Bridget Phillipson strives to persuade disillusioned families to trust Send changes
The most ambitious reform of England’s special educational needs system in a generation, a decade-long programme backed by £4 billion in new funding, now rests on a fragile commodity: the trust of families worn down by years of battling for support. The Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, is attempting to steer these complex changes through a sceptical political landscape and past parents for whom promises have too often been broken.
A Political Education in the Art of the Possible
The scale of the task became starkly clear to Phillipson within her first week as a cabinet minister, when she called a meeting for new Labour MPs on the subject of special educational needs. Nearly 100 attended, including MPs like Jen Craft, Daniel Francis, and Steve Race, for whom the issue was personal to their own families, and the then business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds. Many others, drawing on previous charity, union, or disability sector work, knew the system was at breaking point. For most, however, the evidence was in their constituency inboxes, dominated by pleas for help. It was after that July 2024 meeting that Phillipson told colleagues this would be her biggest task.
The political path to this point has been shaped by two bruising precedents. Departmental insiders say the biggest lesson came not from the dramatic failure of the welfare vote, but earlier, from the sustained attacks on her first major piece of legislation, the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill introduced in November 2024. Its changes, including to academy trusts, drew criticism from the right-wing press and bafflement from Labour MPs. With Number 10 seemingly unwilling to fully own the proposals, there were briefings that Phillipson could lose her job. The bill survived, but the episode left her team badly bruised. The lesson, they said, was to communicate relentlessly the scale of a problem and the moral argument for change.
Yet the welfare rebellion still loomed large. When the Work and Pensions Secretary, Liz Kendall, put forward those proposals last spring, MPs were shown graphs in Number 10 briefings detailing the problem. But the process lost their confidence, viewed as a cuts exercise lacking a moral core. Many feared a repeat with SEND, a signal to Number 10, the Treasury, and the Department for Education that upfront investment was non-negotiable. “We have never put a target on reducing EHCPs, even though the hope is they will go down, because primarily this should be about reforming the system to improve it,” one departmental source said.
The Blueprint for a Decade of Change
The reform plan, set out in the Schools White Paper published on February 23, 2026, envisages a careful, phased transition lasting ten years, with changes not expected to be enacted until 2030 at the earliest. Its core is a significant shift from the current legal framework. Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs), which over a third of a million children rely on, will in future be reserved for those with the most severe and complex needs. For children with less complex needs, schools will create legally binding Individual Support Plans (ISPs).
From 2029, existing EHCPs will be reviewed at key educational transition points, with the government expecting about one in eight children to move from an EHCP to an ISP between 2030 and 2035. The reforms are underpinned by five principles: support should be Early, Local, Fair, Effective, and Shared.
The promised £4 billion investment over three years is designed to improve SEND support in mainstream education, emphasising inclusion. This includes £1.8 billion for “Experts at Hand,” embedding professionals like educational psychologists and speech and language therapists in mainstream settings. A further £3.7 billion is allocated to build 60,000 new school places for children with SEND, with the aim of every secondary school having an inclusion base. Additional measures include a £200 million investment in teacher training on SEND issues, a new “inclusion” judgment in Ofsted inspections, and investment in Best Start Family Hubs for early years support.
The Battle for Trust and Consensus
Mindful of past failures, Phillipson’s team has undertaken an extensive engagement drive. The new schools minister, Georgia Gould, has spoken to 8,000 people over several months as part of a “national conversation” involving parents, carers, young people, and professionals through nine in-person and five online events. Politically, Phillipson made a point of meeting the Socialist Campaign Group of left-wing MPs, led by John McDonnell, and the powerful soft-left Tribune Group, which has over 100 members and contains many who rebelled against the welfare cuts.
This approach has built significant, though cautious, goodwill within the Parliamentary Labour Party. Even its most cynical groups have said they feel heard, though MPs suspect hidden issues may yet emerge from the white paper’s detail. The favourable comparison to the welfare debacle is clear, but as one ally of Phillipson noted, “This is major public service reform, the like of which no other cabinet minister has been able to deliver on this scale.”
Yet the success of the reforms hinges on convincing those most affected. Parents are being asked to trade a defined legal avenue—the EHCP—for the promise of better, less adversarial provision. For many, jaded by a system where local government SEND deficits are projected to hit £6 billion by March 2026, the promise rings hollow. There is cynicism about whether every teacher will be properly trained, or where all the additional specialists will be found, and a real fear that if appeals to schools and local authorities become the only recourse, they will not be treated fairly.
Whether parents and MPs ultimately accept the changes will depend on Phillipson convincing them that a better system is possible. In a difficult political climate, she is attempting to build support not on enforced change, but on a fragile foundation of hope.
