There are more than 1.7 million children and young people in England’s schools who are recognised as having special educational needs and disabilities (or Send). When you factor in their parents and carers, it highlights the huge number of people who anxiously watch this area of policy. All of them know that the systems those kids depend on are dysfunctional and broken. And they are also keenly aware of something else: that whereas their experiences once tended to be ignored and overlooked, they have now crossed from the online world into Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, The One Show, Good Morning Britain and all the rest, as a huge conversation about the politics of all this gets louder and louder.
Beyond the worsening Send crisis itself, there are obvious reasons for that: months of anonymous briefings and rumours, and the prospect of a legislative white paper that, we are told, will finally arrive at some unspecified point “in the autumn”. At the department for education, Bridget Phillipson – the secretary of state who is also running to be Labour’s deputy leader – says she wants many more children to be included in mainstream schools, and is aiming at a system that is more “timely, more effective, and actually maximises support”. In the vaguest of ways, that might sound reasonable enough, but there have also been rumblings that have caused many Send families no end of concern.
Which brings us to another big figure. Around 640,000 children and young people with Send currently have an education, health and care plan (endless acronyms are an in-built part of the special needs universe – these are known as EHCPs). These documents are the responsibility of local authorities and, in theory, they set out the specific help and support individual kids need as a matter of legally enforceable rights: their numbers have gone up in recent years chiefly because, in an endlessly squeezed school system, they are often the only way of securing dependable help.
Getting an EHCP is usually a grinding struggle, and making sure the provision they set out actually materialises can entail the same kind of fight. But for parents and carers whose lives are often a mess of unreturned phone calls and emails, along with the official Send tribunal, they represent a precious means of accountability. Moreover, if the kind of dedicated help they provide and its foundation in law were either diluted or done away with, many kids’ inclusion in mainstream schools would be impossible (I speak from experience here: my son is autistic and has an EHCP, and without it, the productive years he spent in mainstream schools would have been unthinkable). Even if the government’s Send reforms start to work, that will remain the case for a long time to come.
Late last year, whispers from the top of government began to circulate, about drastically restricting the number of EHCPs. Ministers, meanwhile, have refused to be drawn on whether or not EHCPs and the very clear rights they enshrine will survive their reforms at all. The current line is that there will always be “a legal right to extra support” for Send kids. But that could mean very different things: either a continuation of EHCPs and the needs-based rights they provide, or a fairly meaningless guarantee that kids will be legally entitled to whatever the state decides it can offer. Among parents and Send professionals, the result has been a mixture of queasy anxiety and increasing frustration.
Last week, two big developments showed that similar feelings are now spreading through Westminster. The first happened on Monday, when a huge crowd of Send families gathered outside parliament for a lunchtime protest addressed by – among others – the Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey, while inside MPs prepared for a debate about the Send crisis, and the prospect of big changes to the system. Thanks to Rachel Filmer, a parent from Poole who is one of the prime movers in the new Save Our Children’s Rights campaign (full disclosure: I am also involved), a petition opposing any moves on families’ legal entitlements had surpassed 100,000 signatures – which led on to a three-hour session in Westminster Hall. Ninety MPs were there, the kind of turnout that speaks volumes about how hot these issues have become.
It was fascinating to watch: one of those occasions when MPs talk about the human stories contained in their casework, and depart from the usual pre-written party lines. One Labour MP said that many of his constituents wanted “reassurance regarding education, health and care plans. They do not want them to be scrapped; they would like a personalised plan, such as the EHCP, to remain in the reformed system.” Another asked the government to confirm that “legal protections will be in place for those families who so desperately need that support”. Lib Dems, Greens and Tories voiced the same opinions – and, even among the more on-message Labour MPs present, beyond one or two veiled hints, there were no arguments for either restricting or getting rid of EHCPs.
Liberal Democrat party leader Ed Davey speaks to protesters outside parliament on 15 September 2025. Photograph: Vuk Valcic/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock
Three days later came a real watershed moment: the publication of a report from the Commons’ education select committee, which has been immersed in an exhaustive inquiry into the Send crisis for the last eight months. Though it says that the current need and demand for EHCPs is “unsustainable”, it insists – entirely correctly – that the solution to that problem lies in doggedly improving ordinary, everyday support, not taking rights away and leaving children stranded.
Whatever the government’s answer to the Send crisis, the report says: “The solution cannot be to remove the statutory entitlements from a system which lacks accountability in many other areas and in which parents already have so little trust and confidence … The Send reforms must not be based on any withdrawal of statutory entitlements for children and young people with Send.” Those words do not need much translating. One BBC headline crisply summed them up as, “Don’t scrap care plans for children with special educational needs, say MPs”. The Labour chair of the committee, Helen Hayes, was almost as blunt: “There should be no reduction in that entitlement and no raising of the threshold for that entitlement.”
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There is a new element of the politics of special needs education, which centres on a party that could not muster a single MP for the Westminster Hall debate, but was mentioned several times. Back in the spring, with his usual blithe disregard for the complexities of the real world, the Reform UK leader Nigel Farage said that the NHS was “massively overdiagnosing” special needs and disabilities. Early this month, Richard Tice, the party’s deputy leader, said that Send spending was “being hijacked by far too many parents who are abusing the system, taking it for a ride”. These are the blowhards and know-nothings who may yet move from local to national government: they do not seem to have given any thought to the idea that to make that leap, millions of Send parents and their friends and families will be among the voters they will need.
For now, as that white paper approaches, I am more interested in what Reform’s poisonous banalities might mean for the balance of opinion among other MPs, and Labour people in particular. It feels as if there is a mounting realisation in Westminster that existing Send rights increasingly look like a precious wall of defence against the cruelty that would be let loose if Reform took national power. And I increasingly sense something else: a rising aversion to standing anywhere near anyone who believes in the modern myths of “overdiagnosis” or the idea that changes to the Send system ought to start with snatching away rights and entitlements.
I would like to think the same sentiments have surfaced in the education department. In only a matter of weeks, we will see. But in the meantime, for millions of people all too used to silence and slow service, the wait goes on.
