WHAT THE EXPERTS SAY....
A MILESTONE ON A LONG JOURNEY Comment by AMANDA ALLARD, Director of the Council for Disabled Children
T
he publication of Every Child Achieving and Thriving – the SEND Reform consultation paper – is a milestone on a long journey, one which provides a vision and hope for much-needed improvement in the support for disabled children and young people and those with special educational needs. This publication is not the end of this journey, but a critically important landmark. We are pleased to see the scale of its vision and commitment of resources for transforming our education system and ensuring it values children and young people with additional needs and their families.
The starting point for this transformation is a new vision for inclusive mainstream education. We welcome the adoption of the UNCRDP as a guide for interpreting inclusive practice, promoting a consistent, rights- based approach. Currently, there is too much variation across schools in how children’s needs are recognised and supported. Unaddressed needs, late intervention, and children, young people, and their families feeling excluded from education are persistent challenges. Addressing this is long overdue, and delivering it across all schools is a huge ambition.
The Consultation Paper sets out a comprehensive range of measures to drive this shift, including new statutory expectations for schools, guidance on applying reasonable adjustments under the Equality Act, and a new model of Inclusion Bases to provide more specialist support within schools. New funding streams, curriculum changes, revised school incentives, and staff training will support this change. Schools will have a statutory duty to produce Individual Support Plans, developed in partnership with parents and carers, setting out each child’s needs and provision.
If implemented well these measures have the potential to transform inclusion in all schools and early years settings.
Underpinning this will be new National Inclusion Standards developed by teams of experts, setting out what schools need to do and providing practical guidance for staff. These standards aim to ensure that educators understand their role and how to meet the needs of children and young people in their settings. It will not be enough for the standards to look good on paper; they must be real and felt in classrooms in every school.
We welcome the explicit recognition that schools cannot do this alone. The new model of specialist support, Experts at Hand, aims to provide timely access to specialist expertise through training and group interventions, and is an approach we have long advocated for. We believe it has the potential to transform how multi-agency support is integrated with education, breaking down organisational barriers, upskilling professionals, and making support available sooner in education settings.
We also welcome the commitment of investment in training additional specialists and funding for local areas to develop this model. However, we know from our work in local systems and from bringing experts together on this issue that this model must be jointly owned and developed by education providers, the local authority, and NHS partners from the outset and in the long term. The Government must use the consultation to clarify how it will ensure that Integrated Care Boards and health providers are full and equal partners with local authorities in this model, working with a range of partners to ensure input from therapists, psychologists, social care (including Family help and/or Short Breaks), and mental health specialists is there when its needed. For children and young people with more intense needs that cannot be met through targeted support, statutory Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) will continue, and parents and carers will still be able to appeal to the Tribunal when they disagree with a Local Authority about whether their child requires an EHCP.
There are proposals to change how EHCPs work, with teams of April 2026
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experts working with parents to develop a Specialist Support Package that will set out how evidence-based provision is forming the basis of EHCPs. The White Paper also proposes changes to special schools, including a new curriculum, clearer expectations, a focus on value for money, and limits on inappropriate profit in the independent special school sector. It proposes a new mechanism for deciding specialist placements.
We know many parent carers have felt deep concern that accessing the right specialist support may become harder and that routes to challenge decisions could become less accessible. The Department for Education must work with families and the sector to get this absolutely right. The proposals to strengthen information, advice, and support services are an important step, and must be built on with further accountability mechanisms to ensure clear routes to request support, transparent processes for resolving disagreements, swift intervention when the right support is not provided, and a clear escalation process if issues persist.
Overall, there is much to welcome in this paper. Delivering transformation at this scale will require time, effort, and sustained commitment. Legislative changes will not take place before 2029, and children’s current entitlements will not be reviewed until the third phase of implementation. The government has also promised that no child in a special school will be required to leave unless their parents choose to do so. These safeguards are vital to ensure that rebuilding the system does not destabilise existing provision.
It will also be important to consider the read-across to other areas of reform that will impact the lives of disabled children and their families, including the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, the government response to the Law Commission Review of disabled children’s social care, and the Family Help reforms.
The consultation is a crucial opportunity to test these principles and flesh out crucial details in areas such as local joint working and rights of redress. We look forward to supporting the Government and working with everyone across the sector to ensure the vision is implemented effectively. The stakes are too high for this transformation to fall short.
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