The reforms set out in the government’s education white paper, Every child achieving and thriving will place ‘huge expectations’ on schools, trusts and local authorities, according to a senior Department for Education (DfE) official.
The white paper, which was published earlier this week, set out a series of reforms to provision for pupils with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). Under the proposals there will be a new legal requirement for schools to create individual support plans (ISPs) for all children with SEND. The DfE says that every ISP will draw ‘from a national framework of high-quality interventions that lead to the best education and life chances’. There will also be new ‘Targeted’, ‘Targeted Plus’ and ‘Specialist’ levels of support, with only children and young people deemed to require the ‘Specialist’ level of support eligible for an education, health and care plan (EHCP).
Pupils with an existing ECHP in specialist provision will keep it until the end of their schooling. Those in mainstream schools will keep it until the end of the phase they’re in, at which point it will be reassessed. However this will only apply if they finish that phase in 2029/30 or later, meaning in practice any current primary pupil in Year 3 or above will keep their EHCP until the age of at least 16.
Speaking at the National Education Leaders Conference, Tim Coulson, director general of the DfE’s regions group, said of the proposed changes: ‘This is a massive demand. This is a huge expectation on the system. This isn’t easy for schools to do. This isn’t easy for trusts. This isn’t easy for local authorities.’ He said the reforms were designed to build on the existing strengths of the school system but, acknowledging that outcomes for pupils with SEND often remained weak, said it would also require mainstream schools to ‘shift gear’ in how they supported pupils with SEND. Mr Coulson, formerly CEO of the Unity Schools Partnership trust, suggested that the rise in the number of pupils with EHCPs in recent years (from 2.8 per cent in 2014/15 to 5.3 per cent in 2025/26) had in part been driven by many parents having lost confidence in mainstream provision. ‘We need to change that’ he said, telling the delegates ‘it will be leaders like you who make this real.’
As part of the changes the DfE will create a set of national inclusion standards to smooth out regional differences in support, and there will be funding from a £1.6 billion ‘inclusion grant’ to deliver programmes such as small group speech and language support. A further £1.8 billion will fund local authorities to hire specialists, such as educational psychologists, for schools to call on through an ‘Experts at Hand’ programme. There will also be £200 million of investment for additional training for teachers and support staff to meet the needs of children with SEND.
There has been a mixed reaction to the level of funding announced to implement the changes set out in the white paper. Daniel Kebede, general secretary of the National Education Union welcomed the government’s ‘ambition to reshape the SEND landscape to ensure it works for all children’ and said the ‘Experts at Hand’ specialists would ‘provide schools with the additional support and advice that we have long been calling for’. However he also argued the inclusion grant was insufficient: ‘It only equates to a part-time teaching assistant for the average primary school and two teaching assistants for average secondary schools. This is not enough to make schools more inclusive’.
Helen Osgood, national secretary for education and early years at the Community union, also broadly welcomed the white paper as ‘a meaningful step toward ensuring every child receives the support they deserve’. However, in contrast to Mr Kebede, she said of the proposed funding package: ‘This is truly a significant sum of money. We have always said that reform of the SEND system would only be possible with significant investment. This new money will secure provision for the most vulnerable children and allow nurseries, schools and colleges to meet their needs.’