Blog: SEND Reforms: The Schools White Paper – Dr Sean Octigan

One of my big work strands over April and May was to respond to the government consultation on the SEND reforms proposed in the Schools White Paper, published by the DfE on 23 February 2026. 

As part of this process, the AEP actively engaged members to share their professional insights into the proposals. We held two members’ meetings, invited members to share their written responses in a survey, and engaged elected representatives on the AEP’s National Executive Committee to gather views on the questions posed in the consultation.

As both an educational psychologist (EP) and an AEP official, this process has given me lots of time to reflect on the White Paper and, whilst I can’t cover everything it contains in a short blog, I will try and articulate some hopes and concerns on what the Experts at Hand Fund, Inclusion bases, and plans for EHCPs might mean for our members.  

Experts at Hand 

The Experts at Hand Fund will provide Local Authorities (LAs) and Integrated Care Boards in England with £1.8bn over 3 years to commission support services for children and young people with SEND. The support services will include EPs, specialist teachers, outreach from specialist settings, speech and language therapists and occupational therapists. The money will also go on reforming and evaluating existing SEND services.  

The Experts at Hand Fund has the potential to be something for EPs whose workload is dominated by statutory assessments to get excited about. Experts at Hand funding cannot be used for EHCP assessments or pre-EHCP assessments and, as far as I can tell, will be focused on work to skill up staff, provide ongoing supervisory support and engage in actual systemic change to make the school system more inclusive. Alongside the £1.6 billion the government are providing over 3 years as part of the ‘Inclusive Mainstream Fund’, this has the potential to allow EPs to work at an earlier stage and put our energies into implementing systemic change. 

Inclusion Bases 

£3.7bn is also going to be spent between 2025 and 2030 on capital investment to ensure that schools are more accessible places and that every mainstream setting has an inclusion base. An inclusive environment is vital to any SEND strategy. However, ‘inclusion bases’ as a concept, are more complex to evaluate. The key concern raised by our members, and one that I share, is that if every school has an ‘offsite provision’ contained within the school site, then these bases could effectively become ‘exclusion bases’; an easy place for schools to ‘off roll’ children they find challenging to manage.  

Inclusion as a goal can only be achieved if the whole system is set up to include everyone. This scheme runs the risk of creating a two-tiered system where SEND children are educated within the inclusion base and non-SEND children are educated in the mainstream setting. This could potentially allow the wider school system to become less inclusive in its practices because it would no longer have to make adaptations to include SEND children, who can now be placed elsewhere. EP support will be central to ensuring that this does not happen.  

Education, Health and Care Plans 

Finally, it is important for us to look at what should be the headline change, but has been underdiscussed for some reason – changes to the EHCP process. With the new White Paper, the government want to reduce EHCPs and return to a more tiered system. Here, the majority of SEND needs will be met at the universal, targeted or targeted plus levels, with Individual Support Plans being used at these levels. EHCPs will only be necessary to support those whose needs are deemed specialist.  

What does this mean in practice? Essentially, the legal protections of an EHCP will be removed for all but the children with the most profound SEND and replaced with the concept of ‘best endeavours’ (i.e. the school will try their hardest to meet need).  

Now, this could work well in a co-ordinated, well-funded system with good democratic oversight, but our current system is suffering from the effects of almost 2 decades of austerity and fragmentation via the academisation agenda. The question to ask here is: is the current schooling system able to meet the needs of SEND children under the rubric of ‘best endeavours? Or are legal stipulations in fact necessary to achieve this?  

Conclusion: On Funding and Accountability 

In my view, ultimately the potential success of the new White Paper will be down to three factors: funding, accountability and capacity.  

Whilst the government are leading with headline funding figures in the billions, if they achieve their target of reducing EHCP numbers by 270,000, (see recent article) this would ultimately result in a budget cut for SEND provision that totals billions of pounds. EPs will now not only be expected to provide statutory reports, but also become Experts at Hand - in a context where demand for EHCPs is growing due to an uncertain future - and with no additional funding to increase our workforce capacity. Furthermore, is the money being pumped into the system sufficient to support SEND at the universal, targeted and targeted plus levels support? Especially when we consider the downstream effects of austerity within society at large, I suspect not.  

With regards to accountability, how can we ensure that the money that is spent leads to system change that facilitates inclusion and meets the needs of SEND children? If an EP makes recommendations to make the school a more inclusive space, but the MAT CEO (who holds all the power, at the end of the day) feels that this might negatively impact on Ofsted outcomes, grades or another factor, what then? Without the legal protection of an EHCP, who will be held accountable if children’s SEND needs aren’t met under best endeavours? 

Finally, there are EP shortages across the country, and we continue to be in the midst of a more general recruitment and retention crisis in education more broadly. It’s vital that government builds capacity in the system so that the white paper can be successful. Are EPs going to be given the appropriate amount of time needed to be supportive and engaged Experts at Hand, or is that particular strand of work going to be competing with our statutory duties as we continue to be time-stretched and overworked?  

Right now, these are my concerns with the current proposals and I think it is vital that we come together, in our workplaces and as members of the AEP, to discuss, explore and work through these concerns in order to use our standing as a trade union and professional association to ensure that the Schools White Paper achieves its stated goal: ‘Every Child Achieving and Thriving’.