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Under the plans, announced by Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson on Monday, only those children with the most severe and complex needs will receive an education, health and care plan (EHCP). This is the current legal document that identifies the specific needs and sets out tailored support.

In practice, it means fewer children will be given ECHPs than would have been under the current system.

There is a cross-party agreement that the current SEND system is not sustainable, as it is putting extreme pressure on councils and resulting in long waits for parents trying to secure support for their children. The Labour government pledged to fix the system when it was elected in July 2024.

Speaking to reporters today, Phillipson said the changes would be a “really careful and phased transition” and would be a “decade-long reform”.

“I know that parents’ confidence is low in the system. That’s why the fact we’re taking our time to get this right is essential,” she said.

Why is SEND being reformed?

SEND has been a growing talking point in Westminster in recent years as pressure on the system has increased to extreme levels.

Under the current rules, pupils requiring extra support can be issued an EHCP, a legal document that identifies the specific needs and sets out tailored support.

Since 2018, the number of pupils with EHCPs has increased by almost 80 per cent, while funding to deliver the service has failed to keep pace, putting local government finances under significant pressure.

Nearly 80 per cent of local authorities told a recent Local Government Association survey that they would become insolvent in the next few years without reforms to the system.

At the same time, some parents are waiting months and sometimes years to secure support for their children.

What has the government announced?

Speaking today, Phillipson stressed that EHCPs for children with the most complex needs will remain.

However, fewer children will be granted EHCPs overall under the reforms.

The Department for Education estimates that around one in eight children and young people who currently have an EHCP will shift to new support between 2030 and 2035.

Instead, three layers of support will be available to those with additional needs, set out as “Targeted”, “Targeted Plus” and “Specialist”, the latter of which will be the basis of EHCPs.

The government has pledged £4bn over three years to improve SEND support in mainstream education settings.

Millions of children will also have access to a new, digital ‘Individual Support Plan’ (ISP), which will be put on a statutory footing, provided by the school and developed alongside parents. 

The ISP will set out what support a child with additional needs requires from the school, and could include support from health professionals. 

Phillipson insisted that the changes were about “improving” support, not removing it”.

The reforms announced on Monday will not come into effect until 2030 at the earliest.

The government is hopeful that the period of transition, in which the focus will be on training and investment to build capacity in the system, will allow for a smooth changeover.

What is the reaction so far?

The government had originally planned to publish the planned SEND reforms last year. 

However, as PoliticsHome reported at the time, there was nervousness within government about a potential Labour MP backlash similar to the rebellion that forced Prime Minister Keir Starmer to abandon plans to reduce welfare last year.

In a bid to ensure Labour MPs feel that their concerns and points of view are being listened to throughout the process, Phillipson and minister Georgia Gould have held many meetings with Labour MPs in recent months to discuss the reforms.

Asked by PoliticsHome on Monday what message she had for MPs worried about the changes, the Education Secretary said: “This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to deliver a better system for children”.

“Opportunities like this really only come around once, and it’s a big responsibility on all of us to reassure parents, to explain the process of change that we’re embarking upon, and it’s a responsibility that I take incredibly seriously.”

Labour MPs will now take time to study the proposals in detail, while ministers will hope that they can win the support of as much of the Parliamentary Labour Party as possible.

One government source told PoliticsHome that they are not seeing this as the end of the conversation, and the Labour MP outreach that Phillipson has carried out in recent months will continue.

Paul Whiteman, general secretary of school leaders’ union NAHT, said that he was “cautiously optimistic” that the White Paper published today “contains the foundation of a successful new approach to SEND education”.

However, there are concerns that the funding announced may not be adequate. 

Matt Wrack, general secretary of teachers’ union NASUWT, said that it was “absolutely ridiculous to suggest that SEND provision can be adequately overhauled with this low level of funding”.

Dani Payne, head of education and social mobility at the Social Market Foundation think tank, said that it was “good to see government take on an area that is both complex and politically challenging”.

“The government’s planned approach, of prioritising mainstream inclusion for pupils with SEND and strengthening universal support offers, is the right one.”

The Metropolitan Police have arrested Peter Mandelson on suspicion of misconduct in public office.

Police escorted Mandelson from his home in Camden at around 5pm on Monday, 23 February.

He has been under investigation over allegations of his links to – and insider trading with – paedophile and child rape trafficker Jeffrey Epstein whilst he was a serving government minister.

This comes after the Met Police confirmed earlier this month that it had launched an investigation into Mandelson. This was for allegations of misconduct in public office.

