Response to the Schools White Paper Consultation

Submitted by Cathy Wassell, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Autistic Girls Network

I am content to be contacted directly about this response. I do not require my name or organisation to be kept confidential, and I am content for this response to be published in full.

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Introduction

My name is Cathy Wassell. I am the founder and Chief Executive of Autistic Girls Network (AGN), a national, neurodivergent-led charity dedicated to autistic girls, women and gender-diverse young people, and the parent organisation behind The Haven, our specialist online school. I am myself neurodivergent, as are my children, and all of our trainers and mentors and group facilitators. We are not commenting on this cohort from the outside. We are members of it.

AGN supports approximately 35,000 families through our online community. We run regular free family workshops, twenty face-to-face support groups around the country (we would have many more if funding permitted), a mentoring service, and we deliver training to schools, local authorities, healthcare services, parent carer forums and corporate partners. In September 2025 we launched The Haven, a specialist online school for young people who have become unable to attend school, often after long periods of distress, masking, school-based trauma or burnout. The Haven was created because we saw the need was so acute in our community.

I make this response from a particular vantage point that I think the Department for Education does not often hear from directly. I see the girls and gender-diverse young people who have been failed by the existing system, but I also see what becomes possible when the right provision is finally made for them. I see learners who have been out of school for up to five years re-engage with learning within weeks. I see young people who could not speak out loud at the start of a term become the loudest in the room by the end of it. I see families who have been told their child is anxious, manipulative, or simply not trying, walk through our door and find, often for the first time, that their child is understood. These are not small outcomes. They are identity-level transformations, and they have informed every answer in this document.

I also speak as someone who has spent years reading what families say about this system. The collective experience of those 35,000 members, expressed daily in their own words, has shaped my understanding of where the system works and where it breaks. Where this response refers to what families have told us, I am drawing on that lived testimony, not on hypothetical accounts.

Overarching position

Before turning to the individual questions, I want to set out my overarching position clearly. I do not believe the statutory framework requires fundamental redesign. The architecture of the Children and Families Act 2014, particularly the principles of individual assessment, identification of need, specification of provision, and enforceable rights of challenge, is not the source of the difficulties families face. Those principles are, on the contrary, the very things that make the system capable of working when public bodies choose to comply with their duties.

What I see, every day, is not a system unable to function because the law is wrong. I see a system unable to function because the law is widely ignored. Provision is identified but not delivered. Evidence is obtained but disregarded. Children are assessed but not supported. Families are forced into appeals, complaints and Tribunal hearings simply to access what the law already promises. The very high success rate of parents at Tribunal is not evidence of an over-litigious population. It is evidence that local authority decisions are frequently unlawful at the point they are made.

Against that background, I have profound concerns about the direction of travel suggested by these proposals. I am opposed to any erosion of the statutory duty to assess. I am opposed to generic or pre-determined Specialist Provision Packages becoming a substitute for individualised, multidisciplinary, needs-led provision. I am opposed to the migration of the most detailed and consequential provision out of legally enforceable plans and into weaker Individual Support Plans, when there is no mechanism to make sure that support actually happens. And I am strongly opposed to any reduction in the jurisdiction or binding power of the SEND Tribunal. Indeed, I believe Tribunal powers should be extended, particularly in relation to health and social care, because the cohort I serve does not have needs that obligingly divide along administrative lines. I am not willing to simply place my trust that the State will ‘do the right thing’, because I have both personal and collective experience that it frequently does not. Asking parents to have this trust when their trust has been broken so many times is not acceptable.

My particular concern about generic packages is rooted in the cohort The Haven exists to serve. The girls and gender-diverse young people who reach us have spent years being misunderstood by the system precisely because their needs did not match the available template. They masked. They internalised. They presented as quiet, compliant or anxious rather than disruptive. They were filtered through universal provision that could not see them and targeted provision that misidentified them, until eventually they crashed out altogether, sometimes for years. The notion that this cohort, of all cohorts, would be well served by being slotted into a pre-designed package of provision is, in my view, a serious misreading of why they are in the position they are in.

Throughout this response I will refer to what I will call the Sanctuary Cohort. This is shorthand for the group of young people, disproportionately girls and gender-diverse, who have become unable to attend school, who present with internalised rather than externalised distress, whose needs have typically been missed by mainstream identification systems, and for whom conventional attendance-based educational models are no longer accessible without significant adaptation or alternative provision. They are not a fringe minority. They are a rapidly growing population of children whom the system as currently designed is structurally unable to see in time. Any reform that does not explicitly account for this cohort will not work for the children most in need of reform working.

The central thread of this response is therefore this. Reform must remain needs-led, not system-led. It must remain individualised, not packaged. It must remain enforceable, not aspirational. And it must continue to provide meaningful, independent routes of challenge when public bodies fail to do what the law already requires of them. Move away from those principles, and the children my charity sees every day will be the first to pay the price, as they have already paid it once.

Q1. We want children, young people and their families to be involved in making better, evidence-based decisions about SEND, both in their local area and across the country. How can we make sure children, young people and their families have a genuine say in these decisions?

Families already have a voice. The statutory framework already requires that their views be taken into account. The real question, the one that matters at our kitchen-table conversations and inside our 35,000-member community, is whether what they say is capable of changing what happens. Speaking is not the same as being heard, and being heard is not the same as being acted upon.

In our community, the most common single experience parents describe is that of saying the same thing, in the same way, supported by the same professional evidence, year after year, and watching decisions continue to be made as though they had not said it. Independent assessments are dismissed because they were privately commissioned. Parental observations are reframed as anxiety or over-involvement. Schools’ own concerns are minimised in panel discussions the family is not present at. The voice exists. The mechanism by which the voice changes the decision often does not.

For families to have a genuine say, three things have to be true. First, decisions must be visibly and transparently linked to the evidence on which they rest, so that families can see how each piece of evidence has been weighed and why a particular conclusion was reached. Second, professional evidence, including independently commissioned reports, must be properly considered rather than discounted on grounds of who paid for it. Third, where the decision still does not align with the evidence, there must remain a meaningful, independent route of appeal capable of changing the outcome. Without that final element, participation is performance. Generic, pre-determined provision packages cut directly against all three requirements, which is one reason I oppose them.

Q2. How can we make sure that high-quality evidence and best practice inform decisions about SEND? Please share examples.

