What the DfE told councils to show in their SEND reform plans

Written by Amber Windsor

Before Brighton & Hove City Council's SEND reform plan was approved, two advisers working for the Department for Education told the council what the plan needed to show. They wanted to see slower growth in requests for EHC needs assessments and EHCPs, fewer children in special schools, and fewer children being referred for individual help from specialists such as educational psychologists and therapists.

The council released that advice to me under Freedom of Information this morning, and it's the first written record I've seen of what the DfE was looking for when it judged these plans. Although the advice was written for Brighton & Hove, the same aims appear in guidance the DfE sent to every council in England, so what it shows is likely to apply to families wherever they live.

In short, councils have been asked to show that fewer families will need statutory support, meaning EHC needs assessments and EHCPs, without being asked to show how that fits with the law that gives children the right to be assessed and to the help written into their EHCP. In everything I've seen, there's also no clear way of telling whether falling numbers mean children are getting help earlier or being turned away. This post sets out what the documents say, what they leave out, and what I think that could mean for children and families.

It follows on from yesterday's post, What two Sussex councils told the government about SEND, and didn't publish, which looked at what West Sussex and East Sussex County Councils sent the DfE. Brighton & Hove released everything I asked for, removing only people's names, and you can read its full response on WhatDoTheyKnow. As before, I've quoted the documents' own words wherever possible and made clear where I'm giving my own reading. I've also asked Brighton & Hove to respond, and I'll add anything it sends.

What the advisers asked for

Among the documents is the council's own record of the written advice it received from two DfE advisers, one for SEND and one for finance, while it was drafting its plan in May and June 2026. Other councils, such as the Isle of Wight, have described advisers reviewing their drafts, so the process itself isn't secret, but as far as I can find, what the advisers actually said hasn't been published before.

According to the council's record, the advisers asked it to:

  • show how its plan would deliver "moderated statutory demand", which means slower growth in requests for EHC needs assessments and EHCPs;

  • show how it would deliver "reduced specialist reliance", which means fewer children in special schools and independent placements;

  • present its new Experts at Hand service as building "reduced referral dependency", which means schools getting advice from specialists instead of referring a child to be seen individually.

They also asked the council to "make causal pathways explicit" for each of these, which means spelling out, step by step, how the plan would make those numbers fall. The council's published plan already talked about meeting needs earlier "without unnecessary escalation to statutory processes", and the advisers' job was to make it show, in a form a DfE assessor could check, exactly how it would get there.

What this tells us is that fewer assessments, fewer EHCPs and fewer specialist places were set as targets for the plan to deliver from the outset, rather than being figures that would be watched afterwards to see whether better support was working.

Where those aims came from

The advisers were working from guidance the DfE sent to every council in March 2026. It hasn't been published on GOV.UK, but some councils, including Warwickshire and Somerset, have included it in their committee papers.

The guidance describes Experts at Hand, the new teams of specialists who will advise schools, as "ensuring, where possible, needs do not escalate", which it says "reduces dependence on costly, individualised provision". Put simply, the DfE expects that if specialists advise schools early, fewer children will reach the point of needing an EHCP or support planned around them individually, and that this will save money.

The guidance also required every plan to show "how the planned increases in capacity across setting types will reduce reliance on special schools, especially out-of-area placements and independent specialist provision". In other words, councils had to explain how new places in local schools and units would lead to fewer children going to special schools, particularly independent ones or those outside the area.

So the aims in Brighton & Hove's advice came straight from the DfE, and every council in England was asked to show them.

Two ways to bring the numbers down

On paper, a lot of this sounds reasonable. Most parents would love help to arrive earlier, closer to home and without a fight, and if support in local schools really did improve, you'd expect fewer families to need an EHCP and fewer children to need a place far from home.

The difficulty is that a council can bring those numbers down in two very different ways. It can improve support, so that fewer children need extra help, or it can say no more often, by refusing more assessments, writing vaguer EHCPs or turning down specialist places, which is quicker and cheaper. These plans are judged on the numbers going down, and the DfE has said that future financial help for councils will take into account how well they deliver their plans, so there is real pressure to get there one way or another.

Imagine a fire service that's told it will be judged on how far the number of 999 calls falls. It could get there by fitting smoke alarms and preventing fires, or it could get there by making the line harder to get through on, and either way the number of calls would drop. The figures alone couldn't tell you whether there were fewer fires or just fewer people getting help.

What the documents show. Councils had to set out how better support would bring the numbers down, so on paper they are all choosing the first route. The fall in numbers was set as a target from the start, and councils will be monitored against it every quarter.

