by Matt Keer and Catriona Moore. Graphics by Tania Tirraoro
In December 2024, the House of Commons Education Committee launched an inquiry into special educational needs in England. Nine months on, the Committee’s inquiry report has just been published.
This SEND inquiry was a gargantuan piece of work. The Committee held seven oral evidence sessions: they spoke to young people with SEND, parent carers including SNJ’s Tania, individual academics and professionals, and senior leaders from local government, health and education. Finally, they spoke to the Department for Education, including the-then Minister for Schools, Catherine McKinnell.
The Education Committee also received nearly 900 written evidence submissions, again from a wide range of people: families, academics, teachers, schools, councils, consultants, companies, and even the England and Wales Cricket Board. And, of course, SNJ.
You can read most of these submissions here, although you can’t read some of the submissions from parent carers, as the Committee decided to summarise and put them through an AI-assisted thematic review instead. They assure us that all parental submissions were read and analysed, although they didn’t specify by whom—or possibly, by what. But as far as we can tell, parent carer evidence submissions were the only type to receive this treatment.
Why was the Inquiry started?
The 2018-19 incarnation of the Education Committee conducted a similarly huge SEND inquiry. This report set out—six years ago, in painful, exquisite detail—all the ways the English SEND system had been rogered into a cocked hat. Their report was so explicit, it came with a trigger warning for readers.
The current Education Committee saw there was little point in conducting another forensic examination of what’s going wrong. Instead, they focused their inquiry on potential solutions. Given that the government has clearly signalled its intentions to conduct deep-rooted reform of the SEND system, this approach made sense.
So for much of 2025, this inquiry has been racing to overtake the government’s announcement of its SEND reform plans. It’s a race the Committee has won, as the government isn’t now expected to unveil its plans for a few more weeks yet.
TL:DR
The Education Committee has come up with a lot of recommendations to solve the SEND crisis, and it’ll take us more than one post to capture them.
This post will cover what the Committee thinks it’ll take to make mainstream schools more inclusive, what the future of EHCPs, accountability and the SEND Tribunal should look like, and what improvements need to be made to the capacity of the system. The second post will look at early years, funding, joint working, and post-16 education.
If you haven’t got time to read all that, then there are three key points to take away:
- This is a good report. It does a really solid job in defending children’s legal rights, it’s very robust on accountability, and most of its solutions involve boosting and improving supply, rather than denying or suppressing demand. It’s a good fit with a recent report from the Institute of Fiscal Studies, which came to similar broad conclusions.
- At the same time, the Education Committee’s report is very school-focused, it’s light on specifics in some areas (particularly implementation), and while it has plenty to say on education and health, it has almost nothing to say on social care. The last bit is particularly concerning, given that the Law Commission has rowed back on some of its proposals for reforming the legal framework around social care for disabled children.
- Finally, this is a report from a Parliamentary Select Committee. Committees like this one are influential. They have the power to scrutinise the government’s SEND policies, and they have power to make ministers and senior civil servants feel very uncomfortable. However, the Committee doesn’t have any power to set SEND policy. The previous government cheerfully ignored almost every recommendation that the Education Committee’s 2019 SEND inquiry made. We have no idea whether the current government will do the same.
All clear? Let’s proceed.
Setting the scene
The Committee described the current SEND system as one that “all too often feels adversarial, fragmented, and under-resourced.”
“the reality for many children and young people with SEND is one of unmet needs, delayed support, and fractured services. Families are forced into adversarial battles for basic entitlements, while educators and professionals operate within systems that are under-resourced and overwhelmed. The evidence is clear: the current model is unsustainable, inequitable, and failing to deliver the outcomes our children deserve.”
“Change is not optional—it is urgent and essential. The Department for Education must act decisively, working across government and with all stakeholders including children with SEND and their families to deliver a SEND system that is inclusive, fair, and fit for the future. Every child and young person with SEND has the right to thrive in education. We must not wait another decade to make that a reality.”
This is essentially what the 2019 Education Committee said in their SEND inquiry report. This time around, the 2025 report has more solutions to propose, and it kicks off with what it thinks can be done to bolster inclusive mainstream education.
Inclusive Mainstream Education
The Education Committee states upfront that making mainstream education more inclusive is essential:
“Delivering an inclusive mainstream education system is essential both for the quality of provision for individual children and the long-term financial sustainability of the system.”