The problem is not a shortage of evidence. It is the selective and inconsistent use of the evidence that already exists. If we’re talking about evidence (and we should be), please don’t selectively ignore evidence which doesn’t fit the agenda. For example, there is lots of recent research showing neurodivergent and particularly autistic people are highly over-represented in statistics around mental ill health and suicide. Let’s visit just one – a recent study by Sharland et al. (2025) which used publicly available qualitative data to examine preventable factors in child suicides: the Prevention of Future Death (PFD) reports. Sharland and colleagues looked at all 37 available PFD reports concerning suicides of children and adolescents under 18 published between 1 January 2015 and 30 November 2023. Over half were female. Well over half (63%) had been known to CAMHS, and the most common diagnosis was autism (but 80% of autistic girls are still unidentified at 18 so this statistic may not be accurate). The most common concerns of the coroner were around inadequate service delivery; the issue was known, but there was nothing being done about it – not enough availability, not enough urgency, not enough autism-adapted and specific support and placement of vulnerable children in adult services. The second most common concern was around lack of staff training, specifically neurodiversity training. Let’s fix THIS and let the current system work properly, otherwise all the underlying problems will still exists under the new reforms. There is plenty of other evidence that the most common denominator in school distress and ‘refusal’ is neurodivergence- please see Connolly, Constable & Mullally, 2023, who found that “In 94.3% of cases, school attendance problems were underpinned by significant emotional distress, with often harrowing accounts of this distress provided by parents. Notably, 92.1% of CYP currently experiencing School Distress were described as neurodivergent (ND) and 83.4% as autistic…Autistic CYP displayed School Distress at a significantly earlier age, and it was significantly more enduring.” There are now hundreds of papers which essentially back this up – a significant body of evidence indeed.

At The Haven we routinely onboard young people whose Education, Health and Care Plans already contain robust, multi-disciplinary assessments that were never translated into delivered provision. We see EHCPs in which speech and language therapy is specified but has not been delivered for two years. We see plans naming occupational therapy support that the family has never been able to access. We see clear professional recommendations about sensory environments that the named placement is, on its face, incapable of meeting. The evidence existed. It was on the page. The decisions, and the provision, simply did not follow from it.

If government is serious about evidence informing decisions, the evidence base needs to include the operational reality of the system, not only the academic literature. That means Tribunal outcomes, Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman findings, the gap between Section F provision specified and Section F provision delivered, complaint patterns, waiting times for statutory assessment, and the documented experience of families. It means treating lived experience as evidence rather than as anecdote. And it means resisting the temptation, common in policy development, to commission evidence in order to justify a position already taken.

One concrete example. The cohort of autistic girls who present with internalised distress was effectively invisible to research and to policy for decades, because the diagnostic and identification tools that generated the evidence base were built around an externalising, predominantly male presentation. The evidence existed in many kitchens and many Facebook support groups. It simply was not the kind of evidence the system was prepared to recognise. We are still living with the consequences of that omission, and any reform must learn from it.

Q3. How can we ensure that children are best supported by the Universal offer?

A robust universal offer is a proper goal, and there are children whose needs would, in principle, be well met within mainstream settings if mainstream settings were adequately resourced and adequately trained. The difficulty is that, for the cohort I work with, the universal offer is structurally unable to see them in the first place.

The young people who eventually reach The Haven were, almost without exception, in mainstream universal provision at the point their needs began to escalate. They were quiet. They were compliant. They masked. Their behaviour did not register on the systems mainstream schools use to identify need, because those systems are calibrated to externalised distress. By the time they appeared on a school’s radar, they were already in significant burnout or had stopped attending altogether. A universal offer that depends on a child becoming visible through difficulty will, by design, miss the children whose distress turns inwards.

To support these children, a universal offer has to do three things it currently does not reliably do. It has to actively identify internalised presentations, not wait for them to surface as crisis. It has to be delivered by staff who have been trained to recognise masking, autistic burnout, demand avoidance and selective mutism for what they are. And it has to be resourced sufficiently that, when a child is identified, the response is rapid rather than rationed. Defining the universal offer more clearly without funding it, staffing it and training it will not change the outcomes for our cohort. It will simply restate the problem in newer language.

Q4. How can we ensure that children in the Targeted layer are best supported?

I want to begin by questioning the premise that a layered model is the right organising structure at all. The logic of layers is that a child is sorted into a tier and then offered the provision attached to that tier. The logic of need, by contrast, is that the provision is built around the child. The two logics are not the same, and where they conflict, families consistently report that the tier logic wins.

If a Targeted layer is to exist, it must not be allowed to operate as a delay mechanism. In our community we see the same pattern repeatedly. A child could be moved up to Targeted support. The support is insufficient. The child does not progress, or actively deteriorates. Rather than escalate, the school continues at the same level for another term, then another, citing the need to give the intervention time to work. By the time escalation does occur, the child is in crisis. This is not Targeted support. It is structured postponement.

For the layer to function properly, it needs explicit review points with clear evidence thresholds, an obligation to escalate where progress is not being made, and a route into multidisciplinary assessment that the school can trigger without first having to argue its way through the local authority gatekeeping process. Without those features, Targeted provision is simply an antechamber to crisis.

Q5. How can we ensure that children in the Targeted Plus layer are best supported?

The same concern applies here, but the stakes are higher and the risk of misidentification more acute.

By the time a child is described as needing Targeted Plus support, a narrative about that child has usually formed within the school, and sometimes between agencies. That narrative is sometimes accurate. Frequently, in our experience, it is partial or wrong. A girl who has been described for two years as anxious may in fact be autistic. A child described as defiant may be in autistic burnout. A young person who is described as having attachment difficulties may in fact be communicating sensory overwhelm. Similar presenting behaviours can have radically different underlying causes, and the wrong provision flows from the wrong identification.

Targeted Plus must, therefore, build in the assumption that earlier framing may need to be revisited. It must include access to specialist diagnostic and therapeutic input rather than rely on the SENCO to hold expertise across every possible area of need. And it must offer a clear and timely route into the statutory assessment process where Targeted Plus is not producing change. Otherwise it becomes another holding bay, and the child arrives at specialist provision much later and much more unwell than they needed to be. Children and young people will rarely fit into boxes not designed for them individually, and forcing them in will not magically make the ‘boxed’ support work.

Q6. How can we ensure that children in the Specialist layer are best supported?

Children who reach the Specialist layer have, by definition, complex, often long-standing needs and have often experienced multiple previous unsuitable arrangements. Essentially the System has been designed so that they need to ‘fail’ one step before they can proceed to the next, and each step can take a year or even more. A year or more in which they are not being adequately supported, and in the case of our Sanctuary Cohort, frequently a year in which their mental health is being eroded and their self-esteem battered. They require accurate assessment, suitable placement, clearly specified provision and, crucially, actual delivery of that provision.

In practice, this is the layer at which the gap between what is on paper and what is happening in the child’s daily life tends to be widest. Placements are restricted by local availability rather than chosen for suitability. Decisions are kicked down the road by tribunal dates that are a year or more away, without interim support being in place. Specialist therapeutic input is named in plans but unfunded in reality. Local authority commissioning decisions are visibly cost-driven, and the cost calculation is rarely run against the lifetime cost of the alternative, which is a young adult potentially unable to enter further education, training or employment, or worse a young person whose mental health deteriorates to serious crisis point.

I want to add a specific point about the Sanctuary Cohort. These young people often require something that does not fit traditional Specialist categories at all. They need a place that is not a school in the traditional building-based sense, that meets them where they are, even if that is in their house, often initially unable to turn a laptop camera on. The Haven exists precisely because conventional specialist placements were not designed for this presentation. Any reform of the Specialist layer must explicitly account for online, outreach, hybrid and EOTAS-style provision as legitimate specialist responses, not as exceptions or workarounds. At this level, above all, enforceability is non-negotiable, and provision must be genuinely needs-led rather than placement-led.

