EOTAS Consultation: A further assault on children's SEND rights with cost saving and reintegration to schools at its heart

Contents

“Parents… will not be able to appeal to the Tribunal specifically about whether a child or young person should receive EOTAS arrangements.”
EOTAS consultation

Children with SEND, who have already been through devastating experiences, face having their rights to often life-saving provision torn away under new Government proposals for Education Other Than At/In School (EOTAS)

A consultation has been launched into EOTAS (Education Other than at school/in school). EOTAS is not the same as home education; it is a package of education that is set up as part of an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP). These proposals come under the heading of “Make SEND cheaper and give parents less power to decide their children’s education.” If you doubted that limiting parental power was one of the goals of these reforms, there can be no pretence now.

EHCP figures show around 16,000 children and young people are currently on EOTAS arrangements—a 90% increase in just four years. Most are teenagers: over half are aged 16 to 25. The most common needs are social, emotional and mental health difficulties, and autism. It’s a clear sign that there is both a lack of support and a lack of suitable provision. But this consultation is not concerned with that. The Department for Education (DfE) wants as many children as possible back behind school gates, instead of costing LAs money.

These are just proposals, and to reassure some, they will not impact young people with EOTAS who are secondary age and above as they would not begin until 2030.

More rights lost–the Government seems to hate parental choice. And it goes way beyond EOTAS

Here is the crux of the issue that Save Our Children’s Rights will be adding to our campaigning roster:

As well as the rights being limited, we have already laid out, these EOTAS proposals would mean:

No right to appeal a decision on EOTAS
No right to appeal a decision to change or remove EOTAS.
The only recourse would be an early review of the EHCP.
No longer separate appeal rights about the SEN needs (section B) OR about the provision (section I) set out in an EHCP. These will both be considered as part of appeals about SPPs or placements.

“…these will form a central part of the [SPP] eligibility criteria for an EHCP and will inform placement decisions taken by the local authority.”

Strip the Tribunal out of the EOTAS decision and the decision to change or cease it, and you haven’t just “simplified the process”, you’ve also removed accountability.

“Additionally, more detailed information on the specific SEN and [provision] required will be included within a child or young person’s ISP. This means that parents and young people will not be able to appeal to the Tribunal specifically about whether a child or young person should receive EOTAS arrangements”

Just in case you missed the significance of the above, while the above paragraph relates to EOTAS, it also means that a child’s SEN provision will no longer be wholly set out within an EHCP. They will be put in an Individual Support Plan (ISP) which, as you will have seen from the main proposals, are not appealable.

Therefore, your child may get an EHCP, but you cannot appeal most of what is in it, but you will have to complain to the school… This is the first time we have seen this written in black and white. Your child’s EHCP has become a wish-list.

Before we go on, we need you to help trigger a new SEND Parliamentary debate by signing this petition, linked below. Share it in all your social groups. We’ll repeat the link at the end of this post.

The loss of rights is not the end of these proposals’ crimes against SEND children…

Political arrogance will be the death of children

This EOTAS consultation is part 2 of the SEND reform proposals and its mooted Specialist Provision Packages (SPPs). You can read our thoughts on those here. The Education Select Committee held a one-off session on the proposals in June. None of the experts present thought SPPs were a workable idea. None of them. It really makes you want to cry at the arrogance of politicians and officials disregarding the expertise of some of the country’s leading SEND educators.

While it may want EOTAS to be part of the reforms, any mention of it was missing from the main SEND proposals “Every Child Achieving and Thriving”. When this was pointed out, there was some umming and ahhing, and then they decided it was completely intentional. The truth, of course, is that they had no idea what EOTAS was. And this is the danger when the future of SEND is in the hands of people who’ve been involved in it for less than a year, trying to assimilate information and life experiences that are so complex and multi-layered it takes years to understand.

And to rub salt into the wound? This consultation has landed right before the summer holidays and it closes on Sept 18th, two weeks after the autumn term begins. I mean, if your child has EOTAS, the summer hols mean nothing, right? That’s clearly the kind of thinking we’re dealing with. No consideration for family life, no understanding of what life is really like for families who’ve suffered the trauma of school placement breakdown, realising they have no choice but to do it themselves. No understanding of the careful support such a child requires; the rearranging of life, work, and finances it takes, as well as being there for your other children still in school.

