There’s a lot of talk of reform in the air for the English SEND system. There aren’t many specifics, but the general message from the new government and its advisers suggests that reform will be deep, lengthy, and centred on mainstream education.
Something that’s got slightly lost in that noise is a programme of work that’s been road-testing SEND reform for over a year now – the Department for Education’s SEND & Alternative Provision Change Programme. What’s that, how’s it getting on, and what’s being learned?
This post doesn’t include what happened in the Public Accounts Committee hearing on the NAO report yesterday, which heard from senior Department for Education officials (Mon 18 Nov). But we are planning to deconstruct it as soon as our blood pressure has dipped below the hypertensive crisis levels induced from watching it…
A recap of the Change Programme.
The Change Programme was born under the previous government, following the DfE’s March 2023 SEND & AP Improvement Plan. This is the third update we’ve brought you about the SEND Change programme. Find our March 24 update here, and August 23 update here.
The programme—set to cost around £70m—is designed to spend a couple of years road-testing potential reforms that the previous government was considering making to the SEND system. The programme’s run by a band of private sector and third sector consultants, the REACh Consortium.
So what’s the Change Programme testing, and how’s it going about it? You can find detail on the programme’s objectives and operational approach here, from one of its leaders – but in short…
There are 10 main things that the DfE originally wanted the Change Programme to test, grouped into four areas. These include:
- Reforming the Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP) Process: this involves road-testing ideas that most people agree on (like standardising and digitising EHCPs), as well as ideas that are much more controversial, such as giving parents a local authority-authored ‘advisory tailored list’ to help them express a preference around an educational placement in their child’s EHCP.
- Ordinarily Available Provision: this includes a pilot run with the NHS to improve early access to speech and language therapy, plus work exploring new ways of commissioning and delivering alternative provision.
- Enablers: these changes are aimed at helping local authorities and health bodies make better decisions by road-testing local area inclusion plans, a set of data dashboards, and work on improving transition arrangements.
- Standards and Commissioning: this involves road-testing a series of ‘national standards’ (so everyone knows what SEN support should be available to meet a given need), and drawing up a set of nationally-set funding bands and tariffs.
The Change Programme is being carried out in 32 local areas, each grouped into nine regional Change Programme Partnerships, with each Partnership led by at least one named LA. Check here to see if one of these is your LA.
None of these pilots override current SEND law. As far as we can tell, all participants have been scrupulous in ensuring that families and schools know this.
What’s been done so far?
So what work has actually been completed under this Change Programme? That’s harder to tell, but we’ve had a go at finding out. As mentioned, there’s £70 million of funding backing the DfE’s SEND and AP Change Programme. We asked the DfE how this funding had been allocated. This is what they told us:
- By the end of September 2024, the DfE had allocated £39.2m of this funding. ‘Allocated’ isn’t the same as ‘spent’ – it’s the sum handed over to others to spend.
Of this £39.2m:
- £28.1m has been allocated to the local authority Change Programme participants, for them to spend;
- Another £4.5m has been doled out to NHS bodies (via LAs) to implement the Early Language Support for Every Child (ELSEC) speech and language intervention project. ELSEC is a two-year programme aimed at improving early identification and support for speech, language and communication needs in early years and primary school settings. It’s taking place in nine sites across England, one in each CPP area.
- Over £6m has been handed over directly to consultants. Most of that has gone to the REACh consultants who are running the Change Programme, who are very touchy about their funding. However, some of this funding has also been allocated to another group of consultants, ICF Consulting, for ‘evaluation.’ In short, the DfE is employing some consultants to consult on the work of the Change Programme’s consultants. It’s not clear whether anyone is consulting on the work of the consultants who are consulting on the consultants. I hope that’s clear.
How are the council partners spending the money?
We also asked the 32 participating local authorities how they were spending the Change Programme grant money that they had received up to September 2024. We heard back from 23 of them, so it’s a rough and incomplete picture, but this is what we learned:
- Most of the DfE’s Change Programme grant money hasn’t been spent by local authorities yet. We don’t know why, but it’s likely the programme itself was slow to get going, and it’s also likely that some LAs are simply struggling to find capacity to implement these pilots while wrangling their day-to-day services.
- Most of the spending is on local authority staff, bringing in new meatsacks for Change Programme project work, and backfilling council and school staff so that someone can cover their old roles. At the local authority level, the Change Programme doesn’t appear to have been a bonanza for consultants and caterers. At the top level, of course, it’s another story.
