There’s a particular kind of tiredness that hits in late August. Not the bone-deep exhaustion of July. Something quieter. The kind where you find yourself thinking about specific children, specific moments, and wondering whether you got it right.
I’ve been sitting with that feeling this week.
This year has been, by any measure, a significant one for SEMH in education. New guidance. Familiar arguments, resurfacing. Conversations that felt overdue are finally breaking into the open. And through all of it, the same dedicated professionals are doing the same extraordinary, under-recognised work in classrooms, corridors, and phone calls home that no one ever sees.
So before September arrives and sweeps us all forward, I wanted to do something I don’t do enough of: stop. Look back. Be honest about what this year actually showed us.
🔍 The Guidance Said One Thing. The Classrooms Said Another.
This was, by any measure, a big year for policy. It started with the shift in Ofsted’s inspection framework, with inclusion moving closer to the centre of what inspectors are looking for, a change that prompted a lot of schools to have conversations about belonging and accessibility that probably should have happened years ago.
Then came Every Child Achieving and Thriving, the SEND white paper that dominated the national conversation, ambitious in scope, cautious in timelines, and met with a mixture of genuine hope and hard-earned scepticism from those who’ve lived through previous waves of SEND reform.
And towards the end of the year, the updated Suspension and Exclusion statutory guidance added another layer, strengthening expectations around reintegration, SEND consideration, and understanding why a child reaches the point of exclusion.
A LinkedIn post I wrote on the guidance reached over 50,000 people and sparked more conversation than almost anything else I published this year, which told me something significant about where the pressure is sitting in schools right now.
But here’s what I kept coming back to: schools that were already doing this well didn’t need any of it to tell them. And schools where exclusion was still functioning as a pressure valve didn’t substantially change because documents were updated.
Guidance can shift the language. It rarely, on its own, shifts the culture.
That gap, between what policy says and what practice looks like, is one I’m still turning over. Because if we’re serious about SEMH, we have to be honest that updating a document isn’t the same as changing what happens on a Monday morning when a young person walks through the door in crisis.
😟 What Worried Me
The off-rolling conversation has been rumbling for years, but this year it felt louder, and more uncomfortable.
The stories I heard, both formally and informally, pointed to a pattern that the data has long suggested: children with SEMH needs, children with unmet or unidentified SEND, children who are difficult in ways that are expensive and exhausting, finding themselves edged toward managed moves, part-time timetables, and off-site provision in ways that aren’t always transparent.
I’m not naive about the pressures schools face. I know that a child in persistent dysregulation can have a profound impact on an entire class. I know that teachers are stretched, that SENCOs are overwhelmed, and that the system as a whole isn’t adequately funded to respond to the level of need now presenting in schools.
But I also know, from my work in youth justice, what happens when those children don’t get the right support at the right time. The pipeline from exclusion to crisis isn’t a metaphor. It’s a lived reality for far too many young people. And every time a school manoeuvres a child out of its roll without the right process, the right conversation, or the right alternative in place, we’re writing the next chapter of that story whether we intend to or not.
That worried me. A lot.
📈 The SEMH Identification Problem Is Getting Harder to Ignore
Something else shifted this year: the volume of conversations about SEMH identification. Not diagnosis, identification. The recognition that a child’s behaviour or presentation might be telling us something about their emotional or mental health, long before CAMHS gets involved, long before an EHCP is even considered.
Teachers are being asked to do more of this work than ever before. They’re being asked to spot, to record, to refer, to adapt, often with minimal training, minimal time, and minimal feedback on whether their referrals ever went anywhere.
I’ve spoken with SENCOs this year who described a particular kind of demoralisation: writing detailed Assess-Plan-Do-Review paperwork, making careful referrals, and then watching children wait months, sometimes over a year, for any external support. In the meantime, that child is still in their class. Still struggling. Still, in the absence of anything else, their responsibility.
The identification infrastructure is improving. The response infrastructure has not kept pace. And that mismatch is falling on the people least equipped and least resourced to absorb it.
💛 What Gave Me Hope
Here’s what I want to be clear about: this year also gave me genuine hope.
I saw schools rethinking their behaviour policies not because Ofsted told them to, but because their staff genuinely asked: is this working for everyone?
I spoke with headteachers who were redesigning their curriculum to create more space for identity, creativity, and pupil voice, not as a bolt-on to their PSHE provision, but as something embedded across the school day.
I read your responses to posts throughout this year and was struck, repeatedly, by how much wisdom exists at every level of the system, teaching assistants who have built trust with a particular child over months; pastoral leads running informal check-ins before register; school librarians creating quiet spaces that have become, without anyone officially designating them as such, genuine sanctuaries.
The work is happening. It’s just not always visible, valued, or scalable in the ways it should be.
And the conversations, here on SEMH Education, in schools, at network meetings, in DMs, feel like they’re shifting.
There’s a growing refusal to accept that children’s mental health is someone else’s job, or that behaviour happens in a vacuum, or that inclusion is only meaningful when it’s convenient.
That gives me a lot to hold onto.
🎒 What I’m Carrying Into September
A few things, if I’m honest.
A renewed commitment to speaking plainly about the system, what it asks of people, where it falls short, and what good actually looks like in practice. Not in a way that’s resigned or cynical, but in a way that’s useful.
A deeper appreciation for the practitioners who stay curious about the children who are hardest to reach. The ones who ask what is this child trying to tell me? when it would be far easier not to.
And a question I’m sitting with: what would it look like if SEMH was genuinely central to school improvement, not a response to crisis, not a compliance exercise, but a thread running through every decision a school makes?
That’s the conversation I want to keep having in the year ahead.
September is almost here. Before it arrives, what are you carrying with you? What moment from this year is staying with you, and what do you want to do differently? I’d love to hear in the comments.
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✨ Top 5 SEMH Education Digital Resources 👇
Pre Exclusions Checklist
Individual Support Plan Template
Off-Site Direction Checklist
Graduated Approach Checklist
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