UK SEND Reform 2025: What the Improvement Plan Really Means for Families and Providers

## The System Was Broken Before Anyone Said So The 2023 SEND and Alternative Provision Improvement Plan didn't reveal a crisis — it confirmed one that families had been navigating alone for years. Too many children waiting more than 20 weeks for an Education, Health and Care Plan. Too many families in tribunal. Too many young people falling off a cliff at 25 when adult services failed to pick them up. The Improvement Plan was the Government's acknowledgement that the system built by the Children and Families Act 2014 had not delivered its promise. What matters now is whether the reforms that follow can do better. ## What the Improvement Plan Actually Says The plan rests on three pillars: a stronger local inclusion infrastructure, a more consistent and better resourced national framework, and improved accountability and transparency. > "Every child and young person with SEND should have the right support, in the right place, at the right time — and parents and carers should not have to fight for it." This sounds obvious. The fact that it needs to be restated after a decade of the 2014 Act is itself a damning verdict on what came before. ### Local Inclusion Plans Local authorities are now required to publish Local Inclusion Plans (LIPs) — setting out how education, health and care services will work together in their area to support children and young people with SEND. This is a significant structural shift. It moves responsibility back into localities while demanding more transparency and joint accountability than existed before. For care providers and schools, this matters because it creates a framework you can reference — and challenge — when services don't join up. For families, it means a document you can point to when the system fails to deliver what it promised locally. ### Standardised and Digitised EHC Plans One of the most practically significant commitments in the plan is the move toward standardised, digitised EHC plans. The current system allows for extraordinary variation between local authorities — in format, content, quality, and accessibility. A family moving across a local authority boundary can face a process that looks entirely different. Standardisation means a plan created in one authority should be readable and transferable in another. Digitisation means the plan can be accessed, shared, and updated in ways that paper and PDF cannot support. ### Strengthened Family Rights The plan strengthens several existing rights and introduces clearer accountability mechanisms. Schools and local authorities must be able to demonstrate that they have genuinely co-produced plans with families — not simply consulted them. Families have the right to a named SENCO contact, to contribute to annual reviews, and to receive written reasons for decisions within specified timeframes. These rights existed before but were routinely ignored or poorly understood. The Improvement Plan creates clearer expectations around their enforcement. ## What's Still Missing The Improvement Plan is ambitious, but three significant gaps remain. **Funding clarity.** The high needs block is under severe pressure in virtually every local authority in England. Many have issued s.114 notices or come close. The plan does not adequately address the structural underfunding that makes everything else harder. **Workforce.** There are not enough qualified SENCOs, specialist teachers, educational psychologists, or SEND-experienced care workers. Recruitment and retention targets in the plan are aspirational rather than funded. **Transition.** The plan improves provision up to 25 but does not fix the fundamental problem that adult services are commissioned on an entirely different basis. The handover at 25 remains a structural cliff-edge that policy language alone cannot address. ## What This Means for Care Providers If you provide care and support for people with SEND — whether in supported living, residential care, or community settings — the Improvement Plan has several direct implications. CQC's new Single Assessment Framework now expects you to demonstrate not just safe care but **good** care, evidenced continuously rather than at inspection points. The days of preparing a file for inspection are over in principle. You need systems that generate compliance evidence as a byproduct of good practice, every day. The push for joined-up care also means care providers will increasingly be expected to share information with schools, NHS services, and local authorities in ways that current fragmented systems make almost impossible. The organisations that invest in digital infrastructure now will be better positioned to meet these expectations. ## What This Means for Families The most important thing the Improvement Plan does for families is make the standards clearer. When a local authority fails to produce an EHC plan within 20 weeks, or fails to consult you properly, or fails to publish their Local Inclusion Plan — you now have a more explicit framework to hold them to account. This doesn't make the fight easier. Tribunal rates have not fallen. But it gives families and advocates better ground to stand on, and it puts pressure on the system to explain its failures rather than simply absorb them. ## The Technology Gap What neither the 2014 Act nor the 2025 Improvement Plan has addressed is the technology infrastructure required to deliver on these ambitions. Standardised, digital EHC plans require platforms that can create, share, and update them. Joined-up care requires systems that talk to each other. Real-time family visibility requires software built with that purpose. This is exactly the gap SENDHub is designed to fill. Not as a policy response, but as practical digital infrastructure for the system the Improvement Plan is trying to build. The reform is right in direction. The question is whether the tools will exist to make it real.