Former Director of the Council for Disabled Children, Dame Christine Lenahan, has intimated that the Government is indeed considering slashing disabled children’s rights.. But, she says, it’s okay, families don’t need to worry that this will remove legal plans from a large percentage of children with SEND.
As reported in Schools Week, Dame Christine was speaking yesterday, at the national Schools and Academies show. She is now a government SEND adviser and oversees three local authorities’ attempts to improve their terrible and often unlawful SEND provision.
She is quoted as saying,
“…most education, health and care plans these days are actually about getting children the education they deserve… It’s not necessarily about needing the additional factors that health and social care bring, which is what they were designed for in the first place.”
In the Tes, Dame Christine is quoted as saying,
“It started off in 2014 as a system for a very small group of children, children who actively needed the engagement of health, care and education in order to meet their outcomes.
Tes
“Dame Christine said the system has “expanded and expanded” and suggested that most pupils with an EHCP in place “don’t need health and care, they need a really good, focused education”.
The 2014 reforms
Dame Christine worked hard on the original 2014 reforms. Most of us at SNJ did too in various ways, and our memory differs.
The Children and Families Act 2014 was designed to create a joined-up system where children’s needs were set out in a unified, single document.
EHCPs were never just intended for those who have the most complex needs across all three domains of education, health and social care. They were meant to be a more expansive version of Statements of Special Educational Needs, bringing in a more holistic picture of a child’s needs, so they got the wraparound care they needed to thrive.
It meant local and national health services working with local authorities’ education and social care departments to put the child, not the system, at the centre, ensuring those whose children did need health and social care support could have it stated in one document that everyone working with them could see and understand.
But just because public bodies regularly fail to comply with the law to keep their costs down shouldn’t mean that we should just throw up our hands and remove these duties from EHCPs. This failure is not one of legislation, it is one of years of eroded funding. And though government has responded by reactively throwing money at high needs, it hasn’t funded the part of the system that pays for early intervention, and thus enables inclusion.
EHCPs have enabled many to stay in mainstream school
The Schools Week article included, “Asked whether this would involve narrowing EHCPs to only apply to children in special schools and whether they had any place in mainstream, Lenehan said: “I think, to be honest, that’s the conversation we’re in the middle of.”
We would suggest that particular conversation should cease.
A holistic assessment of needs was supposed to see if the child requires short breaks, occupational therapy, intensive speech and language therapy, or any other support that a school cannot normally provide from its (woeful) delegated SEND budget. Children who do not need health and social care or, necessarily, specialist provision, may still have significant educational needs that need to be supported over and above that which can be provided for from a school budget.
EHCPs have meant that many children who may otherwise have had to go into a special school, have been able to get the help they needed in mainstream. Indeed, most families want their children to be included in mainstream schools and EHCPs funding teaching assistants and speech and language therapists have enabled them to do this.
For a government that purports to want greater inclusion in mainstream, this shows a concerning lack of understanding about the role EHCPs can play in supporting inclusion. But then this is the same government that doesn’t understand PIP is not an out-of-work benefit, and that thinks it’s okay to deprive disabled young people of additional support benefits until they’re 22, so perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised. It does seem this government has a thing about disabled people’s right to thrive—make it harder to get the right education, then when they can’t get a job, stop them getting benefits?
We hear the backfire of poorly thought-through plans
We do know the government favours creating resourced provision and units in mainstream schools. Children generally need EHCPs to get this kind of placement. So the notion that only children in specialist provision should get an EHCP is only going create more applications and worsen the overcrowding in specialist provision of all kinds, unless schools get the training and funding they need to be able to support a wider range of needs well.
To be clear, nothing said off the cuff or otherwise at this conference makes up firm government plans. There are as yet, no firm proposals and Dame Christine rightly said that any plans that are published will be subject to a “major consultation”
“Any system that the government looks at will have a full consultation process, will go through quite a long way of getting there, and we’ll have a long lead in time in terms of implementation. And that will mean that within that process, you’re actually protecting children’s rights and entitlements.”
Schools Week
Only we know from the SEND Review consultation, that no matter what parents say, what LAs want always takes precedence. They hold the (empty) purse strings, they have the access behind the scenes and via expensive lobbying through faux-research papers.
And we’ve just been through a major consultation with the Education Committte’s SEND Inquiry that we are still hearing oral evidence for. The last time press reports of major developments in SEND came out, Committee chair, Helen Hayes MP wrote to Catherine McKinnell, SEND Minister for an explanation. We have not seen any published response so far to this.
It is madness that this Labour government is doing a categorically worse job than its predecessors of involving a wider range of parents and most of the SEND sector in discussions before proposing any consultation.
