“Today is a landmark moment in improving the lives of children with SEND and their families. For too long, families have found themselves battling against a complex and fragmented system.”

Those words from then Children and Families Minister Edward Timpson back in 2014 accompanied the launch of a new system for supporting children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities, or SEND for short.

A significant part of this new system was Education, Health and Care Plans, or EHCPs, which would identify any additional needs of children and young people aged up to 25 and set out the extra support that they are legally entitled to receive.

Just over a decade later in 2025, and the SEND system is widely regarded to be complex, fragmented and facing financial ruin. What’s more, the current government’s planned reforms to SEND, which were scheduled for this autumn, have been delayed until the New Year.

In October, IPPR, a progressive think tank, published a new report called ‘BREAKING THE CYCLE: A BLUEPRINT FOR SEND REFORM’, which set out their proposals for putting special needs provision on a better and more sustainable path.

So what did this new report identify as the main problems facing the SEND system? Does SEND provision need major investment, major reform or both? And when the financial pressures on local and national government are so acute, can EHCPs survive in their current form for much longer?

My guests are Geoff Barton CBE, chair of the IPPR Inclusion Taskforce that fed into this new report and also a former headteacher and union leader, and Eleanor Harris, co-author of this new report and also the Director of Policy, Impact, Research and Communications at The Difference, a charity focused on inclusion.

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