Last week, the government announced it was allocating at least £3 billion to create “tens of thousands of new specialist places in mainstream schools” for children and young people with SEND.
The Department for Education (DfE) press release made some bold claims:
- It claims this £3 billion will “end [the] postcode lottery for children with SEND”. In other words, targeting the wide variation in the quality and availability of SEND provision that depends on the school catchment area and local authority in which you live.
- The press release says this investment will be “a transformational expansion of specialist, calm learning spaces in mainstream schools, equipped with facilities to support children with special educational needs and disabilities.”
- It claims this investment “will mean young people won’t have to travel miles from home to have their needs met, and can instead get support in tailor-made spaces with the right facilities while also mixing with other classes for subjects or parts of the day that are appropriate for them.”
- The Government also says this investment marks “a pivotal step to improving the life chances of children with SEND across the country, but the work will not, and cannot, stop here. Full plans to improve the SEND system will be set out through the Schools White Paper early in the new year.”
So what’s in the small print? Is this £3 billion a genuinely new thing? What difference will it make, and how long will it take?
And as we’re apparently in a ‘conversation’ with the DfE about the future of SEND reform, what sort of things are worth asking them about this investment?
What we know 1: It’s for things, not people
At this stage, there’s not much more to go on than the press release. But it’s reasonably clear that the £3 billion is a SEND capital grant.
Capital grants can pay for infrastructure and hardware. That’s things such as new buildings, renovated buildings, portakabins, hoists, ramps, accessible toilets, acoustic treatments, and all sorts of other kit that can be used to help educate and train children and young people with SEND.
These are all necessary and important things—in many cases, vital. But these things can only facilitate education. It’s people who actually educate and train our kids, and capital grants like these can’t be used to pay the wages of teachers, teaching assistants, therapists, or anyone else who works with children and young people with SEND.
What do we know 2: It may not be new money
This grant’s also not necessarily a new thing. The last government allocated around £3 billion of SEND capital grants between 2018 and 2025. The current government doled out a £740 million SEND capital grant for the current financial year that runs from April 2025 to March 2026.
We don’t yet know for how long this new grant will run. But it’s reasonable to assume that it runs over four years – from April 2026 to March 2030 – because that’s the timeframe that government has used to allocate capital investment under its Spending Review.
Here’s a graph to illustrate things more simply, showing previous, current and projected SEND capital grants. Without anything else to inform us, we’re assuming that the new £3 billion gets doled out in equally-sized chunks over four years.
Real terms, 2025 prices (CPI deflator, ONS forecast)
Accessible PDF here
Not as big as it seems
This is a big grant, and it’s capable of making a positive difference. But there are a lot of knackered school buildings out there, and so it’s a small fraction of government’s wider capital investment in schools.
And when you stack it up against previous SEND capital grants and adjust for inflation, it’ll be a bit smaller per year than the SEND system had earlier this decade.
How will it be doled out?
There’s no information yet. But it’s likely this £3 billion grant will be allocated via the same system that the DfE has used since 2021—something currently called the High Needs Provision Capital Allocation (HNPCA).
With the HNPCA, the DfE dishes out the SEND capital funding to councils, who then decide what to spend it on.
While the HNPCA isn’t ringfenced, councils do have to tell DfE what they’re spending it on, and have to account for its use in a way that can be audited.
If this is how it’s being divvied up, the government will probably publish the grant’s conditions in early spring 2026.
It’s obvious the DfE want this grant spent in mainstream, rather than in special schools. But thus far, it’s not forced councils to do that.
SNJ has been following how councils have spent the HNPCA for many years—check this article and this one (also shown below) for examples. We’re currently looking into how they’ve allocated this year’s HNPCA, and we’ll report back early next year.
So far, councils have already received nearly £3.5 billion of SEND capital grant money this route. Most councils have allocated most of that money to special school expansion projects – not mainstream.
Rules for spending the money
A lot of this funding hasn’t been spent yet by councils, and a lot of the new specialist places it’s paying for haven’t yet materialised, particularly when they involve complex building projects. The reasons for that aren’t often councils’ fault.
But if the government wants this £3 billion to be spent mostly or purely in mainstream, then it’ll have to set different rules.
The government says its new £3 billion grant will fund 50,000 new specialist places for children and young people with SEND. The evidence from previous HNPCA spending suggests it’ll be a real challenge to create 50,000 genuinely new and genuinely specialist places with funding on this scale.
This brings us to what’s being sacrificed to fuel this scheme—and many parents are not happy about it. At least 18, and potentially as many as 77 new special schools and alternative provision (AP) building projects are being cancelled.
The retreat from special schools: 12k new specialist places at risk
For many years now, LAs haven’t had the freedom to set up their own special schools. They’ve had to rely on the DfE seeing the need for them, finding trusts to run them, and then agreeing to fund them. It’s a slow, grinding, insanely bureaucratic process: as near as an LA gets to going through an EHCP of its own.
