As the SEND system buckles under spiralling demand, the government is embarking on radical reforms to make education more inclusive and cut costs.
The plans, set out in February’s Putting Children and Young People First consultation, were designed primarily to respond to problems engulfing the schools system.
But they have seismic consequences for colleges too, as the Department for Education envisages more young people with education, health and care plans (EHCPs) receiving specialist provision within mainstream settings.
Many FE colleges already face capacity constraints, while specialist colleges risk more restrictions as EHCPs are reserved for those with the most complex needs requiring a specialist provision package.
An Association of Colleges (AoC) report shared exclusively with FE Week paints a troubling picture of colleges already being expected to accommodate more young people with SEND at precisely the point when the commissioning system is pushing them beyond what they can safely provide.
Seventy-one per cent of responding colleges said local authorities had used the statutory ‘duty to admit’ rule to direct them to enrol young people whose needs the college had formally said it could not meet. One college reported this happened 80 times.
When ‘duty to admit’ goes wrong
In another case, a college said it was told to admit a learner on a hair and beauty or catering course but they could not have access to sharp objects.
“In such situations, there are no reasonable adjustments that would enable the learner to safely participate or achieve the qualification,” the respondent said.
More than two-thirds of respondents said they had encountered cases where, after a college declined a placement, a local authority rewrote the learner’s EHCP, even removing descriptions of behavioural or medical needs.
In one instance, an EHCP was amended to erase information about a young person’s police involvement even though the college said, “evidence was not provided to suggest behaviours had reduced”.
Another college said a learner it had initially sought to refuse caused “significant damage” to a college building, for which he was subsequently prosecuted.
The same college claimed councils were, in an “increasing number of cases”, removing wording that might have prompted a refusal, such as “violent outbursts at school”, and sending the consultation back.
“This cynically leads to a breakdown in placement later on but has for them met deadlines to ‘place’,” it said.
AoC wants Department for Education guidance to make explicit that safeguarding and health and safety considerations take priority.
David Holloway, AoC’s senior SEND policy manager, described the duty to admit as a “mechanism being put in place with schools in mind, that then has perverse consequences for colleges”.
AoC estimates only around 11 per cent of college-age learners with EHCPs attend specialist SEND colleges, whereas nearly half of school-age pupils with EHCPs are educated in specialist settings. The reforms rely on FE doing even more of something it already does at scale.
David Holloway, senior SEND policy manager for AoC
From EHCPs to individual support plans
The reforms will also change how support is recorded and funded. Where an EHCP is currently seen as a ‘golden ticket’ to individual high-needs funding, more support would in future come through ‘universal’, ‘targeted’ and ‘targeted plus’ tiers funded mainly from mainstream money.
Where the financial boundary falls between ‘targeted plus’ and ‘specialist’ becomes extremely important for colleges. If learners who currently attract individually commissioned high-needs support fall below the future specialist provision package (SPP) threshold, colleges will need to know whether the additional mainstream funding genuinely covers the cost of supporting them.
Colleges and schools will be legally bound to produce an individual support plan (ISP) for all those requiring targeted or specialist support, recording needs, reasonable adjustments, provision and intended outcomes.
The DfE wants the digital documents to move with learners between settings, partly to tackle the chronic loss of information at transition.
But more than two-thirds of colleges surveyed by AoC said they received EHCPs that were inaccurate, uninformative or out of date. One in ten reported what they regarded as unreasonable attempts by councils to cease plans.
“We have asked for out-of-date EHCPs to be reviewed, with the local authority response being that there is no capacity to undertake said reviews,” one college said.
Holloway warned that “without a mechanism to ensure accuracy”, ISPs could reproduce existing problems while adding an administrative burden if their digital design does not integrate with colleges’ own systems.
Orchard Hill College opening new SEND provision last year in Sutton
Age concerns
The first young people transitioning into the new EHCP system are due to be assessed from 2029, with changes taking effect from 2030. Existing support is protected until then. But significant uncertainty remains over what happens after learners reach 19.
Clare Howard, chief executive of Natspec, a membership body for specialist colleges, says some are already encountering councils seeking to cease EHCPs at age 19.
The DfE has said the new system remains a 0-25 system, and Alasdaire Duerden, its head of post-16 SEND, told Natspec’s recent conference that young people with the most complex needs would continue to receive specialist support beyond 19.
But Holloway fears plans could nevertheless be “ceased anyway because people have misunderstood the rules”, and wants local authority staff making such decisions to be made “more accountable”.
A less-heralded part of the reforms could also reshape which specialist colleges are allowed to deliver EHCP-funded provision.
Currently, independent special schools and special post-16 institutions can apply to join the education secretary’s approved list under section 41 of the Children and Families Act 2014, which brings them under the same statutory duties on EHCPs as general FE colleges. Joining is voluntary, and institutions can receive council high-needs funding without it.
The DfE plans to replace that with a regime where only approved institutions can deliver provision secured through an EHCP. Duerden said the new list would be “similar” to section 41, and the department’s “starting intent” was that institutions already approved would continue, with the process principally applying to new entrants.
But some specialist colleges have deliberately asked to come off the section 41 list when already full, because inclusion increases placement requests. The DfE allows voluntary removal, and added guidance on how to request it in April, though institutions cannot subsequently reapply for a year.
Duerden acknowledged details remained unresolved, including a need to “check that everybody on that list” should be there. But he said ministers did not want to lose capacity: “We can’t afford for any of you guys to not be doing what you’re doing because that demand isn’t going to go away,” he said.
