One of the most promising-looking initiatives to emerge from England’s SEND reform proposals is the Experts at Hand initiative. Funded with £1.8 billion over three years, the Department for Education (DfE) wants Experts at Hand to provide “a new offer of expert advice and services from education and health professionals into mainstream education settings.”
Unlike the more radical SEND reform proposals—those requiring legal changes that have seen considerable opposition from SNJ and the Save Our Children’s Rights campaign—the Experts at Hand initiative is starting as we speak. Last week, the DfE provided more information on how it expect local areas to implement it. So what does it say?
What it says on the tin
The idea behind Experts at Hand is simple. SEND system leaders believe it’s too hard for mainstream settings to access specialist professionals: people like educational psychologists, speech and language therapists, occupational therapists, and specialist teachers and advisers.
Leaders believe that at the moment, the system is tilted towards specialist provision delivered in specialist placements, supporting individual children and young people with Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs). They’re betting that if more specialist support can be deployed earlier in mainstream settings, more mainstream settings will be able to meet needs earlier and in full – reducing demand for more expensive specialist placements and individualised support.
The Experts at Hand offer is one of the main ways that the DfE plans to make this change.
How it’s supposed to work
Last week, the DfE announced how much funding they’ll be allocating to local area partnerships this year to make this work, and how they expect local areas to deploy it.
You can find more details here, including a breakdown of how much funding your local area will be getting.
This funding is being distributed as a grant to local authorities. It’s not formally ring-fenced, although it comes with conditions. The Experts at Hand funding is also being bundled together with a previously-announced £200m grant, which is supposed to help local authorities transform the way they work in advance of the SEND reforms.
We won’t cover the £200m transformation grant in this post. We’ll keep an eye on how this money is eventually used– but past precedent strongly suggests that most of the £200m will be hosed at consultants and recruitment agencies, to generate PowerPoint and short shelf-life project work.
So rolling the two funding streams together, this grant will be around £2 billion. This is almost entirely coming from the DfE. In eloquent testimony to its commitment to joint working, the Department of Health and Social Care has rooted down the back of its sofa and found that it can spare £25 million—or roughly one eightieth of the total.
LAs will be getting their first instalment of this combined grant in June. For the 2026-27 financial year (the one we’re in now), it’ll be £429m, spread across all LAs. The allocations for subsequent years will be chunkier: somewhere in the region of £750m in 2027-28, and £850m in 2028-29.
These are comparatively chunky sums of money. DfE data indicates that in 2024-25, LAs spent around £570m on educational psychologists, specialist therapists and other inclusion support services.
There aren’t binding conditions of grant yet, but the DfE has made it clear that they expect to see at least 80% of this extra funding directly delivered to front-line services, and they have also clearly specified that this money, “is not intended to fill existing gaps or replace current provision, including traded services. The [Experts at Hand] offer should build on and enhance existing local capacity and good practice.”
That means this funding shouldn’t be used to conduct EHC needs assessments, or to make provision that’s already specified in EHCPs.
While the Experts at Hand cash will be allocated to LAs, it’s not clear at all yet how it’ll be allocated once LAs get it. The DfE expects ‘local area partnerships’ (that’s the LA, the NHS Integrated Care Board, local schools and trusts) to work together to decide that.
As part of wider SEND reform preparations, the local area partnerships have to put together a local SEND reform plan: you can find more details on these plans here. The DfE wants the partnerships to set out how they’ll use Experts at Hand funding in these plans.
There’s still a lot that’s unclear though. For example, in the SEND consultation the DfE says that it wants to see LAs and ICBs using about £1 billion of their Experts at Hand funding, “to commission expert professionals to work directly with mainstream settings.”
But the DfE also wants a very substantial chunk of the funding (around £800 million of it) used to deliver outreach services, where special schools and alternative provision settings will work with mainstream schools. According to the SEND consultation paper, this might also involve paying for mainstream pupils to spend limited periods of time in specialist settings.
No-one seems to know yet how any of this will work in practice. For example, how would this funding be used to help extremely stretched special schools deliver this support without compromising the quality and safety of provision for their own pupils? That’s not to say it can’t work – but it looks likely that there’ll be a lot of people working this out as they go along.
This is SEND, so accountability is a key consideration. From the details published this week, it looks like it’ll be light-touch. DfE civil servants, NHS managers and their consultant advisers will be monitoring how the Experts at Hand offer will work on the ground. As yet, there’s no clearly marked-out role for inspection agencies like Ofsted or the Care Quality Commission.
The record of these officials in detecting maladministration is, frankly, not great. And their record of taking action when they do detect maladministration is isn’t any better.
Is it enough?
By previous benchmarks, this is a chunky investment in early specialist support. Will it be enough?
That’s difficult to tell. Incredibly, it took SEND system leaders until 2023 to commission a major study on demand for specialist therapy services for children and young people with SEND. The findings of this study have yet to be published, and we have no idea whether it’s been completed.
The DfE says that once the Experts at Hand funding flow reaches its peak at the end of the 2028-29 financial year,
“a typical setting could benefit from additional annual support which is equivalent to 40 days per average primary school, and 160 days per average secondary school.”
That’s a magnificently vague statement. It’s really hard to tell what that would translate to in real-life. Schools vary hugely in size and culture, specialists vary hugely in cost, it’ll be entirely up to the local area partnership to decide who gets what, and academy trusts will also have their own policies on how to use it.
But it’s a reasonably good yardstick for one thing: there’s no way that the Experts at Hand funding will be enough to provide direct individualised support to many children, and the chances are high that it’s not intended to.
The language used around this grant indicates that system leaders see Experts at Hand as primarily an advisory service. The overwhelming majority of these experts will be ‘at hand’ to mainstream school staff, to give those staff the knowledge, strategies and insight to educate pupils with SEND better.
