INITIAL THOUGHTS ON THE SEND WHITE PAPER 2026

The government finally released its white paper on special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) today and I keep hearing professionals say they are ‘cautiously optimistic’, and I don’t understand why…maybe it’s a phrase ChatGPT is fond of?

 The headlines around this document are all about how the DfE is going to invest £4bn into the school system but make no mistake, this white paper is about balancing the books. 

As the school system crumbles, it stops meeting the needs of most children, but neurodivergent children experience the negative effects most intensely. Currently parents still have one lever they can pull to gain legal power and try to ensure their children’s needs are met – the Education Health and Care Plan process (EHCP). 

An EHCP is a legally enforceable document outlining the provision required to meet the needs of a child with SEND and allocating addition financial resources to meet those needs. Year on year defunding of the wider ‘non-SEND’ school system, alongside exclusionary reforms in curriculum, pedagogy and ‘behaviour management’ has led to an exponential growth in unmet need. With this, EHCP applications have spiralled, as have the cost of maintaining those EHCPs. 

My view on this is that, with the education system such a mess, it’s no wonder that parents (particularly those with neurodivergent children) want a legal document enshrining their rights. School is increasingly a traumatic and unforgiving space, and this is a mechanism by which protection can be sought. In a more just world, most needs would be met collectively by a socially minded society. We wouldn’t need EHC plans because funding and policy for schooling would be so good that we could trust the system to look after everyone. But after 50 years of neoliberalism, we all know that there’s ‘no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families’…and under such circumstances it’s no wonder that, when given the chance, families will do anything they can to protect their ever-dwindling rights and life-chances in the face of the capitalist machine.

Currently the cost of maintaining EHCPs is £12bn, the aim here is clearly to try and significantly reduce this number (£4bn doesn’t sound so impressive next to it, right?). By their own numbers the government want to reduce the number of EHCPs by 270,000. My (admittedly back of a fag packet) calculations suggest this would bring the £12bn cost down to £7bn meaning that the £4bn 'investment' in SEND over 3 years works out more like a £3.7bn budget cut.

Any government serious about education reform and worrying about the spiralling costs of high needs funding would realise this is the problem and actually start to build a society whereby wealth and power was distributed in such a way that most people’s needs were met. What would that entail? 

• A broadening of the curriculum to ensure children could show success in different ways.
• A move away from behaviourism and zero tolerance towards schools being relational places in which children actually might want to be present. 
• An end to academisation and the removal of the private sector in education to stop vast sums of money being pooled in savings accounts and being spent on inflated SLT salaries and shareholders. Local authorities provided with the financial means and *authority* to discharge their duties in a localised, coherent and centralised way. 
• An end to austerity on a wider level, to ensure that no child starts their life in poverty having to deal with the problems that poverty causes. 
• An investment in public services so that needs are met early and locally.
• Investment in infrastructure so school buildings are fit for purpose. 
• A Keynesian (at least!) attitude to the job market whereby the social contract was restored (i.e. if I go to school, I can get a decent job with good conditions in which my abilities can shine).
• A social safety net to ensure that those unable to work can live fulfilling and rewarding lives. 

Anyway, Labour isn’t going to do any of this because their capitalist technocrats who hate social democracy. It would require a vast project of public spending and heavy taxation of the rich. It would require power and representation to be diverted away from the political and media class so that ordinary people could become involved in representative democracy…So instead they’ve just made it harder for parents to access the EHCP process. This must be understood in the wider context of the governments attempt to position mental health, autism and ADHD as 'overdiagnosed'. Rather than acknowledge needs aren't being met, they deny that need exists in the first place. Less rights for everyone to avoid having to make real change. This will ultimately have an awful impact on SEND children and their families and my heart goes out to them.

What about this £4bn then? Well, as Grace Blakely points out so well in her book Vulture Capitalism, printing money doesn’t necessarily mean socialism. The real question to ask is - where is the money going to? Well £1.6bn is going directly to schools and AI/EdTech is all over this new white paper. I would not be surprised if a lot of it ends up in the pockets of the Silicon Valley tech bros who have their eyes on the UK school system as an emerging market. This government have bet the farm on AI, and they see it as their only possible path to growth. Now the private sector has clearly signalled they don’t want this useless technology the government will do their best to force it on the public sector. My prediction is that, in 10-years-time, rich parents will pay for SEND provision for their children privately, whilst everyone else gets support from an AI chatbot. 

This is a further transfer of wealth away from local authorities and towards schools, which increasingly understand themselves as business ventures and will act according to the logic of exchange instead of social utility. Here, grades and Ofsted results trump inclusion every time because grades and Ofsted results translate to ‘bums on seats’ and this means more money and this means they can engage in the capitalist’s favourite past-time, growing their business.

If I understand correctly, some of this money may also be earmarked to create ‘inclusion provisions’ in mainstream schools. However, without wider reform on pedagogy, curriculum and relationality all this will amount to is a way to downgrade the specialist offer SEND children would have been legally entitled to access via the EHCP. The phrase ‘best endeavours’ can be interpreted in many, many ways. 

And yes, a good £1.8bn has been earmarked to fund ‘experts on hand’ (specialists such as EPs, SALTs etc) to provide support to schools. But in a system whereby advice can be routinely ignored by multi-academy trusts who are only really interested in Ofsted and GSCE results (see above), who says this will have any meaningful impact without the legal backing of an EHCP? Indeed, this is likely to lead to the continued proliferation of private companies, giving simplistic and uncritical advice to back up behaviourist and zero-tolerance approaches, because it will make them more money than someone like me trying to reason with a multi-academy trust about making changes to their system to actually meet the needs of children. 

In short, the key aim here was to disempower parents in order to save money. The rest of it is about a transfer of public wealth to private finance and the now-orthodox technique of injecting just enough money into the public sector to keep the wheels spinning as Labour continue to manage the decline.