- The pilot work that has probably soaked up the largest individual chunks of this funding appears to be the ELSEC speech and language project, and road-testing the reforms to alternative provision.
But following the money doesn’t tell us a massive amount about what’s actually being done. The REACh Consortium has issued occasional newsletters – you can find there here – but these have become a lot less informative in recent months. Or put another way, since the new government arrived.
Most of the pilots are proceeding but at varying speeds. Some of them seem to be months behind schedule. And there’s almost no official data on their progress.
Reforming the EHCP template
- Reforming the EHCP process is an area where a lot of work seems to be underway, particularly road-testing a standardised EHCP template. Most of the feedback appears to be positive. At least one LA says it’s already adopted this template for permanent use.
We’ve seen a draft of this EHCP template. It’s fine, but we haven’t seen the final version. We don’t know whether a digitised EHCP exists beyond a janky prototype Excel file that you can find in the darkest recesses of council websites.
Several LAs have been road-testing the ‘advisory tailored list’ concept and a vaguely described ‘strengthened mediation’ process, but details on progress and outcomes are super-sketchy.
- Ordinarily Available Provision: the ELSEC pilots have proceeded (by design) in a small number of LAs, while most LAs are road-testing a three-tier approach to alternative provision alongside a group of specialists who are based in-school. We don’t know what lessons are being learned from this approach yet.
- Enablers: according to REACh, most LAs have now produced a Local Area Inclusion Plan (LAIP) to help everyone work together better. The Department for Education is now reviewing these. If you have a taste for turgid bureaucratese, you can find an example of one of these LAIPs here. The inclusion data dashboards appear to be way behind schedule – several LAs report that this work is now back with the DfE to decide on.
- Standards and Commissioning: this is an area where work seems to be in its infancy. LAs have provided the DfE with data on their local high-needs funding bands and are engaging in closed-door conversations with the DfE about what mainstream school-funded provision ought to look like. But nothing’s reached a stage where it can be road-tested.
There’s some evidence to suggest that other, off-plan proposals are being thrown into the mix. For example, Leicestershire appears to be trialling a new approach to educational psychology assessment in the EHCP process. It would be sensible to publish more details on the objectives and outcomes of this work, which we suspect might be looking at the impact of dispensing with the legal requirement to include EP advice in an EHC needs assessment.
What next?
This is what £39m of public money has bought so far, and it’s largely unclear what this work will have achieved. That’s no fault of those carrying it out. It’s simply the case that the new government is now considering much more sweeping SEND reforms than the proposals being tested through the SEND & AP Change Programme.
The Change Programme’s future is uncertain. It should have many more months left to run, but it was late to get going. The government has told Parliament that “it will share more news on the future direction of the Change Programme in due course,” and that the programme “is providing valuable learning across the SEND and AP system, including by informing thinking about effective, inclusive mainstream practice.”
So it’s likely that some of what the Change Programme is working on will find its way into future SEND reform work. It’s also very likely that the Change Programme’s highly-paid consultants, in one form or another, will be involved behind closed doors in making those new reforms happen.
Also read:
- Delivering better value in SEND? Much of a new review is based on deep and fatal flaws that may uproot the SEND system
- NAO: The Government has no clear SEND plan and should consider “whole-system reform” to incentivise mainstream inclusion
- Does the SEND Safety Valve scheme have a future under the Labour Government? And if so, who’s next?
- An update on the DfE’s Change Programme—plus another SEND funding announcement
- So SEND is “lose, lose, lose”? Not for these private sector winners in the DfE’s SEND Change Programme
- More system “reform” won’t fix SEND, because the real problem still hasn’t been accepted
- Uncovering the hidden truth about SEND safety valve agreements and how they’ll cut children’s SEND provision
- SEND is an existential threat to LAs’ financial sustainability; junking the SEND Tribunal is part of the answer, claims new report
- The Council for Disabled Children’s new Director on their work to implement the Government’s SEND Change Programme
- What’s new with the government’s SEND Change Programme?
- How government-funded schools’ SEND training has young people’s experiences at its core.
- 10 reasons the Change Programme might fail, by experts from across the SEND sector
- The nine top asks from SEND organisations for the next government
- Ofsted Area SEND Inspections: How bad does a council have to be to fail?
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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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.
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- Mainstream SEND Funding: A simple explainer, another consultation, and why it really matters - July 22, 2026
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