What they don't show. I can't find anything that would tell anyone, once the numbers start falling, which route got them there. The DfE spreadsheet counts requests, assessments, EHCPs, places and spending, and some of those figures, such as rising appeals or a growing gap between requests and completed assessments, could hint that families are being turned away. Nothing I've seen follows up what happens to children who are refused, or asks whether children's needs are actually being met, and the framework the DfE used to judge the plans hasn't been published, so families can't see whether it does either.

There's already an example of how hard this can be to read. At the Education Committee this week, Education Secretary Lucy Powell pointed to a large fall in speech and language referrals in Rochdale after a new offer was introduced, which a local press report described as including AI tools, advice through WhatsApp and online coaching. As Tania Tirraoro pointed out on Special Needs Jungle today, a fall in referrals can happen for many reasons, including schools being told not to refer until they've worked through the new offer first, and without a proper evaluation, nobody can say which it is.

What that could mean for families. If your council's numbers fall, the official figures may not be able to tell the difference between your child getting help earlier and your child being refused it. That's why keeping a written record of what you've asked for and what you've been told is so useful, and why the questions at the end of this post ask the DfE how it will tell the two apart.

This isn't only a worry for the future. In a public Facebook post on 24 October, Michael Charles described having to stop a council that tried to change a child's EHCP ahead of an annual review. He said he was concerned about what looks like a more determined effort by council officers to get involved in annual reviews, potentially to dilute provision or cease EHCPs altogether, and he reminded the council that there isn't even a Bill before Parliament yet, let alone a change in the law.

One of the Sussex councils is already pointing the same way. West Sussex's own published plan says annual reviews will be prioritised according to factors that include "high placement cost", as I set out in yesterday's post. Reviewing a placement is a normal part of an annual review, but the same council's papers show the number of children waiting for a specialist place has doubled, and a review driven by cost may point towards a cheaper setting that doesn't yet exist.

Councils were already making unlawful decisions long before any of these targets existed. When I wrote for Special Needs Jungle earlier this year about why rights on paper don't always become rights in practice, the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman was upholding almost every SEND complaint it received, and in 2024-25 councils' original decisions were upheld in full in only 143 of nearly 20,000 Tribunal appeals. Adding pressure to bring the numbers down is unlikely to make that any better.

I've written before about how a target can start to shape the very thing it's meant to measure, in What gets counted, and who gets missed, and these documents show that risk written into the plans themselves.

What the plans leave out: the law

The guidance does say that some children will still need "individualised and tailored support" and that the plans will be delivered "within the current statutory framework". The statutory framework is the law, which includes the duty to assess a child who may need an EHCP and the duty to provide what an EHCP says.

The guidance sets out 41 requirements that every plan had to meet, and as far as I can see, none of them asks a council to show how its targets fit with those duties. The advisers' advice to Brighton & Hove doesn't mention them either. The plans were then scored against a DfE framework that, according to a ministerial statement on 29 October, was shared with councils but hasn't been published.

Put together, that means councils were asked to show they would reduce assessments and specialist places, while nothing I've seen asked them to show that every child who needs an assessment or a specialist place will still get one. This is one council's advice, so it doesn't prove the DfE never checked, which is why I've asked the DfE directly under Freedom of Information. Its reply was due yesterday, and I haven't received it yet.

The Education Secretary's own description of the law doesn't inspire much confidence either. According to Special Needs Jungle's report today, Lucy Powell told the Education Committee, in an answer about SEND provision, that "no one's particularly had a duty to provide it properly". She may have had in mind children without an EHCP, where schools only have a duty to use their "best endeavours", but for children with an EHCP the law is clear: under section 42 of the Children and Families Act 2014, the council must secure the special educational provision in their plan.

If she did mean children without an EHCP, her comment also leaves out a duty that applies to every child, whether or not they have a plan. Under Section 19 of the Education Act 1996, if a child of compulsory school age won't receive a suitable education because of illness, exclusion or any other reason unless the council arranges it, the council must arrange it. More and more families are having to rely on it: in February, a survey by Ambitious about Autism found that one in six of the autistic pupils who responded hadn't attended school at all since September, and the DfE's own figures for England show autistic pupils are twice as likely as children without special educational needs to be persistently absent.

You might think it's no surprise the law has been left out, since the reforms are meant to change it. They may well do so in time, but any change has to go through Parliament first, and that is now further away than planned. At the same session on 4 November, she said the bill and the government's full response to the consultation would be published early in the new year, and the i Paper has reported that the delay squeezes an already tight timetable for having the new system ready by September 2029. The Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, has also told the BBC that it wouldn't be right to rush the reforms.