What does this mean?
It isn’t clear if Dame Christine is musing that health and care duties may be removed entirely from EHCPs, leaving those with profound needs cut adrift, or if EHCPs should only serve as a gateway for specialist provision, and children in mainstream shouldn’t have one. Or both.
“Lenehan added that the “challenge is how bold and brave you want to be. And I think ministers have to work that through…There are so many people involved in this, and we’re not going to make everyone happy. So we need to be bold and brave. But it’s how bold and brave we are.”
Schools Week
We’re very concerned that the obvious “people who won’t be happy” will be families with disabled children. One thing’s for sure, disabled children cannot afford anyone being “bold” enough to scrap their rights. We won’t accept the laws we worked hard for being deleted like a line item off an Excel spreadsheet.
Christine is well known for speaking off the cuff at conferences, which she’s got in trouble for before. But she isn’t naive. This doesn’t come from nowhere, and she isn’t known for making stuff up. We can take it that these are things that have been discussed behind closed doors, and probably with local authorities or with their lobbying proxies as well as with the Department for Education. So we are right to be very concerned. So…
Given this is now in the public domain, we would like to ask Dame Christine and her government overlords to come clean and speak to us directly about the proposals under consideration. It’s simply not acceptable for parents to find out important things about the provision their children rely on in answers to questions at a conference.
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Also read:
- SNJ in Conversation with Edward Timpson CBE KC “You’ve got to really care about families and their lives …”
- How Plymouth is approaching “Ordinarily Available Provision” for pupils with SEND
- 55% rise in 2024 SEND Tribunal appeals. LAs’ 1.3% success rate cost £153m. The cost to families? Incalculable
- Language matters: Why the definition of SEND is shifting, and why we should be worried
- Ordinarily Available Provision Part 2: What does it look like and what difference does it make? by Philippa Stobbs OBE
- What’s happening with the SEND & AP Change Programme— November 2024 update
- How government-funded schools’ SEND training has young people’s experiences at its core.
- More “bold” reform for SEND and more children in mainstream—but how mainstream is it really?
- 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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- 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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Can we coordinate a response to this using a platform like 38 Degrees?
We have a petition: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/711021
It’s almost, broad daylight Eugenics!
Attempts at wiping the ‘underclass’ as our disabled children with SEND, seems to be categorised as..
It takes a really “brave ” adult to attack vulnerable children. I was hoping for better from this Government, sadly I was wrong, they are as bad as all the rest. When are we going to get someone in charge who does not hate people who are are neurodiverse and understand their needs rather than blaming them for having needs. The system is biased in favour of neurotypical people in the first place and then neurodiverse people get blamed for not fitting in with this because they need too much support through no fault of their own. The system absolutely stinks, it is fundamentally flawed but no-one is seeking to address this, are they ? It is the same old vicious cycle of doom , inequality, ignorance and blame, which constantly attacks the people who need the most support through no fault of their own. Ableist society creates barriers, and to add insult to injury generations of children are also suffering the consequences of lockdown and covid, which they have conveniently forgotten about all of a sudden. Absolutely sick and tired of this cruelty and injustice.
Is a child in struggled in school alot, I got left behind, in primary I didn’t get any extra help, and in secondary I myself fought for help I was in school 3 days a week and did minimal lessons walking out half the time due to being over whelmed. I fought myself for extra time on a couple of my exams. And that was it. I was seen as a naughty child even tho I knew something was wrong. I wasn’t normal. I have recently been diagnosed with ADHD and I’m half way through assesment for ASD (it’s looking likely) my family saw me as a naughty child and too sensitive. I was my own advocate as a child or I would just walk out as it was too much. Now being 31 and having a 11 year old son who is autistic in a special school and have relied on an ehcp for 6years, and a 10 year daughter who is just beginning to unmask and now I’m fighting for a send plan. The thought of taking this vital EHCPs away is mind blowing! They have so much benefit, each individual child is so unique has so many diffrent struggles and needs so many diffrent interventions. Either while in special school or mainstream. I understand mainstream schools are becoming more inclusive which is good and may I say about bloody time!! But yes there are children with extra needs who will be able to continue in mainstream but will still need an ehcp, for things like 1 to 1, adaptive uniform, laptops, tablets, special equipment, just to name a few I know schools are becoming more adaptive and there are send budgets schools can get depending upon the amount of children with send at their schools. But there is still a need for ehcps in mainstream school, not just special schools. I think this whole discussion is pointless in all honesty, I also think that all staff members need more training around SEND and more information needs giving to parents. I’m not the only person who has been diagnosed late where I’ve known something was wrong but no-one else did!