Q5. How can we ensure that children in the Targeted Plus layer, are best supported? Expand The context: ‘Targeted Plus’ is the second of three levels of support for children with SEND. It will include access to ‘Experts at Hand’ – e.g. speech and language specialists, educational psychologists. Each child will have a digital Individual Support Plan and access to an Inclusion Base (when required) within the school for bespoke interventions and individual and small group work. Targeted Plus may also include temporary placements in alternative provision or a specialist setting to assess and address needs, before returning to mainstream. In your answer, you may want to consider: More clarity is needed on who will be included as ‘Experts at Hand’. For example, might this include specialists in supporting children who have experienced trauma and disrupted attachments, therapeutic social workers, clinicians with expertise in differentiating between presentations of developmental trauma, reactive attachment disorder and autism? Temporary placements in alternative provision and specialist settings will not be useful for many care-experienced children if those settings do not have expertise in supporting needs arising from trauma and disrupted attachments. For children who have experienced significant loss, including adopted children, the emotional significance of being taken away from their school and their friends to a new setting, and then repeating this experience only a short time later, must be taken into account.
Q6. How can we ensure that children in the Specialist layer are best supported? Expand The context: Specialist support will be reserved for children with the most complex needs. New, nationally defined ‘Specialist Provision Packages’ will outline packages of provision and these will form the basis of an education, health and care plan (EHCP). A digital Individual Support Plan will set out the day-to-day support needed. Children will have access to Inclusion Bases (‘Specialist Bases’) within mainstream settings where required. Some children receiving Specialist support will attend special school. In your answer, you may want to consider: Children will be assessed as to whether they need a Specialist package by the local authority, using a new, statutory needs assessment process. This assessment must take account of children’s social and emotional wellbeing as well as educational attainment, and allow for needs arising from trauma and disrupted attachments.
Q7. How do you think early years settings, schools, and college can best support the mental health and wellbeing of children and young people? Expand The context: As part of developing the ‘areas of development’ which will define the Specialist Support Packages, the government intends to clarify how settings can effectively support social and emotional development and mental wellbeing for all children and young people. The ‘social, emotional and mental health’ (SEMH) SEND area will be renamed ‘social and emotional’. Schools will continue to have a role in promoting mental wellbeing, but health professionals will lead on clinical interventions for mental health difficulties for children with and without SEND. These clinical interventions can still be part of Specialist Provision Packages for children with SEND. The Government has also committed to publishing a Pupil Engagement Framework to help schools measure children’s engagement and wellbeing. In your answer, you may want to consider: Care-experienced children are disproportionately likely to experience mental health difficulties. 90% of adoptees aged 16-25 have ever sought support for their mental health (Adoption Barometer 2025). Mental Health Leads in schools will need explicit training on the mental health needs of care-experienced children and young people, including guidance on when to refer to specialist services. You may wish to include examples of good or poor practice in supporting mental health and wellbeing in schools and other settings from your own experience.
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. Expand The context: The ‘areas of development’ will replace the current ‘areas of need’ used to categorise and report on SEND. Current ‘areas of need’ are criticised for being poorly defined with some describing underlying needs while others are based on a diagnosis. The new ‘areas of development’ will aim to reflect developmental needs and each area will form the basis of a Specialist Provision package. Currently, the Government is proposing five areas: Executive Function, Motor and Physical, Speech, Language and Communication, Social and Emotional, Sensory. However, the Government is still consulting on this framework. In your answer, you may want to consider: The move away from diagnosis-based categories of need may benefit some care-experienced children who have faced long delays in accessing assessments and diagnosis, especially for autism, ADHD and FASD. However, children with complex, overlapping needs and those with spectrum conditions are unlikely to fit neatly into any single one of these areas of development, risking a significant proportion of their needs being unsupported and unrecognised. The proposal is for Specialist Provision Packages to be defined by one of these areas of development. How will this work where children have significant needs crossing two or more of these areas of development?
Q12. What are the most important issues for national training to cover, to help support children and young people with SEND? Expand The context: The Government has announced a new training package of over £200 million over three years from September 2026. This will be available to all staff working across early years, schools and post-16 settings to support more inclusive learning environments. The training will be Government backed and “developed with experts”. In your answer, you may want to consider: Considering the high prevalence of SEND among care-experienced children (50% of previously looked after children have documented SEND) training must be available on the intersection of needs arising from SEND and trauma, disrupted attachments and care experience.