In the meantime, these plans are being carried out under the law as it stands, as the DfE's own guidance says, which raises a harder question. The plans set targets running to 2029 that fit the system the government has proposed, rather than the one the law describes today. If councils are measured against those targets now, there's a real risk they start acting as though the changes have already happened, before Parliament has even seen the bill. With the legislation already delayed and no guarantee it will pass in its current form, the targets in these plans will still be there whatever Parliament decides.

As I argued in Reform or Retreat?, the SEND crisis grew out of councils failing to apply the law they already had, and plans that leave the law out of the picture make that easier to repeat.

For families, the law protecting your child is exactly as strong as it was before these plans were written. A child whose family asks for an assessment this year has the same rights as ever, even if the plan your council is being judged on doesn't show how it will keep to them.

Gaps in the figures

The advisers also told the council that its plan "could proceed even where datasets were incomplete" and that "proxy or indicative data could be used where necessary". When the DfE approved the plan in October, its feedback noted "some rows left incomplete", and much of the final advice was about whether the plan would be easy for "a first-time DfE assessor" to follow. This is more than a technical point, because if the starting figures are patchy, it becomes much harder to tell later on whether a fall in numbers came from better support or from more children being turned away.

Every council filled in the same DfE spreadsheet, which the DfE will use to monitor each area every quarter and to compare areas with each other, and Brighton & Hove and East Sussex filled it in very differently. From 2026 onwards, East Sussex recorded as zero the number of children with EHCPs who are receiving education otherwise than at school (EOTAS), in home education, or out of education and waiting for a place. Brighton & Hove counted these children and expects all of those numbers to rise, which shows the rows could be filled in and that East Sussex's zeros weren't forced on it by the form.

The children most likely to be let down, those who are out of school or without a suitable place, are the very ones who disappear from the figures in one area while being counted in the next. If the DfE compares the two councils, it will be comparing different things, and whether a child appears in the official picture at all can depend on which side of a county boundary they live on. West Sussex hasn't released its spreadsheet yet, and I've gone back to the council to ask for it.

If your child is out of school, in home education or receiving EOTAS, it's worth knowing that in some areas they may not appear in the figures the DfE is watching at all.

Brighton & Hove: more children than places

Brighton & Hove's plan aims for no new out-of-city placements from September 2027 and holds independent special school places at that level, yet the same spreadsheet's forecast of children's needs has the number of children needing those schools still rising. Special schools show the same gap, with fewer places planned than the number of children forecast to need them.

The two tables may have been built in different ways, and I've asked the council which one is right. The DfE's advisers spotted the problem and asked the council to "reconcile" it before submission, but the final version still doesn't. If the gap is real, the council's own forecast expects more children to need specialist places than it plans to provide, which would leave some families struggling to find a suitable place for their child locally.

The published plan also aims for "a reduction of EHC applications of 5% by 2029", while the council's spreadsheet has requests rising every year, so I've asked what the 5% is being measured against. The council also forecasts more appeals to the SEND Tribunal every year, along with a growing overspend, even after the DfE clears most of its past deficit.

Safety Valve, by another name?

From 2020, the DfE's Safety Valve scheme wrote off the debts of the councils with the largest SEND overspends, in return for plans to bring their spending down. Officially, the agreements didn't contain targets to cut EHCPs, and the DfE said so repeatedly. When IPSEA used Freedom of Information to see them in 2024, though, it found conditions such as a requirement to "appropriately manage the demand for EHCPs", alongside council reports describing families' requests as "inappropriate referrals", and warned that the conditions appeared to encourage councils to breach their legal duties. Schools Week found council papers setting out their own goals, including one council aiming to reduce the number of children who still have an EHCP after their annual review, and Tes found another council's dashboard with targets for the number of EHCPs and for ceased EHCPs, which the council said had been set in agreement with the DfE. The government paused the scheme in 2024, pending wider reform.

These plans are that wider reform, and I'm not the only one making the comparison. Bracknell Forest Council's April 2026 Cabinet report says its new plan "replaces the existing Safety Valve agreement", and that the council has "repurposed the former Safety Valve governance arrangements" to focus on the new plan.

Side by side, the two schemes look like this:

  • Which councils: Safety Valve covered the councils with the largest debts, while the new plans cover every council in England.

  • The money: Safety Valve wrote off debts in stages, while the new plans write off most past debt now.

