Schools White Paper: Every Child Achieving and Thriving

Before we come to the statement from the Secretary of State for Education, I must once again note Mr Speaker’s disappointment about briefing to the media before important announcements are brought to this House, given the Government’s own rules in their ministerial code. As the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee recently stated,

“making the most important statements in the first instance to Parliament means doing so before they are made to the media and not at the first available opportunity thereafter.”

The Government need to either adhere to their own rules or change them.

Madam Deputy Speaker, please allow me to begin by saying that the unauthorised leaking of elements of today’s announcement is deeply regrettable. I have already asked officials to launch a full investigation into the source to ensure that such breaches do not happen again.

With permission, Madam Deputy Speaker, I will now make a statement to update the House on this Government’s work to transform education in this country, because childhood is changing. Our children are growing up in a world of ever-increasing connectivity and communication, but uncertainty and mistrust are on the rise, too. Our children have the curiosity, resilience and enterprise to succeed, but a vision for education that stops at the school gates has failed to deliver the opportunities they need.

Under the last Government, absence was at historic highs. Despite the heroic efforts of staff, the disadvantage gap is still stubbornly wide, children with special educational needs and disabilities are still sidelined, and bright pupils are still left to drift along. A system of high standards for some, but not for others, is not good enough; high standards and inclusion must go hand in hand.

The last Government’s vision for education was too narrow. No school is an island, and for children to do well, we need to look outside the classroom as well as inside it. We need to rebuild the services on which families rely. That is why we have acted fast, beginning to remove the stain of child poverty, rolling out free breakfast clubs, expanding free school meals and removing the two-child limit. I am deeply proud that this Labour Government will have lifted more than half a million children out of poverty by 2030. We have also delivered the expansion of 30 hours of Government-funded childcare; we are rolling out Best Start family hubs, and we will fund a SEND practitioner in every hub.

Today, we go further. We are publishing our schools White Paper, a vision for schools that do not stand alone, but are at the heart of happy and healthy childhoods. For every child, a great local school—a school of ambition and achievement; a school filled with sport, music and drama; a school of high standards and inclusion. Let there be no doubt: standards will rise for all children. Those born under this Labour Government will on average leave school with a grade 5 or higher across their GCSEs, and I will not have higher standards for some while others are left behind. The disadvantage gap was as stark in 2024 as it was a decade before, but now we will cut it in half. We will boost the impact of the pupil premium and the national funding formula, consulting on better targeting, and we will deliver three big shifts in our schools.

The first big shift will be from narrow to broad, capturing the true breadth of opportunity, starting before children even reach the classroom with our Best Start family hubs. To improve the transition into reception, we will establish partnerships between early years and schools, and staff will work together to help children settle. School days will be energised by a broad and rich curriculum that contains the knowledge and skills for all our young people to succeed, and we will consult on measuring attainment and progress, improving the Progress 8 measure to strengthen the academic core and support students to pursue subjects that strengthen our economy and our society, such as drama, art and design, if that is the route they want to take.

I call the shadow Secretary of State.

I thank the right hon. Lady for advance sight of her statement, and her officials and advisers for briefing me over the weekend. I pay tribute to those who have pulled together a 300-page document, which I will now attempt to scrutinise in the five minutes that I have available to me today.

I turn first to SEND. The principles of more support in schools, evidence-led packages, early intervention, and more speech and language therapists are welcome, but despite the 300 pages there is still much that we do not know. We do not know exactly how children will qualify for an EHCP in the future, and no clear eligibility criteria for the so-called specialist provision are set out. There will be around seven packages of support when someone gets an EHCP, but we are not told what these packages of support are, how people qualify for them or how much money will be associated with each. That makes it quite difficult to judge how effective the new system will be, let alone legislate for it.

Many questions also spring from the individual support plans, or ISPs, which will take place in schools. It is not clear from the document what will trigger an ISP, nor the funding that will be associated with it. At the moment, schools generally have to cover the first £6,000 of support before an EHCP is triggered. What will be the new threshold for schools to cover?

On funding, I note the £1.6 billion pot for inclusive mainstream provision over three years, which equates to £24,000 per year per school if divided evenly across every school in England. That is nowhere near enough for the extra work that schools will have to cover to write individually tailored ISPs for every SEND child. This is a mammoth burden to place on schools—one that I do not necessarily think is misplaced, but £24,000 a year is not enough to help them manage it. It is not a recipe for inclusion, but a recipe for disaster. Can the Education Secretary tell schools what additional funding will be available to help them hire extra SENCO support to help them deal with these pressures? Unbelievably, the workforce plan for 6,500 teachers—incidentally, it will not deliver 6,500 more teachers—says nothing about special educational needs provision within the workforce, perhaps because it tries to ignore primary schools altogether.

