Congratulations parents! Whether you signed our petition, wrote to your MP, attended a rally or all of these, your voice was heard. The Department for Education has announced it is delaying the publication of its Schools (and SEND) White Paper until next year to allow a “further period of co-creation, testing our proposals with the people who matter most in this reform—the families—alongside teachers and other experts.”
This is the right decision—and we believe the recent parliamentary debate on SEND, as a result of the petition from our joint Save Our Children’s Rights campaign, was a key turning point. More than 90 MPs wanted to speak in the debate, with most calling for the retention of disabled children’s rights, echoing calls not only from us, but from many thousands of parents.
The government hasn’t helped itself by not addressing careless talk and leaks that left parents spending the summer terrified that their child’s hard-won support was at risk. It had the effect of turning parents against them, especially in the wake of the attack on PIP benefits. So, while nothing is immediately changing for the better, at least you can trick or treat this Halloween without fear of Bridget P answering the door and snatching away all your kid’s sweeties.
But let’s not get too ahead of ourselves—the letter has one very clear omission: there is no guarantee of individual rights to special educational provision—and we’ll look more at this below, as well as at a new report out today on inclusion from the IPPR
What did the letter say
The news came in a DfE letter from Secretary of State for Education, Bridget Phillipson, responding to the recent report of the “Solving the SEND Crisis” inquiry by Helen Hayes MP’s Education Select Committee, which we reproduce in full below:
Dear Helen,
I am writing to thank you for your report published last month, Solving the SEND Crisis, and to provide an update on my department’s next steps.
You rightly point to a system that requires decisive, long-term change and emphasise that reforms must rebuild the trust and confidence of children, young
people, and families. I agree that we must move towards a system where high quality support is provided as soon as a need is identified, rather than only once an EHC plan is in place, and that responding to the needs of children with SEND must become an intrinsic part of the mainstream system, rather than something additional.
Your report contains a number of thoughtful recommendations which my department is considering carefully, and I also want to ensure we’re able to fully consider recent publications from the Children’s Commissioner and organisations including IPPR and Sutton Trust. We will respond in full to your report in due course.
It will be crucial to build a consensus around the reforms we want to bring. My ministers and I have been engaging extensively with families and experts over recent months – and Minister Georgia Gould is now at the forefront of that work. Through that engagement we have made a great deal of progress on plans to build a truly inclusive system. We have already:
- Created new places in special schools, collectively creating 10,000 new school places for children with SEND, as part of a £740m capital investment
to deliver adaptations and expand specialist units in mainstream settings.- Invested in multi-million-pound programmes, such as Partnerships for Inclusion of Neurodiversity in Schools (PINS) and Early Language Support for
Every Child (ELSEC), that bring together central and local government, schools and parents to test and learn new ways to improve outcomes for
children and young people with SEND.- Updated inspection frameworks so Ofsted will hold leaders to account for inclusion. For the first time, they have set out an explicit focus on inclusion in
their new framework, gathering evidence on factors from school culture to assessment of need.
To help us deliver the most effective set of reforms we can, I have taken the decision to have a further period of co-creation, testing our proposals with the people who matter most in this reform – the families – alongside teachers and other experts as you highlight in the Select Committee’s report. We will bring forward a full Schools White Paper early in the new year, underpinned by our belief that high standards and inclusion are two sides of the same coin.
Through this period of co-creation with parents, educators, experts and representative organisations, we will test policy options being considered and seek
views through listening sessions in every region of the country, and fortnightly Ministerial meetings with key parent and expert groups. We will publicise these
events clearly across the department’s channels to ensure that we reach as many people as possible. This builds on the constructive dialogue we have already undertaken, which has helped inform the principles guiding our approach. I will continue to listen directly to those working within the system, ensuring that our policy development is grounded in lived experience and fosters a culture of shared learning and constructive challenge.
Our SEND reforms will be underpinned by the five principles below. I hope that by sharing these now I can provide some clarity on the direction of our approach, and generate debate about how we can meet the objective that your report outlines and that I share: “a reform programme which will put children and young people with SEND back at the centre of our education system, and in doing so, deliver benefits for the system as a whole”.