In November 2025, there were 82 special and AP free schools in the DfE’s ‘pre-approval’ pipeline, with a further 18 due to join the back of the queue. These schools were being set up to provide around 12,000 genuinely new and genuinely specialist places. As of last week, most of these projects are now at risk.
Although 15 projects will apparently be going ahead, others definitely won’t.
- 18 special free and AP schools that were due to enter the pipeline have been canned. These were going to provide around 2,500 genuinely specialist places in 18 LAs – mostly in local areas with already-desperate shortages.
- To make up for it, the DfE will offer these LAs “a per-pupil investment for the council to use more flexibly and quickly to deliver the equivalent places.” We have no idea what that means: what per-pupil level of funding will be offered, whether it’ll be an additional sum on top of the LA’s capital grant allocation, or what strings will be attached to it.
- 59 other special and AP school projects (offering around 7,000 places) won’t automatically be going ahead. Instead, the LAs will be given a choice to keep going with the project (on unknown terms) or take per-pupil investment instead (whose value is unclear).
The DfE press release went hard on the promise of 50,000 specialist places, but you had to look carefully (and go beyond the press release) to see what was happening elsewhere: This grant will give with one hand, and take away with the other.
What does “specialist: actually mean here, and other questions
This looks like it’s part of a long-hinted shift away from special school placements and towards mainstream. The £3 billion will help set up some infrastructure for that, but the numbers tell us that it’s probably going to be spread a lot more thinly than previous grants.
The money can’t be used to employ any new specialist SEND staff—and the budget councils use to help pay for them is already billions of pounds in the red.
- What is specialist? No one outside the SEND magic circle really knows what the term ‘specialist places’ actually means here. With the right mindset, skills, capacity and resources, this can be an effective model where inclusion is a meaningful reality. Without all of those things in place, you can easily end up with something that’s Potemkin provision: insidiously warehoused segregation, pretending to be inclusive to save on the costs of genuinely specialised provision. So there are very real and very sharp questions to be answered about just how ‘specialist’ these new places are going to be.
- Quality of evidence: There are also questions to be answered about the quality of the evidence base behind what are clearly the Government’s preferred models of support in mainstream schools.
- Where’s the strategy? There are also questions to be answered about whether there’s any actual national or regional strategy behind the investment. Will the grant simply be passed on to councils to use as they see fit, to meet their priorities—which, because of where things are now, mostly means emergency investment? Or will the DfE attempt to direct investment in a coherent and centralised way?
- How will it end the Postcode lottery? There are also very real and very sharp questions to be answered about how exactly this grant will “end the postcode lottery” in SEND. This postcode lottery isn’t just about educational floorspace: it’s a product of insane variations in local revenue funding allocation, the uneven process of school academisation, the different organisational cultures of maintained schools, academy trusts, local authorities and NHS commissioning bodies, as well as massive variations in council geography.
For all the good that a £3 billion SEND capital grant can do, it can’t fix any of those things by itself.
Conversational Gambits
So this is where we can all count ourselves really fortunate, because the DfE has just launched a national ‘conversation’ about SEND reform with people at the sharp end of the system. People like us.
The Department says it wants “to have an open conversation on points and ideas organisations have raised to help inform how we shape the policy in the [Schools] White Paper” which will outline the SEND reforms. It’s also outlined its five key principles of reform.
It’s fair to say that the ‘conversation’ events that have taken place so far haven’t instilled a great deal of confidence in those who have attended them.
But luckily, it’s not too late. As the Department is in “conversational mode”, there’s surely little doubt it will be more than willing to answer your questions—in detail—on how it plans to use this £3 billion to ‘end the postcode lottery,’ ‘transform mainstream education’, and ‘provide tailor-made spaces,’ using far less capital funding per head than their predecessors allocated.
We’re sure ministers and officials will be keen to provide these answers, because doing otherwise would simply give inconvenient sceptics and critics more ammunition to argue this ‘conversation’ is just a performative, chaotic and desperate pretence at engagement that offers families no genuine input or insights into what’s to come.
So in the spirit of co-creation, here are a few questions that might be worth asking if you’re planning on attending any of the upcoming in-person or online ‘conversations.’
As the DfE is running these events according to their five principles of SEND reform, I’ve grouped them by these principles.
Best of luck!
Principle 1 – Early
The DfE says that “children should get support as soon as they need it.”
- Funding responsibly:
- To help make this happen, how does the Department plan to distribute the £3 billion—front-loaded and as early as possible, or spread out evenly over several years?
- Supporting early:
- How will this £3 billion capital investment fit into a strategy of early intervention? and
- How does the DfE think organisations can deploy this funding while managing the challenges of making intervention as early as possible, as effective as possible, and as tailor-made as possible?
Principle 2 – Local
The DfE says that this grant “will mean young people won’t have to travel miles from home to have their needs met.” They also say that this grant will create 50,000 ‘specialist’ spaces.
