From the ground up: teachers as producers of knowledge, with Amanda Wright and Patrick Carmichael
Amanda Wright, Head of Whole School SEND, gave her nasenLive 2026 session a title that said it all: From the Ground Up. Over almost five years of the Universal SEND Services programme, Whole School SEND has been delivering training to the sector and gathering evidence of its impact, and what that evidence keeps showing is simple. What really embeds learning is not only being told how to do something. It is learning from peers, seeing what colleagues in other settings tried, what worked and what did not, and adapting it to your own practice.
She set that against a longer story. For almost fifty years, from the 1978 Warnock Report to this year's schools white paper, Every Child Achieving and Thriving, national policy has followed a familiar pattern: identify a problem, build a framework, and direct schools to implement it. Always well-intentioned. But Amanda asked the room to sit honestly with what it has achieved. Pupils with an EHCP still leave school at 16 around three years behind their peers. One in three is persistently absent. One in five children now has a probable mental health disorder. And the recent Milburn Review found young people with SEND are 80% more likely to finish education at 16 with no clear, purposeful destination. Maybe, she suggested, we are missing something.
Her reframe was powerful. What if the knowledge we need is not sitting in another government document, but in our classrooms right now? Teachers, she argued, are not just receivers of knowledge. They are producers of it. Change does not have to come from the top down. Through the collection of almost 200 case studies from teachers, SENCOs, school and college leaders and employers, WSS has captured exactly that: real people, in real settings, being curious, trialling something, reflecting, and making a difference for their learners. That change can happen at three levels. In the classroom, built on real knowledge of real learners, because no top-down document understands an individual child's context.
Across the whole school, there is often a lot of pressure for SENCOs to be the expert, and Amanda wondered aloud whether that can sometimes get in the way. What tends to make the difference is when curiosity becomes a whole-staff habit: when a SENCO's role becomes one of fostering that curiosity, so teachers ask questions of one another, share what they have tried, and learn from each other, rather than waiting to be told what to do. And across multi-academy trusts, where close-to-practice research gives trusts a way of generating knowledge that is genuinely contextual, built from their own schools, their own learners and their own communities.
One of Amanda's favourite examples impacts just three children. A SENCO introduced a school dog, and a whole intervention around it, and transformed their attendance. Does it change national policy? Perhaps not. Does it change those children's lives? Absolutely, and that is what matters most. Across the collection, schools report a more inclusive ethos and teaching, increased attendance for learners with SEND, fewer suspensions and exclusions, and better outcomes.
Amanda then handed to Patrick Carmichael of Camtree, the Cambridge Teacher Research Exchange. A former teacher, Patrick named the problem plainly. Teacher inquiry is a powerful form of professional development, with real impact on learners, teachers and school culture, and yet so much of that knowledge never travels beyond one classroom. Teachers end up reinventing the wheel, and getting work published has too often been a black box. Rather than launch another journal, Camtree built a digital library: a long-term, free home for teacher research, drawing on open science approaches from fields like climate science and public health, where knowledge is treated as a global public good. It is free to publish and free to read, with no paywalls, anywhere in the world.
The Whole School SEND work is now published there, nearly 200 peer-reviewed reports and research summaries, which Patrick described as a snapshot of the collective intelligence of the field right now. Not scattered across old links and broken pages, but gathered in one place, in many forms, including video and children's work, each with a structured abstract and a DOI so it is easy to cite and share. To make it actually usable, the Camtree and WSS teams built a window into the library on the WSS website: the Inclusive Practice Hub. Instead of a library-like interface, it presents the same robust research as browsable cards, mapped against the WSS impact jigsaw. Teachers search the way they actually think, by setting, phase, area of need and the impact they want, and the Hub narrows nearly 200 studies to the handful most relevant, ready to read or download in a click.
It is clearly working. More than 9,000 downloads in just three months, reaching an audience across the UK and worldwide, with adaptive teaching by far the most-searched theme. Patrick was reassuring about peer review, too, describing it as formative and conversational: the reviewer's job is to help your work get published, not to tell you why it cannot be. And the Hub is for everyone, with Camtree keen to receive close-to-practice work from educational psychologists, therapists, occupational therapists and specialist teachers, valuable work that too often falls through the gaps.
There is a bigger vision here, too. Amanda spoke about the potential of a personalised library assistant, where a teacher could type a real question in plain human language. It is a reminder that this is not a static archive but a living, growing resource, of equal value whether it informs national policy or helps one teacher, in one classroom, Patrick encouraged the audience to think, “that is my challenge too, and I can do something about it.”
Amanda closed by naming the fear the word research can provoke. Keep research out of it, the sector told them. Because the adaptive, reflective, curious practice teachers do every single day is exactly what close-to-practice inquiry is. Guidance and a webinar are coming this autumn, on how to run inquiry in your classroom and how to write a case study for the Hub, with the submission framework arriving even sooner. This, in the end, is what from the ground up means: the sector's own knowledge, finally made to travel.
