February 26, 2026
Individual Support Plans: What Schools Need to Know About the New Statutory Duty
Blog
The Schools White Paper, Every Child Achieving and Thriving, has been published today. It represents the most significant reform to the SEND system in over a decade, and every SENCO, headteacher and school leader in England needs to understand what it means. Not eventually, but now.
This blog sets out what the White Paper contains, what changes for schools, what stays the same for the time being, and how leadership teams can start preparing today rather than scrambling later.
A formal consultation, SEND Reform: Putting Children and Young People First, has been published alongside the White Paper and is open until 18 May 2026.
The White Paper introduces a fundamental restructuring of how SEND support is identified, delivered and evidenced across mainstream schools. The government's framing is built around three shifts: narrow to broad, sidelined to included, and withdrawn to engaging. For SEND, the central message sits in that second shift: children with SEND must be able to attend their local mainstream school and have their needs met by highly trained teachers, leaders and support staff.
This is not a suggestion. It is backed by over £4 billion in new funding, a new statutory duty on schools, and a complete redesign of how support is structured.
The reforms follow the government's national conversation on SEND, which saw ministers hold over 100 listening sessions with families, alongside the Education Select Committee's report on Solving the SEND Crisis, which called for a root-and-branch transformation of the system.
The key reforms fall into five areas that every school leader should understand.
This is one of the most immediately practical changes. The White Paper introduces a new statutory duty on nurseries, schools and colleges to record and monitor SEN and provision through an Individual Support Plan for every child with identified additional needs.
This is stronger than many expected. ISPs are not optional or informal. Schools will be legally required to create and maintain them.
The government describes this as an expansion of rights, extending formal recognition of need to the estimated 1.28 million children who currently receive SEN Support but have no statutory plan. The White Paper also references new digital plans that record additional needs, signalling an expectation that schools move to digital systems for managing this information.
In practical terms, this means schools will need to create, maintain, review and evidence ISPs at a scale that most have never managed before. For a secondary school with 200 pupils on the SEN register, this is not a marginal administrative task. It is a fundamental shift in how SEND documentation is structured and maintained across the school.
Schools that already have strong, centralised systems for managing support plans will be well positioned. Schools that rely on scattered documents, inconsistent recording and SENCO memory will face an enormous challenge.
The current binary model, SEN Support or EHCP, is being replaced by a structured approach to graduated support. While the full detail will become clearer through the consultation, the structure broadly works as follows.
Inclusive mainstream provision is what every child should receive through quality-first, adaptive teaching. The White Paper makes clear that the government sees high standards and inclusion as "two sides of the same coin." Every classroom teacher is expected to identify and respond to commonly occurring needs, backed by the new £200 million SEND teacher training programme.
Targeted support is the next level, covering children whose needs are not met through universal provision alone. Schools will be expected to provide structured, evidenced interventions, including small-group work and specific programmes, funded through the new Inclusive Mainstream Fund.
Specialist Provision Packages are a significant new element. These are nationally defined, evidence-based packages that set out the kind of support children and young people with the most complex needs will receive. They will form the basis for future EHCPs. The government has published the Specialist Provision Packages alongside the consultation.
EHCPs will remain for children with the most complex needs, underpinned by these new Specialist Provision Packages. The government states this will end the postcode lottery and ensure children receive evidence-based support rather than provision that varies by local authority.
For schools, the ability to clearly evidence what support has been provided at each level, and why a child needs to move to a higher level, becomes essential. Schools that cannot demonstrate a structured, well-documented approach to graduated support will find it significantly harder to secure the right provision for their pupils.
One of the most significant practical changes for schools is the expansion of specialist support into mainstream settings.
The new Experts at Hand service, backed by £1.8 billion over three years, will create a bank of specialists in every local area, including speech and language therapists, educational psychologists and specialist SEND teachers. Schools can draw on this service for any child who needs support, regardless of whether they have an EHCP.
Alongside this, special schools and alternative provision will be expected to provide expert training, direct interventions with children and short-term placements. The White Paper states that once rolled out, an average secondary school will receive over 160 days of dedicated specialist time every year, roughly an additional full school year of specialist input.
This represents a significant shift in how specialist expertise reaches mainstream classrooms. Schools will need systems in place to coordinate this input, record what support has been delivered, and evidence its impact.
The £4 billion headline breaks down into several distinct funding streams, and it is worth understanding what each one means in practice.
The Inclusive Mainstream Fund provides £1.6 billion over three years, paid directly to schools, early years settings and colleges. This is for targeted interventions at the earliest signs of additional need, including small-group work, structured programmes and early identification activity. Schools will need to show how this funding is being used and what impact it is having.
A new Inclusive Early Years Fund will provide additional funding to early years providers specifically to identify and respond where children have emerging additional needs.
The Experts at Hand service invests £1.8 billion over three years, commissioned through local authorities working with Integrated Care Boards.