Few people disagree with that broad statement. But as people massively disagree on what good inclusive practice looks like, definitions end up becoming important. The Department for Education (DfE) says that improving inclusion in mainstream will be a cornerstone of change – but they haven’t said what that means or looks like.
The Education Committee don’t like the vagueness at all. As their sister Public Accounts Committee did, they are calling for the DfE to get their Pret-fuelled arses in gear to explain what they mean:
“It is unacceptable that a clear definition of inclusive education is still lacking. The Department must publish a definition of inclusive education and rationale for this vision alongside examples of good practice across different phases of education and settings within the next 3 months. Continued ambiguity undermines progress and accountability.”
The Committee also note – shrewdly – that,
“the Department [for Education] does not appear to have a clear understanding of the timescale and level of investment that is needed to achieve a truly inclusive mainstream education system.”
It’s a simple observation, and a correct one. And it’s also mind-melting: the SEND system has been under review for more than six years now, government has thrown tens of millions of pounds at consultants and reform partners since then, and there’s still no answer to this fundamental question.
To fill the vacuum, the Committee has recommended several key features of an inclusive mainstream education system:
- Education settings and environments must be accessible, safe and designed to meet a wide range of sensory and physical needs;
- School staff should have the expertise, training and confidence to support diverse learners, underpinned by regular access to embedded specialist professionals;
- The curriculum must be flexible, relevant, and reflect the representation of young people with SEND; and the Government must ensure the curriculum itself and the assessment of it reflect and accommodate their needs;
- Accountability systems must examine and prioritise the progress and outcomes of all pupils, on a rounded set of indicators which include but are not limited to academic attainment, so that inclusion is embedded as an essential component of quality for all settings. The proportion of pupils with SEND should be published and compared with other local schools and multi-academy trusts, to act as a disincentive to exclusionary practices; and
- Critically, good inclusive practice must always ensure rigorous, systemic approaches to understanding the individual needs of every child and delivering personalised support.
Most of this looks sensible—although publishing and comparing the proportion of pupils with SEND across local schools wouldn’t tell people much that’s useful, and it could also drive all sorts of manky organisational behaviour.
The Committee also recommended that the DfE should bear in mind the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities when drawing up its definition of inclusive mainstream education.
They also have a couple of other recommendations that should be entirely deliverable:
“The Department must urgently assess the funding required to implement meaningful reforms to SEND provision. There must be a clear plan for how the Department will work towards this level of investment in the short and medium term, which aligns with the timeline for SEND reforms.”
“As part of delivering a fully inclusive mainstream, the Government must set out how it will deliver, over time, a system in which highly skilled professionals, including educational psychologists and speech and language therapists, are less tied up in undertaking assessments and writing reports and more electively deployed in delivering the support children need. It should be clear what professional skills and expertise an inclusive mainstream school should be able to draw on, and how this expertise will be made available.”
“The Department must involve stakeholders in reforms and begin to consult with parent-led organisations now. It should set out a clear timeline for SEND reforms and report on progress at least on an annual basis.”
That’s the Committee’s vision – how does it recommend that the DfE, LAs and schools deliver on it?
Securing inclusive education
Making mainstream schools properly inclusive and ensuring they provide support for children is key to delivering the Government’s priority of educating a greater proportion of children and young people in mainstream settings.
The committee addresses this in chapter 3 on “Securing inclusive education”, which concludes that “the lack of consistent good practice in SEN support, driven by insufficiently clear and specific guidance and inconsistent interpretations of ‘best endeavours’ are causing delays in identifying needs, inadequate support, and an over-reliance on EHC plans”. This is the problem in a nutshell.
The conclusion is that “the Department for Education should publish a unified national framework for ordinarily available provision and SEN support, [which] should offer clear, evidence-led guidance and include practical, real-world examples tailored to educators and educational settings”. MPs also recommend that DfE “should publish statutory requirements mandating the minimum resources, specialist expertise, and equipment that every educational setting must have access to as a part of their offer of SEN support and in order to deliver an inclusive education”.
Unfortunately, this isn’t quite a recommendation to put SEN support firmly and unequivocally on a statutory footing, as IPSEA and Contact have advocated – but the committee clearly recognises that getting SEN support in schools right is absolutely crucial to improving the support individual children receive and the sustainability of the SEND system as a whole.
