As I write this, Keir Starmer has resigned as prime minister and Andy Burnham has just been sworn in as an MP, paving his way to take the leadership of the Labour party and the country. Inevitably the speculation of who in the cabinet will stay and who will go has begun and left me wondering where this will leave burgeoning SEND reform. Since this government’s landslide victory, and for many months before, countless teachers, families, campaigners, and young people have been speaking to policymakers about their experience of SEND education. From my personal perspective, I feel like they were beginning to not just listen, but understand. Now, in the face of Starmer’s demise and Burnham’s ascendancy, I wonder if this is the start of another Sisyphean cycle of lobbying? The knowledge that schools minister Georgia Gould and skills minister Jacqui Smith hold is a testament to the tenacity of campaigning groups working with them and their policy advisors, not to mention the work done with the education select committee and its chair, Helen Hayes to champion our sector and the young people we serve. Now, we face the very real prospect of a fresh cabinet reshuffle and a brand-new ministerial roster. Can this sector, and the disabled people we serve, truly afford yet another round of backtracking, delays, and re-education? There are hidden costs to any change in politics. Tweaks to funding formulas or English and maths conditions of funding all create workload for staff in settings to accommodate and adapt to. Much has been written about the workload schools and colleges have faced in adapting to updated Ofsted Toolkits. So it’s no small wonder that ministerial change will do the same, but this feels an especially risky time for SEND reform. How many times in the last decade have we written consultation responses only for them to be changed, ameliorated, or shelved as a new administration changes its focus? In the last 10 years we’ve had nine education secretaries (albeit one for less than 36 hours). Churn has become an accepted feature of our politics, but this is at the cost of our young people’s futures. That’s why we need some consistency of message, a perseverance that change in the SEND sector is needed and it needs to be done correctly. Civil servants won’t change and their knowledge is high, but we have to ensure SEND still sits high on the agenda. We don’t want to start from scratch again to secure the meetings, write the briefing papers, simplify the acronyms, and explain all over again why a specialist college is not the same as a mainstream school base. We have to re-litigate the arguments we thought we had won six months ago. Job changes rarely come at a convenient time for the place we’re leaving, whether it’s too close to an Ofsted window, or too soon after a change to see it embedded. But for the most part in schools and colleges there are several months of notice periods, handover, planning, and preparation that takes place. When ministers move departments they’re gone in a matter of hours, leaving civil servants to complete the handover and be at the behest of potential new directions. This is change management which wouldn’t even make it to the “what not to do” pages of a leadership book as it would be too unfathomable anyone would think it a good idea! The government committed to a ten-year plan of renewal under Every Child Achieving and Thriving, but it cannot commit to keeping the same secretary of state or ministers in post for even the early months of its implementation. If we are to stop this endless cycle of backtracking and re-education, we must demand a different approach to how Westminster values our sector. I’d love to see a world where portfolios like education and health are taken out of party politics, perhaps through cross-party delivery commissions and for ministerial roles in education and health to be held in high enough regard they are not just seen as career stepping stones to those politicians. But perhaps I need to be more realistic. If political churn is an inevitable feature of modern British governance, then we must find a way to churn-proof our reforms. We need to see SEND reform embedded into a new manifesto and central delivery plans so that it becomes non-negotiable. Successive ministers should be tasked from day one with taking this forward, to realise a renewed system that is fit for purpose for all young people. If the incoming administration is serious about delivering a ten-year reform programme for SEND, it must understand that political churn is the single greatest threat to its success. Our young people do not have another two years to wait while a new team learns about the issues. We can’t afford to let the trajectory of political careers dictate the limits of our children’s lives.