I hear the same stories week after week in surgeries and inboxes. Exhausted parents fighting for the support their children need and young people with Education, Health and Care Plans stuck at home for months because no suitable place can be found. Our local schools doing their best under impossible pressure. Surrey has long been one of the areas hardest hit by the national SEND crisis, and families here know the human cost better than most.

This is not a partisan issue. I know that cross-party concern is growing, and organisations like the SEND Matters Coalition are right to sound the alarm. The Liberal Democrats have always believed that every child has a right to an education that meets their needs. That principle must guide any reform.

I welcome the Government’s declared ambition to improve early identification and strengthen mainstream support. Extra resources for mainstream schools are necessary and many children with SEND can and should thrive in inclusive settings when the right help is in place from the start. However, it is simply not credible to claim that this alone solves the problem for those with the most complex needs. There is already a shortage of specialist places. Pretending otherwise risks leaving the most vulnerable children behind while the system is redesigned around those who can more easily be included. We cannot spend the next decade building a better system for the future while allowing a generation of children with complex needs to fall through the cracks in the meantime.

For some children, mainstream provision – even well-supported – is never appropriate. Many have already experienced repeated placement breakdowns, exclusions or long periods out of education. Specialist provision is often their last realistic chance to stabilise, re-engage and build a future. Independent special schools account for only around 33,000 of the 638,700 children and young people with an EHCP, within a wider SEND population of roughly 1.7 million. This is a small but essential part of the system. Restricting or capping it in the name of inclusion would be a false economy that harms the very children who need it most.

The proposed changes to tribunals and parental routes of challenge raise particular concern. Weakening the ability of families to secure a named specialist placement risks turning already lengthy battles into endless delays. While the process grinds on, children remain out of school. Parents lose jobs or are forced onto benefits. The human and financial cost falls on families and, ultimately, on the public purse. Campaigners are right to warn that thousands could be left without suitable education during the long transition to any new model of early intervention.

The economic case for getting this right is clear. Research shows that appropriate support for a child with complex needs can generate hundreds of thousands of pounds in lifetime value to society, after education costs. The alternative is far more expensive. Young people left without suitable education face higher risks of becoming NEET, entering the justice system, or needing long-term support from health and social care. The average annual cost of a place in a young offenders’ institution already dwarfs the cost of specialist education for many of the most complex cases. Eighty per cent of young offenders have SEND or are neurodivergent. Failure is not cheap; it is simply deferred and amplified.

Social, emotional and mental health needs must also be taken seriously. Anxiety, trauma, emotional dysregulation, school refusal and persistent absence are often signs of unmet need, not simple behavioural problems. Treating them primarily as discipline issues compounds the damage and tragically can lead to these young people taking their lives.

Any reform that survives must therefore do several things at once. It must protect specialist capacity for those whose needs cannot be met elsewhere, it must strengthen genuine early intervention so fewer children reach crisis and it must give proper weight to SEMH. It must assess long-term outcomes and costs, not just short-term savings. And it must keep parents, children and local representatives involved in shaping the detail, rather than imposing top-down targets that ignore lived experience.

Liberal Democrats believe in evidence, fairness and individual rights. We do not accept that children with the most complex needs should be forced to fit an ideological template of inclusion that does not work for them. Success should not be measured by how many specialist places are reduced. It should be measured by how many children leave education with a real future.

The Government has a chance to build a system that improves outcomes and delivers better value for taxpayers. That will only happen if children with complex needs are placed at the centre of reform, not treated as an inconvenient afterthought.

* Chris Coghlan is the Liberal Democrat MP for Dorking and Horley