Reform or Retreat? A Close Reading of the Schools White Paper

Before anything else, a clarification that I think matters more than any analysis of the proposals themselves: the Schools White Paper is not law. It is a statement of intent. The proposals it contains will now go through formal public consultation, and then through Parliament, before any of the current legislative framework changes. The Education Act 1996, the Children and Families Act 2014, the SEND Code of Practice, and all the rights that flow from them are still fully in force. If you have been putting off requesting an EHC needs assessment, or have been waiting to formally raise your child's Section 19 rights, or have been hesitating to challenge provision that isn't being delivered - please do not let the existence of this paper become a reason to delay further. If anything, now is exactly the moment to act. Existing rights do not pause during consultations. Local authorities do not get to tell you that things are changing and you should wait and see. Whatever your child is entitled to under the current law, they remain entitled to it today, and if you have an EHCP or are in the process of obtaining one, making sure that plan is as legally precise, specific, and robust as possible has never been more important, because the strength of those plans will matter if and when any transition to a new system comes. With that said, here is what I make of what the paper is actually proposing…

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from watching a system diagnose its own failures and then propose, as the solution, a version of the same problem with better branding. The Schools White Paper - Every Child Achieving and Thriving - arrived on 23rd February 2026, and it is a long, detailed, earnestly written document that contains genuine investment and some proposals that could, under the right conditions, make a real difference. That is worth acknowledging at the outset, because what follows is not a wholesale rejection of reform. It is a sustained argument that this particular reform - in this particular direction, at this particular moment - fundamentally misidentifies what has gone wrong, and that the consequences of that misidentification will fall, as they always do, on the children who can least afford it. There are three arguments I want to make, and they are connected enough that they need to be made in order.

The First Argument: The Law Was Not the Problem

The government's account of the SEND crisis runs roughly as follows: the system is broken, the Education, Health and Care Plan process has produced adversarial dynamics and spiralling costs, and too many families are in conflict with the state. The solution, therefore, is to simplify and streamline - to shift away from reliance on statutory plans towards a tiered system of earlier, lighter-touch support in better-resourced mainstream schools. Some of that diagnosis is accurate enough. EHCPs do take too long. The tribunal system is overwhelmed. The adversarial dynamic is real and exhausting for everyone caught inside it. But the account is incomplete in a way that matters enormously, because it treats the symptoms as though they were the cause, and in doing so it leaves the actual cause largely untouched.

What broke the SEND system was not the legal framework. It was the consistent, widespread, and largely consequence-free failure of local authorities to apply that framework as Parliament designed it. This position is documented, repeatedly and clearly, across years of tribunal decisions, Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman findings, and the evidence painstakingly accumulated by organisations including IPSEA, SOS!SEN, Special Needs Jungle, and the Save Our Children's Rights campaign - all of whom have been saying versions of this for years, and whose analysis the White Paper does not seriously engage with. Local authorities are legally required to complete EHC needs assessments within twenty weeks of a request, and they routinely breach that deadline. Plans must name specific, quantified provision, and they routinely don't. The duty to secure the provision in an EHCP under Section 42 of the Children and Families Act 2014 is absolute - not a best-endeavours standard, not contingent on funding pressures or staffing difficulties, but an absolute legal duty - and when that duty is breached, the routes of redress available to families include the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman and, in the most serious cases, judicial review. When families appeal to the SEND Tribunal over refusals to assess or disputes about the contents of plans, local authorities lose 98.7% of cases taken to a full hearing, which is not what a system with a reasonable legal framework looks like when it is functioning properly. What it looks like is a system in which the law is clear and is not being followed.

What should follow from that evidence is a serious examination of why local authorities breach their legal duties so consistently, and what accountability mechanisms would need to change to make compliance the norm rather than the exception. What the White Paper offers instead is a lighter legal framework - one with less to breach, lower thresholds, and documents whose enforceability is less clearly established than the EHCP system they partially replace. The government has looked at a system in which the law was routinely not applied and responded by proposing a system in which less law applies, which is a particular kind of answer to the evidence.

The enforceability question is the one that will determine whether any of the new structures actually protect children, and it is the one the White Paper leaves most open. The difference between an EHCP and an Individual Support Plan - the document that will describe provision for most children under the proposed framework - is not primarily about what gets written in them. It is about what a family can do when what is written is vague, inadequate, or simply never delivered. When provision specified in an EHCP is not being secured, families have established routes of redress through the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman and, in appropriate cases, judicial review. Whether ISPs will carry equivalent enforceability - whether a family will have any meaningful mechanism for holding a school or local authority to account for what an ISP says - is a question the consultation document will need to answer, because the White Paper itself does not.