He then resigned from the House of Lords.

In a statement shortly after his arrest, the Met Police said:

Officers have arrested a 72-year-old man on suspicion of misconduct in public office.

He was arrested at an address in Camden on Monday, 23 February and has been taken to a London police station for interview.

This follows search warrants at two addresses in the Wiltshire and Camden areas.

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For more coverage of the Epstein files that centres victims and survivors please click here.

Featured image via Sky News/YouTube

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Reform UK have unveiled their new multi-pronged pledge to ‘restore Britain’s Christian heritage’. The far-right party plans to introduce a ‘patriotic’ Christian curriculum, as well as attaching listed status to church buildings to prevent them being turned into mosques.

Quite apart from this pointless reactionary nostalgia, the plans would spell the death of those same churches that Reform claims to value. Which is unsurprising really, given that the pack of liars and conmen that make up the party couldn’t actually give a fig about Christianity – beyond its usefulness in stirring up Islamophobia, of course.

‘More things to take pride in’

Reform presented its plans through newly appointed home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf, as his first speech in the new role. In an interview with the Times beforehand, Yusuf – himself a Muslim born to Sri Lankan immigrants – called Christianity:

core to the history and the DNA of the country.

However, he went on to complain of the UK losing its Christian values:

What we’ve seen is that sense of high-trust society eroded quite rapidly, actually, and that’s in no small part because of the vast numbers of people who have arrived over a short period of time from low-trust societies. Some people might wince at that phrase, but it’s just obviously true.

To counter this perceived issue, Yusuf declared that his party would institute a “patriotic curriculum” centered on Christianity. This, he argued, would give children “more things to take pride in again”:

I think if politicians play their part, then I’m optimistic that over time … they will have more things to take pride in as they are made to feel proud of their history again, rather than being taught that they should be ashamed of [it].

As such, this curriculum would presumably be incredibly restricted. If children are meant to take pride in patriotic Christianity, they’ll presumably have to skip over the litany of atrocities committed by the British church.

This includes, but is by no means limited to, the witch hunts, the forced indoctrination of colonised peoples (and the legacy of homophobia it left behind), numerous pogroms against Jewish people in the UK, and, of course, all those crusades against Muslim nations in the Middle East?

Actually, who am I kidding? Reform would probably think all of that shit was something to be proud of.

Listed status

Along with this festering lump of a policy proposal, Yusuf also stated that Reform would thrust automatic listed status onto church buildings. This would both require their upkeep and prevent changes in their use.

The home affairs spokesman explained that this would prevent churches from being turned into mosques. Yusuf claimed he’d received emails from “anxious residents” complaining about this very phenomenon, and said that:

Regardless of whether somebody is of faith or not, or which faith they follow, I think the Christian heritage of this country is very important and protecting our heritage and our culture is important, otherwise the country is not a country, it’s just an economic zone.

And so, as one step in pursuit of that, we will end the incendiary practice of converting churches into mosques or any other places of worship by granting listed status automatically to all churches and prohibiting that.

The problem here (or one problem at least) is that it’s a policy designed to whip up the idea of Muslims rocking up and turfing out a bunch of active Christians from an in-use church. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

In the last decade alone, over 3500 churches have closed their doors. In turn, they’ve become pubs, clubs, gyms, apartments, and yes – other places of worship. The reasons behind the closures include declining attendance, falling income, and, in particular, the high cost of building maintenance.

In the 2021 census, the number of self-described Christians in England and Wales fell by 13% compared to the previous decade. This meant that Christians made up less than half of the population for the first time in the history of the census.

Empty, expensive and unused

However, for anyone who has attended church regularly in the last few decades, that decline has already been plainly visible. Whilst just under half of the population identify as Christian, only around 5% actually attend church.

Churches are closing, not because of Muslims immigrating to the UK, but because the buildings are old, expensive, and empty. What’s more, I think any representative of the church could have told Reform that, if they’d bothered to ask

Instead, the far-right party plans to burden an already-failing institution with the financial costs of maintaining listed churches. All the while, the buildings still sit idle, when they could instead gain new life and new use in the community – as places of worship or otherwise.

The move marks another step in Reform’s descent into a grim imitation of US-style Christofascism, nakedly motivated by Islamophobia. It’s a vain attempt to appeal to an imaginary, idealised, bygone era of a more homogeneously (white) Christian UK.

Oh, and it would be utterly ruinous to the very institution that Reform is paying lip-service to, to boot.

Featured image via the Canary