Q7. How do you think early years settings, schools, and colleges can best support the mental health and wellbeing of children and young people?

I want to be direct about something that the consultation does not really acknowledge. The large majority of what is described as mental health difficulty in the SEND population is caused by the System. It is caused, or substantially worsened, by the experience of being in an educational environment that does not meet the child’s needs. The child is not anxious because they have a separate anxiety disorder that happens to coexist with their autism. The child is anxious because they spend every day in a sensory environment they cannot regulate, surrounded by social demands they cannot meet, being asked to perform in ways they cannot sustain, while masking the entire time.

If that is true, and the families in our community would tell you almost unanimously that it is, the implications are uncomfortable but unavoidable. Schools are not, and should not be, primary mental health services. But schools are absolutely the source of much of the distress they are then asked to manage. The single most powerful mental health intervention available to most autistic girls is being moved out of an environment that is harming them and into one that is not. The Haven sees this every term. Young people who have been in CAMHS for years, on multiple medications, in repeated crisis, experience significant improvements within weeks of being in an appropriate environment, without any clinical intervention having changed.

The priority must therefore be the underlying provision, the suitability of the environment, the training of staff to recognise distress rather than mistake it for defiance, and timely access to genuine clinical support when it is needed. Anything else risks treating symptoms while continuing to produce them.

Q8. Do you agree that the refreshed ‘areas of development’ will support educators to understand and address barriers to learning and participation? Please explain your answer.

It behoves the Government to design surveys which don’t contain leading questions.
I agree to this only to a limited extent, and with strong reservations.

Frameworks of this kind can be helpful at the level of vocabulary. They give staff a shared language for talking about what they are seeing, and they help organise referrals, plans and reviews. They do not, however, deliver provision, or, necessarily, change attitudes. A refreshed framework that improves description without changing what actually happens in the classroom will not improve outcomes for our cohort. A framework that doesn’t check that improved training has improved attitudes and practical support does not bring change.

There is also a more specific concern. Frameworks of this type tend to be built around the dominant presentations within each area of development, which historically have been externalised. There is a real risk that the refreshed framework will, once again, describe the cohort that is already visible and miss the cohort that is not. I would want to see explicit recognition within the framework of internalised presentations, masking, autistic burnout and selective mutism, so that staff are equipped to identify barriers that do not announce themselves as behaviour.

Q9. What arrangements would best support effective joint working between early years providers, Best Start Family Hubs, health, local authorities, and parents for children with SEND in the early years?

Joint working has been a stated aim of every SEND reform within my professional lifetime. The principle is sound. The execution has consistently faltered for the same reasons, and unless those reasons are addressed it will continue to do so.

The reasons are not mysterious. Effective joint working requires a single accountable point of coordination, clearly defined responsibilities between agencies, shared information rather than parallel records, and consequences when agencies do not deliver their part. Without those features, joint working becomes a series of meetings in which each agency identifies what the other agency should be doing, and the family is left to broker between them. These siloes all lead to siloed budgets, and unless this changes not much else will. If CAMHS is constantly needing to be fighting Social Care to NOT provide support in a Child in Need meeting because of siloed budgets, the System is not working. And I have very personal experience that happens, as well as hearing examples frequently within our membership.

In the families we support, the experience of trying to coordinate education, health, social care and sometimes housing or financial support, on top of caring for a child in distress, is itself a major cause of parental burnout. The mother of a Sanctuary Cohort child is often herself autistic, often newly self-identified, and is being asked to navigate a system that would defeat a full-time professional case manager. Joint working that does not centre that reality is not joint working. It is administrative overhead transferred to the family.

Q10. How can the early years foundation stage two-year-old progress check and the Healthy Child Programme development review be improved so that children’s needs are identified and supported more quickly? Please share examples.

What a question in a consultation that is asking parents all over the country to provide an answer.
Quite honestly, it makes me despair that answers are wanted or intended to be given any attention.
Is an average parent to be expected to have intimate knowledge of these processes in order to answer the question?

Early identification is necessary but not sufficient. The harder problem, the one our community describes constantly, is what happens after identification.

Most families in our network reached a point of recognising that something was different about their child long before any professional system did. Some told health visitors and were dismissed. Some were placed on a waiting list for assessment that lasted years. Some were told to come back if the difficulties persisted, which they invariably did. The early years checks are useful, but they are useful only to the extent that they connect immediately to a functioning pathway to support. Where they connect to a waiting list, they simply move the moment of recognition earlier without moving the moment of intervention earlier.

There is also a specific issue for girls. The diagnostic criteria, the assessment tools and the typical case examples that inform early years professionals’ training were historically built around male presentations. Even when something is identified, it is often misidentified. A girl who is in a state of high anxiety in nursery may be coded as shy. A girl who lines up her dolls in a particular order may be coded as imaginative play. The same behaviours in a boy would be more readily understood as autistic. Training and tools must be updated to recognise the presentations the existing system was built not to see.

Q11. What should the top three priority areas be for building and sharing evidence within the National Inclusion Standards?

My three priorities would be these.

First, the delivery gap. The single most important question the National Inclusion Standards should be designed to answer is whether the provision identified for each child is actually being delivered. Not allocated. Not specified. Delivered. At the moment, this question is answered nowhere systematically, and the absence of an answer is convenient for those whose performance the answer would expose.

Second, the cumulative cost of unmet need. When provision is delayed or denied at the universal or targeted level, the child does not stand still. They deteriorate. Mental health declines, school attendance collapses, family relationships fracture, and the cost to the public purse increases substantially as the child enters CAMHS, social care, alternative provision and eventually, in many cases, EOTAS at significant expense. Children unable to go to school means a parent is unable to work outside the home, and this is not their choice in all cases. The Treasury should be deeply interested in this evidence. The evidence base needs to make the long-term economics of underprovision impossible to ignore.

Third, who the system is missing. Standards must include explicit measures of whether the system is identifying the children it has historically missed. Disaggregated data on identification by sex, by presentation type, by ethnicity and by socioeconomic background would help illuminate whether universal and targeted provision is reaching the cohorts most likely to be filtered out before they reach specialist provision. Without that disaggregation, aggregate improvement can be reported while the most disadvantaged cohorts continue to be missed.

Q12. What are the most important issues for national training to cover, to help support children and young people with SEND?

Training is necessary, but it has limits, and the limits matter.

The content areas that I would prioritise reflect the gaps our community most often surfaces. Internalised presentations of autism and ADHD, particularly in girls and gender-diverse young people. Masking and autistic burnout. The relationship between sensory environment and dysregulation. Situational (selective) mutism and demand avoidance. School-based trauma and the way distress is misread as defiance. The legal duties under the Children and Families Act and the Equality Act. And, critically, the principle that behaviour is communication and that apparent non-compliance is almost always information about unmet need rather than wilfulness.

