Family Fund’s response to the SEND white paper

This week the Government published proposals for education reforms in England, called Every Child Achieving and Thriving. It includes proposals to change the way that SEND support is provided to children with additional support needs or disabilities.

There is a consultation open where you can give your views on these proposals, until 18th May 2026. The documents are quite long, but the Department for Education has created simpler guides to the issues that they cover, to help parents and carers think about how to respond to the consultation.

Family Fund’s partners in the Disabled Children’s Partnership are also working on a response to this consultation. They issued this statement welcoming the proposals:

“We fully support the government’s vision of a society where disabled children and their families get the support they need without having to fight for it – and we welcome the extra investment promised, which is much-needed. We are very pleased that Government has listened to us and our members about giving all children with SEND a legally-backed plan and retaining EHCPs and the Tribunal. This is a huge victory for everyone who has campaigned to keep and strengthen these rights over the last year.

The hundreds of thousands of parents our member organisations work with every day say they want their child to enjoy the ordinary things like a nursery, school or college where they feel safe, with staff who know how to teach them, and a chance to play and make friends.

The money announced is significant and spent well could transform schools’ ability to allow more children to have those ordinary experiences. But we are deeply concerned about plans to restrict access to EHCPs to ‘most complex needs’, while leaving out which children it considers to have complex needs. Parents and young people up and down the country face months of worry unless the government reassures them that all children whose needs cannot or are not met by individual schools’ plans will be able to get an EHCP.

We now want to work with the government, MPs, young people and families to make sure the new system has the teeth to guarantee that every child with SEND gets the support at the earliest opportunity. Without that, the reforms will be built on sand.”