02/01/2026
As an Occupational Therapist, my role goes beyond individual interventions—it includes being politically aware and advocating for occupational rights and justice. For SEND families (my own included), barriers to meaningful participation are not just personal challenges; they are created and reinforced by systems that are inequitable and inaccessible. Supporting children and families means recognising how intersecting inequalities, language, culture, race, policies, funding, education, and health systems shape daily occupations and opportunities.
I guess I'll be one of those "inundating" my MP 🙄.
**SEND Reform: What the leaks reveal- about policy, culture and intent**
Over the past 48 hours, media outlets have carried what are explicitly described as “leaks” from Whitehall insiders regarding the Government’s intended direction on SEND reform.
Let us be clear.
These are not speculative briefings. They are purposeful, timed and sequenced disclosures, framed to test reaction and establish narrative ahead of the formal publication of the White Paper.
The language used matters… not only for what it proposes, but for what it reveals.
This is not exploratory. It is a controlled release of information from within Whitehall, attributed to officials close to the process. It also mirrors language already circulating in policy and operational settings, and it exposes an emerging lexicon of SEND reform: “mild autism”; “unreasonable expectations”; “thresholds and limits”; “discretion, not law”.
Leaks are not neutral.
They are signals.
What is being signalled here is statement of intent; that the comprehensive findings and recommendations SEND Inquiry will be quietly sidelined; that the much-trailed “listening” exercise was not, in practice, listening at all. And yes, that so-called reform will not seek to tackle the real issues driving systemic failure. And instead will seek to re-characterise statutory SEND protections as excessive, permissive or misused, in order to justify stripping legal rights from hundreds of thousands of highly vulnerable children.
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**What this leak is really doing**
Read plainly, the leak performs several functions at once.
⚠️ First, it normalises the idea that statutory protections should be narrowed before Parliament has debated the principle. By presenting the direction of travel as settled, inevitable or already justified, it shifts the debate away from whether rights should be reduced and towards how that reduction should be managed.
⚠️ Second, it reframes challenge as illegitimate. Concerns grounded in evidence of harm, illegality and maladministration are recast as emotional, unreasonable or self-interested. This is a familiar manoeuvre: when delivery failure can no longer be denied, attention is redirected towards those who expose it.
Framing those who object to the erosion of children’s legal protections as hysterical or extreme is not a sign of confidence in reform.
It is the tell.
When a proposal cannot be defended on its merits without diminishing the credibility of those it affects, the problem is not the opposition.
It is the proposal.
⚠️ Third, it prepares the ground for the next stage; the counter-briefing.
We should shortly expect indignant and righteous “official” claims that the Department has, in-fact listened and engaged; that proposals, while not yet published, will reflect what families and professionals have said they want.
The sequencing matters. Narrative is established first; legitimacy is asserted afterwards.
This is not co-creation.
It is narrative conditioning.
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**The narrative versus the reality**
Measure what Matters has been examining delivery, governance and statutory compliance across local government for over eighteen months. That work has focused not on abstract policy design, but on assessing how systems operate in practice- through experiential evidence; family testimonies, and professional input as well as externally verifiable, published data, complaints, tribunal outcomes. Together these present strong identifiable patterns of local authority performance and behaviour.
SEND has become the most exposed area of failure- not by chance, but because reform proposals have forced into view problems long embedded in weak delivery and impaired governance across local authorities.
The consistent finding has been that the SEND framework is not failing spontaneously. It is being systematically undermined at the point of delivery — through delay, obstruction, poor-quality decision-making and the erosion of accountability.
Statutory rights have mattered not because they are over-used, but because they have been among the few mechanisms capable of exposing that failure.
We could not be clearer. Removing those rights does not resolve the dysfunction.
It endorses and embeds it.
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**Where responsibility now sits and why your MP has never mattered more**
It is important to be precise.
Whitehall may brief.
Officials may leak.
Ministers may frame.
But in the UK, only Parliament can decide whether statutory protections for children with SEND are narrowed, redefined or removed.
What is being proposed is not a technical adjustment. MPs are being asked to endorse a retreat from legal protection for children with SEND that is almost unprecedented in scope — particularly in an area where failure to deliver statutory duties is already the defining issue.
However — critically — there is one respect in which Whitehall appears to have fundamentally misread the room.
The confidence underpinning these briefings rests on an assumption that this moment will follow a familiar pattern: that enough MPs will ultimately acquiesce; that opposition can be managed through narrative framing; and that concerns about legality, harm and accountability can be absorbed by reassurance and appeals to fiscal inevitability.
That assumption about MPs is both revealing and extremely unflattering.
But it is also wrong.
What distinguishes this moment is not the volume of dissent, but the clarity of evidence.
MPs are no longer being asked to act on abstract warnings or contested claims. They are being presented with a growing, documented body of evidence showing systemic non-delivery of statutory duties, repeated findings of maladministration, and the devastating lived consequences for children and families.
In that context, attempts to reframe the problem as one of excessive entitlement rather than failed implementation are unlikely to land as intended.
In our view- they do not simplify the choice before Parliament; they sharpen it.
This is no longer a debate about whether the SEND system is under strain. It is a decision about whether the appropriate response to documented failure is to strengthen accountability- or to retreat from the only legal protections that make that failure visible.
That distinction will not be lost on MPs. And it is precisely why confidence that this will “pass quietly” looks dangerously misplaced.
So, in our view, that is the issue Parliament must now examine…. not whether SEND law has gone “too far”, but why this Government would be willing to pursue reform that locks in and normalises failure by removing the very rights that expose it.
Measure what Matters.