The limit is this. Training cannot make a classroom teacher into an educational psychologist, a speech and language therapist, an occupational therapist or a clinical psychologist. If national training is positioned as a substitute for specialist input rather than a complement to it, it will lead to confident misidentification and inadequate provision. Training equips teachers to recognise that something needs specialist input. It does not equip them to deliver that input themselves.

A final point on who delivers the training. Training on neurodivergent presentations is materially improved when it is delivered, designed and led by neurodivergent professionals. The lived perspective is not decorative. It changes what is taught, how it lands and whether it changes practice. We delivered well over 150 training sessions for schools in 2025 and where there is most progress is in the Q & A with an engaged audience who have listened to your presentation and want to unpick real situations in their schools. Our neurodivergent trainers’ lived experience can provide them with endless real life examples to inform understanding and open their minds to the idea that there is more than one ‘right way’ to do things.

Q13. What practical actions can help teachers, educators and leaders manage workload whilst implementing these changes?

Workload cannot be managed by exhortation. It can only be managed by either reducing what is being asked or increasing the resource with which it is being asked. The current proposals add structures, expectations and reporting obligations without any corresponding addition of staffing, time or specialist capacity. That is not workload management. It is workload transfer.

The practical measures that would actually help are familiar and unfashionable. Protected non-contact time for SENCOs and designated SEND staff. Administrative support so that teachers are not personally responsible for the paperwork around plans, reviews and reporting. Genuine access to specialist professionals, so that schools are not silently expected to absorb work that belongs to other agencies. And realistic expectations from inspectors and policymakers about what a school can and cannot deliver from within its own resource envelope.

It is not possible to expand schools’ SEND responsibilities while reducing their resources and call the result a workload reform. I also want to point out that these reforms are recommending that the complaints process currently sitting around EHCPs is effectively moved to schools, and there is no capacity for this in the current System at all. It will also fracture the School/Parent relationship for SEND families.

Q14. How should the Special Educational Needs Coordinator role evolve to better meet the needs of children and young people with SEND?

The SENCO role is, in many schools, already doing the impossible. The post-holder is expected to identify need across the full breadth of the SEND code of practice, coordinate provision, liaise with multiple external agencies, support every teacher in the building, manage statutory documentation, communicate with often distressed families and hold strategic responsibility for inclusion, frequently while continuing to teach a near-full timetable and to occupy a leadership role.

Evolution of the role should begin from an honest acknowledgement that it cannot continue to grow without protection. SENCOs need statutory protected time that is non-negotiable rather than a school-by-school local compromise. They need real authority within the school’s decision-making structure, not advisory status. They need administrative support, access to specialist professionals, and training that is funded and ongoing rather than self-financed evening study.

Above all, the SENCO must not become the structural shock-absorber for a system that is otherwise under-resourced. Every new responsibility that is placed on the SENCO without corresponding resource is a structural decision to make the role unsustainable. Eventually the post-holder leaves, and the school’s SEND provision collapses with them. We see this regularly in the families who come to us.

Q15. What would provide assurance for families that an Individual Support Plan is high-quality and contains the essential information?

A plan reassures a family only if it is accurate, specific, actually delivered and capable of being enforced when it is not. Format alone does not reassure anyone. Our community has seen many well-presented documents that translated into nothing in the child’s daily life.

The substantive question, the one I think the consultation is implicitly raising and that families would want to answer directly, is whether the Individual Support Plan is legally enforceable in the same way that Section F of an EHCP currently is. If it is not, then moving the granular detail of day-to-day provision out of the EHCP and into an ISP is, in practice, a reduction in legal protection. Families will not be reassured by being told otherwise, because they have seen what happens to provision the moment it loses its enforceable status. Successive Governments have not proven they have earned any trust from families of SEND children I’m afraid, just the opposite.

For an ISP to function as a meaningful instrument of trust, it must contain genuinely individualised provision rather than templated language, identify named responsibilities for delivery, specify frequency and duration with precision, and remain subject to independent challenge where it is not implemented. A plan that meets all of those criteria except the last is a description of a child’s needs, not an instrument of provision.

Q16. How can we ensure Individual Support Plans are clear, concise and practical for professionals to use?

Concision is a virtue, but it is not the same as vagueness, and the distinction matters more than the consultation acknowledges.

The provision that the children I work with require is often detailed, because their needs are detailed. A plan that states a child needs access to a quiet space when dysregulated, without specifying what quiet means in that school’s physical environment, who is responsible for facilitating access, how the child is to communicate the need and what happens when the named space is in use, is not a clear plan. It is a clear plan in appearance and an unclear plan in operation. Phrases such as ‘access to’, ‘opportunities for’ and ‘as required’ are particularly notorious in our community because they are commonly used, sound reasonable, and routinely fail to translate into anything happening.

A genuinely practical plan specifies what is to be done, by whom, how often, in what circumstances, and how the impact will be reviewed. That can still be done concisely, but it cannot be done generically. Simplification that strips out specificity is not simplification, it is dilution.

Q17. How can we best support transition for young people with SEND, so that they are well supported into post-16 provision and further education, training or employment?

Transition for our cohort is currently a moment of acute risk, and reform here is urgent.

For many of the young people we support, post-16 is the point at which the partial scaffolding they had at school is removed. EHCPs that were already inadequate become more so. Sixth forms and colleges may have minimal awareness of internalised autistic presentations. Adult social care thresholds are different from children’s social care thresholds, and the family discovers this only after the gap has opened. Health services transition from CAMHS to adult mental health, often with months of lost continuity. Each of these transitions on its own is hard. Compressed into the same year, they can be catastrophic.

Effective transition planning has to begin from Year 9 rather than Year 11, has to be treated as a substantive planning process rather than a paragraph in an annual review, and has to actively involve adult services rather than wait for them to engage at the point of legal transfer. For young people who are not going to attend a traditional post-16 setting, the planning must include EOTAS, supported internships, vocational pathways, online provision and blended arrangements as substantive options rather than residual ones. The Haven supports learners through GCSEs and into next steps, and we routinely encounter local authorities who appear to have no live framework for what happens when the young person is not going to a college. That gap should not exist.

Preparation for adulthood is, properly understood, not a transition strategy but a developmental orientation that should run through the whole of secondary education. The current system tends to treat it as paperwork, and all too often it barely happens at all.

Q18. How can we make sure that every area can meet the full range of the needs of children and young people through Inclusion Bases?

I want to register a concern about the premise of this question, because I think the premise contains an assumption that the rest of the consultation depends on.

Inclusion Bases may be a useful component of provision for some children in some circumstances. They are not, however, capable of meeting the full range of need. Some children require specialist settings. Some require small, therapeutic environments. Some, including most of the Sanctuary Cohort, eventually require provision that is not delivered in a building at all. The presumption that an Inclusion Base attached to a mainstream school is the right answer for the majority of children with SEND is, in my view, mistaken, and it will be most mistaken for the children who are currently least visible to the system.