  • What comes next: under Safety Valve, payments could be held back, while under the new plans future help "will not be unlimited" and will "take into account" delivery.

  • DfE advisers: both pair a SEND adviser with a finance adviser.

  • What the plans aim to reduce: Safety Valve aimed at assessments, special school places and out-of-area places, while the new plans aim at growth in assessment requests and EHCPs, and reliance on special and out-of-area places.

The DfE's own research into Safety Valve, carried out by Isos Partnership, found that the number of new EHCPs grew far more slowly in Safety Valve areas than in the rest of the country. Some of the people the researchers spoke to said that, although a direct link was impossible to prove because the agreements didn't contain explicit targets to cut EHCPs, the scheme had coincided with tougher decisions about assessments and EHCPs, and some parents and school leaders felt it had become harder to get one.

The new plans go further. Safety Valve agreements were said to contain no targets on EHCPs at all, while these plans ask every council to show slower growth in requests for assessment and in EHCPs, and Brighton & Hove's plan sets out "a reduction of EHC applications of 5% by 2029". If Safety Valve made EHCPs harder to get without an official target, my worry is that plans with the aim written into them will do the same, only this time in every council in England at once.

What it all adds up to

Put the documents side by side and a clear picture emerges. The DfE told councils what success looks like, which is fewer families needing statutory support, fewer children in specialist places and fewer referrals for individual help. It accepted incomplete figures, approved plans built to show those results without asking how they fit with the law as it stands, and has said future financial help will take their delivery into account. It will then track progress through a spreadsheet that, in at least one area, doesn't count some of the children most at risk.

All the while, the councils' own papers describe pressures that no plan can wish away, from too few specialist places to more requests for assessment than can be completed and more appeals every year.

When success is measured in fewer assessments, EHCPs and specialist places, and nothing I've seen checks whether the children who need them are still getting them, the pressure falls on decisions about individual children, and the figures being watched are the ones least able to show when that happens.

Questions that need answers

  • The DfE: did anyone check whether plans with targets to slow assessments, EHCPs or specialist places fit with the law? Why were incomplete figures accepted? Will the scoring framework be published? How will you make sure every council counts the same children, including those out of school? How will you tell whether falling numbers come from better support or from more families being refused? If Parliament delays or changes the reforms, will councils still be measured against targets set for the proposed system?

  • Brighton & Hove: if specialist places fall short of the children you forecast, where will those children go? What is the 5% reduction in applications measured against?

  • East Sussex: will you count children receiving EOTAS, in home education and out of education in your quarterly returns, as Brighton & Hove does?

  • West Sussex: will you release your completed spreadsheet, as both neighbouring councils have?

  • All three councils: will you publish the DfE advisers' advice on your draft plans?

All three councils have been asked to respond, and I'll add anything they send. I'm also sending these questions to local MPs, councillors and the Parent Carer Forums, and if you live in Brighton & Hove, East Sussex or West Sussex, you can help by sending them to your own councillor and MP and asking them to raise the questions with the council.

What you can do now

Your child's rights under the Children and Families Act 2014 haven't changed, whatever your council's plan aims to show. Under section 36, a council must carry out an EHC needs assessment if your child has or may have special educational needs and it may be necessary for special educational provision to be made through an EHCP. Under section 42, once an EHCP is in place, the council must secure the special educational provision set out in it, and the health body must arrange any health provision it sets out. You can still challenge decisions you disagree with, including by asking the council to reconsider, through mediation, through a complaint, or by appealing to the First-tier Tribunal (SEND). If your child is of compulsory school age and isn't receiving a suitable education, whether because they're out of school, waiting for a place or for another reason, the council has a duty under Section 19 of the Education Act 1996 to arrange suitable education for them.

Those duties carry on while you challenge a decision or an EHCP, and provision only counts if your child can actually access it. I've set out how that works, with the case law, in Education Only Counts If a Child Can Access It.

Keep a written record of what you've asked for and what you've been told, because the figures your council reports may not show what's happening to your child. My free toolkits cover each of these steps, including challenging a refusal to assess, getting the EHCP right from draft to final, EOTAS and Section 19, in the Canary SEND toolkit library.

If you'd like to see what your own council sent the DfE, check WhatDoTheyKnow first, then make a free request there for the plan as submitted, the completed SEND Reform data template, the DfE's outcome letter and feedback, and any written advice from DfE advisers on the draft plan.

This post is general information based on the councils' own documents and my reading of them, and isn't legal advice about any individual situation.

Sources

Amber Windsor
Next

What two Sussex councils told the government about SEND, and didn't publish