The government’s Schools White Paper, published on 23 February 2026, contains the most significant proposed overhaul of the Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) system in England since the Children and Families Act 2014. Presented as a “radical expansion” of rights for children with SEND and backed by a headline investment figure of £4 billion, it has been received with a mixture of cautious welcome and serious alarm by families, specialist organisations, and sector bodies alike. This response sets out our concerns.
We want to be clear from the outset; reform is necessary. The existing SEND system is under enormous strain. Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP) numbers have risen beyond January 2025’s numbers of 482,240, fewer than half of plans are issued within the statutory 20-week deadline, tribunal appeals have increased exponentially since 2015 (indicating that local authorities are failing to meet the rights of children and young people), and local authorities are carrying crippling deficits; in some cases exceeding their Dedicated Schools Grant income.
Parents have been left to fight exhausting legal battles simply to secure provision their children are legally entitled to. The status quo has failed too many families. 14.3% of SEN students did not have an EHC plan as of January 2025, and 5.3% of all students had been issued an EHCP.
Recognising the need for reform is not the same as endorsing this particular reform. The white paper raises fundamental questions that its architects have not yet adequately answered, and its proposals carry real risks of harm that must be named plainly.
The Erosion Of Hard-Won Legal Rights
The most serious concern raised by this white paper, and echoed across the sector by IPSEA, SOS!SEN, Special Needs Jungle, and Disability Rights UK, is that its proposals would systematically weaken the legal protections that families currently rely on.
Under the existing framework, EHCPs are individual, legally binding documents. They specify what a child needs and what provision must be made. Parents have the right to appeal to an independent tribunal if a local authority fails to meet those obligations, and the SEND Tribunal has historically sided with families in an overwhelming majority of cases.
This legal scaffolding, imperfect as it is in practice, exists because children with the most complex needs cannot depend on goodwill or resource availability alone. The white paper proposes to replace this individual-centred model with nationally defined “Specialist Provision Packages”; standardised bundles of support mapped to broad categories of need.
EHCPs will in future be tied to these packages, rather than being constructed around the individual child. Eligibility rules and national definitions (not individual assessments) will determine who receives legally enforceable support.
This is a profound shift. As Special Needs Jungle put it,
“Eligibility rules, rather than individual needs, would decide who gets legally enforceable support.”
The government insists this creates consistency; critics argue it creates rigidity. For children whose needs are complex, overlapping, or do not fit neatly into one of the anticipated seven package categories, the consequence could be a statutory entitlement that is narrower, less flexible, and harder to challenge than the one it replaces.
The proposals also significantly reduce the scope of the SEND Tribunal. Under the new framework, tribunal powers to order specific placements would be curtailed, and the range of matters open to appeal would be narrowed. This is not a technicality. For thousands of families (disproportionately those without the resources to navigate complex bureaucracies or access legal advice) the tribunal has been the only meaningful recourse when local authorities have failed to act lawfully. Reducing its power while simultaneously making eligibility criteria more restrictive is a combination that should alarm anyone who values children’s rights.
The Inclusion Agenda And The Risk To Those Who Cannot Thrive In Mainstream
The white paper is explicit in its primary aim:
“More children can be educated in a local mainstream school, as part of their local community.”
The emphasis on mainstream inclusion is philosophically unsound. Inclusion, done well, benefits disabled and non-disabled pupils alike. Unfortunately inclusion is done poorly without adequate resourcing, without trained staff, without appropriate physical and sensory environments. It is managed exclusion with better branding. The simple face is that the mainstream school environment was designed for a very narrow range of students, and those with SEN are not part of that range; that is not an issue that can be resolved by this white paper.
The government’s own data shows that 30.4% of children with EHCPs are currently in special schools. Many of those children and their families have arrived there after years in mainstream settings that could not meet their needs. The white paper acknowledges that specialist settings “should continue to play a vital role supporting those with the most complex needs”, yet simultaneously restricts the opening of new independent special schools and proposes to cap local authority spending on placements at “reasonable” rates; rates to be nationally defined rather than individually negotiated.
The Green MP Adrian Ramsey noted in the House of Commons:
“There is not currently enough capacity in alternative provision for young people for whom mainstream school is not working.”
The Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey questioned whether
“The range and complexity of needs and disability can be captured in a small number of predefined EHCP packages.”
These are not partisan quibbles. They are genuine structural questions about whether the proposed system has the flexibility and capacity to serve the children it most needs to reach.
The National Association of Special Schools (NASS) has warned that schools and families will be left “anxious about whether special schools will be able to afford to provide the support that they know is transformative for children”. Independent special schools, which serve children with the most complex and medically significant needs (often because local provision simply does not exist) face financial viability questions under capped funding bands. The government frames this as tackling profiteering; the sector warns it may destabilise the only provision some families can access.
Parental Voice: Promised But Not Guaranteed
The white paper speaks warmly of partnership with families. Principle five of its reform framework states that
“The voices of children should be at the heart of decision making.”