There is also a real risk that Inclusion Bases reproduce, in a smaller room, the same conditions that drove the child out of the main classroom. The mainstream school rules continue to apply. The mainstream sensory environment continues to bleed through the walls. The mainstream culture about behaviour, distress and compliance continues to define the staff response. Putting a vulnerable child in a different room in the same building does not constitute inclusion, and labelling it inclusion does not make it so. Moreover, currently most ARPs require the child to have most of their lessons in the main school building, which means the sensory environment is just the same – it’s the very one which may have traumatised them.

Q19. How can we make sure that Inclusion Bases help children and young people succeed in mainstream settings?

The short and truthful answer to this is we cannot do this for all children.

For some, inclusion bases will simply not be adequate, and if we follow the current plan of waiting for one method to ‘fail’ before sending them down the next route, we will see just as many traumatised neurodivergent children as we do now.

If Inclusion Bases are to function as a genuine support rather than a soft form of segregation, they must be resourced and culturally embedded to a much greater extent than is currently typical.

That means specialist staffing rather than redeployed teaching assistants. It means meaningful therapeutic input rather than occasional outreach visits. It means clear, individualised planning around reintegration where reintegration is appropriate, and explicit acceptance that reintegration is not the right goal for every child. It means meaningful access to the curriculum rather than a stripped-down behavioural programme. And it means a school-wide culture that does not treat Inclusion Base learners as the responsibility of the Inclusion Base alone.

The wider environment determines whether a base succeeds. If the mainstream culture remains rigid, sensorially aggressive, behaviourally punitive or attendance-obsessed, the base becomes a refuge from the school rather than a route into it, and over time it becomes another form of internal exclusion. The base cannot heal a school. A school can, however, undermine a base.

Q20. Through the Experts at Hand offer, we want to ensure that mainstream settings can get quick specialist support for children and young people. What arrangements are needed between local area partners to deliver this Experts at Hand offer effectively?

The principle is welcome. The capacity question is unavoidable and unresolved.

There are already severe shortages of educational psychologists, speech and language therapists, occupational therapists, paediatricians, CAMHS practitioners and specialist teachers. Families in our community routinely wait years for the assessments and interventions that the existing system already promises. The proposal that those professionals will additionally be available to provide rapid, responsive support to mainstream settings on demand is not consistent with the workforce realities I see every week. Without a credible plan to expand the workforce, Experts at Hand will be Experts at Arm’s Length, dispensing advice occasionally and leaving implementation to overstretched staff.

There is also a definitional question that needs addressing directly. What counts as an expert. Families need to know whether the term will be reserved for appropriately qualified and regulated professionals or whether it will be applied more loosely. The presence of a knowledgeable colleague is not the same as access to a regulated professional capable of conducting an assessment whose findings will carry weight in subsequent decision-making.

For the offer to function, there must be clarity on who can trigger it, what response times are committed to, what happens when advice is given but not implemented, and how disputes about quality of advice or delivery are resolved. Without those elements, it becomes another consultative layer rather than an operational improvement.

Q21. What needs to be in place so that children and young people with low incidence, highly complex needs can always access the right specialist placement?

First, there must be sufficient capacity. The most carefully designed access framework is meaningless if the placements themselves do not exist. There is a significant national shortage of suitable specialist provision and, until that is addressed, decisions will continue to be shaped by what is available rather than by what is needed.

Second, decisions must remain genuinely needs-led. The starting point must be what this child requires. The local authority’s commissioning constraints, while real, must not be allowed to drive the analysis as they currently so often do. There must be a robust, multidisciplinary assessment that informs placement, and there must be a meaningful right to challenge when the placement proposed does not meet identified need.

Third, and most importantly for the cohort I serve, I want to register concern about the phrase ‘low incidence, highly complex needs’. The Sanctuary Cohort is not low incidence. It has been historically under-identified, which is not the same thing. Internalised autistic presentations in girls and gender-diverse young people are commonplace, not rare. They have appeared rare because identification systems were built not to see them. A reformed framework that uses ‘low incidence’ as a gating concept will, by definition, continue to filter out the cohort that is currently most failed. Complexity is also frequently masked or mistaken for behaviour, and emerges later. Any definition that depends on early visible complexity will miss the children whose complexity expresses itself through withdrawal, mutism or eventual school refusal rather than through behaviour the system was trained to detect.

Q22. How can Specialist Provision Packages be designed to effectively support the main types of need we currently recognise?

I do not believe Specialist Provision Packages, as I understand them in this consultation, are the right vehicle, and I want to be clear about why.

The Sanctuary Cohort, and a great many other children with SEND, do not have needs that fall neatly into one type. A young person may be autistic, in autistic burnout, anxious, traumatised by previous school experience, sensorially overwhelmed, partially mute, struggling with executive function, hypermobile and dealing with chronic pain, all at once. That is not an unusual profile. It is, in our experience, close to a typical profile. The notion that this child will be well served by being mapped to a package designed for one of those areas of need, with the others either ignored or treated as comorbidities, is not consistent with how their lives actually work. My child could fit into 4 of these packages, different ones on different days. How could we select just one?

If packages are introduced at all, they must function as no more than a starting point for an individualised plan, never as a substitute for one. The provision must adapt to the child. The child must not be required to adapt to the package. The system’s experience of trying to do this in the other direction is precisely the experience that has produced the Sanctuary Cohort in the first place.

There is also a deeper concern. Packages of any kind tend, over time, to become a budgeting mechanism. They become the unit through which finance functions allocate, ration and report. That is a perfectly reasonable thing for finance functions to want. It is a profoundly inappropriate thing for it to drive the design of provision for a child.

Q23. We propose that EHCPs will guarantee educational provision set out in a Specialist Provision Package, with day-to-day provision captured in Individual Support Plans. What is needed to make these proposals work effectively?

I have very serious concerns about this proposal, and I want to set them out as clearly as I can, because I think this is one of the most consequential parts of the consultation.

If the EHCP is reduced to guaranteeing a package, and the actual day-to-day provision the child needs is captured instead in an Individual Support Plan, then the legal force of the most important detail of provision is at serious risk of being lost. Families do not fight for the wording of Section F because they enjoy drafting exercises. They fight for it because the wording is the thing that determines whether the provision happens. Move that wording out of the legally enforceable part of the plan and into a weaker document, and the system has, in practical effect, reduced families’ rights while telling them it has not.

For this proposal to be acceptable, every element of the educational provision the child needs to meet their needs must remain legally enforceable. The simplification described in this consultation is, on the evidence in front of me, a relocation of detail out of enforceable status. That is not simplification. It is reduction, presented as administrative tidying.

I want to add a specific point about the cohort The Haven serves, because I do not believe this consultation has thought carefully about us. The structure proposed is heavily oriented to institution-based, attendance-based delivery models. It does not articulate clearly how it would apply to children educated otherwise than at school, electively home educated by necessity rather than choice, unable to attend school because of illness, disability, school-based trauma or autistic burnout, or receiving full EOTAS provision via an EHCP. For those children, packages designed around the school day, the school year and the school setting are structurally inadequate. A reformed system must remain explicitly capable of responding lawfully and flexibly to children whose needs cannot be met through conventional attendance-based models. At present, that capacity is preserved in law by the individuality and enforceability of Section F. Erode either, and the children my charity exists to serve will be among the first to lose protection.

