A critical discourse analysis of the UK SEND review green paper

In this paper we carry out a Critical Discourse Analysis (cda) of the UK Government’s 2022 Green Paper ‘Right Support, Right Place, Right Time’, known as ‘the SEND Review’. Our analysis is informed both by Hyatt’s (2013) Critical Higher Education Policy Discourse Analysis (chepda) framework and by our cognizance of how the term ‘special educational needs’ is constructed in the context of the state’s active and passive enactment of policies that continue to diminish the quality of disabled people’s lives. Our analysis focuses principally on deconstruction of the Green Paper with close attention to modes of legitimation, interdiscursivity, intertextuality, presupposition/implication, and lexico-grammatical construction. We present three main areas of interest: the (mis)use of and omission of ‘need’, the ubiquitous and ambiguous use of ‘we’, and the presentation of ‘newness’ in the SEND Review.