​It isn’t pay. It isn’t Ofsted. It isn’t even workload — though that matters too. Across dozens of school visits, one pattern keeps emerging, and it has nothing to do with strategy.

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There’s a question I ask almost every school leader I visit. I’ve been asking it for years, across many conversations in corridors and staffrooms and school offices. The question is simple: what makes people stay?

I ask it because, in SEND recruitment, staff retention isn’t just an HR concern. It’s everything. When a teaching assistant leaves a child with complex needs, that child doesn’t just lose a member of staff — they lose a relationship, a routine, and sometimes months of hard-won progress. Turnover in SEND settings carries a human cost that rarely shows up in any spreadsheet.

Over the past few months, I’ve been doing more school visits than ever — part of termly campaigns, but also part of something more personal. I genuinely want to understand what makes certain schools work. Why some are magnets for great staff. Why others, no matter what they offer, can’t seem to hold on to people.

What I’ve found has surprised me. Not because the answer is complicated — but because it’s so consistent, and so simple, that I keep expecting to hear something different.

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Wembley, on a Tuesday morning in late April

Wembley Primary School sits in the middle of one of London’s most densely packed communities. Nine hundred pupils. Forty-plus language backgrounds. A school that, on paper, you might assume would be chaotic, stretched, difficult to manage. You can see Wembley Stadium from the playground.

But the moment I walked through the door, something shifted. There was music playing as parents arrived. The corridors were unhurried. The assistant head — who has been at the school for ten years — walked me round herself, introducing me to staff by name, pausing outside classrooms to point out what was happening inside.

Ten years. In that school. In that setting. I asked her why.

“Even though we’re so large, people always say it feels like a family. You come in in the morning and you just feel it.” She paused, then added: “It comes from the top. Our headteacher is amazing. Very caring.”

That last line is one I’ve heard, in different forms, in every high-retention school I’ve visited. Culture flows downward. When the person at the top is genuinely caring — not performatively caring, but actually invested in the people around them — it settles into every layer of the organisation. Staff feel it. Children feel it. Visitors feel it.

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The story of one teaching assistant

During the visit, the assistant head mentioned a teaching assistant we had placed at the school — a young man, relatively new to the profession, but with a quality she found rare and hard to define.

“He’s got this perfect balance. Real boundaries — but the children genuinely like him. You don’t get that very often.”

She described a particular child he’d been supporting. When this child first arrived, his behaviour had been very challenging. Previous support hadn’t clicked. But with the right TA alongside him, everything changed. Not through any dramatic intervention — just through consistency, warmth, and the kind of patience that can’t be taught from a manual. By the time I visited, that child was thriving. The assistant head had already started thinking about which child he would be matched with in September.

“It’s not a CV that changes a child’s year. It’s a relationship.”

This is what good SEND recruitment actually looks like when it works. Not filling a vacancy. Not hitting a number. Putting the right person alongside the right child, and then protecting that relationship for long enough that it can do what relationships do: build trust, create safety, and make real progress possible.

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The same answer, told three different ways

Wembley isn’t an isolated example. At Sudbury Primary School in Harrow — another large, complex, high-needs setting with over 900 pupils, 40 EHCP children, and a dedicated provision for children with the most significant needs including those awaiting specialist school placement — the headteacher said something that has stayed with me. When I asked what keeps her support staff returning, despite the physical and emotional demands of the role, she barely had to think.

People stay, she told me, when they feel that what they do matters. Not in a vague, abstract sense — but concretely, visibly, every single day.

At Springwell Academy in Hounslow, the wrote about retention in a way that went even deeper. He talked about the difference between a school that manages staff and a school that invests in them. About what it means to make someone feel genuinely part of something — not a pair of hands covering a need, but a person whose presence shapes the culture of the place.

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A PATTERN WORTH NOTING

In every low-turnover school I’ve visited, the leaders don’t talk about retention as a problem to be solved. They talk about culture as something they build, deliberately, every day. The retention is just what follows.

Three schools. Three different conversations. The same answer, told three different ways.

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What’s really happening in SEND right now

I want to be honest about the context, because I think it matters.