Q24. We propose creating a more direct route to Specialist Provision Packages and EHCP assessments for children under 5 with complex needs. How can we make sure this works in practice?

A faster route for very young children with complex needs is, in principle, a positive step, but it must not be narrowly defined.

Some children’s complexity is obvious before they reach school age. Others, including a substantial proportion of the Sanctuary Cohort, are not. Girls in particular often appear to cope in early years settings because the demands are lower, because they mask, and because their distress is internalised rather than externalised. They may then begin to struggle at the point demands increase, typically late primary or the move to secondary. A direct route reserved for visibly complex under-fives will, by definition, miss them. Autistic girls in general are diagnosed around six years later than boys – ‘early help’ for them is therefore a misnomer.

The route must therefore be flexible, multidisciplinary in its assessment, and capable of responding to a wide range of presentations rather than to a narrow checklist of visible complexity. It should also be matched by a parallel commitment to identification and rapid response at the points in a child’s life when previously missed needs typically become visible. Early assessment is only valuable when it is followed by early provision. Earlier identification without earlier provision is simply earlier disappointment for families.

Q25. What would you expect to be considered as part of the needs assessment, for example evidence and expert or professional input?

A needs assessment should consider the whole child, and should do so without privileging the evidence sources the local authority happens to have commissioned or paid for.

That means parental evidence treated as substantive rather than supplementary. The child or young person’s own views, gathered in ways that work for them, which for some children means not in a meeting with multiple unfamiliar adults. The school’s account, including patterns of attendance, engagement and distress. Attainment and progress data, with the caveat that for our cohort attainment can mask the cost at which it is being achieved. Evidence from educational psychology, speech and language therapy, occupational therapy, mental health professionals, paediatricians and any other specialist relevant to the child’s profile. And, importantly, independently commissioned reports considered on their merits, not discounted because of who paid for them.

The assessment must identify the needs first and then determine what provision is required to meet them. It must not begin from what the local authority happens to commission and work backwards. We see the latter routinely, and it is one of the principal reasons families lose trust in the assessment process.

Q26. What factors should local authorities take into account in proposing to parents and young people a list of potential settings to name on a plan?

The starting point must be the child’s assessed needs and the provision required to meet them. Any setting proposed should be one that can credibly deliver that provision. That requires evidence, not assertion.

Specifically, the local authority should be able to articulate how the named setting will meet the child’s needs, what specialist staffing is in place, what therapeutic input is available, what the sensory environment looks like, what the class or group sizes are, how the setting responds to distress and dysregulation, and how attendance difficulties are understood. Where the proposed setting cannot deliver elements of the specified provision, that should be made clear at the point of consultation rather than discovered by the family in the first term.

There is also a wider point. Local authorities should not propose settings that they know, or ought to know, cannot meet the child’s needs, in the hope that the family will accept or be unable to challenge. We see this practice routinely, and it is corrosive to trust. The decision-making process must be transparent, evidence-based, and properly subject to challenge, and online and EOTAS provision, including The Haven, should be included in the list of options where they can credibly deliver against the assessed needs. At present, in many local authorities, they are not even put on the menu.

Q27. What information and support do parents need to make a decision about which setting will be best for their child?

Parents need honest, detailed, comparable information, and they need it from a source other than the body whose decision they may need to challenge.

They need to know, for each potential setting, what provision can be delivered in practice, what specialist staff are in place, what therapeutic input is available, what the class sizes are, how behaviour and distress are understood, how sensory needs are accommodated, how attendance difficulties are handled, and how transitions are managed. They need to know which settings have experience of the specific presentation their child has, and which do not.

They also need accurate information about their legal rights, which they will rarely receive from the local authority. They should have access to independent advice, including from organisations like ours that exist precisely to help families navigate these decisions. A choice that is presented without the information needed to evaluate it is not a meaningful choice. It is a managed outcome dressed as a decision.

Q28. What do you think is the right maximum length of time for a temporary placement in Alternative Provision schools? Please explain your rationale.

Alternative Provision can, in many cases, be temporary, but a rigid universal maximum is unhelpful because the appropriate length will depend on the individual child, the reason for placement and the proposed onward route. What is essential is not the length but the discipline around what is happening within it. And for some ‘alternative’ provision is actually what they needed all along, because provision for our cohort who want a mainstream curriculum but not a mainstream environment does not widely exist.

There must be a strong statutory expectation that AP placements are regularly reviewed, clearly justified, linked either to reintegration or to an identified longer-term provision plan, and not allowed to drift. The drift, in our experience, is the real problem. Children enter AP after a mainstream breakdown, and the AP gradually becomes a long-term destination by default rather than by plan. No child should disappear into temporary provision indefinitely – if that provision is obviously what suits them it should be able to become permanent.

I want to add a specific point that arises from running The Haven. For some young people in the Sanctuary Cohort, what is commissioned as AP is, in reality, the long-term educational solution. They are not going back to a mainstream secondary. They may, in time, be ready for FE, supported internships or vocational pathways, but conventional reintegration is not the right goal. The system needs to be honest about this. Calling a placement temporary when everyone involved knows it is not is bureaucratic theatre, and it produces worse planning than naming the placement for what it is. Uncertainty = anxiety for our cohort – let’s give them certainty to reduce stress and trauma. Let’s not reproduce a very common systemic mistake of seeing success in an accommodation and immediately removing it because it has worked – this makes no sense and just re-traumatises. Where AP is, in effect, long-term provision, the right route may be EOTAS via an EHCP, properly resourced and properly accountable, rather than indefinitely renewed AP.

Q29. We have set out our plans to regulate the Independent Special Schools sector. Do you agree that these proposed changes will lead to suitable placements being available at a fair cost? Please explain why.

Regulation may have a role, but it will not, by itself, create suitable placements or fair cost.

The independent special school sector has grown because state and maintained specialist capacity has not kept pace with need. Families pursue independent provision because the available state options are insufficient or unsuitable, not because they are seeking premium experiences. Regulating the independent sector without addressing the underlying capacity problem will not produce better access. It will more likely produce a reduction in the small amount of provision that currently does exist for the most complex children.

If government wants fair cost, the questions it needs to ask are about commissioning practice, about workforce planning, about why local authorities are not building or commissioning sufficient specialist capacity locally, and about why earlier intervention is not preventing children from reaching the point at which independent specialist provision becomes necessary. The cost of independent special schooling is, in many cases, the downstream cost of upstream underprovision. Capping the downstream cost without resolving the upstream cause will simply produce children with nowhere to go.

There is a further concern. A focus on cost can, in practice, become a disguised restriction on access. The legal test for placement must remain suitability, not administrative convenience or budget. A further point – online schools cannot (currently) become independent schools, and yet online schools very obviously have a part to play in AP in the broadest sense. There needs to be a conversation about how online and hybrid fits into the education system.

Q30. How should settings be held accountable for how they spend their Inclusive Mainstream funding?

