SEND families braced for government's education white paper

The government’s education white paper, which will set out how it intends to alter rights and provision for children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) is expected to be published next week.

Government fears its proposals will face opposition from its own MPs, which is of course because those MPs have constituents who fear new policies will reduce funding, support, legal rights and access to a forum that provides redress and directions for failures.

To say that SEND reform has been a bruising experience for the Department for Education is not to express sympathy with DfE. The department is clearly selectively briefing some parts of the press on its reform intentions while stonewalling others.

It has faced a campaign against the removal of existing rights, which should not have come as a surprise. Every SEND parent becomes, by necessity, a campaigner for their child, because adequate support and provision is hard won against, in many cases, sharp practice adopted by local authorities facing financial challenges in an era of tight public finances.

The Gazette has clearly gone on the list of publications to be stonewalled at this point, as DfE was originally going to respond to my questions last Friday, but now isn’t even acknowledging chasing emails. DfE could say answers need to wait for the white paper. But that would beg an obvious question: why the selective briefings?

To head off opposition to its reforms, and to have some respite from specific questions, the white paper will have to pass a high bar. Here are some points against which the heights DfE stoops to might be measured.

Money

The education white paper wasn’t announced by education ministers, but by the chancellor of the exchequer in her June 2025 spending review. The backdrop is rising SEND expenditure by local authorities, whose prime responsibility this currently is.

Where elements of educational provision for children and young people are protected by the enforceable contents of individual education health and care plans (EHCPs), and the law on school transport (LAs meeting the cost if the nearest school can’t meet the needs of a pupil), councils cannot legally cut them.

LAs, and bodies representing them (the Local Government Association and the County Councils Network) talk of having ‘SEND deficits’ being of an order that threatens their financial stability.

They are under pressure. But deficit is not an accounting term. What LAs have is an overspend of the amounts they budgeted for during what could be termed a sustained and ongoing period of wishful thinking.

Ahead of the white paper we have the public announcement that ‘…the government has… confirmed 90% of these historic deficits up to 2025-26 will be written off through the largest intervention on SEND deficits ever’.

It is difficult to see how deficit here is defined as anything other than the gap between what an LA wanted to spend and wound up spending. And how does government ‘write off’ an overspend when it isn’t the creditor?

That is among the questions DfE didn’t answer last week. Also unanswered is a question on the detail of the write-off deal. The 90% write off is, the announcement said, available to council that agree a ‘SEND local reform plan’.

Why would that be necessary if the white paper heralds overarching adequate change? The suspicion is that this is an interim measure whereby council will commit to suppressing the rate at which the number of EHCPs is growing.

Where are suspicious minds getting this idea from? Under the last government, DfE made ‘safety valve agreements’ (SVAs) with some LAs in return for bailout, on condition that EHCP numbers were suppressed. ‘Specifically,’ I asked DfE, ‘do [reform plans] include target commitments for slowing the increase in EHCPs by the local authority?’ SVAs do, concealed by many councils, but revealed in papers published by Cambridgeshire County Council.

Remember, this write off and the condition of reform plans are official government announcements – DfE should be able to answer the question now, and doesn’t need to wait on the white paper.

Rights and accountability

As a lever to manage down provision, SVAs and now potentially SEND reform plans, have a flaw from the perspective of Whitehall and councils. If need is increasing, how do you supress the increase? Councils have in many instances simply delayed assessments that might lead to an EHCP being agreed for a child.

Around a third of cases before the SEND Tribunal (a forum in which families win 98%+ of the time) as for failure to assess. Further, for a pupil with a plan, with key provision protected by law, legal cuts are harder to make.

Hence LAs and Whitehall have kept returning to the idea of restricting or abolishing EHCPs and finding ways to limit what can be decided by the SEND Tribunal. In June last year, the Gazette was an outlier in reporting that the government was contemplating a future without the SEND Tribunal. DfE denied the story (our source was not a DfE briefing), yet engaged with none of the Gazette’s questions on whether SEND reforms would stop cases going to the tribunal by changing the scope of what is justiciable through the legal status of EHCPs.

We know what’s been floated in DfE’s selective briefings. In the last few weeks, the i Paper reported the following: ‘A source close to the reforms said the SEND overhaul could "cut the tribunal off at the knees".' They said parents would still be able to appeal via the tribunal, but suggested this could be limited to cases where the council, school or NHS had not followed the correct process. If the process had been followed, '"you can’t appeal'", they said, adding that the reforms are expected to put "much more focus on mediation".'

Which rather confirms the Gazette’s original story on the SEND Tribunal. The i Paper also reported: ‘SEND pupils are set to be allocated new “digital passports” to track their needs and designated into a four-tiered system in mainstream schools.’ And that EHCPs ‘are expected to be reserved for pupils whose needs cannot be met via the four tiers’. (‘Cannot be met’ being distinct, you might notice, from a construction like ‘are not being met’. I wonder who’ll decide?)