Principles for SEND reform
- Early. Children should receive the support they need as soon as possible. This will start to break the cycle of needs going unmet and getting worse,
instead intervening upstream, earlier in children’s lives when this can have most impact.- Local. Children and young people with SEND should be able to learn at a school close to their home, alongside their peers, rather than travelling long
distances from their family and community. Special schools should continue to play a vital role supporting those with the most complex needs.- Fair. Every school should be resourced and able to meet common and predictable needs, including as they change over time, without parents having
to fight to get support for their children. Where specialist provision is needed for children in mainstream, special or Alternative Provision, we will ensure it is
there, with clear legal requirements and safeguards for children and parents.- Effective. Reforms should be grounded in evidence, ensuring all education settings know where to go to find effective practice that has excellent longterm outcomes for children.
- Shared. Education, health and care services should work in partnership with one another, local government, families, teachers, experts and representative
bodies to deliver better experiences and outcomes for all our children.
In the coming weeks, Professor Becky Francis will publish the Curriculum and Assessment Review, and the government will publish its response. In it we will set out how we will ensure every child and young person, including those with SEND, receives a high-quality education supported by a curriculum that gives them the knowledge and skills they need to thrive and adapt in the future.
I am acutely aware that our reforms to SEND are some of the most critical this Government will deliver, and that is why it is so essential that we take the time to listen and get it right. I am more determined than ever to transform a system that is letting down our children and look forward to continuing to work with you as we move towards publication of our plans. Given the interest in this topic, I intend to make this letter public. Thank you once again for your important intervention.
The Rt Hon Bridget Phillipson MP
Secretary of State for Education
You can find the letter here
Five principles and co-creation?
Let’s look at these “five principles”. First off, if we are co-creating, perhaps they should have started with co-creating the five principles? Secondly, as mentioned, the letter does not mention retaining rights, so this does not allay any concerns in that area.
- Early. “Children should receive the support they need as soon as possible.” We agree, and this is already set out in the Children and Families Act— it just needs to be made a reality for all who need it.
- Local. “Children and young people with SEND should be able to learn at a school close to their home, alongside their peers.” We agree, so LAs and Government need to work together to ensure there are the right schools in the right places, and that children are not, instead, shoehorned into potentially unsuitable units, segregated from the rest of the school. We continue to be perplexed by the idea that special schools are for those with the “most complex needs” and would like to know they plan to define this, as we predict it will become a key argument by LAs as to who is “most complex” and who is just “a little bit complex”—and crucially, who will decide this.
- Fair. “Every school should be resourced and able to meet common and predictable needs” We agree—schools should be funded and staffed so they can support every child in attendance—the lack of funding at SEN Support level has been a key point of failure. However, you can’t just resource SEND and not the school as a whole, because unless it is ring-fenced, it will be used in other areas of school need. In this principle, it does mention “clear legal requirements and safeguards for children and parents” where needed. But we already have these—so why not simply guarantee they will be retained?
- Effective. “Reforms should be grounded in evidence” And so say all of us. Some of this work is already being undertaken, but it needs to be much further along before any changes are made.
- Shared. “Education, health and care services should work in partnership with one another” Once again, we agree, but once again, this is already set out in law— law that has been routinely ignored by the NHS, councils, and schools.
What would be a good idea is to review the existing legislation to find out where it is most frequently abused, find out why and then fix that aspect so the current law has a chance to do what it was set out to do. That can be done quickly, and we would be delighted to assist, as would our colleagues at the #SaveOurChildrensRights campaign.
What are we still worried about?
The first issue—the rush to legislate—has, for the moment, been abated. We are concerned that this isn’t just a way to give the Government time to push their same agenda forward, to give time for memories of the summer to fade, so Ministers can work on those MPs who spoke so passionately to try to win them around to their current way of thinking. Let’s hope not.