That might well be a good thing – if the knowledge is well-founded, if the strategies can work in mainstream, and if the insights are applicable to individual kids. But those things are not necessarily a given—this blog illustrates some of the potential dangers.
Like most of the SEND reform proposals released so far, this is a project aimed at providing earlier and better help to cohorts of children that are assumed to have similar special educational needs. It’s part of wider efforts to de-prioritise the expensive, messy, and adversarial process of meeting needs at the individual level.
Where are the experts going to come from?
“Nobody has set out what level of educational psychology coverage is adequate to meet given need: it’s probably that no-one really knows.”
But the biggest challenge that the Experts at Hand scheme will face is a simple one. The scheme provides a chunky sum of extra funding – but if there aren’t enough specialist professionals already, then who will the funding be paying for?
A recent research report by the Education Policy Institute (EPI) on the educational psychology workforce illustrates this well.
EPI looked at the current size and composition of the educational psychologist workforce, to estimate whether supply was sufficient to meet current demand. The first thing EPI encountered was terrible data quality. Official statistics have probably underestimated the number of the overall educational psychologist workforce by about a third.
The EPI researchers found huge postcode lotteries with the distribution of the educational psychologist workforce. The best-provided LAs had roughly one EP for every 480 pupils, the worst-provided LAs had one EP for more than 9,400 pupils.
Nobody has set out what level of educational psychology coverage is adequate to meet given need: it’s probably that no-one really knows.
EPI estimates that around 1,400 would be needed to bring support up to the levels of the current best-performing LAs – a 40% increase that they assess would cost around £140 million. That’s well short of the investment that DfE has recently made in EP training over the next few years.
When reading this, it’s important to remember that this is an estimate of the extra educational psychology resources that would be needed right here, right now, to deliver current levels of required support. It doesn’t take into account the projected increase in statutory process support over the next three years, and it doesn’t directly take into account the additional requirements of the Experts at Hand programme. So the actual supply shortfall is probably worse than this.
Shortfall in therapists is sector-wide
Educational psychology isn’t the only specialist profession in this situation. Shortfalls are still huge in speech and language therapy, occupational therapy, mental health support, and the sensory impairment specialist sector. We’ve already covered the lack of teaching assistants, who are usually tasked with carrying out day-to-day therapies in school
DfE Minister Georgia Gould has said separately that the DfE expects 7,500 experts to be involved in the Experts at Hand scheme. When pressed, the Department said that this was a modelling assumption based on specialist staff salaries, rather than an assessment of how many specialists would actually be available.
There’s no quick fix here: it takes up to six years to train an educational psychologist from scratch, for example. And retention will be as important as recruitment: we can expect the DfE to issue increasingly desperate requests for retired or retiring specialists to return to work. That’ll be a challenge, to say the least.
All of this narrows the options for those who will be delivering the Experts at Hand programme in practice. If you have money but you literally cannot get the staff, what do you do?
None of the options are great. They could commission expensive specialists in the private sector, for example. Or they could—and probably will—do things that you hope no one with accountability power detects: skimp further on statutory support; pull more from special schools; use unqualified assistants or trainee specialists; or allocate what you have so thinly, it’ll be closer to homeopathy than therapy.
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Key Content
Also read:
- Beyond EHCPs: Why Inclusion Needs More Than a Document
- The Unacceptable Truth: 20 SEND legal rights at risk from the Government’s SEND reforms
- How health and family support systems are failing children starting school
- WEBINAR RECORDING! The implications for children’s legal rights to EHCPs and EOTAS of the Government’s SEND proposals
- When things go right: Shining a light on SEND Practitioners making a positive impact [Giveaway!]
- From suspicion to support: why the Government’s child protection reforms matter for disabled children
- Have your say on the future of transport for disabled children and young people
- Unison voices major concerns over SEND reform health plans for sick and disabled children out of school in the EOTAS consultation
- Top Tips for the EOTAS & EHCP consultation: Protect your child’s rights to statutory SEND support
- Navigating constraints: Why a former PCF chair thinks the current model is missing the mark for families
- Dear Secretary of State for Education, Lucy Powell: an Open Letter from Special Needs Jungle and SEND legal charity SOS!SEN
- Research: Disabled young people define inclusive education as “learning in the place that’s right for them”
- Research shows children in special schools report higher self-esteem than those with SEN in mainstream
- Experts At Hand: A good idea built on wishful thinking and shaky foundations
- Where will all the teaching assistants come from? The research exposing the reality gap in the government SEND plans
- Part 2: The Testimonies. Children died; the system looked away. Will government SEND reforms make this scandal even worse?
- Children died. The system looked away. Today, the Government is calling the human cost of cutting rights, “reform” [Part 1]
- Jen’s Acorn: Offering vital school support to prevent more unnecessary tragedies like my daughter’s
- ADHD and Autism Right To Choose referrals paused as at least nine NHS areas tell providers to stop booking assessments
- “It’s not a compliance issue—it’s a design failure” Psychologists call for action on mental health and “harmful” school policies
- The neurodiversity “early help” profiling tool creating a very unhelpful barrier to diagnosis
- How to choose a Clinical Psychologist for your child with SEND: A Guide for Parents and Caregivers
- Should “SEN Support” by made a legal duty to make it work children with SEND? And what would that look like?
- The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill: Needs work to be fair to children with SEND
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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.
- Top Tips for the EOTAS & EHCP consultation: Protect your child’s rights to statutory SEND support - August 19, 2026
- Mainstream SEND Funding: A simple explainer, another consultation, and why it really matters - July 22, 2026
- EHCPs 2026: A relentless rise, but who’s surprised? Plus SNJ’s annual LA Hall of Shame - June 27, 2026
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