What the SEND reforms mean for school and Trust leaders

The SEND reforms ask mainstream schools and Trusts to include more pupils with special educational needs and to show that those pupils belong and are doing well. As of November 2026, the direction is clear but much of the detail is still settling, so leaders are planning this term without a final rulebook. This is workable, because the evidence that matters most, how pupils with SEND, their teachers and their families experience school, does not depend on the fine print.

This article sets out what the reforms are, which parts are confirmed and which are still moving and what a school or Trust can start collecting now to support its inclusion plan.

What are the SEND reforms, and where do they stand?

"SEND reforms" is the shorthand for the government's programme to change how special educational needs and disability support works in England. The programme is set out in the Every Child Achieving and Thriving white paper, published by the Department for Education in February 2026. It builds on the framework created by the Children and Families Act 2014 and the SEND Code of Practice that followed in 2015, which introduced Education, Health and Care (EHC) plans and the graduated approach to SEN support in schools.

Terms used in this article are, an EHC plan is a legal document for a child or young person whose needs cannot be met through the support a school normally provides and SEN support is the help a school gives pupils with identified needs who do not have a plan. Pupils with an EHC plan and those identified at SEN support level will appear on the school's SEN register.

The reason for reform is well documented. The 2014 framework left a lot to local interpretation and the DfE's own SEND and Alternative Provision Improvement Plan (March 2023) acknowledged inconsistent provision, variable outcomes and growing reliance on EHC plans as the route to support. DfE's special educational needs in England statistics show the number of EHC plans rising year on year, with more than 600,000 in place in January 2025 (DfE, 2025). Many families have come to see a plan as the only reliable way to secure help in a mainstream school and the reforms aim to change that by making ordinary classroom support more available and dependable.

What is settled and what is not

A white paper states intent. It is not law and not every proposal in it will reach the statute book in the form first described. Some measures need primary legislation, some need changes to the Code of Practice and some depend on funding decisions and consultation responses. As of November 2026, leaders are best served by treating the overall direction (earlier identification, stronger mainstream inclusion, clearer expectations) as dependable and treating specific dates, thresholds and duties as provisional until the DfE publishes them. The DfE's SEND reform pages and the relevant parliamentary bill tracker are the places to check the current stage before committing to anything in a Trust-wide policy.

What do the reforms change for mainstream schools day to day?

The white paper's themes translate into a handful of practical shifts for mainstream settings. Earlier identification of need means classroom teachers and SENCOs spotting difficulties sooner and acting without waiting for a diagnosis or a formal plan. More consistent support in ordinary classrooms places weight on what the EEF's guidance on special educational needs in mainstream schools (2020) already argued: that high-quality teaching for all pupils, with adaptations, is the foundation and that targeted interventions should complement it rather than replace it. Clearer expectations of inclusive practice suggest that schools will be asked to describe, with evidence, how pupils with SEND take part in the full life of the school.

Funding and the Inclusive Mainstream Fund

Funding sits alongside these shifts. The Inclusive Mainstream Fund is one of the streams linked to the reforms, intended to help mainstream schools build the capacity to support pupils with SEND. Allocations, eligibility and the way money reaches schools can differ between local authorities and Trusts and some Trusts pool or direct funding centrally.

Planning prompt, not compliance test

A common reading is that the reforms create a compliance test that schools must pass. A more useful reading treats them as a prompt to be able to write and implement the inclusion strategy focussing on best practice from the IMF guidence.  Inspection frameworks and DfE expectations will continue to look at inclusion, but the practical question for a headteacher is simpler: how do we know our provision is working for the pupils it is meant for? Schools that approach it that way tend to build a picture over several terms, rather than assembling a file at short notice. This picture needs more than provision records and for Trusts it needs to be comparable across sites.

What do Trusts need to see across their academies?

A Trust board reading ten headteacher reports receives ten different descriptions of inclusion, written with different yardsticks. One academy may call its SEND provision "strong" because the register is well maintained, another may use the same word because pupils are thriving in lessons. Neither is wrong, but the board cannot compare them. Provision and experience can differ sharply between academies in the same Trust, because staffing, leadership, local intake, SENCO capacity and transition arrangements all vary.

Suppose a ten-academy Trust asks the same pupil survey questions in every school in the autumn term. The results show that Year 7 pupils with SEND in three of the six secondaries are noticeably less likely to agree with statements such as "I feel I belong at this school" and "There is an adult in school I can go to if I need help". Attendance in those year groups looks ordinary so far, and behaviour data shows nothing unusual. Without the survey, the board would have no reason to ask questions yet.

With it, the Trust education director can start a focused look. Did transition from primary differ in those three schools, perhaps because they take pupils from a wider range of feeder schools? Are Year 7 pupils with SEND spending more of the week with different adults in different rooms? Is classroom practice consistent across departments? Those questions are far easier to ask in October than after a spring term of rising absence.

