SUPPORTING SPECIAL EDUCATIONAL NEEDS

You never know what someone can do until you give them the chance to do it.

I became an Enterprise Adviser in 2015 and was matched with a special school in Northampton. I am now Chair of Governors at Northgate School Academy Trust, a school for pupils aged 11 to 18 with moderate and severe learning disabilities, autism, and physical and sensory needs.

Eleven years in the same building has taught me more about SEND than any amount of reading. It has also made me impatient about one thing in particular.

The employment cliff

6% of adults with a learning disability known to their local authority in England are in paid work. Of those who are not working, 86% say they want a job.

Those two numbers sit next to each other and make no sense. This is not a story about people who cannot work. It is a story about a gap between leaving education and entering employment that we have never properly built a bridge across.

Some of that gap is employer nervousness, and that is fixable, usually with a conversation and a small adjustment. Some of it is commissioning and funding. And some of it, uncomfortably, is aspiration, because a young person who has been managed rather than stretched for fourteen years does not arrive at eighteen expecting a career.

Preparing for adulthood has to start far earlier than the year someone leaves.

The reforms

England is in the middle of the biggest change to SEND provision in over a decade, and anyone working in this space needs to understand both what is coming and how long it will take.

The Every Child Achieving and Thriving white paper was laid before Parliament in February 2026. In outline:

• A four-tier system, moving from whole-class teaching through school-led and specialist-led targeted support, with EHCPs becoming Tier 4.
• Individual Support Plans as a statutory baseline for every pupil identified with SEND, including the estimated 1.4 million who do not hold an EHCP. No diagnosis required.
• EHCPs reserved for the most complex needs by 2035.
• A £1.6 billion Inclusive Mainstream Fund for early years settings, schools and colleges.
• National Inclusion Standards, due for full introduction in 2028.

The timing matters as much as the content. This requires primary legislation, which will come through the Education For All Bill announced in the May 2026 King’s Speech. Nothing is expected to commence before September 2029, and no changes to support delivered through EHCPs are expected before at least September 2030. The current system remains in place until then.

I say that because families are already being told their child’s EHCP is going away. It is not, and the anxiety that misunderstanding causes is entirely avoidable.

My view, for what it is worth

I support the direction and I am watching the delivery.

Greater inclusion in mainstream settings is the right ambition, and mainstream schools that genuinely include generate fewer EHCPs, which suggests inclusion is cheaper as well as better. But an ambition delivered without capacity becomes a cut with better branding. £1.6 billion against roughly £6 billion of accumulated high needs deficits is a start, not a solution.

The question I keep asking as a governor is a simple one. When a system is redesigned around inclusion in mainstream, what happens to the young people for whom mainstream was never going to work? Special schools are not a failure of inclusion. For some children they are the only place inclusion has ever actually happened.

Governance

I chair the governing body of a special academy trust and previously served as Vice Chair of a school governing body. I have also previously chaired the regional board of a Young Enterprise.

Governance in a SEND setting is not the same job as governance in a mainstream school. The financial exposure is different, the safeguarding load is heavier, the parent relationship is more intense, and the regulatory environment is shifting under your feet, with the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 receiving Royal Assent in April 2026 and Ofsted’s report card inspections now in force.

A note on interests. I am Chair of Governors at a special school and I support an Alternative Provision setting in the same county. That is a declared interest on the trust’s register, and I take no part in any decision where the two could touch. I mention it here because I would rather you read it from me than wonder about it.