Local authorities have been issuing non-statutory documents for years: SEN Support Plans, SEN Passports, Pupil Profiles, documents that look official and use professional language and create no legal obligations whatsoever. Families are sometimes told these plans are equivalent to, or even preferable to, an EHCP because they are "less adversarial." They carry no right of appeal and place no enforceable duty on anyone, which is precisely why they are so easy for local authorities to issue and so difficult for families to act on when they fail. If ISPs occupy a similar legal position - more formally required, perhaps, but not meaningfully more enforceable - then the reformed system will have created a larger, more standardised version of something that families already know does not protect their children. The consultation document may clarify this. I will be reading it carefully when it is published. But these are exactly the questions families most need answered before they can assess whether their children will be better or worse protected under what replaces the current framework.

The Second Argument: Shifting Responsibility Downwards Is Not the Same as Building Support Upwards

The White Paper significantly increases the expectations placed on schools. Under the proposed model, schools will be expected to identify need earlier, implement Individual Support Plans, access and deploy the Experts at Hand service, create inclusion bases, track children's sense of belonging, and use the specialist training investment to raise the quality of SEN provision across the board. For mainstream schools that have been chronically under-resourced and operating under sustained pressure, some of this is genuinely welcome - more specialist input, better training, and clearer expectations around early identification are things that could make a real difference to individual children. But there is a pattern in the SEND system that this model risks entrenching rather than dismantling, and it runs through almost every family's experience of trying to navigate it.

When a child's needs are not being met, local authorities routinely deflect responsibility by pointing to schools. The school should be doing more with its notional SEN budget. The school hasn't completed enough rounds of graduated response. The provision is ordinarily available in mainstream. This language shifts accountability sideways - away from the authority that holds the statutory duty and the budget - and onto the school, which then becomes, in the local authority's framing, the entity that hasn't done enough yet. Schools, in turn, often genuinely believe they are doing everything within their means, and feel frustrated by families asking for things they simply do not have the resources to provide. Parents, told that the school should be able to manage, feel increasingly as though the school is the obstacle. The relationship between families and schools deteriorates. And the local authority, which holds the power and controls the money, steps quietly back from the conflict it has generated.

I have written before about the way this dynamic operates in something like the structure of an abusive relationship - the way power protects itself by positioning those with the least of it as the problem, ensuring that frustration circulates between families and schools rather than being directed upward toward the system that is actually responsible. Parents experience the front-facing version of this harm; schools experience the internal version. Both carry its weight, both absorb its consequences, and both are repeatedly positioned to take the blame for failures that originate elsewhere. The White Paper, by dramatically raising expectations on schools without meaningfully resolving what happens when local authorities fail to fund and support those expectations, risks deepening that dynamic rather than dismantling it. Telling schools they should identify need earlier does not change anything if the pathway from identification to adequate statutory support still runs through a local authority with a financial incentive to minimise what it provides.

The funding picture sits underneath all of this. The government has announced £4 billion over three years, and the headline number is significant. Spread across the whole education sector - tens of thousands of early years settings, primary schools, secondary schools, colleges, and post-16 providers - the reality is considerably less generous. The £1.6 billion Inclusive Mainstream Fund works out, when distributed across all settings over three years, to less than the cost of a few hours of teacher time per school per week, and would fall well short of covering an additional teaching assistant. The £1.8 billion Experts at Hand service, which would bring speech and language therapists, educational psychologists, and other specialists into mainstream schools, is more meaningful in principle, but rests on a workforce question nobody has yet answered: where will those specialists come from, given that educational psychology waiting lists already run to years in many areas, and that training new practitioners in any of the relevant disciplines takes the same? The funding exists on paper before the workforce it depends on exists in reality.

The point here is not that the investment is worthless, but that the scale of what is being asked of mainstream schools and the scale of what is being provided to enable them to meet that ask are not in the same conversation. When expectation significantly outpaces resource, what tends to happen is predictable: schools become more stretched and more defensive, families become more frustrated, and the relationship between them - already strained in many places by years of precisely this pattern - deteriorates further rather than recovering. The schools-and-families rift that the White Paper says it wants to heal is considerably more likely to deepen than to close if the model it implements places most of the weight on the layer of the system with the least structural power to bear it.

