Today’s Schools White Paper on SEND reform is, in certain respects, a document Liberal Democrats should welcome. The investment is substantial: £1.6 billion for an Inclusive Mainstream Fund, £1.8 billion for specialist services, and a long-overdue write-off of 90 per cent of local authority SEND deficits that were pushing councils toward effective bankruptcy. The aspiration, a well-resourced, inclusive mainstream, with early intervention, genuine specialist support, and families treated as partners rather than adversaries, is the right one.
The problem is not the destination. It is the route the government has chosen to get there.
A right is not the same as a promise
The Education, Health and Care Plan, for all its bureaucratic weight, is one of the few places in the British welfare system where an individual holds a judicially enforceable claim on the state. Not a guidance note. Not a promise from a minister at the despatch box. A right. Local authorities that fail to deliver what an EHCP specifies can be taken to the SEND tribunal, and families win the overwhelming majority of those cases, most conceded before a hearing takes place. That near-universal success rate tells you not that the tribunal is lenient, but that the system routinely under-delivers and only corrects itself when legally compelled.
The White Paper proposes to replace many of those plans with Individual Support Plans. ISPs would carry a statutory duty and be monitored by Ofsted. What they would not carry is tribunal enforceability. That mechanism remains available only for EHCPs, which would be reserved for children with the most complex needs. The government projects that EHCP coverage will fall from 5.8 per cent of pupils today to 4.7 per cent by 2034/35. That is not a side effect. It is the stated aim.
When Schools Minister Georgia Gould was pressed this morning on whether children could lose their plans at reassessment, she declined to give a direct answer. She said her job was to talk about the investment being put in. That is not good enough. And Liberal Democrats should say so clearly.
The sequencing problem
The new plans are not proposed to come into force until 2030. The narrowed threshold is intended to begin operating sooner. Children currently in Year 2 and below will face reassessment of their EHCP at the primary-to-secondary transition under the new, tighter criteria.
This timing could not be worse, and it contradicts what we know about how neurodivergent children experience school. Many autistic children, particularly girls, spend primary school masking their difficulties. They exhaust themselves performing adequately, and the cracks appear precisely when secondary school changes the demands on them: different teachers every period, less structure, more social complexity, higher academic pressure. The ‘secondary crash’ is documented in attendance figures, CAMHS referrals, and late diagnosis rates. Removing or weakening legally enforceable support at that exact transition is not evidence-based policy. It is the opposite.
The Children’s Commissioner has called on ministers to confirm that no child will lose their EHCP as a result of these changes. That confirmation has not been forthcoming. The assurance that “effective support” will not be removed is not the same as guaranteeing that no child loses what their current plan specifies.
Who bears the risk?
Lib Dems understand, better than most, that equality of formal rights is not the same as equality in practice. The Sutton Trust’s October 2025 report found that among parents of children in special schools, 41 per cent from wealthier backgrounds had successfully secured a place, compared with 25 per cent from low-income families. The gap exists because navigating SEND requires resources: private assessments, legal advice, time. When the legal mechanism weakens, it is not wealthy families who absorb the loss.
This is a liberal argument as much as an equalities one. Freedom that can only be exercised by those with the means to assert it is not freedom. It is privilege in freedom’s clothing.
The White Paper asks families to accept a weaker backstop on the promise that something better is coming. For a community that has spent years learning, through hard experience, that the system withholds support until crisis is the only option, that is a very large ask.
What the Lib Dems should push for
The party’s existing commitments, a national SEND body, an end to private equity profiteering in specialist placements, cuts to the share of EHCP costs schools must absorb, point in the right direction. What this White Paper needs from us is constructive but firm pressure on sequencing and accountability.
Specifically, ministers should be asked to commit that no child will lose an EHCP until independently verified, locally funded alternative provision is in place and has been assessed as meeting that child’s needs. Tribunal rights should be extended, not restricted, to cover ISP disputes during any transition period. And the government’s own five principles, early, effective, shared, inclusive, accountable, should be built into statutory outcome measures so that the reform is judged on whether children are thriving, not on whether EHCP numbers have fallen.
Labour deserves credit for taking this seriously and for the scale of the initial investment. But front-loading the tightening of legal entitlements while back-loading the proof that the new system works is not reform. It is the transfer of risk from the state to the family. That is precisely what a liberal party exists to prevent.
* Tanya Park is a Lib Dem County, Borough & Town councillor in Eastleigh, Hampshire and writes at A Just Society, a liberal policy project making the case for radical progressive policies grounded in liberal principles.
