That's not a complaint. It's a statement of fact, and the numbers back it up.

The demand isn't slowing — and the DfE knows it

Let's start with what we actually know. As of January 2025, there were 638,700 children and young people in England with an Education, Health and Care Plan — a 10.8% rise in a single year, and the eleventh consecutive annual increase since EHCPs were introduced in 2014. Across the same period, the share of school-age pupils with an EHCP almost doubled, from 2.7% in 2016 to 5.2% in 2025.

That isn't a blip. Independent forecasting by Mime, working from DfE and ONS data, projects the EHCP cohort will grow to nearly 660,000 by 2026 — an increase of over 80,000 young people from 2024 — and to over 920,000 by 2040. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has been blunter still, pointing out that high-needs spending has already risen by 66% in real terms since 2016 to at least £12 billion, and warning that on current trajectories the 2026–2029 schools settlement headroom will be entirely consumed by SEND demand.

In Wiltshire, the picture mirrors the national one. As of 29 October 2025, we had 6,800 EHCPs in place — a 10.06% annual increase — with 1,185 new applications in the past 12 months alone.

So when the DfE talks about local authorities "managing demand" or "reducing reliance on EHCPs," they are doing so against their own statistics, their own forecasts, and the Office for Budget Responsibility's projection that cumulative high-needs deficits will reach £14 billion by 2027/28.

You cannot, with a straight face, tell local authorities that numbers will go down while your own modelling says they will keep going up.

The funding announcement that isn't quite what it sounds

Here's where it gets uncomfortable.

At the 2025 Budget, the Chancellor announced that from 2028/29 central government will take on responsibility for all future SEND deficits, with around £5.6 billion to cover 90% of historic deficits up to 2025/26. The statutory override that has been keeping deficits off council balance sheets has been extended to March 2028. On the face of it, that looks like central government finally accepting financial responsibility for a system that has been broken for years.

Look closer, though, and the picture is murkier.

The Institute for Government has pointed out the central tension: centralising the funding does not centralise the delivery. Local authorities will still hold the statutory duty for assessment, for issuing plans, for commissioning provision, for transport, for tribunal defence, and for everything else that flows from the 2014 Children and Families Act. What changes from 2028/29 is that any overspend lands on the Treasury rather than on us.

That sounds great until you ask the obvious question: what happens when the cost of meeting our statutory duties exceeds what the Treasury has decided to allocate?

I cannot see any version of this where the answer isn't: "Local authorities will be expected to absorb the difference, because the deficit must be down to your inefficiencies." West Northamptonshire Council are already a worked example — their access to historic deficit relief is conditional on submitting a SEND reform plan to the DfE by 19 June, with future support tied to "demonstrable delivery" against that plan, and the explicit threat that "persistent failure to demonstrate progress may result in formal intervention, including the removal of responsibility for SEND service delivery."

That isn't partnership. That's accountability without authority — the most uncomfortable position any commissioner can find themselves in.

The White Paper raises more questions than it answers

The Schools White Paper, Every Child Achieving and Thriving, was finally published on 23 February 2026 — after multiple delays and a separate consultation, SEND reform: putting children and young people first, that runs until 18 May. There are things in it I welcome: the shift towards mainstream inclusion, the proposed tiered model of universal/targeted/targeted plus/specialist support, the £200 million for teacher SEND training, and the £3 billion for around 50,000 new SEND places.

But the legislation needed to deliver the reformed system is not expected to come into force until September 2029. That means we have at least three more academic years of operating the current system — under the current law, with the current rising numbers, against a White Paper that explicitly tells us the future will look different.

How exactly do you commission a SEND specialist school satellite, agree a multi-year contract with an independent provider, recruit and train an educational psychology team, or invest in early intervention infrastructure when:

• The DfE's own forecasts say demand is going up,
• The DfE's own reform plan says it wants demand to go down,
• The legislation defining what demand even is won't change until 2029,
• The funding mechanism flips in 2028/29,
• And the conditions of historic deficit relief are tied to delivering reforms that aren't yet law?

You can't. Or rather, you can — but you do it knowing that whichever direction you choose, there's a reasonable chance central government will move the goalposts before the investment has had a chance to land.

The risk nobody at the DfE seems to want to name

The LGA's January 2026 survey of council chief financial officers found that 95% of responding councils currently hold high-needs DSG deficits, and 79% said they would not be able to set a balanced general fund budget in 2028/29 if the override were withdrawn without further intervention. Most starkly, 94% said they would continue to overspend even if their existing deficits were written off, because the underlying drivers of cost — demand, statutory duty, market failure in specialist provision — would still be there.