I will seek to respond to the right hon. Lady’s questions. I welcome the broadly constructive approach she has taken, but it would be remiss of me not to point out that so many of the problems we are dealing with were left behind by the Conservative party, and an ounce of humility, contrition or understanding as to how we got here would really enlighten our understanding of what we need to do to make change happen.

As I said in my statement, I recognise that the intentions behind the 2014 reforms were good intentions, but it became very clear, very quickly that problems were developing within that system. The right hon. Lady asks about council deficits and about the challenge. That became pretty clear, pretty quickly, and in 2019 the Conservatives brought in the statutory override, because it was clear that councils were struggling with the increasing demands they were facing.[Official Report, 2 March 2026; Vol. 781, c. 6WC.] (Correction) That, however, did not happen in isolation. It happened because, between 2010 and 2019, family support services were stripped away—Sure Start centres closed, early help went, children were left to struggle—and we stored up problems for the future. The failure to identify and support children sooner is part of the reason we continue to see escalating need in our school system.

Today, we are putting that right. We will address the challenges that children and families face at the earliest possible point, not wait until years down the line when things have reached crisis point. That is as true in our schools as it is in children’s social care. It is also why we will take action to clamp down on the massive expansion in private equity-backed, independent specialist provision that is sucking money out of our education system into profit when it should be focused on outcomes for children.

I call the Mother of the House.

The Secretary of State will be aware how traumatic it is for a child to grow up with special educational needs and to support such a child. She will also be aware that disproportionate numbers of those children come from marginalised communities, and of those parents’ anxiety that these reforms will mean, in the long run, that children will lose access to support that they are legally entitled to now.

The Secretary of State has said that she wants to reform the SEN system once and for all, but we cannot reform it without the work and the support staff. Just recently, a London borough has seen a third of its staff resign. Will the Secretary of State tell the House how, in order to deliver on her aspirations, which we all share, she will make sure that the staff are there, are paid, and do not face the pressures that they face currently?

My right hon. Friend is right to identify that far too many groups within our country—marginalised communities—are let down by a system that forces parents to fight. The intention behind what we are setting out today is to make it easier for parents and children to get early and better support without having to go through a legal, bureaucratic process in which, sadly, parents who do not have resource are sometimes unable to take part. The Children’s Commissioner will also consider those questions of disproportionality, and will continue to give us oversight of the system as we make that transition.

I recognise the point that my right hon. Friend raises around the need to support staff, both in recruiting and retaining them, but what we are setting out today on the schools White Paper and SEND is part of our wider approach on children’s social care, on investing in early help and family prevention, and of course with our action on child poverty, which will make a huge material difference to the life chances of children.

I call the leader of the Liberal Democrats.

I thank the Secretary of State for advance sight of her statement. I declare an interest as my son, John, has an EHCP, which is critical to his education and to our whole family’s wellbeing. That is why we, like so many families, have been dreading today. We all know that the crisis in SEND must end—the fights, the exhaustion, the underfunding and the private profiteering all must change. It is why the Conservatives’ failure to apologise for the crisis really angered me and will have infuriated families across the country. However, as we fix the crisis, children’s rights must not be stripped away. As we consider the Secretary of State’s proposals seriously, we will continue to listen to and champion all the families whose lives could be impacted profoundly.

I have three questions for the Secretary of State. First, early intervention is critical to improving children’s lives and making the whole system affordable, and I worry that these modest changes will not shift the dial. Will the Secretary of State consider investing in universal screening and then active support for the child and their family earlier on?

My second question concerns the plans for EHCPs. Speaking for my family and for many others like mine, it is hard to believe that the range and complexity of needs and disability can be captured in a small number of predefined EHCP packages. Can the Secretary of State guarantee that her changes will mean that the voices of parents—the real experts on their children—will at long last be heard when decisions are made?

Finally, on changes to the pupil premium, which was devised, championed and introduced by our party, will the Secretary of State give a clear commitment that no individual child, wherever they live, will see their pupil premium funding reduced? Will she instead boost the pupil premium to put right the cuts and betrayals of the Conservative party?

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman, who cares deeply about this matter as both a parent and a politician, for the approach he has taken, and I look forward to working with him and his party in the weeks and months to come. We share a commitment to ensuring that the move from one system—one that we can all agree is not working—to a better one is phased and done carefully. I agree that the voices of parents must be heard right throughout that process.

