Simon Pearson analyses the government’s proposed reform of Special Educational Needs and Disability.

The government says it wants one education system, not two. It has inherited one shaped by scarcity, defensive accountability and broken trust. The new SEND reform tries to redesign how support is delivered. It does not change the conditions the system operates in.

The existing model is adversarial and inefficient. Families fight local authorities for assessments. Schools ration support. Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) function as both lifeline and bottleneck. Councils run deficits. Tribunals expand. Everyone involved knows the process is slow, legalistic and exhausting, yet no one trusts the alternatives. The government acknowledges this and attempts a reset: earlier support in mainstream settings, less dependence on statutory escalation, and a layered system of provision intended to catch need before it hardens into crisis.

The most serious proposal for years

It is the most substantial structural redesign in years. Support is meant to sit at multiple levels inside ordinary schools rather than behind the threshold of an EHCP. Specialist provision is to be embedded more directly in mainstream settings through a new Experts at Hand service, commissioning educational psychologists, speech and language therapists and occupational therapists at local level, available to schools whether or not a child holds an EHCP. The government says an average secondary will receive over 160 days of dedicated specialist time per year. Training is promised. £1.6 billion over three years goes directly to schools for early intervention. Ofsted will inspect explicitly for inclusion. The architecture is coherent and the investment is real.

This is the most serious proposal for SEND in years. It deserves to be recognised as such.

But seriousness is not the same as sufficiency.

The reform assumes mainstream schools can absorb greater complexity: more varied need, earlier intervention, sustained coordination with health and care services. Schools are already operating under pressure from staffing shortages, behaviour challenges, attendance concerns and tight budgets. Whether inclusion becomes real depends less on policy ambition than on whether there is enough time, expertise and stability inside the classroom to make it work.

Inclusion is a material commitment. Smaller classes. Specialist staff working alongside teachers. Time to adapt curriculum and practice. Reliable access to therapists and psychologists. These are not matters of ethos; they are matters of capacity.

The 160 days of specialist time sounds substantial until you consider what a typical secondary school actually carries: dozens of pupils with complex and varied needs, many without EHCPs, managed by staff already stretched across competing demands. Spread across a school year, across a full cohort, 160 days is a start. It is not a transformation.

The reform also sits inside an accountability system that rewards risk management. Performance grades, inspection frameworks and attendance metrics shape how schools behave. A school that takes on high-need pupils assumes institutional risk. That risk affects results, reputation and intake. You can require an Inclusion Strategy. You cannot legislate away institutional self-preservation.

Scarcity sharpens that instinct. Local authorities remain financially exposed, carrying deficits built up across years of rising demand and frozen funding. The government’s investment comes on top of a system already running significant high-needs deficits. Record investment in a deficit-ridden system is not the same as sufficient investment. Health services tied to SEND provision are uneven and overstretched. The Experts at Hand model depends on councils, schools and integrated care boards coordinating effectively. Each of those institutions is already under pressure. A service that relies on three overstretched systems working together is not the same as a service that is simply available.

Trust completes the picture. Phillipson acknowledged directly that EHCPs have become “the only way to get what your child needs.” That is not a bureaucratic failure. It is a confession that the system surrounding statutory provision has already collapsed. Parents escalate to EHCPs because everything beneath them proved unreliable. The reform asks those same parents to trust a new layer of informal provision, delivered by the same overstretched schools, inside the same underfunded system. That is a significant ask.

Wait four years

It is made harder by the timeline. The new framework does not come into force until 2030. Parents fighting for their children now are being asked to wait four years for a system that has not yet been built, on the basis of a promise the current adversarial culture has given them little reason to trust. The press release is written as though the reforms are already happening. The gap between that language and the operational reality is where families will live in the meantime.

The detail of what changes for whom makes the trust problem concrete. Under the new system, parents unhappy with an Individual Support Plan appeal first to the school, then to the local authority or the Department for Education. They do not get access to an independent tribunal. The one mechanism that has consistently forced provision to happen is removed for the majority of SEND children. Where EHCPs are retained, tribunals will no longer be able to direct which school a child attends, shifting that power to the councils whose financial exposure the reform is partly designed to reduce. The system is projected to produce around 270,000 fewer EHCPs than at peak, transferring that cohort from statutory protection to a framework with no independent legal route when things go wrong. Parents are not being asked to trust a new system on faith alone. They are being asked to give up the only lever that worked.

The reform is not uniformly regressive. Around a million pupils currently have identified special needs but no EHCP and very little reliable support. For that group, a statutory right to assessment and access to commissioned specialists is a genuine advance. But the children moving from EHCPs to ISPs at transition face a different calculation. They lose access to independent tribunals and enter a school complaints system instead. Families who spent years securing statutory protection because informal provision failed them are being asked to accept a weaker guarantee in its place. The reform extends something meaningful to one group while quietly reducing the legal floor for another.