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8 Comments
“The Education, Health and Care Plan, for all its bureaucratic weight, is one of the few places in the British welfare system where an individual holds a judicially enforceable claim on the state”
One of the few, yes. Another one is the situation in Scotland where Co-ordinated Support Plans ensure that children and young people with complex or multiple needs get the supports they need – and a CSP is legally enforceable.
Thank you Tanya for emphasising the need for guarantees that the government’s aims for special needs will actually happen. Its good to see the help planned for local authorities and for schools, though we need expert assessment as to whether the latter is enough. Then what about training of teachers in mainstream schools?
I also worry about Reform UK, who either in national government or local councils may reverse some of this expenditure. Staffordshire County Council, now run by Reform have simply refused to take money offered by government for electric vehicle points simply because they do not believe in such environmental steps. Might they also therefore refuse in part, government money for special needs because they think they are grossly over diagnosed ?
Thank you for a most thoughtful article!
Might the money used to well educate all children be more accurately classified and labelled as an investment and not as a lost cost.
By spending to enable ALL children to make the best/very good versions of themselves we are investing in a future work force which is optimised and citizentry which is most secure individually and as a group.
Is the choice of OFSTED to monitor ISPs the best choice?
https://www.disabilityrightsuk.org/news/ofsted-report-misrepresents-main-problems-facing-send-system?srsltid=AfmBOoo-TpOoHhqOVjkalC75NYM
The one thing I find missing in this and almost every other article I see on SEND, is any thought being given as to why demand for send has grown so massively year on year. The possibility that getting the destination right is not the important question to answer, but why we are going inexorably in the wrong direction never seems to cross well people’s radar.
Currently there is increasing amounts of data that points to a link between the takeoff in the use of technology as a mechanism for teaching over the last 10 to 15 years, largely replacing human to human methods being linked to falls in attention span, literacy, numeracy, memory etc.
However political focus is almost entirely on spending ever more energy on addressing the symptoms rather than facing up to the problem – After all for politicos anything is better than admitting a huge mistake has been made.
Yes, downgrading EHCPs to ISPs carries a risk. Schools are overloaded, underfunded, and demoralised. An ISP is more dodgeable than an EHCP. Essentially, this OP calls for more safeguards against dodging – which makes sense, but is liable to cost more money. The money may just not be there.
As David Evans points out, we ought also to look at what has caused the recent huge increase in demand, and whether that can be reversed. I suggest that there are two problems:
Screens. It isn’t only “the takeoff in the use of technology as a mechanism for teaching”. It’s also the kids’ tablets at home, which replace reading books and playing with the passive consumption of cartoons and games, and massively hold children back.
Gove’s “fact based education”, a system of drudgery which treats children as devices to be programmed with facts and rules. Kids don’t read stories any more, they learn “structured synthetic phonics”. Those who can’t do that become part of a growing SEND problem. Get rid of Goveism!
David and David, thank you both for pushing on this. The demand-side question is genuinely underexplored in most SEND commentary, including mine, and you are right to raise it.
David Allen’s point about curriculum narrowing is one I find more persuasive than he might expect. There is real evidence that post-2010 reforms squeezed out the kinds of exploratory, creative, and play-based learning that give neurodivergent children more room to develop. When you design a system around a narrow band of cognitive norms and assess relentlessly against them from age five, you will flag more children as not meeting the standard. That is at least partly a design problem, and it is territory the Lib Dems have useful things to say about.
On screens, though, I want to push back fairly hard. The causal claim being made, that technology use is driving SEND need at scale, is much stronger than the evidence supports. EHCP demand is rising sharply in England within a specific legal and institutional framework, in ways that map closely onto changes to that framework. The more parsimonious explanation for rising numbers is diagnostic expansion and historic underidentification, particularly of girls and children from minority ethnic backgrounds. We are not seeing more autism. We are finally seeing autism that was always there.
I would also gently flag a risk in the screens framing: it can slide, whether intended or not, toward implying that need is manufactured or that support can wait while we address root causes. The children in front of us right now cannot wait. Their needs are real regardless of what produced them.
So interesting here to hear of the “secondary crash”. Since not all children conform to that generality, please bear in mind those autistic children who are “at sea” in the potato print world of early primary but find their feet once they have the academic challenge, lists of vocab and periodic tables of secondary education!
Let me clarify, I think the evidence is that screens hold all children back – Not only children wih SEND needs. However, if Labour’s SEND plans are to work, then busy teachers will need to find more time “free” to meet the needs of individual children with SEND needs. Right now, they are finding less time “free”, because they are having to spend more and more time doing things like changing the nappies of children who are not school-ready.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2026/jan/22/children-england-start-school-without-being-toilet-trained-teachers
So, yes indeed, SEND needs can’t wait. If screen use isn’t somehow tackled, there may be no teacher time available to meet SEND needs.