The right hon. Gentleman asks about early support. I completely agree with what he says, which is why we are investing £1 billion in rolling out Best Start family hubs, expanding early years education and school-based nurseries and investing in local authorities’ ability to develop early help.[Official Report, 2 March 2026; Vol. 781, c. 6WC.] (Correction) Colleagues will note in the material we have published that we will continue to see an increase in EHCPs in the years to come before we see a plateauing and then a reduction. The reason for that is that we want to do this in a managed way. I hope that we can reduce those numbers more quickly—not for any arbitrary reason or because we are chasing a number, but because we should be supporting children much earlier. The evidence from Sure Start was clear: if we step in earlier and support families, we reduce the need for SEND support later on in school, especially in areas such as speech and language support, because we have met that need more quickly.

I understand the right hon. Gentleman’s point around transition and education, health and care plans. We have already set out some detail on specialist provision packages, which will be shaped by an expert panel independent of Government—we will put that on the statute book. There will also be clear national accountability and national standards to move away from the postcode lottery that we have seen recently. I know that the right hon. Gentleman is also interested in how we can ensure that cases of high need and low incidence are addressed through regional models, which we have committed to considering through the consultation.

I call the Chair of the Education Committee.

I welcome the publication of the schools White Paper, the clear statement of intent from the Government on narrowing the attainment gap and the consultation on SEND reform. I appreciate the time that the Government have taken, in preparing these reforms, to listen to parents, carers and children and young people across the country who are being failed by the current SEND system. I am encouraged to see many of the priorities identified by the Education Committee in our report “Solving the SEND Crisis” in the consultation paper, including early identification of need, reform of mainstream provision and strengthened accountability.

The Secretary of State knows that it is impossible to overstate the anxiety of parents and carers who have been failed by the current system about what reform will mean for them, and rebuilding their trust must be central to the Government’s approach. Parents and carers are particularly anxious about the requirement in the proposals for a child with an education, health and care plan to be reassessed at the end of their current stage of education. What assurance can the Secretary of State give parents who are worried about this change that reassessment will not mean loss of support, that their views will be listened to during the 12-week consultation period, and that the Government remain flexible to respond to the feedback that is received?

I am grateful to the Chair of the Education Committee and all members of the Committee for their very serious work and report. She will see reflected in what we are setting out today that the Committee’s work has shaped our approach. I am grateful to the Committee and all its members for their support in this.

I completely recognise what she says about the anxieties and worries of parents. I have spoken to parents the length and breadth of the country about the fights they have had to go through and how tough it has been to secure the support that their children need. I want to thank and pay tribute to our SEND development group, which has worked so closely with us to ensure that the voices of parents, carers, children and those who are delivering services have been heard as we shape our reforms.

We do want to do this carefully. This is a decade-long process and transition that we are embarking on. From now until the commencement of legislation in 2029, the current system, with all its existing duties and rights, will continue. Only after that will we begin to move children through our new system of support. My hon. Friend will recognise that children should be assessed annually through the EHCP process. Frequently that does not happen or it does not happen well. Our intention is to deliver better, expanded support more quickly for a wider group of children and to manage that carefully. We have made a commitment that all children in specialist provision with an EHCP will be able to remain within specialist provision unless their parents take the decision to move.

I do recognise the wider point about transition, especially in post-16 education. We want to continue to work with colleges and providers to ensure the smoothest move for children. I know that that is an area that my hon. Friend has taken great interest in, and it has been flagged to us as a real concern.

I welcome the right hon. Lady’s ambition, but where in all this will she retain the power to do something about councils that simply fail completely? An Ofsted report of my local council referred to it as disjointed and having weak co-ordination and limited accountability. It also talks of services falling short, parents being ignored and EHCPs never being granted when they should be. This is the reality for many of the parents that I meet. They are petrified. Will the Secretary of State explain what can be done about local councils’ failure? She speaks about EHCPs, but I have talked to parents recently and they are very worried. They struggled to try to get an EHCP, and now they are worried that somehow they will lose it. Could she reassure those parents that that will not happen?

On EHCPs, the transition, in terms of the phased review, will take place in 2029-30 for commencement in the academic year starting in 2030. The children to whom that would apply are currently in year 2. In the time we have available to us now, we will build up the system. It will be transformed from where we are now with the new investment that I have set out. It is genuinely new money and new investment that will make a huge difference.

There will be more support like an EHCP available without the fight for an EHCP. We used to have a system that delivered more of that; it was pulled away and we need to make it much more central to the work of schools. The right hon. Member is right to raise the responsibilities of local authorities. Although we have, together with colleagues across Government, acted to address the long-standing deficits built up by councils over many years, and we have committed to write down 90% of that, it will only happen, and the write-down will only follow, if local authorities produce SEND plans that will deliver accountability and the places and support for children. We will not tolerate failure. I will not tolerate failure.

Order. Can we have much shorter questions, please?