Q15. What would provide assurance for families that an Individual Support Plan (ISP) is high‑quality and contains the essential information? Expand The context: All children receiving SEND support will have a digital Individual Support Plan (ISP). This will be a statutory duty for settings. There will be guidance to support settings to create high-quality plans, developed with parents and standardised to facilitate transitions. Plans will be reviewed annually at the minimum. Concerns about provision set out in the ISP will be resolved with the setting, but the Government proposes improvements to the complaints process, including that when a complaint relates to SEND provision, the complaints panel must include a SEND specialist who is independent of the school. In your answer, you may want to consider: The average age for a child to obtain an adoption order is 3-4 years old. Therefore, some children who are moving to adoption may already have a digital ISP. How will the system ensure that essential information is appropriately retained and passed on to the adoptive family and any relevant professionals when a child is adopted and receives a new, legal identity and a new Unique Pupil Number with all links to their pre-adoption records severed?
Q19. How can we make sure that Inclusion Bases help children and young people succeed in mainstream settings? Expand The context: Current terms, such as SEN unit, resourced provision, pupil support units and internal alternative provision will be collectively described as ‘Inclusion Bases’ in mainstream settings. There will be two models – ‘Support Bases’ to deliver Targeted Support, and ‘Specialist Bases’ to deliver Specialist Support. The intention is that every secondary school will have an Inclusion Base, with an equivalent number of places in local primary schools. National guidance will set out the principles and standards of high-quality practice. In your answer, you may want to consider: The School Admissions Code currently gives the highest priority to looked after and previously looked after children on account of their need to access a suitable setting following a placement move, and a frequent need for high quality, trauma-informed provision which is not available in every setting. However, this does not apply where an eligible child has an EHCP. Since only a limited number of primary schools in an area will have an Inclusion Base, what measures will be taken to ensure that looked after and previously looked after children with an EHCP are able to attend an appropriate mainstream setting that can meet their needs through a Specialist Base? How will Guidance ensure that Inclusion Bases do not become a ‘school within a school’ with children accessing Bases largely separated from their peers rather than truly included in the life of the school?
Q20. Through the Experts at Hand offer, we want to ensure that mainstream settings can get quick specialist support for children and young people... Expand What arrangements are needed between local area partners (education, health, social care) to deliver this Experts at Hand offer effectively? The context: The Government will make a £1.8 billion investment over three years to improve access to health and education professionals such as speech & language therapists who will work with both teachers and children. Local authorities and Integrated Care Boards will establish an ‘Experts at Hand’ offer comprising support from education and health services and outreach from specialist settings including alternative provision. Experts will be able to work directly with mainstream settings so they can access advice without a child or young person requiring a referral. In your answer, you may want to consider: Some children who are adopted or in permanent kinship care access specialist therapeutic support through their local authority or regional or voluntary adoption agency. While this support may not be directly education-related, it can have an indirect impact on children’s ability to thrive in education. For example, by improving attendance, supporting children to self-regulate, and addressing social and emotional challenges. Will such specialist services be part of the ‘Experts at Hand’ offer, bringing their expertise into mainstream settings?
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? Expand The context: The proposals recognise that a small number of children have highly complex needs that are relatively uncommon which makes accessing support more difficult. The Government will explore options for moving to regional commissioning and regional budgets to improve collaboration and ensure children with these complex needs can access a suitable placement without being affected by regional variations in what is offered. In your answer, you may want to consider: Children who have experienced early trauma, disrupted attachments and time spent in care are highly likely to be disproportionately included in the category of those with low incidence, highly complex needs, as they frequently also have additional diagnoses, including FASD, autism, ADHD and specific learning difficulties, creating uniquely complex profiles of need. There are very few settings which can meet the needs of this cohort of children. Too many adoptive families are forced into home educating their children (around 6-10% in any given year according to the Adoption Barometer) – around 80% of these home educating adoptive parents would prefer their child to be in a school if a school could be found that could meet their needs. Proposals for regional commissioning of specialist settings must include a requirement for every region to have at least one specialist school for the education of children with a background of complex trauma and attachment disruption.