Translate that into plain English: the system itself loses money. Removing the historic debt without fixing the system means the debt simply rebuilds.

And yet the implicit message coming out of the DfE — through the conditional deficit relief, through the "demonstrable delivery" tests, through the threat of formal intervention — is that local authorities are the source of the inefficiency. That if we just managed our markets better, processed our assessments faster, kept more children in mainstream, and resisted parental challenge more robustly, we could square this circle.

We can't. Not because we're not trying. Because central government's own numbers say we can't.

What I think councils should be saying — loudly

I'm a serving councillor and a Cabinet Member, so I'm not in the business of throwing rocks for the sake of it. But I do think the sector needs to be much firmer in three messages right now.

First, the DfE has to be honest about its own forecasts. You cannot ask councils to plan for falling demand while your own statisticians are telling Parliament demand is going up. Either the projections are wrong — in which case publish the working — or they are right, in which case any reform plan that assumes savings has to show, with evidence, where those savings come from without compromising statutory entitlement.

Second, the funding-without-delivery model needs to be challenged before 2028/29 arrives. If central government is funding, central government has to share the risk of demand exceeding budget. If local authorities are still delivering, local authorities have to retain the flexibility to commission to need rather than to a formula set in Whitehall. You can't have both — central control of the money and local accountability for the outcome — without local authorities ending up as the political shock-absorber for unrealistic central commitments.

Third, the transitional period needs proper investment, not conditional rescue. The years between now and 2029 are when early intervention infrastructure has to be built if the reformed system is going to work in 2029 onwards. Councils are the bodies that have to build it. We cannot do that if every penny of historic deficit relief is contingent on hitting national reform milestones that don't yet exist in law, and if our 2026/27 and 2027/28 deficit support is being doled out year by year against a White Paper that the sector has only just begun to read.

Where this leaves us

I'll be honest — I'd rather be writing about specific, deliverable things this week. The reopening of the Northwood Centre satellite. The Short Breaks redesign. The Adoption West partnership. Real things that change real children's lives.

But none of that local work happens in a vacuum, and right now the policy weather coming out of the DfE is the single biggest variable in whether the next three years of SEND in Wiltshire are a story of careful investment paying off, or a story of councils running to stand still while central government rewrites the rules underneath us.

If the government means what it says about putting children and young people first, the test is going to be whether they trust the local authorities who deliver the system enough to give us a long-term, predictable, properly resourced framework to plan against.

On the evidence so far, I'm not yet convinced that they do.

Sources

• DfE, Education, Health and Care Plans: England, Reporting Year 2025 (26 June 2025)
• DfE, Special Educational Needs in England, 2024/25 (12 June 2025)
• DfE, Every Child Achieving and Thriving (Schools White Paper, 23 February 2026)
• DfE, SEND reform: putting children and young people first (consultation, open until 18 May 2026)
• House of Commons Library, The Schools White Paper 2026: SEND Reform (CBP-10550)
• Institute for Fiscal Studies, Support for children with disabilities and special educational needs (December 2025)
• Institute for Government, Central government's takeover of SEND deficits raises the stakes for SEND reform (5 December 2025)
• Institute for Government, Performance Tracker 2025: Schools (November 2025)
• Local Government Association, SEND crisis: Vast majority of councils warn of insolvency (5 February 2026)
• Local Government Association, SEND reform: Parliamentary briefing (December 2025)
• Mime, Forecasting the Growth in England's EHCP Cohort (June 2025)
• Office for Budget Responsibility, Economic and Fiscal Outlook (November 2025)
• House of Commons Library, Local Government Finance Settlement 2026/27 to 2028/29 (CBP-10485)

A system full of contradictions

Let me start with something that has bothered me throughout this process.

If a young person with SEND is 15, the law requires us to provide free home-to-school transport where they meet the eligibility criteria under section 508B of the Education Act 1996. If that same young person turns 16 and continues in education, there is no statutory duty to provide free transport at all — it becomes entirely discretionary, with the council required only to publish a Post-16 Transport Policy Statement setting out what arrangements it considers necessary. If they then turn 19 and remain in education with an EHCP, a statutory duty returns under section 508F: where the council considers transport "necessary" for an adult learner with an EHCP to attend their setting, it must be provided free of charge.