Given all the unhelpful and anxiety-provoking speculation in the press in recent months on the future (or otherwise) of EHC plans, we turned impatiently to the committee’s conclusions on statutory support for children and young people. And it couldn’t be clearer:
“The solution cannot be to remove the statutory entitlements from a system which lacks accountability in many other areas and in which parents already have so little trust and confidence.” [para 92]
“The SEND reforms must not be based on any withdrawal of statutory entitlements for children and young people with SEND. The Department [for Education] must instead set out plans for reform which increase accountability across the whole of the SEND system, so that many more parents and carers can be confident that their children’s needs will be met regardless of whether they have a diagnosis or EHC plan.” [para 93]
The recommendation that “support should be provided as soon as a need is identified, rather than only once an EHC plan is in place”, followed by the observation that “such a change would prevent the current situation in which many children receive little or no effective support while waiting for an EHC plan” does slightly imply that this is a weakness of the current legal framework. It’s important to note that there is nothing in law that gets in the way of schools supporting children as soon as their needs are observed and identified. Schools that suggest this is the case have misunderstood the Children and Families Act 2014 and the SEND Code of Practice and ignored the Equality Act.
Restoring parent trust and confidence
Throughout the inquiry, the word “accountability”—in the context of there not being enough of it—was mentioned so often, it should have been appearing in MPs’ dreams. And accountability features prominently in the report, mentioned no fewer than 116 times and located firmly in the chapter on “restoring parent trust and confidence”. The message has been heard loud and clear, and we are grateful to the committee for their perspective and clarity.
The report looks in turn at the extent to which schools, local authorities, Ofsted and the NHS are accountable for decision-making and provision for children and young people with SEND. On schools, MPs conclude that “the provision of support for children with SEND in mainstream schools does not receive enough attention or scrutiny by Ofsted”, something they heard repeatedly from witnesses. They recommend that:
“The Department [for Education] must urgently engage with Ofsted to ensure that the inclusion criterion within the new inspection framework is robust, measurable, and reflective of the experiences of all pupils, particularly those with SEND. This should include incorporating metrics such as the proportion of pupils with SEND on roll, their attendance rates, exclusion figures, school swaps, progression and attainment and other indicators of engagement and outcomes, to provide a clearer picture of how effectively schools and multi-academy trusts are supporting these learners.”
They also say that the Government should introduce mandatory, comprehensive SEND training for all Ofsted inspectors. And that’s not all on inspections. On area SEND inspections, the committee says this:
“The outcomes of SEND Tribunal cases must be factored into area SEND inspections, with clear scrutiny of how repeated non-compliance reflects the quality and effectiveness of local provision. Where local authorities fail to uphold their statutory duties, this should directly lower their inspection rating. Ongoing failure must have clear consequences if accountability is to mean anything.”
The role of the Ombudsman
The role of the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman (LGSCO) is considered at length. The LGSCO told the committee, as they told the previous Education Select Committee back in 2019, and as they’ve been saying consistently for as long as anyone can remember, that the Ombudsman’s remit needs to be extended to allow it to investigate complaints about the implementation of EHC plans or SEN support. The committee concludes, as did the previous committee back in 2019, that this represents a significant gap in accountability.
“The limitations of the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman’s powers mean there is insufficient accountability for the delivery of SEN support, as well as other aspects of school-based provision. This has led to repeated failures to meet children’s needs. This is a serious and unacceptable accountability gap that must be closed if inclusive mainstream education is to be a reality.”
MPs recommend—again—that the Government “must extend the powers of the Local Government Ombudsman to cover complaints about the delivery of EHC plans, SEN support and other appropriate inclusive education for children with SEND in schools, multi-academy trusts and other education settings”. Successive governments have been hearing this message for at least a decade: will they please finally act on it?
Retain the SEND Tribunal
The role of the SEND Tribunal is also addressed in the chapter on restoring parents’ trust and confidence. For the avoidance of doubt, the committee recommends that “the SEND Tribunal must remain as a backstop of the accountability process”. And there’s more – much more! – on compliance with the law:
“The Department for Education and Department of Health and Social Care must systematically monitor SEND Tribunal outcomes and identify local authorities that repeatedly fail to comply with their statutory duties.
