Capital carrot, SEND steamroller: The Government's evidence-light reform route isn't waiting for anyone

Contents

It’s been a month since the government announced the Schools White Paper and their consultation on SEND reform.

The consultation’s still ongoing. If you need some inspiration or motivation to complete it, read some of our recent posts – including a post to help you put together your own response.

To reiterate: There’s been no change to the law – and if they’re enacted, most of the main SEND reform proposals won’t be implemented until 2029. If you want an insight into what the legal changes might mean, check out our recent webinar recording.

But at the same time, the Department for Education (DfE) isn’t hanging around for consultation responses. It’s pulling levers to make the current SEND system operate in slightly different ways, and already laying the groundwork for the reforms it wants to implement. This post will explain how and why.

Another funding injection

This week, the DfE announced some additional funding it plans to inject into the SEND system soon.

None of the things it announced this week is new: they’re all things the DfE announced when it unveiled its SEND proposals a month ago. This week’s announcements set out how things will work over the next financial year, which begins in April.

The main thing the DfE announced was a big dollop of capital funding £860 million, which will be:

“…allocated to every council in England – the biggest ever single high needs capital allocation – to create more inclusive physical spaces and drive a transformative expansion of Inclusion Bases. These are physical spaces in schools that ensure early specialist support becomes part of the fabric of mainstream schools.”

This is a SEND capital grant known as the High Needs Provision Capital Allocation (HNPCA). The last government set this up in 2021. If you remember the government talking last month about a £3.7 billion transformative investment in SEND – well, this is the second part of it. The first part (£740 million) was allocated to LAs last year.

You can find out how much your local authority will be getting here.

Cancelling special schools

Back in November, the DfE told several LAs their special free school projects weren’t going ahead. It gave several other LAs the choice of proceeding with a special free school, or cashing in their chips for quicker, more flexible capital funding instead. For those choosing to cash in their chips, a one-off grant—the Alternative Places Grant—will dole out an extra £235m across 32 affected LAs over the next two years.

Is the £860 million grant the “biggest ever single high needs capital allocation” as claimed? It’s hard to tell, not least because the Department’s own published figures say that it’s not. But all the same, it’s a significant extra investment.

This is capital funding. It pays for buildings, renovations, infrastructure, and accessibility kit. But it can’t be used to fund the people who educate and train our kids. That comes out of a different funding pot.

How is this funding used?

How do LAs typically use this funding? We’ve kept an eye on that for many years. From our Freedom of Information-based research, we know that LAs mostly use this funding to expand and improve provision in special schools, rather than in mainstream.

Obviously, this isn’t in keeping with the spirit of the upcoming mainstream-focused SEND reforms. So this time round, the government has found new ways to “motivate” LAs to spend this grant differently.

This year, each LA will need to sign a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the DfE to get its hands on the HNPCA grant. You can find the MoU text here.

The MoU asks LAs to think hard about how they use the HNPCA grant, firstly by prioritising “the sufficiency and suitability of places in mainstream settings, including through inclusion bases,” and secondly by improving “the suitability of the mainstream estate.”

Finally—with what, in Whitehall dialect, is barely suppressed disdain—the MoU says that this money “could” be used to increase special school and AP places.

The fundamental legal conditions of grant haven’t changed, and as a document, this MoU is pretty toothless. But the DfE has a bigger stick up its sleeve to ensure that LAs hose the HNPCA capital grant at mainstream schools: The local SEND reform plan.

What’s The Local SEND Reform Plan?

To get LAs ready for the reforms, the DfE and the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) are getting each of them to complete a local SEND reform plan.

We’ve covered this briefly in a previous post. Each LA’s readiness for reform will be measured across seven pillars, and their local SEND reform plan has to reflect this.

The plan has to be ready for review in June.

If the DfE and DHSC don’t like what they see, then it’ll be revised until they do like what they see.

The big stick here is financial. Most LAs have built up very large off-book education funding deficits, almost all SEND-related.