But the DfE has closed its ears to naysayers like us, whom they cannot control. It’s on a relentless forward roll, pushing into place policies before their consultation has reported back, strong-arming LAs into compliance (not that relieving them of responsibilities is a hardship). But this forward roll might end up sending families who depend on this type of provision right off the edge of the cliff.

So here we are.

The DfE held a series of “deep dives” into different aspects of SEND just a few weeks ago, and EOTAS was among them. So these proposals have either been put together very rapidly, or the deep dive was a smokescreen for pretending to listen.

The overarching themes

The DfE name three overarching themes it wants for EOTAS,

Clear eligibility criteria (!): Only those with “The most complex SEND who have been assessed as needing a Specialist Provision Package and an EHCP.”

The DfE expects you to overlook the fact that it still does not have any criteria for what “complex needs” means, despite numerous stakeholder groups being constituted, consulted, and then… 🤷

Tying EOTAS to an unevidenced, not-yet-defined or tested SPP eligibility bar is a definite narrowing of eligibility. The current law (s61, Children and Families Act 2014) has a broader, simpler test: “inappropriate for provision to be made in school.” And don’t forget, SPPs themselves are still only proposals from a consultation that has yet to report back.

Improved quality of provision: EOTAS provision should support long-term outcomes by being “high-quality, safe, appropriately tailored to the child or young person’s needs, and underpinned by a strong curriculum with progression.”

Hmm, isn’t the whole point of EOTAS being about having the freedom to learn in a way the child can access? The Children and Families Act doesn’t say much about what can and cannot be in an EOTAS package, which gives families the ability to be imaginative about the provision and kind of curriculum a child accesses. So we hope by “curriculum” they don’t mean “national curriculum.” Parents are not (usually) teachers, but they do know their children best, and if they have taken on the responsibility for providing EOTAS, they do not do it lightly.

“The government acknowledges current EOTAS quality is inconsistent and sometimes unsafe.”

This is information from a recent Ofsted Thematic Review into Alternative Provision. But EOTAS is supposed to be monitored and approved by the local authority that funds it. If it’s lacking, perhaps you could fix that first? As you will see, the Government expects schools to be monitoring the quality instead of LAs. And if LAs don’t do it well enough, how on earth do they expect schools to? ,

Decision-making needs to be closer to the child or young person:

“A school or further education setting… would take on the role from the local authority of managing any EOTAS arrangements.”

So the DfE is saying: relax local authorities, you don’t have to worry about this anymore, we’ll make a school or college do it. I kid you not; the DfE wants a school or FE setting named to deliver whatever category of SPP, to take over day‑to‑day responsibility for arranging and overseeing EOTAS provision—possibly several different providers per child.

It’s almost as if they have developed these themes on another planet. The DfE says it’s spoken to thousands of parents and children over the past few months, so presumably some would have children using EOTAS. Why then does it not understand that if there was a setting that would accept the child or young person, and that was suitable, THEY WOULD BE IN IT ALREADY.

But the goal is reintegration.

The consultation repeatedly emphasises reintegration into school or FE as a desired outcome, with settings “involving families early” in continually assessing readiness, coordinating with AP schools, health, and other services, and plans “regularly’. There is some acknowledgement that reintegration must be “appropriate and achievable”. For some families, reintegration may well be the goal anyway, but for many more, it’s impossible to contemplate.

“We recognise that returning to a formal setting can be distressing for some families… we do not want past relationships to prevent a child… from moving into a setting where this would be beneficial.”

“Distressing”. Tell me you don’t understand the mental health of a traumatised child without telling me… It is often not just a case of one school not fitting, but another might. Some children have been made actively suicidal by their school experience. They may never be ready for another. The above paragraph reeks of someone sitting dispassionately through an EOTAS listening session, brows furrowed, head tilted with sympathy, but not empathy, and with no idea how to walk in the shoes of a family agonising over their child in crisis from their school experience.