The Government should mandate the framework for reporting SEND Tribunal data and undertake focused work with poor performing local authorities to understand why they are so often failing to uphold their statutory duties and support them through resourcing and targeted intervention, including specialised training, to address underlying issues and ensure that the rights of children and young people with SEND are upheld.
The SEND White Paper should explicitly identify and set out plans to address any structural or resource-related barriers to effective support.”
If this is actually implemented, it could make a huge difference to the experiences of children and young people and their families. It could even make the system less adversarial, as everyone emphasises they want.
Another Tribunal-related recommendation is extending the SEND Tribunal’s powers to allow it to issue binding recommendations to health services, not just education providers: “This should include the introduction of a statutory duty on health services to respond to Tribunal decisions within a defined timeframe, with clear consequences for non-compliance.”
If all this were to happen, it would be an excellent outcome. MPs have recognised that restoring confidence isn’t just about “involving” parents, important as that is. It’s also very much about making sure the law is followed, and taking action against local authorities that make a mockery of it.
Boosting Capacity in schools
If a more inclusive mainstream education system is going to have any hope of working for children and young people with SEND, it’ll need professionals to be better equipped to do their jobs without being overloaded. The Committee clearly recognise this as a key issue, and they have set out a series of recommendations they want to see implemented.
Firstly, they want the Department for Education to go further in improving the training that teachers get—in their initial training, in their early stages of their career, in early years education, and throughout their career.
The Committee wants the DfE to explore the viability of mandating every teacher to complete a placement in a specialist setting during initial training and early career phases. They also want to see mandatory SEND continuous professional development (CPD) throughout teachers’ careers. That sounds great, right up until the point where you realise three things: SEND is a really unhelpful catch-all term for this type of improvement work; this type of CPD is often a bullshitter’s paradise; and if basic humanity is lacking, you can’t really train that into people.
The Committee is very concerned – rightly – at how much work typically falls on the shoulders of Special Educational Needs Co-ordinators (SENCOs) in schools. They want the DfE to mandate that (in the short-term) at least one member of a school and a multi-academy trust should hold SENCO qualifications. They want the DfE to set out an appropriate SENCO-to-pupil ratio. And they want the DfE to ensure that all new headteachers will hold a ‘SEND-specific’ qualification (whatever that is) within four years.
Similarly, the Education Committee wants teaching assistants and learning support assistants to get better SEND-specific training, to get competitive pay and a clear career progression framework, and for the DfE to set out guidance on appropriate TA-to-pupil ratios. The Committee describes these recommendations as “essential” – without them, the system will continue to lose experienced staff.
Boosting capacity in LAs and the specialist workforce
The Education Committee also hones in on issues in the local authority workforce – challenges which they say are “often rooted in a failure to work empathetically in partnership with parents and carers and demonstrate a limited understanding of the assessment process and its significance.”
The Committee’s recommendation here runs like this:
“Local authority staff require improved training on child development, SEND law, parent engagement and mediation, alongside changes in practice that strengthen accountability and foster more constructive relationships with parents and carers. This should include meaningful parental involvement at every stage of the decision-making process regarding a child’s needs and support. Embedding a more collaborative and transparent approach would not only enhance trust and outcomes for families but also help alleviate the pressures contributing to staff burnout within local authorities.”
We’re sure that none of this would hurt— this 2024 post on the views of LA SEND workers is worth bearing in mind here—but the culture and service expectations are set by operational management, who typically aren’t making bad or unlawful decisions out of ignorance, but because they can.
Shortages of specialist professionals are also a key issue. The Committee also want the Department for Education and the Department of Health and Social Care to:
“urgently develop a joint SEND workforce plan to address shortages and build capacity across education, health, and care services. This should include explicit measures to deliver a shift in the deployment of educational psychologists, speech and language therapists and other allied health professionals away from undertaking assessments and writing reports and towards greater deployment in education settings, delivering therapeutic support for children and upskilling early years practitioners, teachers and support staff.”
This makes obvious sense – but it’ll take crocodile clips, a car battery and a light course of Whitehall waterboarding to get it implemented. The 2019 Education Committee SEND inquiry report made similar recommendations. The previous government’s SEND and AP Green Paper and Improvement Plan said this would be a good idea too. And the cube root of sod-all has happened since.