So the legal entitlement, broadly, runs: yes, then no, then yes again.

There is one important caveat to that. In exceptional cases, the SEND Code of Practice (paragraph 9.215) allows transport to be specified directly within an EHCP where the child or young person has particular transport needs. Where that happens, the transport becomes part of the legally binding provision in the plan. But these are exceptional cases, not the norm — the vast majority of EHCPs do not specify transport, and the standard statutory framework above is what applies to most learners.

The young person hasn't changed. Their needs haven't changed. Their geography hasn't changed. The only thing that's changed is their birthday. And yet the framework we operate within treats those three years between 16 and 19 as a statutory no-man's-land, where local authorities are expected to make ends meet on goodwill, discretion and a shrinking budget.

It is, frankly, a silly system. It reflects neither how young people actually develop nor how families actually live their lives. And it puts councils like ours in the impossible position of trying to do the right thing within a framework that wasn't designed with them in mind.

Rural Wiltshire is not urban anywhere

The consultation responses were unambiguous on one point above all others: rurality changes everything.

Public transport policy is largely written by people thinking about cities. Frequent buses. Trains every fifteen minutes. A tube map. The ability to step out of your front door and find a route to wherever you need to go.

Wiltshire is not that. Wiltshire is a county where the bus to the next village runs twice a day, where evening services dry up entirely, and where some of our specialist Post-16 settings — Fairfield Specialist College in Dilton Marsh being the obvious example — sit in locations that simply cannot be reached by public transport on anything resembling a sensible schedule. Around 35% of all Post-16 learners with an EHCP attend Fairfield. Most of them currently arrive by Council-commissioned taxi.

When national policy assumes Independent Travel Training will get young people onto a bus, that assumption breaks the moment you cross the M4 heading south. It's not that travel training doesn't work — it absolutely does, and I'll come to that. It's that the bus has to actually exist for travel training to be the answer.

This is why our policy is stepped, not blanket. It's why contracted transport remains on the table for those who genuinely need it. And it's why I will keep pushing back, hard, against any suggestion that rural authorities can simply adopt the same approach as our urban counterparts. We can't. The geography won't let us.

Why I genuinely believe in travel training

For all my frustration with the framework, I want to be clear about something: where Independent Travel Training is right for a young person, it is one of the most transformative things we can offer.

Think about what travel independence actually means. It means being able to get yourself to a job interview. It means being able to meet a friend in town on a Saturday. It means going to the cinema, joining a club, attending a medical appointment, picking up a prescription, visiting a relative — without having to ask someone else to drive you there.

For young people with SEND, that independence is not a small thing. It is the difference between an adulthood that's lived inside the family home and an adulthood that's lived in the community. It is the difference between social isolation and social connection. It is, in many cases, the difference between employment and unemployment, between mental wellbeing and mental ill-health, between a life with options and a life without them.

Our Community Connecting Team in Wiltshire is genuinely good at this work. They meet young people where they are. They go at the right pace. They build confidence in stages, alongside someone the young person trusts, until the bus journey that once felt impossible becomes routine.

When that lands — and it does land, repeatedly — what we've given that young person is not a bus pass. It's a future.

That's why I keep returning to the same point: the primary motivation for this policy change is not financial. It is preparing young people for adulthood. The savings matter, but they sit firmly in second place behind the question of what kind of life we want our young people to have access to.

The bit that keeps me up at night

Here's where I want to be honest in a way that perhaps a council report doesn't allow me to be.

I worry about the parents.

I worry about parents who have been carrying the weight of advocating for their child for years before this conversation even started — fighting for an EHCP, fighting for the right placement, fighting for therapy, fighting for the diagnosis, fighting just to be heard. I worry about parents who are already exhausted, already running on reserves they didn't know they had, and who now read in a council newsletter that something else they relied on is being reviewed, reshaped, or asked of them.

The financial pressures on local government are not going away. They are getting worse. Anyone who tells you otherwise is not paying attention. And every time we have to look at our budget and ask "what can change?", the people who feel that change most acutely are the families who were already at full stretch.

A parent reading this policy may see the words "individual assessment" and "stepped approach" and "we'll consider every case on its merits" — and what they may hear is "more forms, more meetings, more appeals, more uncertainty, more nights spent worrying whether their child will be able to get to college in September." I understand that. I do not dismiss it. I have heard it loud and clear in the consultation responses, in the Wiltshire Parent Carers Council submission, in conversations with families, and in the questions submitted to Cabinet today.

