Last week, the Department for Education (DfE) provided more details on Experts at Hand, one of the most important parts of its changes to the English SEND system. We ran an initial article on this plan here.
Thus far, most of the focus has been on the bits of the DfE’s proposed SEND system reforms that require changes to the law. And, whatever you are told, be assured those changes haven’t happened yet. And even if the legal changes do go through, they won’t take effect until 2029.
In the meantime, the DfE is focusing much of its effort on prepping mainstream settings for their much expanded role in the new SEND system.
The DfE has set aside a £1.6 billon Inclusive Mainstream Fund to help mainstream schools enhance their SEND practice. That sounds like a lot of money, but spread over three years and tens of thousands of schools, it’s a borderline homeopathic investment.
The Experts at Hand (EaH) Service is another, potentially much more impactful, DfE project to enhance mainstream inclusion. This will provide around £1.8 billion for local authorities over three years. Kicking off in September, EaH will provide
“investment in services that individual early years settings, schools and colleges cannot commission alone, such as specialist health and education support, to improve the quality of inclusive education for children and young people with SEND.”
Deparrtment for Education
What sort of things is Experts at Hand supposed to pay for?
The aim is to,
“strengthen the capability of mainstream education settings to meet the needs of children and young people with SEND more effectively and inclusively through:
- provision of additional education specialists (educational psychology services and specialist teachers)
- additional outreach from alternative provision, special schools and post-16 institutions
- additional clinical health professionals (speech and language therapists, occupational therapists).”
Last week, the DfE published some detailed guidance and grant conditions outlining how it expects LAs and partners to use this funding. So what does it say?
Terms and Conditions Apply
The Experts at Hand funding is being bundled with a smaller £200m DfE grant, the Local Authority SEND Transformation Fund, which is supposed to do what it says on the tin: help LAs get ready for future reforms.
In total then, this combined grant is worth £2 billon over three years. In the summer, LAs will be getting a share of £429 million to cover the 2026-27 period. The grant money isn’t being distributed evenly. This year’s grant will be smaller than the following years, and the amount each LA gets will depend on the size of its pupil population, its location, its pupils’ attainment, and the LA’s relative deprivation. You can find out how much your LA is getting here.
Is the grant allocation ring-fenced?
It’s not ringfenced in a watertight legal sense, but the DfE has imposed some conditions on its use. These conditions are backed by a big financial stick that should mean that LAs will broadly comply.
Firstly, the DfE expects LAs to show (at least at a broad level) in their local SEND reform plan how their EaH service will work. If you want more details on these plans, check this post for more. These local SEND reform plans are due to be sent to the DfE on 19th June, so LAs don’t have long to put their offer together.
The DfE expects LAs to route the EaH service through standard channels, with the offer:
“commissioned jointly by local authorities and [NHS] integrated care boards within the local area SEND partnership joint commissioning arrangements. Local area partnerships must provide clear routes for mainstream education settings to access specialist support from a range of experts across education and health.”
The DfE also wants to ensure that most of this grant money goes to the front-line. It says that at least 80% of this grant money has to be spent on “EaH direct delivery for all settings, staff and their children and young people,” with no more than 10% of funding spent on associated admin costs, and no more than 10% to be spent on LA SEND service transformation costs.
That all sounds sensible, although in practice a lot depends on what gets classed as “direct delivery.” There are already EaH staffing plans out there where back-office support and management posts have been stuffed into the ‘direct delivery’ category, in the hope that no one’s going to be looking too closely.
The Department has also set out pretty clearly what this funding can’t be spent on: it can’t be used to make provision already specified in EHCPs, it can’t be used to fund EHCP assessment processes, and it can’t be used to fund wider social care or family support services. In short,
“local areas must demonstrate that the Experts at Hand offer increases overall capacity rather than displacing or replacing existing services.”
The DfE also says this funding can’t be used “to make provision schools can or should make themselves,” although the nature of the Experts at Hand service will probably make this a blurry distinction.
Who are the Experts at Hand and whose hands are they holding?
The DfE guidance offers some expectations of how the experts should be used in mainstream settings, and the guidance indicates that “direct delivery” is a fuzzy term.
Broadly speaking, the experts are expected to primarily work at the group and cohort level, and mostly in an advisory role.
