Labour has created a real chance to reform SEND, writes Zachary Marsh — but will it take it?
Last week the Government published its long-awaited SEND White Paper, setting out how they intend to rescue a system that now caters for more than 1 in 5 students in England and which will cost over £18 billion by 2028. Their reforms are not only ambitious but politically astute. Learning the lessons from the welfare reform debacle, their announcement was well trailed, stress-tested and rigorously stage managed to reassure stakeholders and jittery back benchers. Yet beneath the softly coded language on inclusion and rebuilding confidence are radical and serious proposals to address key shortcomings of the current system and set more children with SEND up for success.
As Policy Exchange has consistently advocated, the Government’s reforms commit to a new SEND model that will bear down on the costs and failures of EHCPs and ensure support is available earlier and more flexibly. Their new £1.8 billion “Experts at Hand” programme will free specialists such as educational psychologists and speech and language therapists from the bureaucracy of EHCP assessments to once again spend time with children in the classroom. Local “inclusion bases” will mean children with milder SEND needs, who nonetheless struggle to be full-time in mainstream classrooms, can access support in their current school. This change will push back against spiralling SEND transport costs to specialist placements, which have risen 81 per cent in real terms since 2018.
Crucially, the new tiered model of support will slash the numbers of young people on EHCPs. This old system has demonstrably failed to improve outcomes for young people with SEND whilst driving local councils to the verge of bankruptcy. Raising thresholds to access these plans — and implicitly linking them to places in high-needs, specialist schools —- is a vital step to restore sanity to the system and ensure it can sustainably deliver for families in the years to come.
As the dust has settled, however, key challenges remain. The announcement of statutory Individual Support Plans (ISPs) for every child with SEND is a dangerous bone thrown to the SEND lobby, which could inadvertently replicate many of the failures of EHCPs for millions more children. Whilst the Government has rightly pushed for an earlier and more schools-focused approach, these proposals place a major new burden on the shoulders of mainstream schools. Inclusion sounds nice, but for it to work — for teachers, students with SEND and their peers — it must mean rigorous evidence-informed practice led by specialists, not higher expectations for mainstream teachers without the time, knowledge or resources to deliver.
These lingering questions strike at the heart of what could become a core contradiction at the very foundations of the Government’s promising reforms. They have identified the key problems of the system: poor outcomes, spiralling costs and incentives that backload support to those sharp-elbowed enough to secure EHCPs. Yet they do not as yet tackle properly the root cause of surging demand, driven by expanding social definitions of neurodivergence, a harmful culture of labelling, and a lack of evidence which means inadequate diagnosis and ineffective support is rife.
By cutting the weeds instead of pulling the roots, these reforms risk simply rearranging how support is delivered, rather than ensuring it is effective and targeted to those who need it most. Shifting the burden to discretionary budgets and schools means poor practice, waste and woeful outcomes could become harder to spot — a shadowy version of the same crisis.
To avoid this the Government must go further with many of its more ambitious proposals. New expert-designed “Specialist Support Packages”, designed to constrain costs and end the proliferation of poor practice with mandatory evidence-informed guidance on how to support particular SEND needs, should not be limited to those who retain EHCPs. Instead, as Policy Exchange has advocated, the Government’s new National Inclusion Standards should be a “NICE for SEND”, setting out how schools can spend funding to ensure value for money on interventions based on evidence, not fads.
Above all, its commitment to revise the definitions of the four areas of SEND need should tighten eligibility. It must remove the vagueness which has seen diagnoses extended to those with increasingly mild needs who often do not need or benefit from labels or specialist support that disrupts their mainstream learning.
All this is achievable — and the Government has left itself the room it needs to deliver. For political reasons it may quite reasonably wish to win the argument for reform in principle, before delivering these technical yet vital changes during implementation. Yet they must understand that their promising plans will not succeed without tackling spiralling demand and eradicating the SEND pseudo-science of ineffective support at the root of spiking costs.
These reforms could yet be one of Labour’s great achievements in office — or just another iteration of a SEND model that does not work. Treating the root causes and not just the symptoms of the SEND system’s present failure is the only way to guarantee success.
