Getting ahead on SEND reform: making the most of the preparation years

The Schools White Paper, Every Child Achieving and Thriving, was published in February 2026, with its accompanying SEND consultation closing in May. The reforms it set out are the most significant change to SEND provision in more than a decade and almost none of them take effect this year.

That gap between announcement and implementation is where trusts are currently sitting. It is easy to read the dates and conclude there is time. The dates are real, but they describe when duties bite, not when preparation is needed.

What is changing

The reforms are being rolled out in three overlapping phases: aligning to best practice from 2025/26, preparing for the SEND and curriculum reforms from 2026/27, and full implementation from 2028/29 onwards.

The core structural change is a tiered model of support, with targeted, targeted plus, and specialist tiers. Individual Support Plans become the day-to-day mechanism: a digital plan for every child with SEND, developed by the setting alongside families, setting out needs, the support provided and what it should achieve. Schools will have a legal duty to produce them from September 2029. EHCPs are retained and reworked for children with the most complex needs, based on new nationally defined Specialist Provision Packages.

Funding accompanies the expectations. A £1.6 billion Inclusive Mainstream Fund runs over three years, £3.7 billion of capital investment through to 2030 will create Inclusion Bases in mainstream settings, and over £200 million is committed to SEND continuing professional development. The National Inclusion Standards are due to be in place by 2028.

The workforce question underneath it

Strip away the structures and the reform is, in practice, a workforce programme. Higher expectations on mainstream settings to meet a wider range of needs means more adults in schools who know how to do it.

That reaches a long way beyond SENCos. Individual Support Plans describe day-to-day support, and day-to-day support is delivered by teaching assistants, learning support and pastoral staff. Inclusion Bases will need staffing. Targeted plus provision assumes access to expertise that has to sit somewhere. The capability the reforms depend on is distributed across the whole staff team, not concentrated in one office.

The part that gets missed: double-running

The transition is deliberately gradual. The current system under the Children and Families Act 2014 remains in place while the new one is built. Children with EHCPs keep them, in most cases until at least September 2030, with movement to the new arrangements happening as pupils change phase rather than all at once.

For families, that continuity is the point. For trusts, it has a practical consequence that is easy to overlook: for several years, schools will be running the existing system and preparing for the new one at the same time. Existing EHCPs, current specialist placements and present provision all continue, while ISPs, inclusion practice and new funding routes are built alongside them.

Double-running increases demand for SEND-capable staff during the transition. It does not reduce it.

What to do with 2026/27 and 2027/28

Audit current provision against what is coming. Map existing SEND support across the trust against what ISPs will ask for - needs, day-to-day provision, adjustments, intended outcomes. Gaps found now are gaps you have three years to close.

Use the CPD funding at trust scale. SEND development money spent school by school buys training. Spent across a group, with a shared standard for what a well-trained support team looks like, it buys consistency and consistency is what the National Inclusion Standards will be looking for.

Think about the pipeline before demand peaks. Every trust in the country is preparing on the same timetable. Staff with genuine SEND, SEMH and behaviour experience are already competitive to recruit in most regions; they will not become easier to find as 2029 approaches. The trusts that will be comfortable are the ones building relationships and pipelines now, while there is no deadline attached.

Decide what sits centrally. Specialist capacity is often more affordable as a shared trust resource than as a post in every school. That decision is easier to make in a planning year than in a year when the duty has already landed.

Working with NextGen Teachers

NextGen Teachers works with schools and trusts across primary, secondary, SEN, college and sixth form, recruiting supply and long-term teachers, teaching assistants, and behaviour, pastoral, SEN and SEMH support staff.

Preparing for reform at trust level is difficult when every school sources its staff separately. Rates differ for the same role, compliance is evidenced to different standards, and nobody holds a picture of what the trust as a whole will need. We work with trusts as a single, consistent partner across every school in the group - one set of terms, one compliance standard, and a vetted pool of SEND and SEMH-experienced staff built around what the trust actually needs, rather than assembled each time a request comes in.

As a DfE-approved supplier on the Crown Commercial Service's RM6376 framework, holding APSCo Compliance+ accreditation, we can be appointed directly on pre-agreed terms, with no tender process to run.

If you would like to talk about how this would work across your trust, we would be glad to hear from you.