The honest truth is that I cannot promise families that this will be the last change. I would be lying if I did. The wider SEND system is under review nationally. The financial settlement for local government is under pressure. Demand for EHCPs continues to rise — Wiltshire alone now maintains 7,062 of them, with over 1,000 new applications this year. Something, somewhere, will continue to give.

What I can promise is this: when we make changes, we will explain them honestly. We will consult properly. We will build in appeals. We will protect those mid-course. We will keep contracted transport available for those who genuinely need it. And we will keep the door open to families who want to talk to us about what's happening in their lives.

That isn't enough. I know it isn't enough. But it's what I can offer, and it's what I will keep offering for as long as I hold this portfolio.

Where this leaves us

The policy passed today applies to young people entering Post-16 education from September 2026. No young person currently part-way through a two-year course will see their arrangements change. The stepped approach — public transport with travel training first, Personal Travel Budget where that isn't viable, Spare Seats Scheme where it works, contracted transport where nothing else does — is the most graduated, most individualised approach we could reasonably build within the constraints we face.

It is not a perfect policy. There is no perfect policy available, because the framework above us isn't perfect. But it is, I believe, a defensible one — and one that takes seriously both the financial reality and the human reality of the families it affects.

To the families who responded to the consultation, who came to the webinar, who wrote to me directly, who submitted questions to Cabinet: thank you. Genuinely. You have made this a better policy than it would otherwise have been, and you have made me think harder about every word of it.

The conversation continues. My door, as always, remains open.

The headline

The Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 received Royal Assent on 29 April 2026. It is the biggest reset of children's social care, safeguarding and schools law in England since the Children Act 2004.

For Lead Members, three things matter:

1. Most provisions are not yet in force. Royal Assent is the legal birth of the Act. Commencement is a separate process, and many of the headline duties depend on regulations and statutory guidance that have not yet been written.
2. Some duties bite quickly. A handful of provisions come into force on the day the Act passes or two months later. Others — including multi-agency child protection teams — are timetabled for 2027.
3. The implementation cost will land on local authorities. Almost every operational duty in the Act sits with the council, the safeguarding partners or the Director of Children's Services.

If you are the Lead Member, your job over the next 18 months is to scrutinise readiness, challenge timelines, and make sure the resourcing conversation is happening now — not when the commencement orders land.

A 30-second summary

The Act does five big things:

• Reforms child protection (multi-agency teams, information sharing, a single child identifier).
• Reforms children's social care (kinship offer, care leavers, agency worker rules, profit caps on placements, regional care co-operatives).
• Reforms home education and school attendance (Children Not in School registers, tighter rules on out-of-school education).
• Reforms schools (academies on the national curriculum, teacher pay and conditions, uniform cost cap, breakfast clubs, multi-academy trust inspections, new admissions framework).
• Introduces online safety and digital wellbeing measures (statutory mobile phone guidance, powers on under-16 social media access, curriculum changes from September 2027).

The rest of this article walks through each in turn, with the local authority obligation called out at the end of every section.

Part 1 — Child protection and safeguarding

Multi-agency child protection teams (MACPTs)

This is the biggest structural change for safeguarding. The Act amends the Children Act 2004 to require the three statutory safeguarding partners — the local authority, the NHS Integrated Care Board and the police — to establish at least one Multi-Agency Child Protection Team in every local authority area.

Each MACPT must have, as a minimum:

• A social worker (nominated by the council)
• A person with education experience (nominated by the council)
• A police officer (nominated by the constabulary)
• A health professional (nominated by the ICB)

The team's job is to support the local authority in discharging its section 47 duties under the Children Act 1989 — investigating where a child is at risk of significant harm. In practice, the policy intent is for MACPTs to lead section 47 enquiries, chair strategy meetings and child protection conferences, and oversee child protection plans.

What this means for your council: The local authority remains legally responsible for the child protection function — but the operational delivery model is being rewritten around a co-located, multi-agency team. You will need a memorandum of understanding with the ICB and police on staffing, governance and information sharing. Expect 2027 commencement, but the design work needs to start in 2026.

A single child identifier

The Act creates the legal framework for a consistent child identifier (often called a Single Unique Identifier, or SUI) — the long-asked-for "one number per child" that follows them across health, education and social care. The DfE intends to pilot the NHS number as the identifier.