Questions that move the conversation on

Trustees do not need to interpret survey data themselves, but they can shape how it is used. Four questions tend to be enough:

• Which cohorts are scoring lower, and in which academies?
• Is the gap between pupils with SEND and their peers wider than elsewhere in the Trust?
• What has changed since last term?
• Who owns the response, and when will the board see the next result?

The last question matters most. Data without a named owner and a review point becomes a report that is read once.

Why does how pupils with SEND experience school matter as much as provision?

Most SEND reporting is provision data: the number of pupils on the SEN register, the proportion with EHC plans, the interventions delivered, the hours of teaching assistant support. These tell a board what the school has put in place. They say little about whether a pupil feels safe in the corridor, included in the group work, or listened to by the adults who teach them. Experience data fills that gap, and a school can have strong provision records alongside a weak sense of belonging among the pupils those records describe.

The link between experience and outcomes is why this matters for planning rather than only for culture. The EEF's 2020 guidance on special educational needs in mainstream schools starts from the principle of creating a positive and supportive environment for all pupils without exception and treats it as a precondition for teaching and intervention to work. Government attendance work points the same way. The DfE's guidance on working together to improve school attendance (2022, with later updates) asks schools to understand the barriers behind individual absence rather than treating it as a single problem and pupils with SEND are consistently among the groups with higher absence in the DfE's published statistics. A pupil who does not feel they belong has less reason to come in and a school that sees the signal in survey data has more time to respond than one waiting for the attendance register to show it.

Capturing experience without free-text from pupils

Pupil surveys work best with structured questions: agree or disagree statements, rating scales and multiple choice. They are quicker to complete, easier to read for pupils with literacy needs and produce scores that can be compared across year groups, cohorts and academies. They also avoid asking children to write about their experiences in their own words, which is neither necessary nor appropriate for this purpose. A statement such as "I have somewhere to go at lunchtime" gives a leader a clear, comparable signal.

Staff and parent views add what pupil scores cannot. Staff can describe, in open text if the survey allows it, the barriers to inclusive teaching they face, such as workload, training or access to specialist advice. Parents and carers of children with SEND can say how well communication, review meetings and day-to-day support work. Together the three groups give a rounded view that no single source provides.

How can leaders gather evidence of inclusion this term?

A school can run a useful cycle inside one term. The sequence below is one that many schools and Trusts find manageable.

1. Choose a baseline window, often three weeks in the autumn or spring term, avoiding assessment weeks and the first fortnight back.
2. Survey pupils, staff and families with the same set of belonging topics, so results can be read side by side.
3. Break results down by SEND status, SEN support versus EHC plan, Pupil Premium, year group and any combination that matters locally.
4. Share findings with staff, agree where to act, and set a review point for the following term.

Practical details tend to decide whether this works. Shorter pupil surveys, around five to ten minutes, get better completion, particularly from the pupils leaders most need to hear from. Response rates tend to be strongest when form tutors or teachers set aside a lesson slot and weaker when a link is sent home with no time protected. Anonymous surveys encourage candour and make sense for a first baseline. Named surveys allow results to be broken down by cohort and followed over time, so many schools use named or pseudonymised responses with clear communication about who sees what. Whichever is chosen, it helps to tell pupils and families in advance how results will be used.

Sharing results with staff usually goes better when the headteacher or SENCO presents the patterns by cohort rather than by class or teacher and frames them as a planning tool. Staff are more likely to engage when the aim is to decide where to focus support, not to judge individual practice.

Turning low scores into a plan

The step that makes the data useful is assigning each low-scoring cohort an owner. If Year 8 pupils with SEND are less likely to agree that adults listen to them, the SENCO, head of year or a named assistant headteacher takes responsibility, chooses a response (a change to tutor time, a review of seating and grouping, more consistent communication with families) and records a review point in the SEND and inclusion plan. Next term's survey then shows whether the score has moved. That cycle gives governors and trustees something better than a narrative: a measure, an action and a result.

How Satchel Pulse can help

Perceptions, from Satchel Pulse, runs termly belonging surveys for pupils, staff and families using the same questions each time. Results can be broken down by SEND, Pupil Premium and year group using data drawn from your MIS, so a school can see how Year 7 pupils with SEND compare with their peers without building the cohorts by hand. Staff and parent free-text responses are analysed for topics and sentiment, with suggested actions, and pupil questions stay structured.

For trusts, the trust-wide dashboard puts results from every academy in one comparable view, which supports the questions raised above about which cohorts, which schools and what has changed since last term. A sensible first step is to pick one year group or cohort, agree a survey window this term and name the person who will own the response.

Evidence that holds up while the detail settles

The reforms will keep developing through 2027, and some details will change before they settle. What is unlikely to change is the expectation that leaders can show how pupils with SEND experience school, alongside what the school provides. Schools and trusts that have a baseline, a clear view by cohort and a named owner for each result will find it easier to adapt when guidance firms up, because the evidence is already in place.

The one action worth taking this term is to agree a baseline survey window and give every low-scoring cohort an owner and a review date. If you would like to see how that works across a school or trust, Learn more about our services.