Whitehall has agreed to remove 90% of each LA’s education funding deficit. But only if they approve the LA’s local SEND reform plan. If Whitehall doesn’t like the plan, then it’ll withhold deficit relief, with a decent chance that the LA then goes bust in 2028.

And the DfE and DHSC have gone so far as to quietly tell LAs and health bodies what they think a “good” local SEND reform plan looks like.

And from the documents we’ve seen, it’s crystal-clear that the DfE and DHSC’s perception of a good local SEND reform plan is a plan that has virtually no extra investment in special school places. The benchmarking allows for this investment if evidence is ‘compelling.’ We have no idea what the DfE would consider compelling.

Cuts to special school means even less much-needed provision

So the pressure’s on LAs to minimise investment in special school places. Are there enough of these places? Absolutely not.

According to the DfE’s own figures, in 2024-25 state special and non-maintained special schools were educating 11,000 more pupils than they had capacity to educate.

That number will be even higher today. And it doesn’t even include kids who are currently parked in mainstream awaiting a special school place.

So it’s virtually nailed-on that most of the 2026-27 HNPCA capital funding will be funnelled to mainstream schools, particularly at inclusion bases. These will include ‘specialist bases’ commissioned by LAs, and ‘support bases’ commissioned by “settings or groups.”

Whenever we post about SEND capital funding, there’s a key point to make: Shiny buildings and kit can make a big contribution towards educating and training children and young people with SEND. But ultimately, it takes skilled people to do the job.

Promoted

Inclusive Mainstream Fund

So, given the extra capital investment, is there extra funding for staff too?

There is—sort of. Although whether it’s enough is another matter.

This week, the government also announced that it was releasing the first £500 million of a previously-announced £1.5 billion inclusive mainstream fund (IMF). This grant will be pushed to LAs and academy trusts in June.

The Inclusive Mainstream Fund is designed to help settings:

“improve the inclusivity of their universal practice, providing them with more resource to meaningfully embed inclusion and remove commonly occurring and predictable barriers to learning. This includes: investing in high quality, adaptive teaching; inclusive pedagogy and decision-making; creating safe, calm and accessible learning environments.
“Schools will also be able to spend this funding on developing more targeted evidence-based support, such as specific group interventions for those that need them.”
Department for Education

The IMF is not supposed to be the only source of funding for mainstream SEN support. The DfE expects mainstream schools to use their own delegated budget to make that happen.

And that’s just as well, because once you spread the fund out across all tens of thousands of state schools, nurseries and colleges, it doesn’t go far.

The DfE estimates that each primary school (on average) will get around £14,000 this year from the IMF, with secondary schools each getting an average of £42,000.

In return for this princely sum, settings will be expected to pony up some paperwork. Just in case leadership teams are tempted to trouser the IMF cash and use it to build a bigger car park or gimp dungeon, the DfE says that:

“Schools will be required to publish an inclusion strategy. An inclusion strategy is a report of their activity and approaches to identify and meet commonly occurring and predictable needs within their cohort and embed inclusive practice.”

Ofsted will also probably be checking these inclusion strategies too.

In short, it’s not clear at all yet how staffing for the new mainstream inclusion bases will be funded. If you’re in line for a ‘specialist base,’ then the LA will pitch in. If you’re in line for a ‘support base,’ then it’ll be down to the school or trust.

Follow the “evidence”

According to the Schools White Paper, the SEND reforms will be “evidence-based,” and this week the DfE explained a bit more how that’ll work.

As indicated above, the DfE is shaping council decisions to ensure that billions of pounds will be invested into ‘inclusion bases’ – a type of provision which, for now at least, almost entirely lacks an evidence base demonstrating either effectiveness or value for money.

That doesn’t automatically mean it’s a bad bet. But it’s a bet, nonetheless.

One of the main reasons that so much in SEND lacks an evidence base is that—for decades—it’s been a rock-bottom priority for the education and research sector.

The DfE wants to remedy that by introducing a set of evidence-based National Inclusion Standards, and an evidence-based set of Specialist Provision Packages. We’ve covered some of this in recent posts. For an early insight into Specialist Provision Packages, read here. For an analysis of the politicisation of SEND expertise, read here.

