'Effective' SEND support won't be taken away, minister says

The government will not be withdrawing "effective support" from children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) under its planned school reforms for England, the education secretary has said.

Bridget Phillipson told the BBC the government would be "spending more money", not less, on supporting children with SEND as part of its efforts to overhaul the system.

But the cabinet minister said children "will be reviewed in terms of their needs", following leaks which suggested pupils will be assessed as they move into secondary school.

The full details of the government's proposed changes to SEND provision in England will be outlined in a White Paper, which will be published on Monday.

The policy paper has been highly anticipated by parents who fear the reforms could mean the support their child receives could be limited in some way.

The proposals in the paper come as the government faces significant pressures from the rising costs of a SEND system, widely considered to be in crisis.

Leaks from the paper, reported by the BBC, suggest children with education, health and care plans (EHCPs) - which are legal documents outlining their extra support entitlement - will be reassessed after primary school from 2029.

The BBC understands this will sit alongside an extension of legal rights to include all children with SEND through school-led Individual Support Plans (ISP).

Every child with identified special educational needs, including those who do not currently have an EHCP, will have an ISP drawn up by the school, which will have some kind of legal status.

Phillipson told the Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme that "EHCPs will have an important role to play in the new system".

"The assurance I can give to parents is that under the new system, more children will receive support," Phillipson said.

"But they'll receive it more quickly. They'll receive it when they need it and where they need it. Parents won't have to fight so hard to get support through an EHCP."

She said the new ISPs would have a legal "underpinning", meaning "there are clear routes and clear principles set out in statute that will guide all of this".

When pressed on whether any child who currently receives support would lose it under the proposals, Phillipson said: "We are not going to be taking away effective support from children."

She added: "And what I'll be setting out tomorrow is a decade-long, very careful transition from the system that we have - which everyone recognises isn't working."

But she acknowledged that children "will be reviewed in terms of their needs assessed".

"That should be happening at the moment," Phillipson said. "We're meant to be having a system where every year an EHCP is reviewed. That doesn't always happen."

In an interview on the same programme, shadow education secretary Laura Trott said the Conservatives "do have some big concerns about what is being floated".

Trott said too many parents "had to fight for the support and the idea that they're going to be reassessed will be genuinely frightening".

For Hannah Luxford, whose teenage son has anxiety, it took 18 months to get him an EHCP.

"It's an unhelpful, adversarial, complex system that is designed to make you give up," Luxford told the BBC.

Now, Luxford says her son is thriving at a funded virtual school. But she worries about his legal rights under the new reforms.

"I want to hear that for those of us already with EHCPs that we are protected," she said noting how her son's is getting the "education he deserves" at the school he currently attends.

"If that's taken away, it will take us back to where we were five years ago."

There is a risk of a backlash against reforms among Labour MPs, whose backing will be required if these plans make it to Parliament.

The government has decided to pay SEND costs currently covered by councils from 2028, a move that is forecast to create a £6bn pressure.

In recent analysis, the Institute for Fiscal Studies said the government had three options for addressing this pressure: increase education funding, reforms to slow the growth of SEND spending, or cuts.

Luke Sibieta, from the IFS, said the situation is "worst of all worlds" with rising numbers of EHCPs and increasing costs but no better quality for children.

"Unfortunately we still have a system that is characterised by conflict, by fight, but also by really patchy levels of quality."

Under its proposed reforms, the government is also planning to halve the attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their peers in England by the time children born in this Parliament finish secondary school.

It will attempt to do this by reforming how schools target funding for children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

The latest GCSE results show the disadvantage gap index for year 11s stood at 3.92, according to the Department for Education (DfE).

It had previously dropped to a low of 3.66 in 2019/20 with some small fluctuations in between, but it began widening in the post-pandemic years.

In the 2022/2023, it reached the highest it had been in a decade at 3.94.