What does the Education for All Bill mean for children receiving SEN support in school?
SEN support in school is changing.
On 6 October 2026 I attended Professor Christopher Robertson’s webinar on SEND policy reform in England. This post is an update on what I learned.
I’m sure you are aware of ‘the SEND crisis’: a growing funding deficit for SEN provision in England. Local authorities in England were estimated to have built up a combined SEND deficit of £6 billion by April 2026. There is an argument to be made that if specialist educational support were to be more accessible in mainstream schools, the need for EHCPs - and diagnoses to unlock potential provision - would decrease. This is what the government is betting on with these new legislative changes.
Let’s start with the facts.
The largest group of children in the SEND system are mainstream pupils receiving school-based SEN support. The latest Department for Education figures show the scale: 1,319,780 pupils in England receive SEN support. That is 14.8% of all pupils, up from 14.2% a year earlier. 88% of pupils with SEND are educated in mainstream settings, and 92% in the state sector. These pupils are also the group the reforms will change most directly.
The vehicle is the Education for All Bill, announced in the King’s Speech on 13 May 2026. The Bill has not yet been introduced to Parliament. The government’s response to its February consultation has not been published. Cabinet Office guidance sets a twelve-week window for that response, and the window closed in August.
SEN support has never carried a statutory plan. What a pupil receives has depended on the individual school: its budget, its staffing, its SENCo’s capacity and its leadership’s priorities. The reforms are designed to replace that discretion with defined duties. This should be a good thing.
Seven measures apply to in-school provision, but I will focus on the ones which really caught my eye.
The first is a statutory Individual Support Plan for every pupil with SEND. In everyday terms, consider two Year 4 pupils with the same language difficulty in two different schools. One has a written plan, termly reviews and a daily small-group intervention. The other has a note on the register and nothing further. Under the proposals, both schools would be legally required to produce and maintain a plan, with the expectation that the plan will have termly reviews. This is the necessary foundation of the assess-plan-do-review cycle that determines who gets extra support, how it is delivered, for how long and by whom. This would be a huge gain for parents who fear their child never receives what has been promised, or have no way to gauge how effective support actually was. It will also support schools, helping them to understand what works, where, when and how often, enabling a better distribution of school resources and better outcomes.
The second is a new duty on every school to publish an inclusion strategy, setting out how it will remove barriers to learning across its whole population of pupils with SEND. Schools will be held to account for that strategy through inspection, monitoring of complaints data and new school-level SEND complaint panels. The panels should be very interesting - particularly if made up of external sources, like school governors. It has been my experience that the SENCo is rarely on the Leadership team, which is unfathomable as they have a massive responsibility to overall teaching and learning.
We know that working with children who have additional needs is based on increasing the specificity and precision of tuition. Schools don’t always have access to skilled specialists, or the wait is painfully long. That is why this third measure is so vital: specialist support brought into the school.
Under a new service called Experts at Hand, speech and language therapists, occupational therapists, educational psychologists and specialist teachers will work directly in mainstream schools. For children whose needs are not complex, the specialist help comes to the classroom they already attend. You will NOT need a diagnosis to access this support. The Department for Education states that help will depend on what a child needs, not on a label.
Classroom teaching should also improve. All school staff, teaching assistants included, will have to be trained in SEND and inclusion. The revised Code of Practice will set out exactly what that training must cover. On 24 September 2026 the Department published its first materials for mainstream teachers and teaching assistants. They set out a draft framework of the skills teachers should build to teach inclusively.
The difference between primary and secondary matters here. In primary, a pupil spends most of the day with one teacher, so the training duty lands on that one adult. In secondary, a pupil may meet ten or more teachers a week. An Individual Support Plan only works if every one of them knows it and applies it. Every school has taken the call from an irate parent of a child caught out for not being able to do something already specified on the individual plan. The proposals do not yet set out how plans will travel across departments, or across the transfer from Year 6 to Year 7.
What should be our concerns?
The reforms place new legal duties on schools faster than they build the capacity to meet them. The Experts at Hand service depends on local authority, health and special school staff who are already stretched. Robertson (2025a) argues that Ofsted’s inspection framework is not fit to evaluate inclusion, yet inspection is one of the main accountability levers. The reform programme spans a decade. The first phase, to 2028, funds and builds the new system. Support is due to improve in 2028–29. The full system rolls out from 2029/30. Pupils currently in Year 3 will have left primary school before the new system is fully in place.
There are still big gaps in what we know. There is no Bill yet, so everything set out so far could change. Nobody has said what an Individual Support Plan must contain, or what legal weight it will carry. Nobody has said at what point a child’s needs will be judged too great for support in mainstream. Robertson (2026b) puts it plainly: for SENCos, the promised extra support raises more questions than it answers.
One thing is now clear. For children on SEN support, the school will plan the help, deliver it and be judged on it, with legal duties behind it for the first time. What we do not yet know is whether schools will have the training, the specialists and the money to do it well before those duties begin.
Sources
Cabinet Office. (2018). Consultation principles: Guidance. GOV.UK.
Cambridgeshire County Council. (2026, January 23). Cambridgeshire backs national campaign for increased and fairer education funding and major reform to SEND provision. https://www.cambridgeshire.gov.uk/news/cambridgeshire-backs-national-campaign-for-increased-and-fairer-education-funding-and-major-reform-to-send-provision
Department for Education. (2026a). SEND reform: Putting children and young people first [Consultation]. GOV.UK.
Department for Education. (2026b, June 11). Special educational needs in England: Academic year 2025/26. Explore Education Statistics. GOV.UK.
Department for Education. (2026c, June). Experts at Hand: Everything you need to know. The Education Hub. https://educationhub.blog.gov.uk/2026/06/experts-at-hand-everything-you-need-to-know/
Department for Education. (2026d, September 24). SEND training for schools: Inclusive teaching and areas of development. GOV.UK.
Robertson, C. (2025a). Ofsted and its ‘new’ approach to ensuring accountability for inclusive education. British Journal of Special Education. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8578.70037
Robertson, C. (2026b). Improving the quality of mainstream education: The promise of additional support raises more questions than answers for SENCos. British Journal of Special Education. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8578.70107
Robertson, C. (2026, October 6). Reimagining special educational needs and disability (SEND) policy in England: Inclusive education and system change [Webinar].