The accountability question runs beneath all of this and the White Paper does not satisfactorily resolve it. Nothing in the paper clearly changes what happens to a local authority that consistently breaches its duties. The financial structures that incentivise LAs to keep children out of statutory provision - because EHCPs are expensive to fund and maintain and LA SEND budgets are under enormous pressure - remain in place. If you follow that logic through, you arrive at a system in which schools carry more responsibility, families carry the same degree of uncertainty, local authorities face much the same accountability deficit, and the documents on which families' rights depend carry less established legal weight than the ones they replaced.

The Third Argument: Mainstream Is Not Neutral, and We Are Asking the Wrong Question

The White Paper rests on a premise that is widely shared, understandable in its political logic, and - for a significant and growing number of neurodivergent children - fundamentally incorrect. The premise is that mainstream school, properly resourced and supported, is the appropriate environment for the vast majority of children, and that where it currently fails them, the answer lies in improving what is available within it.

That premise needs examining directly, and doing so honestly requires acknowledging at the outset that many neurodivergent children do well in mainstream settings when their needs are genuinely understood, support is real, and environments are meaningfully adapted to the way they actually function. Inclusion, properly built from the ground up rather than bolted onto an existing structure as an afterthought, is a meaningful aspiration, and for some children mainstream is where they want to be, where they experience a genuine sense of belonging, and where they can thrive with appropriate support. That is worth protecting, and the investment in it is not misplaced for those children.

The difficulty is that the evidence - and there is now a substantial and growing body of it - points clearly toward a different reality for a significant subset of neurodivergent children, particularly autistic children, for whom the barrier to education is not a missing resource within the mainstream environment but something closer to the environment itself. The structure of the mainstream school day - its pace, its sensory demands, its constant transitions, its requirement for near-continuous social performance across six or seven hours, its expectation that attention will be divided rapidly between multiple subjects and teachers, that regulatory behaviour will be suppressed, that the enormous diversity of human neurological experience will be accommodated within an architecture designed for a particular kind of nervous system - asks for a kind of sustained functioning that some children cannot maintain without cost to themselves that accumulates, quietly and invisibly, over time.

Siggers and Day's 2024 research, published in BJPsych Open, examined twenty autistic children who had been unable to attend school for at least three months, and found that every single child in the cohort showed the same cluster of presentations: chronic exhaustion, loss of previously acquired skills and interests, heightened sensory needs, social withdrawal, mood dysregulation, and physical complaints. The uniformity led the researchers to conclude that what they were observing strongly indicated autistic burnout as the shared underlying mechanism, and they called explicitly for an urgent shift away from potentially punitive approaches and a fundamental re-evaluation of current educational practices and support systems for autistic children. Published in a Royal College of Psychiatrists journal and representing clinical findings rather than advocacy, this research says directly that the system's response to these children does not match the nature of what is actually happening to them - and that what is actually happening to them begins, in most cases, long before attendance visibly collapses.

Burnout does not announce itself through sudden non-attendance. It develops gradually through sustained overextension - the cumulative cost of navigating an environment that consistently demands more than a nervous system can sustainably provide. A child may be attending every day, their academic results unremarkable in either direction, their attendance record giving no indication at all of what getting through each day is actually requiring of them. The picture at home tells a different story: the after-school unravelling intensifying week by week, skills that were once managed with relative ease beginning to require visible effort, the child who was communicative and engaged becoming narrower and harder to reach, interests that usually provide regulation beginning to fade - which tends to be one of the most alarming signs for the families living alongside it. The world contracts, quietly and gradually, while every external measure the system has access to says that things are fine.

These children pass through the attendance target undetected, because they are attending. They pass beneath the EHCP threshold, because their needs look manageable from the outside. The system registers no problem until the day they stop managing, at which point it tends to want to know why nobody saw it coming, a question that is extraordinarily difficult to answer without acknowledging what we know about masking, about the way neurodivergent children learn to contain their distress within specific contexts, and about the gap between what is visible to professionals and what is happening at home.

The White Paper engages with the question of how we measure whether education is working, and does gesture toward broader wellbeing indicators alongside attendance and attainment. But attendance targets and exam results remain the accountability framework's structural foundations, and broader wellbeing measures tend to yield when they come into conflict with the things that are formally counted. The deeper problem with all of these measures - including the wellbeing indicators - is that they are measures of performance and presence rather than of whether a child's experience of education is genuinely accessible to them in the way the law actually requires. A child can have excellent attendance and be eroding. A child can perform academically and be masking at a level that is costing them enormously more than the results suggest. A child recovering from burnout may show nothing in any data set for months, and yet be doing the most consequential work of their educational life.