Decision-making ‘closer to the child”

At present, a large proportion of EOTAS provision is sourced by families to fit what their child can manage and benefit from. That’s as close to the child as you can get. The LA either agrees with it or not. Sometimes, the LA has its own ideas and sources that may also be suitable. But there is often a battle leading to a SEND Tribunal hearing where the family almost always prevails.

This phrase, moving “Decision-making closer to the child”, is designed to sound cosy and well-meaning, following on in the spirit of BP’s ridiculous notion that children in specialist provision have no local friends. But it makes no sense, and it means nothing—what does proximity have to do with anything, if the child isn’t in the school anyway? For EOTAS, a broad view of what is available, and the experience of setting it up for lots of children, is far better than the hyper-local view of a school.

But what it really means is moving financial and legal responsibility, as well as managing and quality-assuring the provision from the LA to an educational setting. A setting that perhaps had previously said the child was unsuitable. The plans also expect a named setting to review the EOTAS more often than an EHCP annual review.

The local authority would continue to have “an oversight role, including on matters of redress, and we are interested in whether they should, for example, retain a role in making a decision with the setting on whether some or all of the provision may need to be delivered through EOTAS arrangements. Together, this means the system is working together to ensure high-quality arrangements are made that are flexible to the needs of the child or young person.”
EOTAS Consultation document

What does this even mean? It’s complete gobbledegook. I am happy to offer some Plain English lessons to whoever wrote this, at a very reasonable rate. If SNJ wrote like this, we’d have no readers left.

How will EOTAS be decided on from 2030

The Government intends to scrap the way EOTAS is currently decided.

At present, post-EHC needs assessment, a school is sought, none is found that is suitable, and an EOTAS package is (eventually) decided on. Sometimes the family has decided this is the only option after a succession of failed placements. Sometimes the family sees it as a last, even a life-saving, resort. Sometimes, the battle is such that families give up the fight and home educate without support. The DfE does not like this.

The other way EOTAS comes about is at an annual or early EHCP review, when a child has fallen out or been “helped” out of school. As some kind of education must be provided, the LA negotiate with the family and (usually reluctantly) work with them to identify something that is suitable and commission it. This may take a very long time. Sometimes it is a variety of options, sometimes an online provider, a tutor, or even equine therapy or training—if it meets a child’s outcomes, it is in play. It is far from always national curriculum-based. The DfE does not like this either.

The Government will fundamentally change this.

EOTAS decision-making Proposal 1

As now, the LA undertakes the EHC needs assessment
It determines the child will fit into some category of its seven Specialist Provision Packages (SPP)
The provision depends on what is relevant to the SPP category, less so, the child.
The LA names a school that can provide for this kind of SPP provision, and decides how much, if any, will be delivered via EOTAS. The school will “typically a specialist one and different to the one the child or young person previously attended – will have demonstrated it has the expertise and capacity to meet the needs of children and young people receiving that [SPP]”
The child would be on the roll of that school, even if they never set foot through the door.
If the LA decides no EOTAS should be had, the child must go to that school, and the parent cannot appeal
The school or college then takes on the legal responsibility for commissioning and managing any EOTAS provision. Later on, the setting may recommend more or less EOTAS. The LA makes the decision.

“This would draw on their local knowledge of need and provision. We are interested in whether this would provide reassurance about oversight of provision to families”

Given how often LAs are now taken to Tribunal and lose, I do not think this would give families ANY reassurance whatsoever, and it is incomprehensible that the DfE does not understand this.

The named setting would also be responsible for the child’s safeguarding while accessing the off-site EOTAS provision, even though it has no power to influence this, and… “Maintain a clear focus on progression including, where appropriate and achievable, supporting reintegration into a school or further education setting.”

And there you have it– the ultimate goal is to force the child back into a school they were never considered suitable to attend. This is not about the child. It’s about the money and Bridget Phillipson’s poorly thought-through ideology that every child should be in a school, because she did well in one.

EOTAS decision-making Proposal 2

The DfE’s other idea is to shut the LA out altogether, once it has decided on a setting (the one that the parent will not be allowed to appeal).