And of course, we’re still concerned at the lack of a hard guarantee that rights will not be diluted
For true “co-creation” or co-production, or whatever you want to call it, to happen, it has to involve a broad range of stakeholders, including a broad range of parents. It also has to start from a shared understanding, not a government-derived set of principles to work from. Our work with SOCR—and the sterling efforts of Aimee Bradley’s SEND Sanctuary parent group and recent rally—has again shown the power parents have to influence the agenda. The Government must listen to that. Delaying the White Paper is a good start to a recalibration that takes families with it.
We asked IPSEA, key members of our campaign group, for their thoughts.
“We are relieved that ministers aren’t pushing ahead with the wrong reforms, which restricting EHC plans in the way that was rumoured would have been. But allowing rumours and speculation to develop in the way they did is unconscionable: it has caused so much uncertainty and anxiety for parents of children and young people. SEND reform has to mean making the system work as it should, not tearing up the right to an education that meets every child and young person’s needs.”
IPSEA
But wait, here’s another report from the IPPR…
As well as yesterday afternoon’s big news, today, the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR) has published a report on SEND. You can’t move for think-tank reports on SEND these days, and it’s not clear what prompted this one. Sharon and I have been thanked in its acknowledgements, but I cannot remember what I did to be thanked for, which is fairly typical for me, though Sharon and I did recently participate in an IPPR podcast with Geoff Barton that you can find here.
The report was commissioned very recently, with the backing of an “Inclusion Taskforce” that includes former Education Secretary Baroness [Nicky] Morgan. It’s tempting to believe the IPPR report has been indirectly commissioned by someone in government who wants to check the DfE’s SEND reform homework.
The report itself? It’s brief, identifies most of the things that have gone wrong with the system, but blames everything on the “system”, rather than the preferences of the people who have power within it. This is one of my biggest bugbears—systems do not operate by themselves and whatever you do to “fix it” won’t work unless the culture of the people running it changes too.
It also seems to have got wrong that the 2014 reforms lowered the threshold for statutory provision. This not not the case; the legal threshold stayed the same.
Brief and incomplete
The report looks like it was written in a hurry. There are some very basic things about the current system that appear to have been ignored, such as joint commissioning duties, and other things, like the role of parental preference, SEN Support, and individual entitlements, that seem to have been misunderstood. They seem unaware that it’s mostly schools, not parents, who apply for EHC needs assessments, as Matt’s research showed.
There aren’t many surprises in their diagnosis of the problems in the SEND system. This is the outline of their proposals to fix it:
- A more inclusive education system for a more inclusive society: there’s not much detail here, and nothing we haven’t seen here in posts past. IPPR recommend “a systematic alignment of policy and practice and the deliberate creation of capacity and inclusive culture,” but there’s no ‘how,’ or any explanation of what levers would make this happen
- A new model based on early intervention: IPPR recommends a new category of SEN support called Additional Learning Support. It’s not clear how this is different from current arrangements. IPPR says it would be based on need rather than diagnosis. Sounds great, but the current system is also supposed to be based on need rather than diagnosis, and it’s written into legislation, so what would actually need to happen here to make that shift?
- Specialist plans for the most complex needs: Here we go again with “the most complex needs” as seen in BP’s letter above—almost like she cribbed from the report for her letter—the timing is certainly interesting. What does “most complex needs” mean in practice? ”Some children with more complex needs or those who need coordination between multiple agencies will always need specialist plans coordinated by local authorities. In some cases, these children will need specialist settings to help them achieve and thrive.”
Again, without a definition of ‘more complex needs’ this means little. And it means even less when IPPR dodge the issue of whether these specialist plans would have legal force. This recommendation could (unintentionally) describe the system as it currently stands. It’s reasonable to assume here that IPPR is trying to hint that ‘fewer children should get statutory plans like EHCPs’ without actually coming right out with it. Of course, if the system was well-resourced, expertly-staffed, and compassionately and lawfully administered, that might be true—I mean, we could always give it a try before doing anything that might will be regretted.