Individual Support Plans (ISPs), the new digital documents replacing EHCPs for children at the targeted and targeted plus tiers, are described as being “developed with parents”.
In practice, the legal architecture tells a different story. IPSEA has identified that under the proposed ISP model, parents would have “minimal rights about their content and creation”. The new plans are a significant change from EHCPs, which carry statutory force and are subject to clear procedural requirements. Parents’ ability to challenge what goes into an ISP, or to seek independent review of its contents, is far less clear under the proposals than under the current system.
The Education Policy Institute has warned that parents will “need reassurance that tiered support and EHCP reforms do not simply become a new set of hoops to jump through”. That reassurance has not yet been provided. A system that purports to strengthen parental voice while simultaneously removing the legal tools through which parents have historically been able to hold systems accountable is relocating legal rights to a space that is harder to reach and easier to ignore.
Workforce: The Plan Depends On People Who Do Not Yet Exist
The white paper’s ambitions are significant. It commits to creating 50,000 new specialist places in mainstream settings, deploying specialist professionals into schools through the new ‘Experts at Hand’ service, expanding the educational psychology and speech and language therapy workforce, and upskilling every teacher in the country on SEND and inclusion by September 2026.
These would seem to be welcome commitments on paper. Despite this, the workforce does not currently exist to deliver them at scale, the timelines are ambitious to the point of concern, and the presence of more highly trained professionals does not address the fundamental normative aggression of the educational system.
The Association of Educational Psychologists told the Commons Education Committee in 2025 that government funding for EP training is “nowhere near sufficient to meet rising demand”. The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists, while welcoming the white paper’s inclusive education focus, explicitly warned that the Department for Education cannot achieve its workforce goals alone and called on the Department of Health and Social Care to urgently address recruitment challenges in its forthcoming 10 Year Workforce Plan. T
he Local Government Association cautioned that:
“[The ‘Experts at Hand’ service] could increase expectations of available help, which would in reality take time to embed.”
The system cannot become more inclusive simply by directing schools to be more inclusive. Inclusion requires trained people, time, and sustained institutional capacity. If the workforce investment is not delivered in parallel with the legislative changes, and the history of SEND reform does not inspire confidence here; families will be promised a system that cannot yet be delivered.
The Transition Period And Uncertainty For Existing EHCP Holders
The white paper anticipates a phased transition. Legislative change is not expected to come into force until September 2029, with EHCP changes taking effect from September 2030 at the earliest. Children currently holding EHCPs will retain them through their existing phase of education.
On the face of it, this sounds reassuring, however the period between now and implementation is profoundly uncertain. Local authorities will need to simultaneously maintain the current system for existing EHCP holders, prepare for the new system, manage the debt write-off process (conditional on agreeing local SEND reform plans with the DfE), and begin implementing the new ‘Inclusive Mainstream Fund’ from 2026/27.
For families currently in the system, or approaching key transition points (moving from primary to secondary, or from secondary to post-16) the uncertainty about what the new system will mean in practice is significant and real. The consultation closes on 18 May 2026. The government expects to have returned EHCP numbers to current levels by 2035. That is a ten-year horizon.
For a child aged eight today, their entire secondary and post-16 education will be navigated within this transitional and then reformed system. The government owes it to those families to provide far greater detail and certainty than the white paper currently contains.
What We Need to See
We are not opposed to reform. We are opposed to reform that reduces legal protections ,that shifts funding away from the most complex needs in the name of inclusion, and that relies on a workforce plan that has not yet been published and a legislative timeline that stretches to the end of the decade.
For this reform to truly serve children and families, the government must:
- Strengthen, not weaken, legal protections. Individual Support Plans must carry meaningful statutory weight, with clear parental rights around content, review, and appeal. Tribunal access must be preserved, not curtailed.
- Ensure the new Specialist Provision Packages are genuinely flexible. Where a child’s needs span multiple categories or do not fit any predefined package, the system must allow for individual assessment, not force that child into the nearest available box.
- Publish a credible, costed workforce plan before, not after, legislation. The ambition to have specialist professionals in every school is meaningless without a funded plan to train and retain them.
- Guarantee meaningful co-production. Not consultation. Not information sheets. Real co-design of the ISP model, with legal rights around parental and young person participation built into the statutory framework.
- Protect independent specialist provision for those with the most complex needs. Capping fees must not become a mechanism for reducing access to the only provision that can safely meet some children’s needs.
The white paper’s title is Every Child Achieving and Thriving. That aspiration is one we share entirely, but for it to be more than a slogan, the government must be honest about the trade-offs embedded in these proposals and willing to hear (and act on) the serious concerns being raised by the families, practitioners, and organisations who live and breathe this system every day.
The consultation is open until 18 May 2026. practice — values common to many organisations in the SEND space. If your business has a different focus (e.g. you provide independent specialist education, you’re an assessment service, a parent advocacy charity, or a technology provider), do let me know and I can refine the framing, emphasis, and sign-off to better reflect your specific mission and audience. The core critique stands, but the angle and tone can be adjusted to suit your voice.
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