The aim is to bring specialist expertise into everyday mainstream learning environments at an early stage, to help skill up mainstream staff, to stop children’s SEN from escalating, and ultimately to reduce referrals of individual children to specialist services. Sometimes, specialists might work directly with individual pupils, but that will be the exception rather than the rule.
Time-limited help
The guidance also says—repeatedly—that EaH support will be “time-limited.”
What this means in practice isn’t clear—support via the much-vilified EHCP process is also time-limited, for example—but the aim is to transmit specialist skills and understanding to mainstream settings so that they can eventually meet need without further external involvement.
The EaH guidance also delineates the types of specialist that should be funded through the grant:
- educational psychologists,
- speech and language therapists,
- occupational therapists, and
- specialist teachers.
Eligible specialist teachers can be employed by the LA via outreach services (for example, sensory impairment teachers, or teachers specialising in speech, language and communication needs) or they can be teachers who work in special schools or alternative provision (AP) settings.
The DfE envisages that over 40% of EaH funding will be allocated to special school and AP outreach: it’s unclear for now how this will work without affecting pupils in those specialist settings.
The Department also gingerly hints at the types of specialist that the grant shouldn’t pay for, including “mental health professionals, physiotherapists, and other relevant experts.” It’s unclear what would actually happen if an LA decides to use some of the Experts at Hand funding to address yawning gaps in mainstream mental health support. It’s also unclear where medical needs, dyslexia or other specific learning difficulties sit here. It’s very possible it’s unclear to the DfE too.
How “expert” will these experts be, and where are they coming from?
The main challenge that Experts at Hand faces is simple, but huge: there just aren’t enough qualified specialists to go round.
For many years, SEND system leaders have complained about spiralling demand for specialist SEND services. Many of them lobbied for changes that would allow them to suppress “demand” more easily. You can see the skid marks of their lobbying all over the DfE’s SEND reform proposals.
But while these council leaders complained about “demand” particularly from parent carers, they did next to nothing about supply.
In the long, long run-up to SEND reform, central government and local services—especially on the health side—simply didn’t do enough to boost the number of specialists on their books. It usually takes years to train and qualify specialists: current schemes to boost numbers are either in their infancy, or are completely inadequate in scale.
Even before the Experts at Hand service was announced, almost every SEND specialist service was suffering from deep, deep shortages. The introduction of Experts at Hand will compound this problem, and over the next few years more and more specialists will also be needed to make EHCP provision too.
Even if you have the money to pay for them, how can you get experts at hand to support mainstream inclusion if there aren’t any available?
Diluting what passes as expertise
The Experts at Hand guidance doesn’t directly acknowledge this shortage. Instead, it squares the circle by diluting permissible expertise.
When setting out the types of specialists that the EaH grant should pay for, the guidance allows LAs and ICBs to employ trainees and assistants, as well as fully qualified experts.
This means that ‘expert’ support might come from a trainee educational psychologist, a speech and language therapy assistant rather than a qualified therapist, or an occupational therapy support worker rather than a qualified occupational therapist. You could even imagine a leader in need casting someone like a Higher-Level Teaching Assistant (HLTA) in this guise.
In its guidance, the DfE half-heartedly tries to guard against the very obvious risk:
“Experts at Hand funding should primarily support fully qualified professionals, in line with established professional practice. Local areas should maintain a clear emphasis on delivery led by trained professionals, while also recognising the important role that assistants, trainees and support workers play within the wider workforce. These roles may form part of the delivery model where appropriate.”
But realistically, a lack of upstream investment—one that predates the current government—means there just aren’t enough fully-qualified professionals to go around. It will also create a bidding war for professionals currently floating out in the private sector that will drive up costs.
In short, it looks like the Experts at Hand service is going to critically depend on staff who aren’t qualified experts.
That’s not to say that assistants and support workers don’t have worthwhile knowledge and skills – and the DfE points to examples from the Early Language Support for Every Child (ELSEC) scheme to indicate that assistants can capably identify need in some situations.
There are also broader problems that will probably emerge as the Experts at Hand service beds in. The DfE’s EaH guidance says that
“All support delivered through the Experts at Hand offer should be grounded in robust educational and clinical evidence and should ensure that evidence-informed practice is consistently applied and embedded within mainstream settings.”
