This chapter presents the Special Educational Needs Coordinator's (SENCO) role and operation in the context of broad policy and administrative changes since the General Election of 1997. The passing of the 1988 Education Reform Act marked the beginning of a period of remarkable volatility in English and Welsh education policy. The national strategies for literacy and numeracy prescribe content, time allocation per subject and teaching method. The strategies can be seen as the practical working out of the broad policy objective of refusing to tolerate failure–'zero tolerance'. As well as the school effectiveness research, it draws on the idea that schools cannot/should not be allowed to fail, what is often referred to as 'high reliability'. While the national targets apparently recognise Warnock's contention that 20 per cent of the school population will have SEN at any given time, this percentage will not be evident in every school.