- Increase capacity in the system: ‘rebalancing funding’ (by implication, carving out more high-needs cash for mainstream); better and more early years support; ‘workforce development’, ‘the right mix of professionals,’ and ‘evidence-based practice’. There’s very little detail in this section, but “rebalancing” can only happen if SEND in mainstream is working well first—and that requires a massive infusion of cash up front and a “rebalancing” of culture and skills so that children with additional needs can be identified quickly. Too often, parents are told their child is “young in the year” or they are fobbed off with some other platitude. This needs to stop; parents’ concerns are usually right.
- Incentivising inclusion: Changing the Ofsted inspection framework and monitoring admissions processes; “inclusion should be measured as rigorously as other aspects of schooling and use wider measures of success that give a fair reflection of what a school does.” Thing is, making reluctant schools take SEND pupils is one thing. Making them feel welcome and helping them thrive is another—again, it’s a culture thing, and that’s free if you hire the right people in leadership positions.
How would these ideas be implemented?
IPPR make some key recommendations for implementation:
- Parents as Change Partners: “The government should ensure that it engages with families as key strategic partners to ensure that reform is informed by lived experience and reflects the needs of children and families. Their active involvement in shaping policy and practice is essential to achieving the vision.” Sounds great, but this is exactly what Parent Carer Forums are already tasked with doing—although of course, we think a far wider community of parents should be included. So, is IPPR recommending something additional here? If so, we are all ears!
- Retaining existing EHCPs: IPPR wants the new system to include ‘specialist plans’ (whatever they are) for ‘the most complex needs’ (whatever they are) – but it also recommends that children who currently have EHCPs should keep them “as the system gears up to deliver better support sooner” (whatever that means).
- Consultation: The IPPR wants to see ‘consultation’ over SEND reform proposals, (which has already been promised but in what form, nobody knows) and says “any future reforms to existing EHCPs should only be implemented following the existence of significantly better support for children and families,” with the government clearly laying out in advance what “significantly better support for children and families” actually looks like. We would say, with better support at lower levels, fewer EHCPs should be needed, so why go to the expense of changing perfectly good legislation?
This report is very much “headlines” and we certainly support the notion that an inclusive education helps to create an inclusive society. One day, it might even be true.
Children get one shot at education, and we must understand that the lives, environment, and needs of children today are very different from even a decade ago. I see it even in the difference between my own adult children and my young grandsons (isn’t perspective beautiful?). These changes are part of the reason for the growing complexity of needs being seen, and we have to respond to that. With the growth of AI, we are in the early stages of a rapidly changing world. This creates an opportunity to create an education curriculum that meets everyone’s needs. Any forthcoming changes must take this potential into account.
The best thing we can do now is to fund the SEND system we have appropriately, tightening loopholes through accountability, such as making SEN Support statutory. Then we give it a chance to be what it can be, instead of wasting another generation and billions of pounds on new reforms that will take years to create, test and implement—only to be met with the same issues we face now.
Disabled Children’s Rights are Under Attack.
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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”
- Why my daughter’s SEND experience means we’ll take this consultation judicial review fight wherever it needs to go
- Legal challenge launched against government SEND proposals that “significantly weaken the legal rights of children and young people”
- The law on SEND HAS NOT changed! But restricting EHCPs would be legally-sanctioned gatekeeping and a decimation of rights
- Why the Human Rights Act matters when advocating for your child with SEND
- Why legal aid may now be available for SEND families challenging school exclusions
- When the LA wants to cease to maintain an EHCP: The law and some top tips
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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
She is a rare disease & chronic pain patient advocate with Ehlers Danlos syndrome.
- Dear Secretary of State for Education, Lucy Powell: an Open Letter from Special Needs Jungle and SEND legal charity SOS!SEN - August 4, 2026
- Research: Disabled young people define inclusive education as “learning in the place that’s right for them” - July 30, 2026
- EOTAS Consultation: A further assault on children’s SEND rights with cost saving and reintegration to schools at its heart - July 15, 2026
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