The Special Educational Needs and Disabilities and Alternative Provision Improvement Plan

In January 2022 there were around 1.5 million pupils with identified Special Educational Needs (around 17% of pupils in England). The majority of these pupils attend mainstream schools.

In January 2022 there were 1,022 state-funded special schools in England with around 142,000 pupils recorded as attending them.

The Government published its plan to improve special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) support and alternative educational provision in March 2023.

The plan is the Government’s response to a green paper consultation held in 2022. The consultation took place after a review into support for SEND that began in 2019.

A roadmap of actions the Government plans to take to improve SEND provision was published alongside the plan, setting out timelines.

The SEND and Alternative Provision Improvement Plan

The Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) and alternative provision improvement plan: right support, right place, right time proposes  a unified system for SEND and alternative provision, driven by new national standards. This was a central proposal of the green paper.

There are no immediate plans to amend existing legislation, although the Government does intend to underpin the new national standards with legislation once they have been rolled out, which is planned to begin in 2025.

Alongside new national standards, the improvement plan sets out the Government’s intention to:

• Create local SEND and alternative provision partnerships to lead change and commission provision
• Set up a National SEND and Alternative Provision Implementation Board to oversee the implementation of the plan
• Develop a standard template for Education, Health, and Care Plans (EHCPs), and digitise the plans
• Create a three-tier alternative provision system, focused away from long-term placements
• Develop options for providing parents and carers with a tailored list of SEND educational settings
• Support a SEND and alternative provision change programme to oversee the reforms
• Improve skills in the SEND workforce, with a particular emphasis on early intervention
• Strengthen accountability, including with a new local and national inclusion dashboard and refocused inspections of local SEND provision by Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission
• Explore options for strengthening mediation between schools and local authorities, before deciding on whether to make mediation mandatory
• Introduce a new national framework of banding and price tariffs for high needs funding, with more details on this to follow later in 2023

Education policy is a devolved issue, and this paper applies to England only.