Funding must be linked to delivery and outcomes. Schools should be able to demonstrate how SEND funding is used, which children benefit, what provision is delivered and what impact it has. The form this takes matters. Another paperwork exercise will produce another paperwork exercise. Meaningful accountability requires meaningful transparency, including to parents, who at present often have no visibility of what funding has been received in respect of their child or how it has been used.

Accountability cannot, however, sit on schools alone. Schools cannot be held responsible for delivering what they have not been resourced to provide, and they cannot be held responsible for the consequences of local authority decisions over which they have limited influence. A serious accountability framework holds schools, multi-academy trusts, local authorities and the Department for Education to their respective parts. At the moment, the chain of responsibility frequently breaks at the local authority level, and schools and families are left to manage the consequences.

There is also a specific point about the Sanctuary Cohort. The cohort is largely invisible to attendance and attainment data, the two metrics that dominate current accountability frameworks. A school can be doing genuinely good work for these young people and have nothing in its data to show for it, or, conversely, be quietly failing them while its headline figures look reassuring. The new Osted framework singling out Inclusion has not changed this. The majority of schools inspected on the new framework are ‘passing’ Inclusion but they are certainly not what I would call inclusive schools. Inclusive Mainstream funding accountability needs measures that can see this cohort, otherwise the funding will, in practice, follow the data and the data does not include the children most in need.

Q31. Do you agree that more SEND funding should sit directly within mainstream budgets? Please explain why.

I have significant reservations.

In principle, embedding more SEND funding within mainstream budgets could support earlier intervention and reduce the bureaucratic threshold to access support. In practice, unless that funding is ringfenced, transparent and sufficient, it will be absorbed into already overstretched mainstream budgets and the individual child for whom the funding was nominally provided will not be the beneficiary. We have seen this pattern repeatedly in the way SEN notional budgets are deployed at present.

Mainstream funding must not be used as a justification for restricting access to statutory assessment or to EHCPs. The administrative location of funding does not, in itself, determine whether the child receives provision. The question is whether the money reaches the child and produces the provision, and at present the system does not reliably evidence either.

There is also a relational risk. If schools become the bodies that are seen to refuse or ration support, the relationship between schools and families, which is already strained for the families in our community, will deteriorate further. Families do not generally enter conflict with schools because they want to. They enter conflict because the system has positioned schools as the place where rationing decisions are made. Reforms should preserve, not erode, the conditions under which schools and families can collaborate.

Q32. In relation to pooled funding, we propose that every school becomes part of a local SEND group. Do you agree that this proposal aligns with our aim for all schools to be part of high-quality, community-based trusts?

I am not persuaded that pooled funding through local SEND groups is the right answer, and the reason is structural rather than ideological.

The risk with pooled arrangements is that responsibility is diffused. Where multiple schools share responsibility, it becomes harder for a family to identify who is accountable for a given decision and harder for an external observer to attribute consequences. The more complex the structure, the easier it becomes for decisions to be delayed, displaced or rebadged as the responsibility of another part of the structure. We already see this between schools, MATs and local authorities. Adding a further layer is likely to compound rather than resolve it.

If local groups are introduced, they cannot be permitted to override individual statutory duties. They cannot collectively decide that a particular child’s needs cannot be met because resources have been allocated elsewhere within the group. Each child’s right to provision is individual. Funding mechanisms must not be allowed to override the individuality of that right.

Q33. How should disagreements about membership, provision, or funding in groups of schools for SEND be resolved?

Disagreements between institutions must be resolved transparently, swiftly and in a way that does not interrupt the support being delivered to a child.

That requires a clearly identified, genuinely independent decision-maker. It requires clear timescales for resolution. It requires a clear route of challenge for families who are affected by the disagreement but are not party to it. And, critically, it requires that the child’s provision continues while adults work out the funding.

The single greatest fear families in our community express about pooled arrangements is exactly this. That a dispute about which school, trust or local authority is responsible will result in their child receiving nothing while the dispute is resolved. That outcome is currently common in cross-authority transitions, in mid-year placement changes and in cases where responsibility shifts between agencies. It must not be designed into pooled SEND arrangements as well.

Q34. How can we ensure the most effective use of these local partnership groups?

Local partnership groups will only be useful if they are accountable, transparent, grounded in evidence, and able to change what is happening on the ground. There is no shortage of forums and meetings in the current SEND system. There is a shortage of forums and meetings that produce decisions and outcomes. A meeting itself is not an outcome.

For these groups to add value, they need to identify local gaps in provision, monitor whether identified provision is being delivered, listen substantively to families, and act when patterns of failure emerge. They need the authority, the resource and the political mandate to change practice, not merely to discuss it. A group that surfaces problems but cannot resolve them will at best be a venting space and at worst a system for legitimising inaction. In practice, this is almost impossible and would mean sitting on and having influence in LA SEND capital partnership boards.

They will also need lived-experience representation that is meaningful rather than tokenistic. Families and young people must be participants in decision-making, not consulted on decisions already taken. Our experience of co-production in this sector is that it varies enormously, and the variation tracks closely with whether the lead organisation actually wants to hear what families say.

Q35. Which stakeholders are important for the success of local partnership groups, and why?

Families and young people themselves are central, and their participation must be substantive rather than ornamental. Schools, local authorities, health services, social care, therapists, educational psychologists, post-16 providers, independent specialist providers, voluntary sector organisations and legal or advocacy specialists all have potential roles. Crucially, neurodivergent-led organisations such as ours should be represented in their own right, not folded into a generic voluntary sector seat, because we bring perspectives that other voluntary sector partners cannot. PCFs in particular seem to be being stripped of any capacity to disagree with the wider system, and that does not translate to a good mechanism to funnel parent views.

Representation, however, is not the same as influence. It is not enough to invite stakeholders if the agenda, the framing and the conclusions have effectively been determined in advance. Families and young people must be able to shape priorities, identify systemic failures and challenge prevailing assumptions, including assumptions that are uncomfortable for the lead bodies in the partnership. Lived experience must be treated as evidence, not as feedback.

Q36. How can we build stronger collaboration and a culture of improvement through local SEND strategic plans?

Strategic plans only contribute to improvement if they lead to delivery. The current generation of local SEND strategies, in many areas, has not done so, partly because they have been written as communications documents rather than operational plans.

A useful local SEND strategic plan identifies local needs, capacity gaps, workforce shortages, therapy delays, placement shortages and patterns of dispute, honestly and in public. It commits to measurable targets, with named accountability and dated milestones. It is subject to independent scrutiny. It includes consequences when targets are missed. And it is co-produced with families, including with neurodivergent-led organisations, in a way that allows uncomfortable findings to survive the drafting process.

A culture of improvement requires admitting where the current culture is failing. That is harder than producing a plan, and it is the precondition for the plan being worth producing.

Q37. What information, advice and guidance can best support children, young people and their families to ensure greater fairness across the system?

