Where the law is going
The SEND reforms 2026.
The most significant proposed change to the SEND system in England since the Children and Families Act 2014. Here is what is in it, without the spin.
Why I am writing this
I have read it. All of it.
On 23 February 2026 the Department for Education published its Schools White Paper, Every Child Achieving and Thriving, alongside a SEND reform consultation that closed on 18 May 2026.
I have read the White Paper. 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.
The proposal
What the government says it is doing.
The White Paper proposes a shift away from the current binary system, an EHCP or nothing, toward three 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 would receive an Individual Support Plan, produced by the school, in a standardised digital format.
The funding package is substantial.
£1.6 billion
Inclusive Mainstream Fund, over three years.
£47 million
Inclusive Early Years Fund, 2026 to 2027.
£200 million
National SEND training.
£3.7 billion
Capital investment for inclusive spaces, accessible buildings and new specialist places.
There is also an Experts at Hand programme bringing speech and language therapists and educational psychologists directly into schools, and 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.
The other side of it
What the disability rights community is saying.
A legal challenge was filed on 27 February 2026, four days after publication. Solicitors 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 removing 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.
Families who challenge EHCP decisions at Tribunal win 95 per cent of cases.The Tribunal is one of the few places 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 saying. 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.
Right now
What this means for settings and organisations today.
Nothing has changed yet. 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 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 this period.
Settings 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 because you understand why it matters and you get ahead of it.
Where I come in
Inclusion that is real, not performative.
I work with settings and organisations to build inclusion 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 as a child and adolescent psychotherapist, postgraduate 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.