The LA identifies which Special Provision Package(s) the child can be slotted into
It names the setting it thinks can provide this, whether or not the setting agrees
The school decides whether EOTAS is required, “to deliver the designated special provision package effectively”. In other words, if it doesn’t provide what the child needs, it can commission an off-site provider that it will be responsible for.
If it decides EOTAS is in order, it chooses, commissions and manages it. The parents may be involved.

According to the proposals, this, “would establish a single point of accountability for commissioning and delivery, providing greater clarity for parents and supporting more timely and responsive decisions about a child or young person’s provision.” This is no less lunatic an idea than the other one.

This also brings a conflict-of-interest risk. If the school doesn’t want the child, and LA is paying–but a limited amount, the risk is that it will plump for a cheap and possibly unsuitable out-of-school provision (as long as it’s on an LA’s approved list). Where does parental choice come in? It may stress “involving parents”, but that can mean anything. There is a huge accountability issue here—how has the DfE not seen this?

These are set out in a visual in the consultation document on page 27

What ifs and why nots

The consultation asks respondents to choose between these two arrangements, saying this has not been settled. It clearly can’t decide which is worse.

Parents and children do not want any old EOTAS; they want provision where the child can genuinely thrive and learn to have the bright future they deserve.

What happens if the school decides no EOTAS–maybe because it doesn’t want the responsibility (or the child)–and this named school is not, in fact, suitable. So the child begins to suffer, breaks down, or cannot go in? Will the family then be fined for non-attendance? How damaged do they want a child to be? How many suicides are they hoping for? All the family can do in this instance is to call an early EHCP review–and you know how long that can take.

These options are far more likely to force a family to abandon EOTAS altogether and home educate at their own expense to avoid this horrific prospect. But now, under the Children and “Wellbeing” Act 2026, the LA can refuse to allow them to home educate, because the child has an EHCP. This will leave them facing both fines and a court hearing. So the family may then feel they have no option but to request the EHCP is ceased altogether. What a result for the LA!

This is not an unrealistic scenario under these proposals. Whatever the DfE’s “concerns about variability in current practice”, beefing up monitoring is a much better way forward than destroying families’ peace of mind and children’s futures.

It’s my guess that schools will not accept these proposals. I know for sure that parents will not want this. I doubt these proposals will get through parliament— if everyone takes action.

“We recognise that some children and young people with more complex needs will continue to require EOTAS arrangements at times, where their needs cannot be best met in a school or further education setting. In these cases, it is essential that provision is personalised, high-quality and designed to support positive outcomes and progression. Too often, current arrangements do not deliver these aims, with inconsistent quality and variable oversight.”

Does the above quote sound anything like these proposals?

How will schools manage this new role?

So, under either of these proposals, the responsibility for delivering EOTAS will fall to schools or FE colleges, most probably specialist ones. How is a special school going to have capacity to administer this? Don’t forget, under the wider proposals, it will also be providing outreach to mainstream schools…

How will a school SENCO (who doubtlessly would be landed with this task) have the time or expertise to investigate the practicality, suitability, safety, and quality of a particular therapy or training when it may be way outside of their competence or training, even if a suitable list is handed to them by the council? I don’t see anywhere in the proposals that gives them protected time—or the extra pay or budget—to do this.

What institution would want to assume responsibility for a child (quite possibly traumatised from previous school experiences), for whom they may not have daily oversight, but are responsible for safeguarding? Form an orderly queue.

The DfE spotted that some specialist and AP schools “already have experience of commissioning and managing provision beyond their own setting.” But this is unlikely to be on the scale that it is proposing, and will be for children that it has on roll willingly. Nevertheless, the DfE has clearly made a huge leap and decided this is evidence enough for a national rollout.

LAs already have frameworks set up for tendering, which take a long time. I am told this is a huge process that schools would find difficult to manage themselves. Is the government suggesting these are scrapped, and schools individually start from scratch?

