‘The biggest conversation in a generation’? A critical discourse analysis of the UK government's national conversation on England's SEND reform

Abstract

This study was conducted as a rapid response to the UK government's announcement of a ‘national conversation’ on England's special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) reforms, prior to the publication of the English Schools White Paper in early 2026. The announcement of the ‘national conversation’ initiative was met with scepticism from advocacy groups and sector commentators, who questioned both the purpose of the exercise and the conditions under which participation would take place. Using a Critical Policy Discourse Analysis framework, this study analysed a data corpus of the national conversation texts to explore the discursive articulation of the government’s intended policy directions, and how the initiative was enacted as a policy process in advance of formal reform consultation. Our analysis resulted in the following findings: (1) The initiative worked to construct legitimacy of policy direction, (2) The National Conversation was discursively constructed as metaphorical rather than reciprocal and (3) Children and young people received only symbolic inclusion in the initiative despite being positioned as central figures in the public engagement process. Taken together, we argue that the national conversation was a quasi‐consultation, moving public engagement away from gathering input for policymaking, towards its use as a means of pre‐emptively legitimising policy. Through its discursive infrastructure, collective consent was organised and policy authority stabilised in advance of its creation. These findings extend existing scholarship on policy discourse by demonstrating how legitimacy can be constructed, not only through policy texts themselves but through the orchestration of engagement infrastructure surrounding them.