By the time you read this, we’re expecting the Department for Education (DfE) to have announced extra funding to help get the SEND reforms in the Schools White Paper off the ground (reforms that you will have seen from today’s two earlier posts, here and here are not needed because the law is faulty, but are clearly down to cost-cutting).
The press release for this dropped on Sunday, before the White Paper itself. We’re expecting the DfE to major on this extra funding when they unveil the White Paper later today (23/2/26)
At the time of writing this, we haven’t seen the White Paper itself, just an irritating drip of paywalled leaks from anonymous sources. The DfE’s press release contains nothing about proposed changes to law or rights—read into that what you will.
But we do now have some details on the funding side, so read on.
Bear in mind that this is a first look, with very few details. We don’t yet know how much of the extra funding is genuinely new, and how much of it sits within the three-year funding envelope that the Treasury gave the DfE last year.
But here’s the detail we have so far, with some questions to think about.
How much extra funding has been announced?
Late on Sunday night, the DfE announced the allocation of “£4 billion over three years to make every school an inclusive school.”
This is funding that the DfE will use to try to set up their SEND reforms for success. Most of the £4 billion has been allocated to two main funds.
The first of these is a new Inclusive Mainstream Fund. This is worth £1.6 billion over three years, and will be available to early years, schools, and post-16 settings.
The DfE say they want settings to use to help make:
“changes that put inclusion at the heart of every school, so that every pupil can thrive – from funding interventions like small group language support, to supporting staff to identify commonly occurring needs and introducing adaptive teaching styles, so that every pupil can thrive”
£1.6 billion is a big number on paper. It’ll help make for a great headline. But this is inclusion for the whole education sector. Once you spread it across tens of thousands of individual settings, and once you spread it across three whole years, it’s surprisingly little.
The DfE claims this fund is “equating to thousands of pounds extra every year” for each setting. And that’s true.
But put another way, it wouldn’t be enough to pay for more than a few hours a week of teacher time in a school. It wouldn’t even be enough, by itself, to pay for an extra teaching assistant.
So even if your mainstream setting already has an inclusive culture, this funding won’t meaningfully add capacity to help you get the job done better.
More Specialists – Somehow
The other main fund that the DfE is setting up is called the Experts at Hand service.
This will invest £1.8 billion over three years, commissioned by LAs and supported by health services, to
“create a bank of specialists like SEND teachers and speech and language therapist in every local area which schools can draw down from on demand, regardless of whether children have an EHCP – meaning every child will be able to access these resources if they need them.”
The principle here sounds really promising. Assuming that the funding is divided up equally over three years, then investment in specialists on this scale could make a really positive difference in mainstream.
To give you a sense of scale, in 2024-25, LAs spent around £830m on this type of support. This includes educational psychology services, autism specialists and advisers, qualified sensory impairment teachers, and educational therapies from health professions (like speech and language therapists and occupational therapists).
Adding around £600m per year in funding to these services is a big increase. It could help get the SEND system out of a real bind when reforms kick in—how to get more specialist expertise into mainstream without compromising provision for those children and young people with high needs who are already in the system.
But there’s one big unanswered question here: where are all of the extra specialists going to come from?
There are already huge shortages of specialists across all types of need, and training up new specialists won’t be a quick process – it’ll take years.
Some sectors have specialists who could be coaxed over from the private sector, in theory. But how’s that going to happen when, presumably, many have thriving practices of their own? Is there a long-term plan to develop these workforces yet?
Smaller Pots
What about the rest of the £4 billion? This is made up of three smaller pots, each getting around £200 million in funding.
The government is already setting up Best Start Family Hubs for pre-school support. The first of these 1,000 hubs will start rolling out this year. They’re intended to help with early intervention, but they’re not just for SEND: by 2028, the government says the hubs,
“will act as a one stop shop for the whole community – offering parents a range of support, including a menu of proven interventions, from child-focused speech and language sessions for toddlers to specialist parent and baby groups.”
The Best Start Family Hubs already have £500 million in funding allocated to them. This week’s announcement refers to £200 million so that “every community’s Best Start Family Hub provides a dedicated SEND outreach and support offer.” It’s not clear whether that’s on top of the original funding or part of it.
The government will also allocate £200 million to improve teacher training in SEND issues. This isn’t new; it was announced a few weeks ago.
And finally, the government will also “invest” £200 million “to ensure all local authorities can transform how they operate in line with our reforms while maintaining current SEND services.”
This sounds very similar to the implementation grant that the DfE gave LAs from 2014-2018 to implement the previous reforms: as most of the previous grant went to temping agencies and consultants and achieved no impact, it’ll be worth asking the DfE how they will make sure this is used properly.
Other investments
Will £4 billion be enough “to make every mainstream school an inclusive school” as the DfE says it wants to see?
No. If only because money alone cannot change an organisation’s culture.
We haven’t seen the rest of the White Paper yet, so it’s premature to comment. But all the same, there are some promising things in this package.
Nonetheless, there are some commitments that the DfE has announced that don’t have obvious funding, and that should set some alarm bells ringing.
For example, special schools and alternative provision will be expected
“to provide expert training, direct interventions with children and short-term placements in their schools. Once rolled out, an average secondary school will receive over 160 days – around an additional full school year – worth of dedicated specialist time every year.”
Sounds great, right? Christ knows, there are mainstream schools that could use that. But who’s paying for it, and how?
There are about 1,000 state special schools. There are about 3,500 state secondary schools. So to make this work, it’s going to take a lot of special schools’ time, money and capacity. Most state special schools are already full to bursting and underfunded.
So an important question to ask is how state special schools and Alternative Provision schools will be given the chance to do this outreach work properly, while still having everything they need to educate and support their own pupils.
Longer-term, the way that SEND is being funded will be changing too. We’ll provide analysis on that in time, once we’ve got our head around it all.
Setting it out
There’s a lot of different of money flying around in the DfE’s announcements: here’s a table summarising all of the most recent ones! Anything shaded is newly announced in the last couple of days.
SNJ will be analysing the proposals over the next week or so, and helping you answer the 12-week consultation. Please help us by making a small donation below.
Edited by Tania Tirraoro
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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”
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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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