The Department for Education is in hot water — and for good reason. While families of children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) are fighting tribunals, battling burnout, and begging councils not to go bankrupt, the DfE has been busy organising what can only be described as a celebrity photo op with The Only Way Is Essex star Gemma Collins.
The backlash has been seismic — and it goes far deeper than the snobbery accusations that Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson is attempting to level at her critics. This is about priorities. This is about trust. And for the SEND community, it's about being failed — again.
A £90.7 Million Media Machine
Let's start with the money. Because there is quite a lot of it.
On 31 January 2025, the Department for Education quietly awarded a media buying contract worth £90,700,000 to agency Manning Gottlieb OMD. The contract, registered publicly on the government's Contracts Finder service under Crown Commercial Services framework RM6123 (Strategic Media Activation), runs from 1 February 2025 to 14 June 2026. In plain English: the DfE signed off nearly £91 million for a single media buying contract covering just 16 months.
To put that in context: it is more than the entire annual high-needs funding uplift for some of England's most cash-strapped local authorities. It is more than double the government's £40 million investment in the Multiply numeracy programme. And it is being spent at a time when the Public Accounts Committee has found the SEND system "in disarray", "mired in red tape, lacking funding, and failing to produce value for money."
Separate Freedom of Information requests reveal the picture gets worse when you zoom in on influencer marketing specifically. The DfE used 26 paid content creators in 2024 — that jumped to 53 in 2025, more than doubling in twelve months. Overall DfE advertising and marketing spend has risen by more than 40 per cent in two years, from £34.6 million in 2022–23 to nearly £50 million in 2024–25, with a £15 million increase in a single financial year alone. The Liberal Democrats' education spokesperson Munira Wilson MP called that rise "a slap in the face" for families.
The official line is that this is about "meeting people where they are." The reality, as far as SEND families, teachers and school leaders are concerned, is that they know exactly where the DfE is — just not in their corner.
Enter the GC
On 19 May 2026, the DfE posted a heavily produced, 18-second teaser video across its official social media channels. It shows Gemma Collins — TOWIE alumni, Celebrity Big Brother veteran, and self-described diva — strutting through Westminster corridors to the soundtrack of The Devil Wears Prada, throwing a peace sign at the camera, and posing with her hands on her hips to ask: "Right. What are we doing to help the children?"
Cue Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson opening her office door like she'd been waiting for precisely this moment, saying warmly: "Come in, let's have a chat."
The clip racked up over 2.3 million views in under 24 hours. Based on the comments, most of those views were made in disbelief.
In subsequent videos, Collins sat down with Phillipson to discuss vocational qualifications, expressed a fondness for Richard III, and revealed that she left school without a maths GCSE — something she has previously been candid about, admitting: "I remember sitting in the exam room for my maths GCSE and thinking, 'I'm going to be famous, I don't need maths'."
This, apparently, is the DfE's chosen ambassador for the importance of education.
The department clarified that Collins was not paid for her involvement. "GC wasn't paid," their Instagram account confirmed, adding that the pair "had a great chat about the education system." Phillipson later confirmed Collins received nothing more than "a couple of cans of Red Bull."
Which raises an obvious question: if the DfE has just signed a £90.7 million media buying contract, why is the Education Secretary personally vouching for the fact that her celebrity collaborator received soft drinks as compensation? The budget is clearly not the problem.
Catastrophic Timing
Here is where the real wound opens. The DfE's Collins videos landed on 19 May 2026 — one day after the government's SEND Reform Consultation closed.
For months, families, advocates, specialists and campaigners had engaged painstakingly with that consultation process, attempting to have meaningful conversations with a department they feel has consistently failed to listen. And on the day after the consultation closed, the DfE's communications team served up pantomime-style Instagram reels with a reality TV star.
Aimee Bradley, who runs the parent campaign group SEND Sanctuary UK and is herself awaiting a tribunal for her son's school placement, spoke for thousands when she told the BBC: "It felt like a joke on us parents. It came up the day after the consultation closed. There needs to be an apology for us parents, who are literally just fighting for our lives."
She added: "Some parents are literally grieving children lost after years of unmet need, school trauma, mental health collapse, and systemic failure."
Parent advocate Amy White was equally direct, saying the campaign showed the DfE was not "reading the room." Using someone with no lived or professional experience of supporting children with SEND "feels completely disconnected from the reality families face every single day." Her words cut through: "The Department for Education appears to think promoting pantomime-style reels is somehow going to reassure parents that they are acting in our children's best interests. It is frightening. It is insensitive. And for many families, it feels downright insulting."
Scroll through the comments on the DfE's own Instagram reels and you'll find those sentiments amplified a thousandfold:
"Could you kindly let me know if Gemma Collins has read the education white paper?"
"This is the government response to worn-out and desperate parents of children with special needs? Bridget Phillipson should apologise and resign."
"Incredible reach with young people?! She's hardly KSI. And which young person comes home from school, picks up their phone and thinks, 'I wonder what the DfE has posted?'"