Q22. How can Specialist Provision Packages be designed to effectively support the main types of need we currently recognise? Expand The context: The Government will introduce standardised Specialist Provision Packages of support for children with the most complex needs. They anticipate that approximately seven different Packages will be developed, each reflecting a particular set of support needs, which will set out the interventions and resources required to support children in receipt of the Package. Children who need a Specialist Provision Package will have an education, health and care plan (EHCP) setting out the over-arching support and reviewed at the end of each key stage, and a digital Individual Support Plan setting out the day-to-day support and more regularly reviewed. Decisions about the appropriate setting for children with EHCPs will depend on which settings are able to offer the Support Package. In your answer, you may want to consider: Some children have complex, overlapping needs which will not fit neatly into any single Package. It is difficult to see how, for example, an adopted child with social and emotional support needs, dyslexia and FASD could easily be accommodated by a single, pre-defined Specialist Provision Package. It is not clear that all schools will offer all Packages – in fact the proposals state that settings will be commissioned to provide placements for the whole group of children assigned to a Package, and acknowledge that a change of setting might be needed in order for children to access the chosen Specialist Provision Package. This will effectively limit parental choice only to settings which can offer the Package identified. How will the Government ensure that all children can access the appropriate Package at a school in their local area? Although ISPs will be a mandatory provision, parents will not have legal recourse should they have concerns about the provision outlined on the ISP or the delivery of this provision. This amounts to a watering down of parents’ legal rights compared to the current situation where provision is outlined on the EHCP with a legal recourse for resolving disputes.
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? Expand The context: The Department for Education and the Department for Health and Social Care will work with NHS England to enable better information sharing to speed up the process of matching children to a Specialist Provision Package, effectively creating a fast track route for children under 5. In your answer, you may want to consider: Many care-experienced children will not attend early years settings consistently, nor have consistent contact with education and health professionals during their early years due to unstable family situations, changes of placement and moves to adoptive or kinship families. They risk missing out on the possibility of fast track identification of their needs. The fast track option should be extended to all care-experienced children of any age in respect of the likely delays to assessment and diagnosis that they will have experienced during their early lives.
Q26. What factors should LAs take into account in proposing to parents and young people a list of potential settings to name on a plan? Expand The context: The principle of ‘presumption to mainstream’ will be retained so that local authorities (LAs) will still have a strong duty to secure a mainstream place for children with an EHCP if requested. LAs will provide parents with a list of settings able to provide the Specialist Provision Package identified for the child, and parents will be able to choose any of these settings or express a preference for an alternative setting which can deliver the Package. Effectiveness, value for money and the needs of other children in the setting will be considered in making decisions about preferences. Parents will still be able to appeal to Tribunal if they disagree with a placement decision, but the Tribunal will no longer decide on the placement – instead they can request that the Local Authority reconsiders the placement decision. (N.B. this change to the Tribunal’s powers is not being consulted on as part of this consultation). In your answer, you may want to consider: There are no reassurances that there will be several settings in the local area which can offer each Specialist Provision Package. If only one setting can offer the identified Package then there will effectively be no choice of setting. The proposal risks reducing parental choice to a question purely of whether a setting can or cannot deliver the Specialist Support Package identified. This ignores other considerations, including locality of the setting, the ability of the setting to meet the child’s social and emotional needs, the ethos of the setting (e.g. faith schools), the setting attended by a child’s siblings, etc.
Q39. This consultation outlines a series of measures intended to reform the SEND system. Some of these measures have already been finalised, and this is clearly indicated within the document... Expand With this in mind, is there anything further you would like to contribute to help inform the remaining proposals that are still under consideration? This question provides an opportunity to raise any issues which you feel have not been covered in the rest of the consultation questions.
Mandy Rowsell Director, Wales Expand Mandy is Director of Wales, both staff and volunteers. Her role ensures that all of the services are delivered to the highest of standards. Mandy also works closely with the central team at the National Adoption Service, as well as working collaboratively with regional managers and teams to deliver support and improve standards and services in Wales. She has over 25 years of practical management experience , 10 of those gained in the charity sector in a number of roles supporting volunteers, families and young people. She is also a qualified children and young person advocate representing care-experienced young people's views and experiences. Mandy is a mum to 2 boys and outside of work her life revolves around their hobbies. Mandy loves all things Rugby and is also a Team Manager for her son’s rugby team. Mandy’s family are avid caravanners and like to jump in the car and take their tourer to new places whenever they get the chance!
Joanna Duggan Director of Fundraising, Marketing and Communications Expand Joanna is a senior fundraising and marketing leader with over 15 years’ experience in the nonprofit sector. At Adoption UK, she leads income generation, marketing, communications, and policy, driving sustainable growth, strengthening brand and engagement, and influencing policy to improve outcomes for adoptive families. Prior to this, she was Director of Fundraising, Communications & Marketing at Newlife the Charity for Disabled Children and Director of Income Generation & Marketing at John Taylor Hospice. Joanna has also served as a magistrate and held several board-level roles. She holds a degree in psychology and a certificate in fundraising management.
Process Expand The Adoption Process Scotland's Adoption Register Dispelling the Myths of Adoption Additional Support Needs
Parenting Expand Therapeutic Re-parenting Parenting Adopted Teenagers Dan Hughes PLACE Parenting Promoting good sleep in adopted children Self-Regulation Managing Transitions