Future cohorts will encounter a further change in how need is defined. EHCPs will be granted on the basis of standardised specialist provision packages, modelled on NHS clinical pathways. Consistent thresholds may reduce the postcode lottery. But clinical pathway models can also exclude children whose needs are complex and do not fit standard categories. The detail of how those thresholds are drawn will matter as much as any funding commitment.

These pressures are not separate. They reinforce one another. Accountability frameworks push schools to manage risk. Scarcity makes that risk harder to absorb. Parents, aware of both, escalate to secure certainty. Escalation increases tribunal use and local authority deficits, deepening scarcity. The cycle predates the current system and will outlast this one unless the underlying conditions change.

The White Paper addresses process with care. It is less direct about the spending decisions that produced the crisis. SEND provision sits at the intersection of education, health and local government. All three spent a decade under fiscal restraint. Services cut. Specialist expertise thinned. Waiting lists lengthened. Schools absorbed the consequences.

The reform promises new funding and a different delivery model. The test is whether those resources are sufficient to alter day-to-day incentives inside the system, not simply to support a new framework on paper. If capacity does not rise alongside expectation, schools will still be asked to manage complexity they cannot securely carry.

Reactions

The Council for Disabled Children, representing over 300 organisations in the sector, welcomed the scale of the vision while asking the question the document does not fully answer: how will accountability work when the new model fails to deliver? That question is not hostile to the reform. It is the reform’s central problem. ISPs will carry legal weight, but the enforcement routes remain unclear. Parents who have spent years learning that informal assurances do not hold will want to know what recourse they have when a school’s Inclusion Strategy turns out to be aspirational rather than operational.

Helen Hayes, the Labour Chair of the Education Select Committee, refused to give the measures her wholehearted support, saying she was looking for cast-iron guarantees that children’s rights would be strengthened rather than eroded. If the government cannot satisfy its own Select Committee Chair on that point, the accountability gap is not a detail to be resolved in consultation. It is the fault line the entire reform sits on.

It is worth noting what the alternatives look like. Reform UK and the commentary that surrounds it treats rising SEND numbers as a symptom of ideological capture rather than genuine need: the idea that diagnosis has been inflated by therapeutic culture, parental gaming or ideologically motivated professionals rather than by a real increase in children requiring support. That framing is not just wrong. It is actively harmful, because it treats a public health and educational reality as a culture war target. The children showing up in classrooms with unmet needs did not invent their difficulties to inconvenience anyone. The professionals identifying those needs are not engaged in a political project. Dismissing the scale of demand does not reduce it. It just means more children wait longer for support that should already be there.

The Conservatives present a different problem. They built the current framework through the 2014 reforms and presided over a substantial increase in EHCP provision. But they created a system and then starved it of the resources it required to function. The deficits local authorities are now carrying, the waiting lists, the thinned-out specialist services: these are the direct consequences of a decade of underfunding a framework the Conservatives themselves designed. The failure is not one of intent but of political will. They built the architecture and removed the foundations.

Neither position takes the scale of the problem seriously. Reform UK denies the need exists. The Conservatives acknowledged it and then refused to fund it. That is the political landscape this reform is entering, and it matters, because the case for getting this right has never been stronger or less contested from any direction that counts.

Will it work?

This is the best SEND proposal in years. It is also one that relies too heavily on a system already in crisis. The investment is genuine. The intentions are serious. But the reform asks schools worried about results, councils managing deficits and health services running on reduced capacity to collectively deliver something none of them could manage before the money arrived. That is not a reason to dismiss it. It is a reason to be precise about what it can and cannot achieve.

None of this makes the reform insincere. It reflects a genuine attempt to reduce conflict, intervene earlier and integrate support. But design cannot override structure. A system shaped by austerity, performance pressure and eroded trust will reproduce adversarial behaviour under new labels unless its underlying conditions shift.

The likely outcome is not failure in any dramatic sense. It is something more familiar: some processes improve, some conflicts ease, but disputes shift rather than disappear. Parents keep escalating. Mainstream schools keep struggling quietly. The adversarial culture finds new forms because its causes have not changed.

The government has done the serious work. It has looked at the system, named what is broken, and put money behind a different model. That is more than its predecessors managed. But the test is not the announcement. It is what happens in 2030 when a parent in a poorly resourced authority finds their child’s ISP is not being delivered and discovers the tribunal route is closed. That moment will come. How the system responds to it will tell us whether this was real reform or a reorganisation of the deckchairs.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Simon Pearson writes at Anti-Capitalist Musings on Substack, where this article first appeared.

Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/number10gov/53966056604 Orpington, United Kingdom. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Bridget Phillipson, Secretary of State for Education visit Primary school children in Orpington. Creator: Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Str | Credit: Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Str. Copyright: Crown copyright. Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Deed