Mark Roberts explores how the recent Schools White Paper and associated SEND Reform Proposals could affect support for students, and how Initial Teacher Training can support the changes.

The Schools White Paper (‘Every child achieving and thriving’; DfE, 2026) has been published. Several of the headline proposals have been pre-announced over the last few weeks, particularly those relating to a planned overhaul of the Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) system and while the paper contains other proposals, it is the issue of SEND which dominated the headlines.

For those of us working in education, the way in which schools have been supporting and including children with SEND has become an area of considerable debate and concern. While the aim of the last significant change to the SEND system in 2014 was to reduce the number of children requiring additional support, the Educational Health and Care Plans (EHCP) those changes introduced have been issued to an increasingly large group of children identified as having SEND. The most recent figures from the DfE show that 1.6 million children are identified as having SEND and 482,640 of these children have an EHCP. In 2014 the number of children with Statements of SEN (the precursor to the EHCP) was 232,190 from a similar population of 1.55 million children identified as having SEN.

The White Paper and associated SEND Reform Proposals identify a return to a tiered system abolished by the previous reforms (i.e., School Action and School Action plus) with the new system being Targeted and Targeted Plus and a new layer of support called. In addition, there will be stronger focus upon in-school plans, called Individual Support Plans (ISPs), with the suggestion that these will have greater standing than the Individual Education Plans (IEPs) currently used by schools. While these changes have been broadly welcomed, they do not represent the ‘radical’ change to the SEND landscape that has been many suggested. It does appear to recognise that the decision to create a single SEN support category in the previous reforms may have had unintended consequences in prioritising EHCPs as the only route for parents to guarantee that their child’s needs will be met.

Parental concern and consistency of support

The parental reaction to the proposals has been focused upon the status of the EHCP and their concerns with an announced reassessment process which is intentionally limiting future EHCPs to children with the most complex needs. For parents the current EHCP represents the only route by which they can guarantee that schools will meet their child’s needs because it carries legal weight and brings funding. This has caused a funding crisis for Local Authorities who are spending increasingly large sums of money on SEND provision, yet there is no evidence that this is having a positive impact on outcomes for those children.

This is not a new issue; the Green Paper of 2023 recognised these same issues and made proposals to reform the system to create a single national standard to try to address the inequities in the system. This is a concept that was taken forward in Kent as the Kent Continuum of Need and Provision and by other local authorities, but as the Green Paper never became policy, no national approach or understanding emerged and the way in which need is met in schools has remained fragmented and inconsistent. That the new reforms identify the need for nationally defined ‘Specialist Provision Packages is therefore helpful, as is the concept of ‘National Inclusion Standards’ as a way of addressing the variation in support available to children. How these will be developed and whether oversight from the Children’s Commissioner will be sufficient will be one of the key implementation challenges.

The introduction of an Inclusion grading within new school inspection frameworks is likely to have a more direct impact upon the practice of schools, though the value of this will be dependent upon the quality of the additional training undertaken by Ofsted inspectors and the consistency of the judgements made. This is no easy task when the criteria involve assessing the quality of assessment and the setting of appropriately high expectations for children with SEND. Since these assessments and expectations derive from the National Curriculum (2014), a deliberately ambitious curriculum designed to replace a curriculum considered to be ‘substandard’, and informed by the ideas of E. D. Hirsch and others, Ofsted inspectors and the schools they are evaluating are placed in a challenging position. With no change to the curriculum, the context within which SEND is defined, and the construction and focus of the curriculum we are including children in, remains unchanged. This is an issue for teachers and schools in terms of the range of adaptations they can offer and how ‘included’ children can be. While the proposed ‘Inclusion bases’ in Secondary Schools and some Primary Schools will offer some curricula flexibility the Curriculum and Assessment Review recommendations, in particular the support needed for school teachers and leaders to adapt the curriculum, need to be woven together with the SEND reform process, rather than being seen as parallel developments. This would create opportunities for schools include children who currently struggle to access learning in line with their peers and to create curricula which placed greater emphasis upon subjects and skills which are currently marginalised within mainstream curricula provision.

Initial Teacher Training support

The Initial Teacher Training (ITT) inspection framework also now includes a new focus upon inclusion, though this has a focus upon the trainees themselves, rather than how well they are taught to include children and pupils, which remains part of the broader ‘curriculum, teaching and training’ inspection strand in ITT. It will be interesting to see how these two Ofsted frameworks (School and ITT) develop and what impact they have, both on the inclusion of children in schools and on how well-prepared teachers are to be inclusive.

Working in Initial Teacher Training (ITT) the comment that ‘In every classroom, in every school, teachers and support staff will be trained to meet the needs of children with SEND, based on the latest evidence, and backed by £200 million of investment’ is extremely positive and there is a strong role for CCCU both as a training provider and research centre to become involved in these opportunities as they emerge.

The reforms to ITT in 2024 have already anticipated some of these changes and there is already strong alignment between approaches to SEND here at CCCU, and the focus upon developing teacher knowledge and practice to better meet the needs of more complex learners in mainstream settings for teachers who were trained prior to these changes.

Mark Roberts is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Work, Education, and Teacher Education, and SEND Priority Lead.