The education white paper sets out the most ambitious reform to SEND provision in England since the children and families act of 2014.
It deserves a fair hearing, not least because the crisis it seeks to address is not of this government’s making. Like the road to hell, the current situation is the accumulated paving of (mostly) good intentions over many years.
Each subsequent reform added complexity, each funding settlement fell derisibly short of rising demand, and the people caught most painfully in the middle were the children themselves and the remarkable professionals who work alongside them every day.
To understand the proposed new system, it might help to recall what came before.
Certain logic
For those with long enough memories (I was appointed as a headteacher in 2004), the old framework of statements, school action and school action plus had a certain logic to it.
School action was the school’s own response. The SENCO and class teacher identified a child, wrote an individual education plan (IEP) and provided additional support from within existing school resources.
School action plus brought in external specialists such as educational psychologists or speech and language therapists to advise and help. Neither stage carried any statutory guarantee of resources.
The legally binding entitlement came only with a statement of special educational needs, issued by the local authority, and the process to reach it was often slow, adversarial and exhausting for families.
The 2014 Act replaced this with education, health and care plans (EHCPs) and merged the two school-based tiers into a single category of SEN support.
The intention was a more integrated, child-centred system. In practice, demand outstripped capacity, tribunal appeals multiplied, local authority high-needs deficits ballooned and the number of EHCPs more than doubled nationally.
The system has been held together by leaders using wider budgets to subsidise the real cost of inclusion and the dedication of SENCOs and their teams.
Their effort deserves to be recognised, because it is easy to critique a system without acknowledging those who have kept it functioning, in partnership with the most effective local authorities.
Three tiers
The white paper’s new model works across three tiers beyond the universal offer: targeted support, targeted-plus and specialist provision for the most complex needs.
Its centrepiece is the individual support plan (ISP), a digital, legally mandated document that every school must produce for any child with identified SEND, with no requirement for a prior diagnosis.
The echo of the old IEP is clear, but the difference matters: the ISP would carry legal force, whereas the IEP carried only professional expectation.
EHCPs are retained for children with the highest levels of need, though their scope is hoped to narrow as the new tiers absorb more of the work.
The funding headline is £4 billion. £1.6 billion paid directly to schools. £1.8 billion for establishing local cadres of educational psychologists, speech and language therapists and specialist SEND teachers. £200 million for what is described by the DfE as the “the most ambitious and comprehensive SEND training offer ever seen”.
The ambition is real, but the challenge is equally real.
Recruiting specialist professionals in many parts of the country is already a serious problem.
And school leaders will be managing both old and new systems simultaneously through a lengthy transition period while also meeting new requirements to publish an inclusion strategy subject to Ofsted scrutiny.
The long-term goals of the white paper are admirable: closing the gap between those with plans and those without, investing in specialist support as a routine resource rather than a contested prize and committing to genuine mainstream inclusion.
In the meantime, the professionals who have always done the most with the least deserve every support the new system can offer them.
Critically, whether the funding or the workforce capacity will match the ambition is the question that matters most and it remains, as yet, unanswered.
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