The government published Every child achieving and thriving on 23 February 2026. The white paper sets out proposed major reforms to the system of support for children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) in England. They also published a consultation on the proposals, SEND reform: putting children and young people first. This consultation closed on 18 May 2026.
In response to the proposals, Lambeth and other local areas were asked to submit a detailed SEND Reform Plan outlining how we will work together with schools, health, social care and, of course, with children, young people and their families to implement the first stage of the reforms from September 2026.
To support the development of our plan, we completed a detailed assessment to measure the strengths and areas for improvement of our current services and the way we work together. We did this assessment at a SEND strategy day at Elm Green School, where we were joined by the Parent Carer forum lead and by children and young people from the SEND Youth Council, who helped to shape our understanding of how services were working for them.
Following that, we submitted the final version of our plan to the Department for Education on 19 June in line with a national deadline. Our plan for year one outlines 3 key areas of work.
All schools will have increased access to services and expertise to help them to develop their skills and knowledge in supporting children with SEND. This is a national requirement known as ‘Experts at Hand.’
In Lambeth, our experts will include:
- speech and language therapy
- educational psychologists
- specialist advisory teams, including area SENCOS
- teams to support around autism
- social, emotional and mental health teams
- hearing and visual impairment teams.
We will put in place new processes to enable schools to ask for support for individual children too, to make this quicker and easier.
We will continue to expand our SEND Inclusion Provision by increasing specialist provision in mainstream settings.
We will strengthen the support we provide to schools to help them to support children and young people’s social, emotional and mental health needs, focusing on intervening early to prevent needs from escalating. Aligned to this will be the continued expansion of mental health support teams across all our schools.
We are currently waiting for our plan to be approved by the Department for Education. We will update this page when our plan is finalised and will continue to keep you updated and involved as we move forwards. We will work closely with Lambeth Parent Carers Forum to do this.
Further information
You can read Every child achieving and thriving and SEND consultation supporting information on Gov.UK. These are shorter, simpler documents that summarise the schools white paper and SEND Consultation.
To read the full SEND white paper visit Every child achieving and thriving on Gov.UK