- There are over 20,000 state-funded mainstream schools. Providing 2-3 extra specialist SEN places for each mainstream school won’t meet need, and would also be a grossly inefficient use of resources.
- How does the Department propose to balance these pledges?
- Each local school will support children with a wide range of different types of SEN and disability, including some with several types of need. Their differing needs will require different types of specialist support.
- How will the Department ensure that the new ‘specialist’ places will be capable of meeting the needs of a wide range of local children in their local school, whilst simultaneously ensuring that the support is genuinely specialist and ‘tailor-made’?
- The Department’s own data suggests for every three new SEND units or resource bases that are created each year in mainstream schools, two close their doors in the same year.
- What will the Department do if my local mainstream school decides that no longer wants the specialist places it’s been allocated, or if it doesn’t want any specialist places at all?
Principle 3 – Fair
- Buildings and bean bags don’t educate kids—staff do:
- How will the Department ensure that the 50,000 ‘specialist’ places that this grant will create will be resourced by adequate revenue funding to pay for staff?
- Keeping the money for SEND:
- How will the Department ensure that neither schools, nor trusts, nor local authorities cannibalise the £3 billion SEND capital funding to deal with up their wider problems?
- Access to specialist education:
- Who decides which children with SEND will be allowed to use these ‘specialist’ places: the school, the academy trust, the LA, or the Department?
- How transparent will this decision-making process be?
- The DfE’s Secretary of State says that “where specialist provision is needed for children in mainstream, special or AP, we will ensure it is there, with clear legal requirements and safeguards for children and parents.”
- For a child who needs one of these specialist places, what specifically will those legal requirements and safeguards be?
- Who is responsible and accountable for fulfilling these legal duties, and what recourse will children and parents have if the statutory duty holder can’t or won’t meet those duties?
Principle 4 – Effective
The DfE says that “reforms should be grounded in evidence, ensuring all education settings know where to go to find effective practice that has excellent long-term outcomes for children”
- Research in this area is underdeveloped, and the DfE is still commissioning some of it.
- So what evidence base did the Department specifically draw on when it decided to channel a nine-figure SEND capital investment sum into a primarily mainstream environment?
- The DfE has decided to withdraw capital investment for up to 9,000 special school places.
- What assessment did the Department make of the impact of this policy change on the overall effectiveness of SEND provision nationally, and what evidence base did it draw on in making this assessment?
- How much funding are the affected LAs getting instead?
- The funding variation in mainstream SEND units, bases and hubs is enormous: some SEND units are resourced better than special schools, other bases and hubs receive next to no extra funding.
- What level of funding does the DfE think is the right level for these ‘specialist’ places, and what evidence is it drawing on in making that assessment?
- Financial accountability:
- How will the Department know whether this £3 billion has been invested effectively?
Principle 5 – Shared
- The DfE wants to use this grant to create 50,000 new ‘specialist’ places. The first grant allocation will be issued in four months.
- What assurance does the Department have that LAs, NHS bodies and academy trusts are working together to commission the right level of genuinely specialist support for these new places, without impacting the quality and sufficiency of support that other pupils currently receive?
- Ensuring accountability:
- If these organisations aren’t providing that joint commissioning support, either because of resource shortages, differing organisational priorities or a simple lack of warning that this investment was on its way, what does the Department plan to do to ensure that they will work together to provide those resources from April 2026 onwards?
- The Department says that education, health and care services should be working with families “to deliver better experiences and outcomes for all our children”
- What is the Department putting in place to ensure that they are working with families to invest the £3 billion effectively, and does it think that existing measures are effective enough?
SNJ note: On past performance, we know that officials and those helping to run the meetings are not selecting the tricky questions. The answer to this is, if you’re taking your time to attend, make all your questions count. Let us know your thoughts after attending.
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Also read:
- Check out our new SEND Politics page, where we’ll be keeping you up to date with all developments
Also read:
- 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
- REGISTER NOW! WEBINAR on the Government’s plans to cut EHCP and EOTAS rights. With SNJ & SEND legal charity, SOS!SEN
- 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”
- Why every child deserves Portage, wherever they’re born
What kind of government is “bold” enough to scrap statutory EHCPs from vulnerable children?May 16, 2025
The SEND reforms in the Schools White Paper reveal rights given, and rights stripped awayFebruary 24, 2026
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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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The fact of the matter is whether you scale up in mainstream schools or not, these young people re unable to access the curriculum and will require an environment that’s supports their styles of learning which isn’t always desk and chair bound and the needs could be so diverse that mainstream children may not have successful opportunities to access the education they are entitled too. Unless the plan is to open a school and the send school next to the school. I sometimes feel the policy makers haven’t actually stepped foot in send environments especially high needs send environments so this plan can only work for low level need. But the truth is more high level needs are occurring so are these children still going to remain out of education until a placement is sourced? Seems like we are going around in circles without knowing what the truth is…….