All this will send a chill down the spines of academies, which currently have a lot of control over their intake. This is set to change under provisions of the Children and Wellbeing Act, and they will not be able to refuse a child with an EHCP. So what do you think they will do if they are “lumbered” with a child with a partial EOTAS package, or one who has been refused one, but they aren’t coping? Exclusion, parental fines, and bouncing back to the LA to do it all again, unless the family take drastic action and walks away from the system.

The named setting would regularly review the arrangement and recommend whether EOTAS should continue. The page 27 process suggests that, if the school wants the child to return and the family disagrees, the family could request an early EHCP review and the LA would make the final decision.

“EOTAS only exists for those children and young people who were seriously failed by mainstream and often specialist too. Frequently it works really well for those who need the autonomy – take away that autonomy by hanging a big temporary sign over it and you’ve taken away that safety. For the Sanctuary Cohort it is not being dramatic to say this can quite literally be life-threatening. In addition, working online can also be a great fit for these young people, and the same applies if there is a threat to treat that as temporary too. We risk even EOTAS being unsuccessful, when in fact there has been huge successes in both EOTAS provision and online schooling for young people experiencing very serious barriers to education.”
Cathy Wassall, Autistic Girls Network, CEO The Haven

Who would fund the EOTAS provision?

Ah, the ol’ elephant in the room–who will be footing the bill? And you will find zero answers or even a hint of answers here.

As explained, in either scenario, the named special school would apparently mostly or wholly arrange and commission it.

But nowhere does the consultation say whether:

the LA would pass an individual EOTAS budget to the academy;
funding would be included in a nationally priced Specialist Provision Package and EOTAS provision would have to fit within it;
the LA would pay external providers directly;
the school/FE would receive place funding plus additional top-up;
health and social care elements would have separate commissioners;
the academy would be expected to meet any difference between the allocated package and the actual cost; or
the LA would remain financially liable if the package proved insufficient.

In one option, the school is a “sole commissioner”. But commissioning normally means selecting, contracting with and overseeing the provider. This says nothing about where the money originates.

Indeed, the document says only that proposals taken forward may require a “new burdens” assessment to establish their potential costs before legislation. That strongly suggests the funding mechanism has not yet been worked out

At a guess, high-needs funding attached to the SPP would be allocated to the named school, which would use it to commission the EOTAS provision. As drafted, there is therefore a serious risk that the legal duty and contractual risk would sit with the setting, while control of the funding level remains elsewhere. That would be particularly problematic where a named setting says the proposed package is neither sufficiently funded nor deliverable.

If there is additional cost for the setting, it’ll be in their interest to get rid of it as soon as possible–and that means integrating the child into the setting that, presumably, could not cater for them at the outset. This is upsetting, even to write. For a family with a child with an EOTAS package, this will be devastating.

Far from the DfE trying to support families, it’s trying to destroy them and their child along with it. Why on earth would you come up with a proposal that so clearly benefits the local authority and places almost impossible pressure on a setting that is, in any case, likely to be unsuitable? Why would you put the family through endless reviews, with the clear intention of forcing a young person into an education they cannot tolerate? What is WRONG with you, DfE?

If, as it looks like, the approved list of EOTAS providers is determined by the LA, they have direct control over supply and, by extension, price. By what other criteria would an LA add providers?

My child already has EOTAS. What happens to them?

If your child already has an EOTAS package, the DfE proposes different rules depending on age.

Secondary/ Post-16: For those in secondary and post‑16 years, EOTAS will stay as is, presumably because they will age out of the system before these plans come in (if they do).

Primary/ Early Years: If your child is in primary or early years, a mandatory reassessment at the end of the primary phase is proposed. Not just a review, a full needs assessment. If the child is deemed eligible for an EHCP/SPP they will move into the new system (with a school/FE managing the EOTAS provision, if they retain it).

If they are somehow NO LONGER deemed eligible for an EHCP/SPP they will move to a “”supported transition arrangement” overseen by an Alternative Provision school, with regular reviews every three months, to avoid children “remaining in alternative provision for longer than necessary”.