Key Content
System Capacity
As well as human resources, the Committee’s report also addresses wider issues of capacity within the SEND system – whether there’s enough of the right provision in the right places at the right time, and whether the planning is in place to ensure all of that.
The answer to those questions is, of course, “hell no” – and the Committee has a few things to recommend to get that fixed.
They’ve noticed that the government is very, very keen on getting more SEND units and resource bases set up within mainstream schools. They’ve also noticed that these vague ambitions don’t seem to have a lot of substance behind them yet. So they want the DfE to set out a detailed implementation plan, including required expertise and staff-to-pupil ratios. Reading between the lines, the Committee want to avoid new units becoming holding pens.
The current government has continued the previous government’s capital investment in new specialist SEND provision. The Committee likes that, but it also wants the DfE to,
“develop and implement a comprehensive capital investment strategy for SEND. This strategy should provide clarity over future funding streams, enable better forecasting and planning, and support the development of high-quality, fit-for-purpose settings across both mainstream and specialist provision.”
Currently, SEND capital funding is delegated to LAs to use. We’ve tracked the use of SEND capital funding in previous posts: it’s currently used for piecemeal fire-fighting, with little-to-no regional or national strategy behind it. So this proposal makes sense.
There are also some recommendations around the use of specialist provision that are going to be challenging to execute – for example, getting high-quality state special schools to act as centres for excellence that spread expertise locally – and getting the DfE to implement a national SEND data strategy. The issue with data isn’t getting the DfE interested, they already are: it’ll be getting LAs and schools to pony up reliable and valid statistics.
Conclusions, Part 1
The committee has done an excellent job, and we salute their efforts. There’s a lot to digest in this report, and it has the potential to change lives. Having considered and analysed a huge amount of evidence, this cross-party group of MPs rejects the idea of unpicking the comprehensive legal framework that underpins the SEND system and instead demands that it be made to work.
But it’s light on a key area. Given how badly SEND system leaders implemented the 2014 SEND reforms, how does the Government ensure that the same thing doesn’t happen again in 2025?
As Jo Hutchinson from the Education Policy Institute comments, “these improvements are unlikely to be achieved without proper funding and detailed implementation plans with realistic timelines. As the report points out, dismantling safeguards such as EHCPs and tribunals, will not solve deep-rooted systemic issues”.
Back in 2019, the previous Education Committee’s SEND inquiry made a really shrewd observation: “The distance between young people’s lived experience, their families’ struggles and Ministers’ desks is just too far.”
If anything, that distance has increased over the last six years.
Back in 2018-19, local government leaders barely engaged with SEND policy. Back then, some of them simply refused to give oral evidence to the Education Committee’s SEND inquiry. Nowadays, they describe SEND as an “existential crisis” – and the semi-flaccid, tweed-jacketed proboscis of local government lobbying can be found rooting around all over Westminster, leaving slime in its wake.
At the same time, consultants and one-weird-trick-to-fix-SEND merchants are everywhere. This summer, government ministers have made an effort to show that they’re speaking to more parent carers. But a great deal of careful choreography is going into which parent carers they get to meet.
Ministers and friendly journalists tour top-of-the-line, lavishly-funded mainstream SEND units, steered imperceptibly away from the funding-starved units that act as holding pens and the SEND units that are on the brink of closure. There are also approaches to parental evidence that are difficult to understand if gathering candid ground-level insight was the objective.
It remains to be seen how much this work will influence the Government’s forthcoming Schools White Paper which, for all we know, has already been written. If ministers took parliamentary scrutiny seriously, they would have worked with the education committee on timings to make sure all this work doesn’t go to waste. Let’s hope the new schools minister, Georgia Gould, has already made a date in her diary with Helen Hayes, the committee chair.
- SEND Inquiry Report 2: Force the NHS to pay its fair share, plus fixing early years and post-16 education
- SEND Inquiry report 3: How does the Education Committee want to fix SEND funding?
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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”
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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- The Unacceptable Truth: 20 SEND legal rights at risk from the Government’s SEND reforms - September 9, 2026
- WEBINAR RECORDING! The implications for children’s legal rights to EHCPs and EOTAS of the Government’s SEND proposals - September 3, 2026
- From suspicion to support: why the Government’s child protection reforms matter for disabled children - August 28, 2026
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