Designated bodies will be required to include this identifier when processing information about a child for safeguarding purposes.

What this means for your council: Children's services data systems — case management, EHCP systems, school census interfaces, attendance, early help — will need to be able to capture, store and exchange the identifier. Start asking your IT and digital teams now about the cost and timeline of compliance.

A new statutory duty to share information

The Act places a clear statutory duty on safeguarding bodies (councils, ICBs, police, probation, youth offending teams, and designated education and childcare agencies) to share information where it would help another body safeguard or promote the welfare of a child — unless sharing would be detrimental to the child.

This is intended to end the long-running cultural problem of agencies citing data protection as a reason not to share. The Act explicitly says the duty must be considered alongside data protection law, not overridden by it.

What this means for your council: Refresh information-sharing protocols. Brief frontline staff. The legal basis is now stronger — but the professional judgement still has to be made.

Family Group Decision Making (FGDM) — a new duty

When a council is considering a court application for a care or supervision order, it must now offer a family group decision-making meeting to the child's parents (or anyone with parental responsibility), and must hold one if the offer is accepted.

The duty does not apply if the council determines it would not be in the child's best interests.

What this means for your council: This is a "near-front-door" duty. It needs trained facilitators, a clear referral pathway from social work teams considering proceedings, and capacity to convene meetings at short notice. This is one of the duties that comes into force relatively quickly — within months of Royal Assent — so it is the one to brief your DCS on first.

Wider safeguarding changes

• The offence of ill-treatment or wilful neglect by a care worker now extends to 16 and 17-year-olds in regulated establishments — closing a long-standing gap in the Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015.
• A new statutory framework for deprivation of liberty placements for children, beyond secure children's homes. This is intended to bring the cohort of children currently held in unregistered placements (669 children at £10,500/week as of September 2025, according to the Children's Commissioner) into a proper legal framework.

Part 2 — Children's social care

Kinship care: a statutory local offer

Councils must publish a kinship local offer — information about how they support kinship carers and children in kinship care, including what financial support is available locally. Councils must also take reasonably practicable steps to make sure carers and children actually receive it.

This bolsters existing DfE statutory guidance into a legal duty.

What this means for your council: If you do not already publish a kinship offer, you will need to. If you do, audit it against the new requirements — and plan for the demand that publication will generate.

Care leavers: "Staying Close" support

The Act requires councils to consider whether care leavers up to the age of 25 should receive "Staying Close" support — practical help with accommodation, health and wellbeing, relationships, education, training, employment and participation. Where their welfare requires it, councils must provide that support.

Councils must also publish their arrangements for supporting care leavers in the transition to adulthood.

What this means for your council: Expect a meaningful uplift in care leaver service demand. This is a duty that scrutiny committees and corporate parenting boards should be tracking from day one.

Sibling relationships

A clearer duty on local authorities to promote and maintain meaningful relationships between siblings, whether they live together or apart. The Children's Commissioner has highlighted that 32% of children with a sibling are separated from them when in care — this provision is intended to push that figure down.

Agency social workers

The Act gives ministers the power to make regulations on the use of agency workers in children's services — replacing the current statutory guidance regime introduced in 2024. The new regime will be enforceable, will cover staff beyond social workers, and will be able to set requirements on how locums are managed and supplied.

What this means for your council: If you are already heavily reliant on agency staff in children's services, the cost and supply implications could be significant. Workforce planning needs to factor this in now.

Profit caps on placement providers

Ministers can make regulations to cap the profits of non-local-authority registered children's social care providers. The government has said it will only use this power if other measures fail to reduce profiteering — but the legal lever is now in place. The Secretary of State also gains a power to commission independent business reviews of providers and warn councils where a provider may fail.

Regional Care Co-operatives

A new section 22J of the Children Act 1989 allows the Secretary of State to direct councils to establish regional co-operation arrangements for the strategic accommodation of looked-after children. The intent is to reduce the number of councils competing for placements (currently 150+) and use collective purchasing power to drive down costs and improve quality.

What this means for your council: Regional working may become mandatory. If your council is not already part of a regional pathfinder, find out which regional grouping you are likely to fall into and start the conversations.

Part 3 — Home education and school attendance

This is the most politically charged section of the Act, and the one Lead Members should expect to receive constituent correspondence on.

Children Not in School registers

Every local authority will be required to maintain a register of all children not in school — primarily home-educated children, but also children educated in unregistered settings or otherwise out of school.