"And £200 million a year for Ofsted that we don't need and pretends to improve schools. It doesn't."
"Let's also not forget the very quiet announcement yesterday that the sports grant is being cut next year."
"I genuinely thought you lot couldn't shock me any more."
The SEND Crisis: A System in Collapse
To understand why the SEND community has reacted with such fury, you have to understand the context in which these videos landed.
An estimated 1.7 million school-aged children in England have special educational needs and disabilities. The number of pupils with Education, Health and Care (EHC) plans has surged by 140 per cent over the past decade, yet funding has not come close to keeping pace. The Public Accounts Committee has found the SEND system "in disarray" — a damning assessment from cross-party MPs who scrutinise public spending. Local authority deficits on high-needs funding are projected to reach £4.6 billion by 2026, threatening to push nearly half of English councils toward effective insolvency.
More than 40,000 children were waiting over 12 weeks for speech and language therapy as of mid-2024. Families are waiting years for EHC plan assessments, losing tribunal after tribunal to underfunded councils, watching their children deteriorate while bureaucracy grinds on.
For special school staff — who work with some of the most complex and vulnerable children in the country, often in under-resourced environments, with stretched caseloads and minimal recognition — the sight of the DfE signing a £90.7 million media buying contract while their sector crumbles is not just tone deaf. It is insulting in the most profound sense.
These professionals dedicated their careers to children the system has repeatedly failed. They attended consultation after consultation. They read the white papers. They submitted evidence. They trained, specialised, and stayed — despite everything. And then they discovered their government department had quietly committed nearly £91 million to a media agency, while using a celebrity who once boasted she didn't need maths because she was going to be famous to front its education messaging.
If there was any moment to invite a well-known face to amplify the SEND crisis, the DfE had options. Advocates pointed out that disabled influencers and parents of SEND children who have been publicly campaigning — people like Izzy Judd, who has a neurodivergent child — exist, and would have brought genuine care and understanding to any collaboration. Instead, the department chose a celebrity whose most famous educational sentiment is that she sat in her maths GCSE exam confident that fame would make qualifications irrelevant.
'Tone Deaf': The Charge Against Phillipson
When the backlash broke, Bridget Phillipson's response was to call it snobbery.
She insisted that Collins had an "incredible reach" and could connect with audiences "politicians can't reach," specifically citing young people who "frankly don't really care what the secretary of state for education has got to say." She dismissed much of the criticism as "outright snobbery and just downright unpleasant."
This framing has done her no favours with the education sector. Critics have pointed out — with some justification — that characterising the response of desperate SEND parents and overworked special school staff as snobbery is not only inaccurate, it is itself a form of dismissal. It sidesteps the substantive issue entirely.
One commentator writing for The Canary put it plainly: "The backlash is not about Gemma Collins. It's about a growing feeling that the people leading are no longer truly listening to the reality families are living every single day."
Even voices sympathetic to the DfE's strategic intent had reservations. Teacher Russell Clarke noted that while he understood the reasoning, the risk of "blurring" the message is real: "When someone like Gemma Collins is saying, in effect, 'I didn't get qualifications, and I've still become successful', some young people could make that connection in the wrong way."
The word that has followed Phillipson through this saga is not snobbery. It is tone deaf.
To sign a £90.7 million media buying contract, spend that budget on influencer campaigns and celebrity corridor sketches — while presiding over a SEND consultation process that families describe as largely cosmetic — and then respond to justified outrage by accusing the critics of class prejudice, suggests a secretary of state who is either disconnected from the emotional reality of the communities she serves, or who has chosen a communications strategy over genuine accountability.
What Schools and Parents Actually Want
Let us be clear about what special school staff, mainstream SEND practitioners, and parents are asking for. It is not complicated, and it does not require a celebrity cameo or a nine-figure media budget.
They want an EHC plan system that processes applications within the legal 20-week timeframe. They want adequate high-needs funding that actually matches demand. They want local authorities that are not on the financial brink. They want early intervention, properly resourced. They want specialist staff who are paid fairly and supported to stay in the profession. They want to stop fighting tribunals to get their children the support they are legally entitled to.
They do not want Instagram reels.
At Earwig Academic, we work every day with the professionals and settings at the sharp end of SEND provision. We understand the extraordinary commitment of the staff in special schools — the patience, the training, the emotional labour — and the impossible pressures they face when systemic funding and policy failures cascade down to classroom level. We understand, too, the exhausting tenacity of parents who refuse to give up on their children, even when the system makes that fight nearly unsurvivable.
The DfE's Gemma Collins campaign will fade from the news cycle. The SEND crisis will not.
We would ask Bridget Phillipson — not as critics, and not as snobs — but as people who care deeply about the children in this system: please hear what is being said. Not on Instagram. In the consultation responses. In the tribunal data. In the school corridors. In the letters from families who have nowhere left to turn.
The children this system is failing cannot wait for the next reel.