On 23 February 2026, the Department for Education published its Schools White Paper, Every Child Achieving and Thriving, alongside a SEND reform consultation that closes on 18 May 2026. It is the most significant proposed change to the SEND system in England since the Children and Families Act 2014.
I have read it. I have read the disability rights responses to it. And I am reading it as someone who has spent thirty years working inside education, rights, and neurodivergent community practice — and as a registered parent carer who knows, from the inside, what it means when a system built on promises fails a real child.
Here is what you need to know, without the spin.
The White Paper proposes a shift away from the current binary system — EHCP or nothing — toward three new levels of support: Targeted, Targeted Plus, and Specialist. Only children in the Specialist category would qualify for an Education, Health and Care Plan. Children in the other two categories would receive an Individual Support Plan, produced by the school, in a standardised digital format.
The funding package is substantial. A £1.6 billion Inclusive Mainstream Fund over three years. £47 million for an Inclusive Early Years Fund from 2026 to 2027. £200 million for national SEND training. £3.7 billion in capital investment for inclusive spaces, accessible buildings, and new specialist school places. An Experts at Hand programme bringing Speech and Language Therapists and Educational Psychologists directly into schools. A Universal Offer setting a new baseline for what every mainstream setting must provide.
On paper, this is a serious investment. The vision — earlier support, more children included in mainstream, less fighting for a legal document — is one most of us would agree with in principle.
A legal challenge was filed on 27 February 2026, four days after publication. Solicitors Rook Irwin Sweeney are acting for a family on the basis that the consultation omits any questions about proposals that would significantly weaken the legal rights of children and young people with SEND. There are no consultation questions about the proposal to remove the SEND Tribunal’s power to name a school in a child’s EHCP. There are no questions about shifting the legal duty to deliver EHCP provision from local authorities onto schools.
These are not technical tweaks. They are structural changes that would reduce the number of children with legally enforceable rights to support, and reduce the number of families with access to an independent tribunal when things go wrong.
Currently, families who challenge EHCP decisions through the Tribunal win 95 per cent of cases. The Tribunal is one of the few places in the system where the playing field is levelled. The proposed reforms would restrict it to a smaller cohort and reduce its power to direct where a child is placed.
I say this clearly because it needs to be said: giving with one hand and taking away with the other is not reform. It is management of a financial crisis at the expense of disabled children and their families.
Nothing has changed yet. The consultation is open until 18 May 2026. Legislation will be drafted in late 2026, pass through Parliament from 2027, and be phased in from 2028. Full implementation is not expected until 2035. Your current legal duties under the SEND Code of Practice 2015, the Equality Act 2010, and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child are unchanged.
But here is the point that settings and organisations consistently miss: the reforms are being designed now. The shape of the new Universal Offer — what every mainstream setting will be expected to provide without an EHCP — is being decided in the consultation period we are currently in. Settings and organisations that are already building genuinely inclusive practice are not playing catch-up in 2028. They are already there.
The question is not whether you will need to change. You will. The question is whether you change because you are chased into it, or whether you change because you understand why it matters and you get ahead of it.
I work with settings and organisations to build inclusion that is real, not performative. Rooted in the Equality Act 2010 in its full scope, the SEND Code of Practice 2015, and the UNCRC. I hold disability and neurodivergence as equally central — neither subordinated to the other, both understood in full intersectional context. Informed by thirty years of direct practice, clinical training at the Tavistock and Portman, postgraduate academic study in autism under Dr Luke Beardon, and my own life as a mixed race, disabled, AuDHD woman and registered parent carer who has navigated the very systems I consult on.
The SEND reforms make this work more urgent, not less. Settings that understand what is coming, and build for it now, will be better placed, better protected, and — most importantly — better for the children inside them.
The consultation closes 18 May 2026. If you want to understand what it means for your setting or organisation, and what you should be doing about it, a discovery call is the place to start.