How can the government join up the delivery of its SEND reforms?

At the heart of the government’s plans to reform the special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) system is the principle that SEND services should be delivered jointly, with education settings, health partners and local authorities working in concert. If achieved, this would improve outcomes for children and generate cost efficiencies. The problem, however, is that the government hasn’t yet figured out how to make that happen. This will be one of the trickiest parts of the reform to get right, with major mismatches between what organisations believe they are supposed to do, the incentives and resources they have to do those things, and how they’re held to account for doing them.

The government must be clear on the reforms’ desired endpoint and provide the infrastructure to coordinate delivery

Asking tens of thousands of institutions to pull in the same direction without first telling them where they’re meant to be heading is less reform and more improvisation, but there is a real risk that the government’s SEND reforms see substantial investment coming before clarity on intended outcomes.

More than £3bn will flow to schools between 2026/27 and 2028/29 with the aim of making the system more inclusive. ²⁷ Department for Education, SEND Reform: putting children and young people first, CP 1509, The Stationery Office, February 2026, https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/send-reform-putting-children-and-young-people-first/send-reform-putting-children-and-young-people-first-h…  The funding is deliberately frontloaded because many initiatives (for example, creating Inclusion Bases – specialist bases in mainstream schools) will take time to establish and longer still to deliver results.

But schools may be investing before they know precisely what they are working towards. National Inclusion Standards – intended to define what support mainstream settings should provide – may not be published until 2028, two years after funding begins, to allow time to build the underlying evidence base. ²⁸ Department for Education, SEND Reform: putting children and young people first, CP 1509, The Stationery Office, February 2026, https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/send-reform-putting-children-and-young-people-first/send-reform-putting-children-and-young-people-first-h…  Schools could nevertheless be held accountable for their use of this new ‘inclusion funding’ from 2026/27, potentially before government itself knows the desired endpoint.

Effective joint delivery also requires formal structures for collaboration, at both a local and national level. ²⁹ House of Commons Education Committee, Solving the SEND Crisis (HC 492), The Stationery Office, September 2025, https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/49536/documents/265373/default  Without this, schools are likely to, for example, develop overlapping specialisms in their Inclusion Bases, even if the government would prefer expertise to be strategically distributed across an area. Local SEND groups – which the government envisions every school joining ³⁰ House of Commons Education Committee, Solving the SEND Crisis (HC 492), The Stationery Office, September 2025, https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/49536/documents/265373/default  – could provide the necessary forum for coordination. Yet this will only work if the government ensures the groups are operational before significant funds are committed, explicitly directs schools to coordinate investment, and clearly defines its expectations.

The reform plans lack equivalent formal mechanisms at the national level. While the Department for Education is supposed to collaborate on specific issues with the NHS and the Department of Health and Social Care, the government has not proposed any enduring structures to ensure bodies coordinate their efforts more generally. There is an important role for this kind of central government architecture: without it, there is no clear broker to resolve competing priorities or guide course corrections if reforms are not achieving their intended goals.

Delivery bodies must be incentivised and resourced to pull in the same direction

As Sam Freedman noted earlier this week, ³¹ Freedman S, ‘SEND help’, blog, Comment is Freed, 24 February 2026, retrieved 24 February 2026, https://samf.substack.com/p/send-help?r=72szy&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true  and as we warned last year might happen, the government’s reforms risk creating a moral hazard. Ministers are aiming to reduce reliance on the highest tier of SEND provision, instead investing more in lower levels of support to prevent needs from escalating. Under the government’s proposed timetable, children who secure a package of acute SEND support before September 2029 will retain it at least until the end of their current school phase (nursery, primary, secondary, et cetera). After that date, new packages will be less bespoke, and it is not yet clear what they will include.

Faced with the prospect of tighter and less predictable arrangements in future, schools and parents have a clear incentive to secure acute provision before September 2029. In effect, the reforms create a ‘use it before you lose it’ dynamic, encouraging families to lock in the very provision the government ultimately hopes to scale back. Local authorities have limited incentives to counteract this dynamic, since much of their SEND spending between now and 2028/29 is expected to be cleared by central government. ³² Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, ‘Explanatory note on the government’s approach to Dedicated Schools Grant deficits’, 9 February 2026, retrieved 25 February 2026, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/explanatory-note-on-the-governments-approach-to-dedicated-schools-grant-deficits

The proposed reforms are also being introduced at a time of significant structural upheaval in the NHS, local government and schools. Integrated care boards and district councils are being consolidated into fewer bodies each covering larger geographic footprints, and all schools are being asked to join or form trusts. ³³ Department for Education, Every Child Achieving and Thriving, CP 1508-I, The Stationery Office, February 2026, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/every-child-achieving-and-thriving  The government acknowledges that these changes will absorb significant organisational capacity, potentially disrupting a coordinated rollout of SEND reforms, ³⁴ Department for Education, SEND Reform: putting children and young people first, CP 1509, The Stationery Office, February 2026, https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/send-reform-putting-children-and-young-people-first/send-reform-putting-children-and-young-people-first-h…  but has yet to propose strategies to manage or mitigate that risk.

More broadly, it is unclear whether delivery bodies have the capacity to meet the government’s SEND priorities. The NHS, for example, is already under intense pressure to meet the 18-week elective target that the Starmer administration is using as a key measure of its overall performance. Meanwhile schools – the largest burden-bearers of the reform plans – face staff shortages while being tasked with moving approximately 1.8m children with special educational needs onto new support plans.

Delivery bodies must be appropriately held to account

The government plans to introduce new accountability mechanisms into the SEND system, but it needs to ensure they land on the right delivery bodies. Schools, for instance, will gain statutory duties to provide "timely, high-quality and effective support". ³⁶ Ibid, p. 98.  The government has yet to set out how this will be measured, or what will happen if duties aren't met. More concerningly, the delivery of timely support doesn’t rely solely on education: what happens if a child's support plan talks about health provision? Who has the levers to get health partners on board?

A call for evidence

The challenges outlined above – unclear roles, weak infrastructure for coordination, misaligned incentives and blurred accountability – will determine whether the new SEND system delivers better outcomes or simply redistributes pressure.

The Institute for Government is developing recommendations on how central government can strengthen partnership working across SEND. Among the questions we are exploring are:

• Where should holistic oversight of children’s journeys through the SEND system sit – and how should it operate in practice?
• What systems-level changes would better enable local bodies to commission SEND services jointly?
• How should the government sequence reforms to manage the risks and take advantage of wider structural reforms in public services?

We are keen to hear from practitioners, policy makers, parents, researchers and others with relevant insights and experience. If you have evidence or practical examples of what enables effective joint working, please get in touch. Your input will inform our recommendations to government and, we hope, support more coordinated delivery of SEND services.