At Wembley Primary, the assistant head told me that some children in their informal provision — children who need specialist school places — have been waiting up to three years. Three years in a mainstream setting, with needs that the school is doing its absolute best to meet, but without the specialist infrastructure those children require. Ratios that were once one-to-one have shifted to one-to-two, sometimes one-to-three, because the funding simply isn’t there to maintain them.

This is not unique to Wembley. It is the story of SEND in England in 2026. More children with increasingly complex needs. Fewer resources. Longer waits. And the schools absorbing all of this pressure, quietly, every day.

What strikes me about the schools managing this best is that they don’t pretend it isn’t hard. The assistant head at Wembley said it plainly: “We just do the best we can.” That honesty — with staff, with families, with agencies like us — creates a kind of trust that becomes its own form of retention. People don’t expect perfection. They expect to be told the truth and supported through it.

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Three things every low-turnover SEND school does differently

After many visits, many conversations, and a lot of time in corridors and staffrooms, I keep coming back to three consistent differences between the schools that hold on to great staff and those that don’t.

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First: they treat continuity as a non-negotiable, not a bonus

The schools that retain staff longest are the ones that understand — deeply, not just intellectually — what disruption costs in a SEND context. Not in budget terms, though the financial cost is real. In trust. In a child’s sense of safety. In the weeks it takes to rebuild a relationship with a non-verbal pupil who has finally started to respond to someone, only for that person to leave.

These schools fight for continuity. When a good TA is in danger of leaving, they ask why. When an agency candidate is working well with a particular child, they think carefully before ending the arrangement. Continuity isn’t just good people management — in SEND, it’s an act of care for the most vulnerable children in the building.

Second: every member of support staff feels seen, not just deployed

There’s a version of school leadership in which teaching assistants are logistics. They receive timetables, cover classrooms, and fill gaps. In the high-turnover schools, this is often the norm — not through any bad intention, but because headteachers are stretched and there are only so many hours in a day.

In the low-turnover schools, something different happens. TAs are introduced to visitors. Their names are known by senior leaders. Their concerns are heard. The assistant head at Wembley, after ten years, still introduces staff she passes in the corridor. It takes thirty seconds. It is not a small thing.

People don’t leave jobs. They leave environments where they feel invisible. The schools that understand this — and act on it consistently, not just during appraisal season — are the ones with the longest-serving teams.

Third: they are honest with the agencies they work with

This one matters more than most people realise. The schools with the strongest staffing stability are the ones who take the time to help agencies actually understand their setting. Not just the role and the rate. The child. The classroom. The culture. What good looks like in practice for this particular school, with these particular children, at this particular moment.

When that conversation happens — when an agency understands a school well enough to make a genuinely considered placement rather than a reactive one — the outcomes are measurably better. Candidates stay longer. Children are less disrupted. The relationship between school and agency deepens into something more useful than a transactional phone call at seven in the morning.

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What this means for school leaders

I’m not suggesting that culture is easy, or that it can be manufactured overnight. The headteachers I admire most have spent years building theirs. But I do think there are things that can be done now — this term, this week — that make a difference to how SEND support staff experience their work.

Learn the names of the TAs in your SEND provision. Ask them how a particular child is doing, specifically, by name. When an agency places someone good, tell the agency what made them good — not just that it worked, but why. When a placement is coming to an end, think about what continuity would mean for the child before making the operational decision.

These are not large things. They are, in the words of someone I spoke with on a recent visit, small habits — incremental improvements that compound over time into something that looks, from the outside, like an extraordinary school culture.

From the inside, it just feels like a family.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Balraj Guraya is the Founder and Director of Envision Education, a specialist Education and SEND recruitment agency based in Brentford, West London. Envision Education has been placing teachers, teaching assistants and SEND support staff in schools across London and the Home Counties for over 11 years. Balraj visits schools regularly as part of Envision Education’s commitment to understanding — not just filling — the needs of the schools they work with.

GET IN TOUCH

If you lead a school and you’re thinking about September staffing, Balraj would love to come and visit. Not to pitch — to listen, to understand your setting, and to find the right people for it. He is also available to deliver a short talk to your leadership team on small habits and the science of sustainable school leadership, free of charge.

Reach out via LinkedIn or contact Envision Education directly to arrange a visit.

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