“EOTAS arrangements for those who are reviewed at the end of primary and do not meet the eligibility criteria for a Specialist Provision Package. Our priority here is to ensure that there are effective and well-managed transitional arrangements in place. Rather than moving children without an EHCP back into a mainstream setting, one proposal is that the child moves onto the roll of an alternative provision school. The alternative provision school will oversee the education provision and support the child and facilitate a return to a school (alternative provision or mainstream), when this is appropriate and achievable.”
DfE EOTAS Consultation

This is a major structural change that will not be welcomed.

Other education that’s outside school

While not the same as EOTAS, the consultation mentions children who have a placement, but are unable to attend school through illness (s19). The DfE wants schools to move faster, with clearer responsibilities, better access to alternative provision and better reintegration planning. This includes CAMHS, local health bodies, LA specialists and hospital education working better together. We have an explanation of the difference between s19 in the Education Act and s16 EOTAS in the Children and Families Act 2014 here.

For online providers, such as online schools, the consultation mentions possible time limits. We know many online providers will have a lot to say about this. Often this is the only way children can thrive–indeed, evidence during lockdown showed that many neurodivergent children in particular did well. This appears to have passed the DfE by in its rush to stuff every kid back into bricks and mortar classrooms. Ms Phillipson is beating vulnerable children over the head with her ideology when many of them have finally found the learning that works for them.

The proposals set out an intention to create national regulatory standards for non‑school Alternative Provision often used in EOTAS–this may include tutors, things like equine therapy provision and the more unusual kinds of provision.

“We are interested in views on extending national standards to non-school alternative provision settings delivering special educational provision as part of EOTAS arrangements.”

This is likely to be one of the most contentious proposals.

The pretence is unmasked

By this point, it is clear that the DfE has thrown all pretence of evidence-based reforms out of the window.

Now read the stated aim below. Does ANY of this look like what I have detailed above?

“The significant growth in the number of children and young people receiving EOTAS arrangements raises important questions about how effectively needs are being identified and met across the wider system. For some children and young people, EOTAS is not only a reflection of the complexity of their needs, but also evidence of late identification and intervention alongside a lack of suitable provision. We must do better for this group.”
Department for Education, EOTAS consultation document

This is not a child-focused reform; it’s a cost-containment document. Every proposal the DfE tries to dress up as a quality improvement also happens to shrink the number of children who can access this route: tying EOTAS to Special Provision Package category eligibility means EOTAS stops being a standalone entitlement and becomes conditional on qualifying for a different, still-undefined gateway. Undefined gateways are easy to make even narrower later, when the budget or the politics dictate.

As I’ve said, a large proportion of children with EOTAS are neurodivergent. It is a sign of how the education system fails this cohort. It is a sign that the curriculum, the way it is delivered, and/or the way the school operates, has so traumatised a child that there is no way they could set foot across the threshold of any setting for the foreseeable. That, in itself, is an indictment of today’s education system. These proposals will not fix this while the education system itself remains the same.

I urge the Department for Education to rethink. These plans are thoughtless, cruel, and unworkable. The DfE should be ashamed—if it can recognise the emotion—of the damage it is preparing to perpetrate on vulnerable children.

Is Andy Burnham paying attention? As a fellow Culcheth kid (though he went to a better school), I have always considered the almost-new prime minister to be a sensible sort, like most of the folk in our shared Cheshire village. Is this what you want to be associated with? Seriously? If you are a resident of Makerfield, I suggest you start writing to him–use the SOCR tool we created.

Promoted

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We urge you to sign the new petition to #SaveSENDLegalRights—you have just over two months left to get it past the 100k mark to gain another parliamentary debate—only this time, there will be no conjecture—we now KNOW how Bridget Phillipson and Georgia Gould want to irrevocably tip the scales away from parents’ and young people’s rights and choices.

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About
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Tania Tirraoro

Founder, Co-Director at Special Needs Jungle

Founder & co-director of Special Needs Jungle. (She/Her) Autistic parent of two young autistic adults Devoted Grandma. National SEND advisor, journalist & author. Tania also runs a PR, web & social media consultancy, SocialOro Media.
She is a rare disease & chronic pain patient advocate with Ehlers Danlos syndrome.

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