In the Schools White Paper, the DfE promised to

“appoint an independent expert panel who will oversee the development of the National Inclusion Standards and improving [sic] the quality of SEND evidence. They will also oversee the development of the new Specialist Provision Packages to underpin the specialist system.”

And as of this week, we now have a bit more detail on this independent expert panel.

The panel will have two co-chairs. On the education side, it’ll be Tom Rees, CEO of Ormiston Academy Trust and SEND parent: he’s already a lead DfE inclusion adviser, and he’s played a key role in getting the SEND reform proposals to their current state.

On the health side—well, it probably won’t surprise you to learn that health hasn’t turned up yet. The advert’s out: £400 per day, one day a week, for two years.

The independent expert panel will also include somewhere between 5-8 experts, yet to be appointed but currently recruiting, with a one day per month commitment.

The panel will also invite experts from other organisations, including UK Research and Innovation, the Education Endowment Foundation, and the DfE’s own scientific advisory council. It will be expected to ensure that “the voices of children, parents and sector groups feed into the development of both the Standards and Packages.” But if you were expecting something along the lines of direct and well-established ‘experts by experience,’ then that’s not on the menu here: parent carers are expected to know their place.

There’s no terms of reference for the panel in the public domain yet, so it’s very hard to tell how the panel will do their job. But it is clear that the panel will be stretched very thin. Based on the job adverts, the combined amount of working time that these panel members are expected to commit adds up to the equivalent of less than one full-time employee per year.

Or put another way, most panel members will be committing far, far less time to this job than you, as a frontline parent carer or professional, will be spending on SEND bureaucracy this year.

Panel members will also have to deliver expertise across an incredibly broad range of needs and disabilities.

When you look at the requirements for panel members, when you look at the tiny size of the panel, and when you consider how many different categories of expertise will be needed to do the job, well, it’s honestly difficult to see how this is going to work.

Within their tiny working time allocation, the 7-10 panel members will be expected to oversee the creation of the key architecture of the reformed SEND system, and develop and codify the evidence base that underpins it. They’ll also presumably play some role in commissioning up to £15 million of research spending promised in the White Paper.

If this work is ever implemented, it’ll radically change the way that children and young people with SEND are supported. The National Inclusion Standards and Specialist Provision Packages are supposed to define what support each child needs, what provision schools will be expected to deliver, and which agencies are responsible for what—across the entire gamut of needs and disabilities. As if children are widgets who can easily be categorised.

That’s a mammoth undertaking. Over the years, this work would deeply impact the life chances of millions of children and young people.

And yet, the panel are each being asked to contribute either one day per week, or one day per month, to get the job done.

It’s very hard to make sense of this, but there are two competing explanations.

It’s possible—but unlikely—that the DfE and DHSC have made a deliberate decision to hand over direction and design of the most critical part of the most radical SEND reforms in a generation to a handful of external independent ‘experts’ – who will all essentially be doing this as a side hustle.
What’s more likely is that the hard graft of putting these new standards and packages together will be done by other organisations, and the panel will mostly just review, approve or challenge what’s put in front of them.

But if this work is being done properly, even that task would be challenging in the time allotted to the panel.

So when looking at how this is going to play out, it’ll be important to keep an eye on exactly who these background organisations are, how genuinely independent they might be, and what conflicts of interest they will have.

Because once they’re completed, the National Inclusion Standards and Specialist Provision Packages would determine whether your kids survive, thrive, ot otherwise under this new system, and what practical pathway to an appropriate education they might get.

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Matt Keer

Matt (he/him) has two deaf children. He has over 20 years of experience grappling with the SEND system as a parent, and he’s seen the best and the worst that the SEND system offers.
Matt specialises in SEND stats, data analysis, and in-depth investigations of policies. He has given evidence to several Parliamentary Select Committee inquiries, and his articles for SNJ on SEND funding, local government policy, and the SENDIST Tribunal have been quoted in Select Committee inquiry reports and national media.

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