The White Paper's proposal that children's sense of belonging and wellbeing be tracked more consistently runs immediately into a further difficulty that the paper does not adequately grapple with: many neurodivergent children, particularly autistic children, particularly those who are still in the environments that are eroding their capacity or are in the early stages of recovery from burnout, cannot reliably self-report their own distress in the way a standardised wellbeing measure requires. Alexithymia - difficulty identifying and naming internal emotional states - is common among autistic people. Children who have spent years learning to mask often find it genuinely difficult to distinguish between actually feeling okay and the automated performance of okay that masking produces. Children who have been in sustained distress sometimes lose the internal reference point for what not-being-in-distress feels like. A child who circles "somewhat happy" on a wellbeing survey while collapsing at home every evening is not providing inaccurate data. They are providing the only data they have access to, and a system that reads their response as evidence of belonging has not understood what it is measuring.

What all of this leads to is the question the White Paper does not properly address, and that the SEND sector has perhaps been hesitant to name as directly as the evidence now requires. The question is not only how to fix the current system. It is whether the current model of compulsory full-time mainstream education - structured as it is, measured as it is, built for the nervous systems it is built for - is the right model for the numbers of children it is demonstrably failing. The White Paper treats that question as having been settled — of course mainstream is the destination, the task is to resource it better - and proceeds directly to implementation. But the scale and consistency of what is happening to neurodivergent children in mainstream schools across England suggests that the question has not been settled so much as set aside, because settling it honestly would require a conversation about what education is for, and how we measure whether it is working, that is politically and logistically uncomfortable to have.

A paper that genuinely aimed to create a system in which every child could achieve and thrive would need to grapple seriously with the possibility that for some children, achieving and thriving requires not a better-resourced version of the current structure, but a fundamentally different one - different in pace, different in setting, different in its model of what education looks like and what it asks of a child. It would need to reckon honestly with what the research tells us about how neurodivergent learning actually works, what conditions it requires, and what the cost is when those conditions are structurally unavailable. And it would need to be willing to make real accessibility - whether a child can reach their education without it costing more than they have to give - the outcome the system is accountable for, rather than a secondary consideration that yields whenever it comes into conflict with attendance data.

What Remains True, and What to Do With It

The White Paper is not without anything worth engaging with. The Experts at Hand service, if it delivers real specialist capacity into mainstream settings rather than generating another layer of referral waiting lists, could mean that children receive specialist input before things become acute - and that would represent a genuine shift from how things currently work. The £200 million staff training investment is real, and teachers who understand autistic burnout and can recognise accumulating strain before it becomes visible crisis change individual children's trajectories in ways that matter. The Children's Commissioner's new remit to scrutinise SEND reform implementation and report publicly on gaps and unintended consequences could, if given genuine independence and the teeth to act on what it finds, provide the kind of ongoing accountability that has been conspicuously absent from the current system.

The consultation is open, and the detail that will determine whether this reform actually protects children - or simply reclassifies what protection looks like - is in the consultation document rather than the White Paper itself. The questions worth pressing on are specific: what can a family actually do when an ISP is vague, inadequate, or simply not delivered, and what is the enforcement mechanism? Are Specialist Provision Packages being designed as a minimum entitlement - a floor that makes it harder for local authorities to under-provide - or as a threshold children must meet before statutory protection applies? What changes, concretely and practically, about local authority accountability, and what happens to an LA that fails children under the new framework in the same way it has failed them under the current one? Responding to the consultation does not require legal expertise or formal advocacy training. It requires an honest account of what you have lived, and what your child has needed, and what the system failed to provide. The people writing these proposals need to hear that, and the formal consultation process is the mechanism through which it carries weight.

But for families navigating the system right now - whether you are at the beginning of the EHCNA process, mid-appeal, fighting for provision that isn't being delivered, or trying to establish your child's right to education under Section 19 - please do not let this White Paper become a reason to pause or hold back. The law as it stands is still the law. The duties local authorities owe your child today are the same duties they owed yesterday. A government consultation does not suspend statutory obligations, and no local authority has any lawful basis for asking you to wait for a new system before it meets the obligations of the current one. If anything, the period ahead - in which rights may change and the shape of new protections remains unclear - is precisely the moment to ensure that existing entitlements are properly documented, properly specified, and as legally robust as they can be made.