If that seems like a move that would cause instant outrage, there may be a ‘boiling a frog’ strategy in play. It has also been briefed that reform would conclude after the next general election.

Sky News, clearly also on the briefing list, reports with confidence that ministers ‘ultimately want to restrict the number of children with specific per-pupil funding packages, and to curb the number of parents who end up taking their case to tribunal’.

What else is being talked of? With responsibilities shifting to schools, there is the possibility of a statutory duty on schools to meet pupils’ SEND needs. That’s possibly fine. But, where would the accountability be, especially for pupils in the ‘four tiers’ who do not have an EHCP or its equivalent? And if cases that can go to the SEND Tribunal restricted where, for many, would the redress for failings come from?

It all points, as fellow journalist and SEND parent John Harris (who is also being stonewalled by DfE) puts it, to this: ‘The government’s underlying vision seems to be of a great rebalancing, away from personalised support towards the kind of top-down system in which families basically get what they’re given.’ 

Mainstream preparation

The government says that over ten years, £3.7bn will be spent on buildings and facilities in mainstream secondary schools that will seemingly contain ‘inclusion bases’, where kids with the relevant needs will be given extra help.

It also says it will implement ‘the most ambitious and comprehensive SEND training offer ever seen by the English schools system’, which will mean ‘every teacher receives training to support pupils’, in both these new facilities and standard-issue classrooms.

As Harris points out, a generous estimate results in the £200m government has allocated to this at no more than £200 per head for training teachers and teaching assistants. (Observed up close, the level of specific skill and experience needed to teach a pupil with special educational needs is very high.)

What, one has to wonder, is there to stop schools behaving as badly as under-pressure councils?

There is a further worry that DfE has an ongoing attachment to consultants whose view of special educational needs is contested and controversial. Its view of inclusion, in the context of the increase in support needed for pupils with autism and ADHD, is to lean heavily on the controversial work of Tom Bennett, its ‘attendance and behaviour ambassador’.

Bennett was also adviser the last government on behaviour. His theory that strict behaviour policies and inclusion ‘dovetail perfectly’ plays well in an era of tight budgets. Yet suspension and exclusion for on behavioural grounds disproportionally affect SEND pupils, one key cause being that their needs are not being supported. A policy that leans on discipline not support is one that relies on sanctions like exclusion.

What else? Today’s Times, again on the list of media DfE will brief, reports a series of policies will appear in the white paper that will stop what DfE typifies as automatic continuity of provision from primary to secondary school. Again, this is based on the idea that with EHCPs, once one is attained a pupil is immovably ‘in’. Whereas EHCPs are currently subject to an annual review. The headline of a ‘review’ when a child moves from primary to secondary therefore makes no sense.

Also apparently envisaged is a panel of experts to decide what level of support each tier will attract. Schools will make decisions about what provision is right, and for many funding that attaches to will end, with ‘mainstream’ schools responsible for meeting needs from their own budgets.

Worrying language is attaching to autism and ADHD in briefings, indicating both will be seen as needing forms of support that can be, by word, somehow commoditised compared to other conditions.

A lack of evidence

In place of rigorous research, we have Bennett’s thought leadership, and we have reports by bodies with varying degrees of self-interest and, occasionally good intentions, seized on to support ministers’ mantra that ‘the system is broken’.

Like a village in the Vietnam War, to save it, it it is necessary to destroy it.

Thus, a reported willingness to heavily restrict the type of case that can go to the SEND Tribunal with no effort to look at the quality and fairness if its decisions.

Reports by the Local Government Association and the County Councils network commission, from consultancy the Isos Partnership, lean on ‘research’ that is no stronger than selectively measured sentiment.

And it seems obvious to me that no-one – not Isos, thinktank Policy Exchange, DfE or government advisers, is systematically reading EHCPs. Authors of a well-intentioned report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the only body to reply to my question on whether any EHCPs were reviewed to better understand the field, confirm that examples of actual ECHPs were not read as part of the process.

DfE began the year with a ‘big conversation’ on SEND. It could have used this to ask parents and carers to voluntarily share the actual contents of plans, to help inform policy making. Anonymised, or course.

If there’s a SEND ‘golden ticket’ inside an EHCP’s wrapper (‘golden ticket’ being the particularly unappetising typification used by some commentators of what it means to secure an EHCP), why not open these SEND Wonka Bars?

What a peak inside the wrapping would show is that a well written EHCP is designed to be useful and should be referred to continuously as a guide. It is tailored to the child or young person.

I’ve quoted before from section A of my late daughter’s EHCP, which would never become a legal dispute, states: ‘When something makes her laugh, like someone being silly or a funny story, she has the most infectious giggle, and she enjoys it when people respond.’ She likes ‘the attention she gets when she does something well’.

That’s not a golden ticket. But it is personal and was tailored to her.

Often it is indifference, not adherence, to the provision EHCPs set out that puts local authorities on the road to losing at the SEND Tribunal. Without a plan, without access to the SEND Tribunal, how does accountability happen? And if LA responsibilities shift to schools, what is to stop schools doing the same?