SEND reforms: ‘Penny pinching on the backs of the most vulnerable ruin lives’

It’s been a long eight months for disabled children, their parents and disabled people more broadly since Rachel Reeves announced the intention to release a schools white paper which included significant reforms to special educational needs provision in the June 2025 spending review.

Dither and delay have left families in limbo as the government tries to work out a plan that would work for all and would survive its increasingly raucous backbenchers.

We should welcome efforts to fix this broken system but it is, first and foremost, an announcement of further delay. Bridget Phillipson’s plans announced today state that Educational, Health and Care Plans will be reserved for the most complex cases, and students will be moved off these and onto new “Individual Support Plans”. These support plans will not begin until 2029, leaving many students facing an abyss of uncertainty.  

The substance of these plans delivers a mixed picture. We all should welcome the reform to support, as access to EHCPs and support for special needs students more broadly is a nightmare to navigate for parents. I was a child who was a victim of this support regime, and it’s right that we make that support more attainable. 

A lot of this comes down to funding, staffing, and training and much of what’s been announced, including £4 billion in additional funding and the long-awaited plans to recruit 6,500 new teachers, will go some way to alleviating the problems in the existing system.

Unfortunately, there’s far too little detail about what will happen with EHCPs and the new ISPs, and what we know is broadly negative. More information on what “multiple tiers” of ISPs will mean in practice would go some way to alleviating the concerns and the uncertainty many parents will doubtless be experiencing.

Devolving decision-making to individual schools and weakening duties to provide support in the era of academised fragmentation risks exasperating major regional and inter-trust inequalities in access to support. This would make the stated aim of reducing the achievement gap, fueled by the existing postcode lottery on SEN provision, unachievable. 

READ MORE: Government announce SEND reform in schools white paper

‘Devastating outcome for disabled children’

Many parents are forced to go to war for their children to receive the support they need. There are too many incentives in this white paper which will reinforce this conflict. Further fracturing the relationship between parents and educators will defeat the entire purpose of these reforms, not to mention the thousands of children who will lose support with parents unable or unwilling to fight for the support they need.

The stated aims of these reforms do not add up to the realities they would unleash. Ending the “soft bigotry of low expectations”, a noble aim, does not mean cutting support. Currently, 1.7 million students receive support for some form of Special Educational Need. If these plans are to see this number cut, they will only expand the generation of students disabled by institutional failure. Penny pinching on the backs of the most vulnerable ruins lives; it is not something that is repaired by simply raising expectations.

This review comes on the heels of an ongoing review called by Wes Streeting. His review is led by two long-time advocates for the idea that we too readily diagnose neurodiversities and mental health disorders in children. It is a review which seems rigged towards one outcome, which will further feed the cuts and see a devastating outcome for disabled children.

‘Culture war austerity against disabled people’

We should be calling these plans out for what they are and what role they play: culture war austerity against disabled people. Too much is happening in the realm of support for the disabled, feeding narratives that we are scroungers and skivers. Only a Parliamentary rebellion beat back the appalling cuts to PIP, leading to an act of unnecessary retribution against those involved in organising it.

Wes Streeting has completely ignored Disability Labour’s attempts to engage with him on the review into overdiagnosis. Now we have the spectre of cuts to educational support. It is all deeply un-labour, only fueling narratives that mainstream politics is a no-good force, which is driving Reform’s polling lead and the risk of a far-right government in 2029.

‘Support delayed is support denied’

There is a better way forward. Support delayed is support denied, and every SEN child, disabled adult or parent of a SEN child knows how bad the waiting lists for diagnosis are and how poor the care and support provided afterwards can be.

This reform package is coming as part of the school’s white paper – perhaps instead a white paper on disability is a better place for them, allowing the government to create a more holistic view of diagnosis, care and support, which would better fit the needs of disabled children than a patchwork of reforms such as these. 

Disabled children do not have time to wait. Disabled families cannot be left in limbo. Our party does not have the time to dither away its mandate for change. Let’s stop pandering to Tory narratives that serve no one but wealthy donors. Let us be more Labour and deliver inclusive, properly-funded reforms built not on a false narrative that too many receive support but on one which believes no child must ever be left behind.

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