That’s a great ambition. But in some areas of SEND, robust educational and clinical evidence is (to put it politely) disputed. In other areas, the evidence simply isn’t there; not because the special educational need itself doesn’t exist, but because academic grant issuers and system leaders simply haven’t previously felt it worth investing in relevant research.
The DfE is starting to allocate funding to help remedy that evidential shortfall, but the investment won’t bear fruit until well after the current round of Experts at Hand funding has made its way through the system.
How will parental expertise be involved?
We all know the phrase “parents know their children best” from the SEND Code of Practice, and parent carers themselves are a source of expertise that can inform effective provision. However, in the Experts at Hand guidance, there’s no acknowledgement of this.
There are two ways the guidance envisages parent carers getting involved: through your local parent carer forum, as a member of the local area partnership for SEND services; and as a passive recipient of the service’s expertise
When suggesting ways to deliver the Experts at Hand service, the DfE suggests things like working with mainstream staff in,
“jointly developing resources and workshops for parents to help them understand and support their child’s development,” or generating “resources and workshops to strengthen engagement with parents and carers.”
A lot of this is down to the focus of Experts at Hand: skilling staff up, improving things at a cohort level rather than at an individual level. But there are clearly ways that parent carers can contribute here. However, the likelihood that we’ll be asked to will depend on individual specialists and school leaders.
Will Experts at Hand work? The odds are against it
Experts at Hand is arguably one of the most important and welcome changes to SEND service delivery in a decade.
If the proposed SEND reforms are to have any chance of delivering for children and young people, then Experts at Hand has to work; it’s aimed squarely at a key problem that needs solving, and it’s properly funded.
But the odds are still against it.
Thanks to years of previous inaction, Experts at Hand will kick off from a standing start. There are really important questions to ask about where the expertise is coming from, and who won’t be getting that expertise instead.
That’s not just about shortages of therapists and educational psychologists. It’s also about how acutely-stretched special schools and alternative provision settings can continue to support their own pupils whilst also providing outreach services.
This is a service that’ll have a bit more accountability than the norm for SEND—but not much more.
And if capacity falters, then service leaders—particularly those in health—will be sorely tempted to double down on well-practised demand suppression tactics and stripping of statutory provision.
If that happens, it’ll be a clear test of the DfE’s stated commitment to improving accountability. If local system leaders cannot deliver on Experts at Hand, then Whitehall can either step in at an early stage to change local behaviours, or they’ll revert to type, issue yet another strongly-worded cheque, and wring their hands from the sidelines.
Disabled Children’s Rights are Under Attack.
We’re fighting, but we can’t do it alone: we need your help more than ever.
We’re volunteer-run, but costs are rising. To help us keep going, please consider a one-off or, if it’s possible, a regular donation.
Read more about being a regular donor here.
We use Zeffy to fundraise, which doesn’t charge us a fee, so 100% of your donation reaches us.
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”
- Top Tips for the EOTAS & EHCP consultation: Protect your child’s rights to statutory SEND support
- Mainstream SEND Funding: A simple explainer, another consultation, and why it really matters
- EHCPs 2026: A relentless rise, but who’s surprised? Plus SNJ’s annual LA Hall of Shame
- SEND 2026: Tracking a decade of rising need with earlier EHCPs and moves to specialist provision for secondary
- Using “Not Quite Experts” at Hand will be the only solution to staff the Government’s big new plan for school support
- The Government thinks Ofsted will ensure SEND reform accountability. This evidence suggests ‘significant concern’.
- Experts At Hand: A good idea built on wishful thinking and shaky foundations
- Capital carrot, SEND steamroller: The Government’s evidence-light reform route isn’t waiting for anyone
- Accountability after SEND Reform: A system that marks its own homework
- Schools White Paper: What do we know so far about funding for SEND?
- A sceptics eye on government EHCP prep research shows the “deranged” numbers just don’t add up
- SEND cash splash: What does it all add up to—and will ditching debt improve provision?
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
Don’t miss a thing!
Don’t miss any posts from SNJ – simply add your email address below. You must click the link in the confirmation email you’ll receive to activate your free subscription.
You can also keep up with us by following our
Want more? Be an SNJ regular donor!
SNJ is a non-profit and everyone who writes here does so voluntarily. We need your support to help us with costs by donating once or as a regular patron. Find out more here
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
Please share this article!
Discover more from Special Needs Jungle
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