Parents will be required to provide information including how much time each parent spends educating the child. Out-of-school education providers will also be required to provide details, with fines for non-compliance.

School Attendance Orders on new grounds

Councils gain powers to serve a notice and, if necessary, a School Attendance Order to send a child back to school where:

• The child is subject to a Child Protection Plan, or
• The child is being assessed under section 47 of the Children Act 1989, and
• The council believes school attendance is in the child's best interests.

Councils may also request home visits in connection with these powers.

What this means for your council: Your home education team will need new processes, data systems and trained staff to maintain the register, handle parental information returns, and operate the new SAO pathway. The CNIS provisions are widely expected to be in force from 2027 at the earliest, after regulations and guidance are finalised — but the operational planning starts now. Expect this to be a hot topic in scrutiny.

Illegal schools

Ofsted gets stronger powers to investigate suspected unregistered schools, with clearer routes to gather evidence and act where settings operate as schools without registration. This closes a long-standing loophole exploited by some unregulated religious settings.

Part 4 — Schools

Academies brought back into the national framework

This is a structural change to the schools landscape:

• Academies will be legally required to follow the national curriculum (commencing after the curriculum review concludes).
• Academies will be required to follow national pay and conditions for teachers.
• Multi-academy trusts will face dedicated Ofsted inspections for the first time.
• Academy orders for "inadequate" maintained schools become discretionary rather than automatic — schools deemed to have capacity to improve can be supported through new regional improvement teams instead.

A new admissions framework

A new framework gives the Schools Adjudicator powers to intervene where local agreement on admissions breaks down, with parental preference and school quality as the guiding principles. Lead Members should expect implications for their council's admissions function — particularly in two-tier areas or where academies dominate.

Cost-of-living measures

These are the provisions most parents will notice:

• Free breakfast clubs in all state primaries — over 2,000 expected to be open by September 2026.
• Free school meals extended — around half a million more children eligible.
• Branded uniform items capped at three (excluding ties), from September 2026.

What this means for your council: Direct delivery sits with schools, but councils have a role in monitoring, supporting smaller maintained schools to comply, and answering parental queries.

Mobile phones

The Act puts the existing DfE guidance on mobile phones in schools onto a statutory footing. All schools will be required to follow it.

Part 5 — Online safety and digital wellbeing

The Act gives ministers the power to act on the findings of the ongoing Children's Digital Wellbeing consultation, including measures around children's access to harmful internet services.

A particular flashpoint during the bill's passage was the question of restricting under-16 access to social media. The final position commits ministers to implementing restrictions following the consultation, with provisions for a review of OFCOM's enforcement powers within six months of Royal Assent.

From September 2027, the national curriculum must include age-appropriate material explaining why children under certain ages are restricted from accessing certain online services — covering both wellbeing implications and the business models behind online data collection.

What this means for your council: Less direct LA delivery here, but the implications for school safeguarding leads, designated safeguarding leads (DSLs) and youth services are significant. PSHE and RSHE leads will need to be briefed.

Part 6 — When does it all happen?

The Act uses a tiered commencement approach. Broadly:

• On Royal Assent (29 April 2026): powers to make regulations and orders.
• Two months after Royal Assent (late June 2026): the kinship local offer duty, extension of the wilful neglect offence to 16- and 17-year-olds, and a small number of other provisions.
• Through 2026 and into 2027: family group decision making duty, information sharing duty, and a phased rollout of social care reforms.
• 2027: multi-agency child protection teams, the Children Not in School register (in full), the consistent child identifier (after pilots).
• September 2027: curriculum changes on digital wellbeing.

Crucially, much of the Act is "skeleton legislation". It sets out the framework, but the detail — minimum qualifications for MACPT members, the form of the CNIS register, the rules on agency workers, the cohort of children eligible for new deprivation of liberty placements — will sit in regulations and statutory guidance still to come. Watch the consultation pipeline closely.

What Lead Members should be doing now

A practical checklist for the next 90 days:

1. Get a written briefing from your DCS on each of the major duties, with a RAG-rated readiness assessment and a commencement timeline.
2. Confirm safeguarding partner alignment. Are your council, ICB and police forces talking — at officer and at member/board level — about MACPT design? If not, convene them.
3. Audit your kinship offer. It is one of the first duties to bite. If it is not publication-ready, it needs to be.
4. Brief your scrutiny committee on the Act's headline implications. This will be a multi-year programme of change and scrutiny needs to be on the front foot.
5. Engage with the LGA and your regional Lead Member network. Sector-led improvement and shared learning will be essential — particularly on MACPTs, regional care co-operatives and the CNIS register.
6. Open the resourcing conversation with your council leadership and S.151 officer now. The funding settlement will not match the scale of new duties without active lobbying. The CCN, ADCS and LGA are all building the evidence base — your local case adds to it.
7. Watch for consultations. Each set of regulations will be consulted on. Lead Members should be visible in those responses, and so should DCSs.

