Sir Keir Starmer’s overhaul of the special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) system is finally out.
But it seems much of the educational world, while broadly positive today, is withholding its final verdict as there’s still so much we don’t know or have not fully digested.
We don’t know whether the money to create special needs provision in every school will be enough.
Number 10 said there was no additional funding beyond the already tight spending review settlement last summer and half of the £7bn transformation pot was announced as long ago as November 2025.
Unions say some of the sums involved will not allow schools to realise the scale of what’s now expected of them.
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We don’t know exactly how many children in future will – and won’t – qualify for the highest levels of support and funding.
Nor have we yet seen the specific, tougher criteria that could be put in place to obtain an Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs). This is a huge gap, and could ultimately determine how MPs vote later this year.
And we don’t know where the staff to support special education needs in mainstream schools will come from, at a time when teachers and teaching assistants are leaving the profession in higher numbers, with 90% of teachers going before retirement age.
But we do know one massive change that is taking place: Bridget Phillipson is turning an existing nightmare for local councils into a potential problem for individual schools and their headteachers, just as they juggle so many other challenges.
At the heart of today’s SEND reforms is a plan to steer children with special education needs away from specialist schools and back into mainstream settings, thereby reversing the result of government policy over the last 12 years.
Under this plan, fewer children in future will receive the highest level of…