Families need clear, accessible, independent and legally accurate information about their rights and about how the system works in practice. They need it from sources that do not have an interest in the outcome of their case. They need it in formats that are accessible to disabled parents, parents with learning difficulties, parents for whom English is not a first language, and parents who are themselves neurodivergent and exhausted by the cumulative weight of caring responsibilities. As a case in point the Easy Read version of this very consultation is not accessible because it cannot be put through a screen reader. If even the bodies in charge of SEND across England cannot get it right what hope is there?

This is, incidentally, work that voluntary sector organisations like AGN do every day, largely without funding, because the families finding their way to us have so often been unable to find the information they needed anywhere else. Information services delivered by independent and trusted community organisations are significantly more credible to families than the same information delivered by the body whose decisions they may be challenging. Sustainable funding for this layer of the system would be a high-leverage investment, and one that the current settlement does not adequately make.

Information, however, has limits. Information helps a family understand when their rights are not being respected. It does not, on its own, secure the provision. For fairness to be real, the rights themselves must remain enforceable, and the routes of challenge must remain meaningful.

Q38. Do you agree that a SEND specialist, for example a SENCO, should sit on the school complaint panel when the complaint relates to SEND support and provision? Please explain why.

On a first reading, the proposal seems sensible, and there is something to be said for the involvement of someone with SEND expertise when a complaint turns on technical SEND issues. The fundamental question, however, is not about expertise. It is about independence.

If the SEND specialist on the panel is part of the same school or closely connected to the system being complained about, the family will not have confidence in the process, and they will be right not to. Many families in our community already experience internal complaints procedures as the system reviewing itself, with predictable outcomes. Adding a specialist who is part of the same system does not resolve that perception; it deepens it.

A SEND specialist may improve technical understanding within a panel, but expertise without independence does not provide the safeguard that families need. Complaints about SEND provision require both, and where they cannot both be provided internally, they should not be expected to be resolved internally.

There is also a wider concern. The more disputes about provision that are pushed into school complaints procedures, the more families are forced into adversarial relationships with the school that is educating their child. That is corrosive for the school, for the family and, above all, for the child. Internal complaints procedures cannot, and should not, substitute for the independent statutory routes of challenge that currently exist.

And lastly, I imagine the Education Unions will not be pleased that there is yet more pressure being put on SENCOs without any funding or increased capacity. What responsibilities will be removed from SENCOs so that they have the capacity to take on this additional task, and where is the supervision and support (and the funding to provide it) necessary to carry out this harrowing task?

Q39. This consultation outlines a series of measures intended to reform the SEND system. Is there anything further you would like to contribute?

Reading the consultation as a whole, I am struck by a consistent and serious tension between what the consultation says it wants to achieve and what its proposals would, in practice, do. I note also that there is a complete disregard of all the aspirations of KCSIE 2025 which made responsibilities towards vulnerable SEND children stronger.

The consultation describes a desire for simplification, for earlier identification, for stronger universal provision, for genuine inclusion. Those are aims I share. But the specific proposals, taken together, point in a different direction. They tend to migrate detailed provision out of legally enforceable plans and into weaker documents. They tend to substitute generic packages for individualised assessment. They tend to push more decisions into structures that are harder for families to navigate and harder to hold to account. They tend to reduce, rather than expand, the role of independent challenge. Each individual proposal might be defensible in isolation. Taken together, the pattern is unmistakable, and it is a pattern of reducing rights while describing the reduction as reform.

I want to speak directly about the cohort I serve, because I do not think this consultation has thought carefully enough about them. The Sanctuary Cohort, the young people who have become unable to attend school, who present with internalised distress, who have been failed first by identification and then by provision, are not a statistical curiosity. They are a rapidly growing population. They are disproportionately (but certainly not only) girls and gender-diverse young people. They are disproportionately children of parents who are themselves neurodivergent and often newly self-identified. They consistently show up also in CAMHS populations. They are children whose lives are being shaped, right now, by a system that was not designed to see them and is now being asked to reform itself without explicitly acknowledging that they exist.

Generic Specialist Provision Packages will not work for them, because their needs are individual and overlapping. Layered models will not work for them, because the layers were calibrated to a different presentation. Universal offers that do not actively identify masking will not work for them, because by the time they are visible they are already in crisis. EHCPs in which the detailed provision is relegated to weaker plans will not work for them, because their provision is, by definition, the kind of provision that depends on specificity and enforceability. Inclusion Bases will not work for them, because the children we serve cannot, at the point of crisis, be in the building at all. Any reform that does not contend with this cohort directly will not be reform for them.

I also want to address the question of parental behaviour, because the framing of the consultation, in places, edges towards it. Parents are not the problem. Families do not enter appeals, complaints and Tribunal proceedings for entertainment. All of these are really hard things to do, and they have to be done at the same time as picking up all the pieces for your child. They do so because provision is not delivered, evidence is ignored, and public bodies routinely fail to comply with the duties placed on them by legislation that this government’s predecessors enacted. The very high success rate of parents at Tribunal is not evidence of an excitable parental population. It is evidence that the original decisions were wrong. Reframing parents as the source of pressure, rather than as a symptom of system failure, would be a serious analytical error and a political miscalculation.

Finally, on the SEND Tribunal. I am opposed to any reduction in its jurisdiction or in the binding force of its decisions. Education is a civil right of profound consequence, and decisions about a child’s needs, provision and placement may shape that child’s life trajectory. The ability to challenge those decisions before an independent body is not optional. It is fundamental. A system in which the Tribunal loses the power to make binding determinations, in which families are forced back into repeated cycles of dispute as positions shift and goalposts move, in which decisions can be revisited indefinitely without ever being resolved, cannot reasonably be described as offering an effective remedy. It is the appearance of remedy without the substance.

Conclusion

I return to first principles. The Children and Families Act 2014, for all its imperfections, rests on principles that are sound: individual assessment, identification of need, specification of provision, and enforceable rights of challenge. The system’s failures are not, in the main, failures of the statutory architecture. They are failures of compliance, of capacity and of culture, and they will not be remedied by replacing the architecture with one that protects children less.

The families and young people I work with every day, across our 35,000-strong community and within The Haven itself, do not need a more elaborate system. They need a system that does what it already promises to do. They need decisions that follow the evidence. They need provision that is delivered, not merely specified. They need the ability to challenge unlawful or inadequate decisions before an independent body whose decisions are binding. And they need a framework that is honest about the cohort it has historically failed and serious about not failing them further.

Investing properly in children with SEND, and in particular in the Sanctuary Cohort that this consultation does not yet name but cannot afford to ignore, is not a cost. It is an investment in young people who, given the right support, become contributors, leaders and pioneers. I see them every term. I see them speak who had been silent. I see them connect who had been alone. I see them learn who had been told they could not. They are not a problem the system has to manage. They are a generation the system has, so far, failed to serve, and they are still, against the odds, ready to be served.

If these reforms genuinely strengthen delivery, accountability and enforceable rights, they may succeed. If they weaken any of those, this generation of children, and the next, will pay the price. I urge the Department for Education to choose the first path.

Cathy Wassell

Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Autistic Girls Network

Founder and Proprietor, The Haven

We are registered as a charity in England and Wales (1196655) and in Scotland (SC054837).