A final thought

This Act is the most ambitious piece of children's legislation in a generation. It is also a framework, not a finished product. The shape of children's services in your area in 2028 will depend on the regulations written in 2026 and 2027, the implementation choices made by your safeguarding partners, and the scrutiny applied by Lead Members and corporate parents.

The political weather around children's services has rarely been more challenging — rising SEND demand, a placements market in crisis, attendance still recovering, and tight council finances. The Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act will not, on its own, solve any of those problems. But it gives Lead Members a stronger statutory footing to demand the joined-up, child-centred system that the children we serve have repeatedly told us they want.

The real work, as the Children's Commissioner put it, now begins.

For corrections, queries or to share how your council is preparing, please get in touch via the comments below.

This site aims to provide:

• Practical resources and templates
• Updates on national policy and legislation
• A space for sharing best practice
• AI-curated news from across the sector

If you're a Cabinet Member for Children's Services, I hope you find this site useful. Please feel free to contribute your own insights and experiences through the comments.

I understand why MPs are concerned. Education Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) sound like the gold standard to parents fighting for their children. They appear to offer legal protection and guaranteed support. But here's the uncomfortable truth from someone managing SEND services daily: EHCPs often promise more than they deliver, whilst creating unsustainable financial pressures that ultimately harm the very children we're trying to help.

The Reality Behind the Statistics

Wiltshire, like councils across the country, faces a massive High Needs Block deficit. We're part of a national crisis that has seen SEND costs spiral by 140% since 2015, creating a £4 billion black hole with no clear path to resolution.

But here's what many don't understand: in most cases, schools and local authorities are already providing the support an EHCP outlines before it's even awarded. The EHCP doesn't magically create new resources or expertise - it often just formalises what's already happening. Parents go through months of stress and bureaucracy, only to find little practical change once the plan arrives. Meanwhile, the system becomes more expensive and complex to manage.

The False Promise Problem

EHCPs have become a false promise to families. They suggest a level of personalised, legally-protected support that sounds comprehensive but often doesn't translate into meaningfully different outcomes for children. This isn't because professionals don't care - it's because the fundamental issue is resource constraints, not legal frameworks.

When we spend months processing EHCP applications and reviews, that's time and money not going directly to supporting children in classrooms. When we're tied up in tribunals defending decisions, those are resources diverted from frontline services.

Why Reform Matters More Than Opposition

I understand MPs' concerns about appearing to "cut support" for vulnerable children. But blocking reform without offering alternative solutions isn't protecting these children - it's condemning them to a system that's failing them financially and practically.

The current trajectory is unsustainable. In a few years, the system will collapse under its own weight, leaving everyone worse off. We need the courage to ask difficult questions:

• How do we ensure genuine additional support rather than expensive bureaucracy?
• How do we create accountability without creating undeliverable legal obligations?
• How do we prioritize early intervention over crisis management?
• How do we make the system financially sustainable while improving outcomes?

A Call for Constructive Challenge

To Labour MPs considering rebellion: I urge you to engage constructively rather than just oppose. If you believe EHCPs must remain unchanged, please tell us how you'll solve the £4 billion deficit. If you oppose reforms, offer alternative solutions that are both compassionate and financially viable.

Your constituents deserve more than good intentions. They deserve a system that actually works.

We need to be radical in change, compassionate in delivery, and realistic about cost. That means being willing to challenge assumptions about what works, even when those assumptions feel politically safe.

The Path Forward

Real support for SEND children requires:

• Sustainable funding from central government that matches legal obligations
• Early intervention that prevents crises rather than managing them
• Mainstream inclusion that actually works, with proper training and resources
• Honest conversations about what we can realistically deliver

The children and families we serve need us to have the courage to reform a broken system, not just defend its current form. They need solutions, not political positioning.

The status quo isn't working. Blocking change without offering alternatives isn't compassionate - it's short-sighted.

We owe these young people and their families better. Let's work together to build it.