An additional £200 million goes to Best Start Family Hubs for community SEND outreach, with a dedicated SEND practitioner in every hub. Another £200 million supports local authorities in transforming their operations.
The £3.7 billion capital investment funds 60,000 new specialist places and the creation of inclusion bases in schools. Every school will eventually be expected to have one.
The previously announced £200 million for SEND teacher training continues, with a new requirement in the SEND Code of Practice that all staff in every nursery, school and college should receive training on SEND and inclusion.
It is important to be realistic about what this funding means at school level. The Inclusive Mainstream Fund, spread across every setting in the country over three years, works out at roughly the cost of a few additional hours of staff time per week. It is welcome, but it is not transformative in isolation. The real question is whether the combined package, including funding, specialists, training and structural reform, creates enough capacity for mainstream schools to deliver on the promise of genuine inclusion.
These reforms do not exist in a vacuum. Ofsted has already introduced inclusion as a formal judgement within its inspection framework. Schools are being assessed on how well they educate all children, including those with SEND, right now.
The White Paper reinforces this direction. New School Profiles will act as a public information service for parents, showing attendance, attainment and enrichment data. The government is also exploring new progress measures that better capture the achievements of children who start secondary school significantly behind their peers.
The White Paper also introduces the concept of collective local accountability, with schools, local authorities, health services and other partners jointly responsible for children's outcomes across a community. This is a clear signal that SEND will not be treated as a school-only responsibility.
For school leaders, the message is consistent: SEND is no longer a peripheral concern managed by a single coordinator. It is a whole-school responsibility that will be judged through inspection, measured through data and visible to parents.
It is essential to understand the timeline. The White Paper sets out proposals for future legislation. It is not law today.
The SEND consultation is open now and closes on 18 May 2026. After that, any legislative changes must pass through Parliament. The White Paper sets out implementation in three phases:
During this time, existing law, existing EHCPs and existing rights remain in place.
No child loses their EHCP because of today's announcement. No legal right changes until new legislation is passed and implemented.
This is important context for families, and schools should be prepared to communicate it clearly.
The fact that implementation is phased does not mean preparation should wait. The government is explicit that schools should begin aligning to best practice now, with preparation for reforms beginning from the 2026-27 academic year. The schools that start building the right systems now will be in the strongest position when the reforms take effect.
There are several things every school can do immediately.
Audit your current SEND information systems. Where does SEND documentation live? Can leadership access it? Can class teachers find strategies for individual pupils without asking the SENCO? If information is scattered across emails, personal drives, shared folders and notebooks, that is the first problem to solve.
Prepare for the statutory ISP duty. The White Paper makes ISPs a legal requirement. Schools will need to maintain structured, up-to-date plans for every child with SEND, in a consistent digital format accessible to all relevant staff. This is the time to get that infrastructure in place.
Start recording interventions systematically. Under the new system, schools will need to evidence what support has been provided at each level, how consistently it has been delivered, and what impact it has had. If your school does not currently track interventions in a structured way, begin now.
Ensure provision maps and strategies are visible to teaching staff. The expectation of adaptive, inclusive teaching across every classroom requires teachers to know what adjustments are in place for each pupil. If this information only exists in the SENCO's files, it is not serving its purpose.
Brief your leadership team. SLT needs whole-school SEND visibility to plan staffing, allocate the new funding effectively, and prepare for Ofsted. Build this into your governance and reporting structures now.
Respond to the consultation. The SEND consultation is open until 18 May 2026. Schools have a direct opportunity to shape how these reforms are implemented.
Senflow was built precisely because the SEND systems most schools rely on were never designed for this level of complexity. With the White Paper now confirming a statutory duty to maintain ISPs, a structured approach to graduated support, evidence-based reassessments and Ofsted's inclusion focus, the need for structured digital SEND oversight has never been clearer.
Senflow provides the infrastructure schools need by centralising all SEND documentation, plans and reports in one place. Teachers and LSAs can access current strategies instantly, without relying on the SENCO to retrieve information. Interventions are tracked in real time, building the evidence base that will underpin the new graduated approach. Review timelines are managed automatically rather than manually. And leadership teams can see the full picture of SEND provision across the school at any point, not just when the SENCO has time to compile it.
As the reforms develop, Senflow will continue to evolve alongside them, ensuring that schools always have the tools they need to meet new expectations confidently.
Start your free trial at senflow.co.uk
We will be publishing more detailed guides on specific areas of the reforms over the coming weeks, including the practical detail of ISPs, how the Specialist Provision Packages work, and what the Experts at Hand service means for day-to-day school operations.
For now, the most important thing schools can do is understand the direction, assess their current systems honestly, and begin building the foundations for what is coming.
The reforms may be phased over the coming years. But the schools that will navigate them most successfully are the ones that start preparing today.
See how Senflow can help your school prepare
