Ask any school leader in England to describe the special educational needs and disabilities system and they will say fragmented, adversarial, exhausting.

Ask a parent and the answer is often worse. For years, families have had to fight simply to get their child seen - not listened to, not supported, just seen - by the right professional. That fight is one of the great failures of our education system.

So when I read the detail of this week’s White Paper, and specifically the proposal for a new £1.8 billion “experts at hand” service, I felt something I haven’t felt in a long time with education policy: genuine relief.

Help when it is needed

The principle is straightforward: every local area will have a bank of specialists - educational psychologists, speech and language therapists, occupational therapists, SEND-trained teachers - that schools can access on demand.

Crucially, a child will not require an education, health and care plan (EHCP) to access this support; they just need to need it.

The importance of that cannot be overstated. The EHCP process, for all its good intentions, has become a battleground. More than a million children in England with additional needs currently have no legally enforceable rights whatsoever.

And as we all know only too well, the children who fall through the gaps tend to be those whose parents are least equipped to fight for them.

A clear problem to fix

As CEO of a trust running 37 schools and serving 25,000 pupils across England, I have watched this problem compound for years.

We have talented, committed Sendcos working miracles on a shoestring. They spend the majority of their time on admin and paperwork rather than leadership and practice improvement.

We have teachers who want to do right by every child, but who are waiting months, or sometimes years, for an educational psychologist’s assessment.

We have parents arriving at schools already battle-weary, distrustful and certain that the system will let their child down.

Experts at hand changes that equation fundamentally. It makes specialist support a routine part of schooling, not a prize to be won at tribunal.

It gives local authorities a meaningfully expanded role that is strategic rather than merely administrative.

Councils, working jointly with integrated care boards, will commission the experts at hand service in their local areas, shaping it around the needs of their schools, children and communities.

An additional £1.8 million is being invested to help local authorities transform how they operate and build the infrastructure to make this work.

In practice, this means an average secondary school will receive more than 160 days of dedicated specialist time every year once the service is fully rolled out - roughly the equivalent of an additional full-time specialist in the building.

For primary schools, it equates to around 40 days a year. These are not trivial numbers.

Joined-up local provision

What this architecture creates is something the system has long lacked: a joined-up local offer, with specialists commissioned by the council working alongside school staff trained to identify need early, supported by a Sendco who can focus on practice rather than process.

And all operating within a framework of new individual support plans that give every child with SEND a digital, parent-accessible record of their needs and provision.

Of course, ambition on paper is not delivery in practice. The success of experts at hand depends on whether the professionals are actually there to hire. And right now, they often are not.

The commitment to training 200 more educational psychologists a year from 2026 is welcome, but the system needs them faster than that pipeline will deliver.

And there are legitimate questions about whether local authorities - already under severe financial strain - can commission and deploy this service at the pace children need.

Why educational psychologists are so important

But even with this caveat, the fact that schools will now have more immediate access to educational psychologists is a huge boost.

For too long, these doctorate-level qualified psychologists have been on the periphery of system leadership. Often lost within a system of bureaucracy, their knowledge and expertise will now take centre stage.

Educational psychologists can now impact at a whole-school level, supporting leaders and training staff in schools in a “rods, not fishes” approach. For trusts like ours, it brings a level of SEND expertise we knew was there but struggled to reach.

As noted, there are issues to consider, and they deserve honest scrutiny. But they are risks of implementation, not of design.

The architecture that the White Paper creates can help us move from a system built around bureaucracy and disputes to one built around children and early action.

It will allow us to take the expertise that has always existed in our specialist workforce and put it where it has always needed to be: in the classroom, available to every child who needs it, not just those whose parents know how to ask.

Tom Campbell is CEO of E-ACT multi-academy trust

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