Clare Howard
Safety Valve’s unfinished experiment
The government’s previous ‘safety valve’ scheme aimed at pushing councils to lower their high-needs requirement is now replaced by the local SEND reform plans that local authorities have submitted to officials.
Between 2020 and 2024, the DfE signed 38 safety valve agreements with councils carrying the largest dedicated schools grant deficits.
Although often presented as school reform programmes, FE Week analysis found that 22 included a discernible post-16 or preparation-for-adulthood element, with around 16 making explicit commitments involving colleges, training or employment.
However, DfE’s own evaluation of the programme found that many college leaders reported “little involvement” in it.
“There is nothing that I am doing currently that is being done because of the safety valve,” one college principal said.
That creates a tension; the DfE was holding councils to financial commitments which, in some cases, depended on colleges taking more SEND learners. But some of those colleges did not even regard themselves as meaningful participants in the programme.
Going forward, post-16 does seem to feature more prominently in new local SEND reform plans, which include a national template specifically asking councils how they will work with FE colleges, including those outside their area.
Several new plans aim to boost supported internships, but safety valve documents show how these programmes do not always lead to the cost savings that councils hope they will.
Perhaps the biggest post-16 SEND commissioning failures were seen in Kent, which received £140 million through its 2023 Safety Valve agreement – a third more than any other authority – and committed to developing a robust post-16 offer.
But that offer never got off the ground, and the planned “transitions to mainstream pathways” project intended partly to help young people move from special schools into FE failed to attract its intended pilot schools.
This left 293 year 11 learners with EHCPs, 31 per cent of the cohort, still awaiting a post-16 placement in August 2024.
By December 2025, Kent was still refreshing its post-16 coordination group to develop “a clear strategy” (despite this having been a formal safety valve condition since 2023), while forecasting a £68 million dedicated schools grant overspend for 2025-26.
The county’s structural problem remains, with Kent using specialist post-16 institutions at around three times the national rate. Kent’s post-16 planning work identifies multiple “cold spots” and a need for more level 1 and level 2 provision. Meanwhile, the county’s NEET population increased 50 per cent from 1,355 in June 2024 to 2,029 in March 2026.
Elsewhere the picture is mixed. Wokingham, which had no local FE college, is opening a 40-place SEND hub with Activate Learning, and Bexley said 32 learners moving out of independent or out-of-borough special schools saved an estimated £36,787 per student. But Kingston upon Thames saw plans for a flagship 16-25 SEND campus fall through.
Many of those ‘safety valve’ policies have survived into the new local SEND reform plans. Councils can only receive the high-needs stability grant, covering 90 per cent of eligible deficits accumulated to the end of 2025-26, once the DfE approves them.
A funding system already ‘in disarray’
Much remains unknown about how SEND funding will be distributed in the future, particularly with 16-19 funding being devolved to strategic authorities.
Jerry White, AoC’s new policy consultant and former principal of City College Norwich, said many colleges now receive more income associated with SEND than from apprenticeships and adult education combined.
“The risk of these reforms going wrong for the post-16 sector is really significant,” he said, adding that the reforms’ post-16 element remains “underdeveloped in DfE’s thinking”.
The government has already begun shifting money towards mainstream inclusion. Its new inclusive mainstream fund includes £65 million this financial year for colleges, supporting adaptive teaching, accessible environments and earlier identification of need.
Allocations are based primarily on the disadvantage block 2 (DB2) formula, which uses prior attainment in GCSE English and maths as a proxy for whether that learner has additional support needs.
White pointed out that a young person can have strong GCSE results but nevertheless require expensive support because they are blind or deaf, while another learner without GCSE English and maths might have no SEND-related support requirement at all.
Only 21 per cent of colleges responding to AoC said councils consistently took account of the actual cost of provision when agreeing high-needs funding.
Almost a third reported payments arriving after the academic year in which the support had been delivered, while only a quarter said payments consistently followed an agreed schedule.
And just 7 per cent thought local authorities consistently complied with the SEND code of practice on consultation and commissioning.
Barking & Dagenham College governors were told last year that some learners waited so long during the complex EHCP funding process that they were ultimately not offered a place and became NEET. South Hampshire College Group had around 300 applicants on hold in February pending conversations about EHCPs or criminal convictions.
The government’s reform paper acknowledges how critical college transitions are: young people with SEND are considerably more likely to become NEET, and transition planning should begin at least 12 months before entry to post-16 education.
AoC concluded that college SEND provision was being “hindered by a commissioning and funding system in disarray”.
Putting a price on specialist support
The DfE also intends to develop national price bands that cap what councils pay for independent special school and college placements, which it says charge an average of £63,000 a year against £26,000 for a state special school.
More than 30 per cent are backed by private equity. In Somerset, one such provider raised its upper annual fee from £51,500 in 2018 to £99,339 in 2025.
Post-16 independent specialist college costs vary, with councils reporting costs of £38,000 in Kingston and £53,000 in Surrey, where an FE college high-needs place costs around £23,000. Natspec says that charges vary widely across both GFE and specialist colleges depending on the cohort, the level of support required and a range of other factors.
But nearly half the colleges in AoC’s survey said local cost-banding had already produced funding that did not reflect the actual cost of provision, and eight described local costing models as unfit for purpose.
Colleges cannot be an afterthought
The government is also trying to strengthen support around mainstream institutions.
Its Experts at Hand programme, backed by around £1.8 billion over three years with delivery starting this month, is intended to give schools and colleges greater access to occupational therapists, educational psychologists and speech and language therapists. But councils have questioned where those experts will come from, and integrated care boards are restructuring after being told to halve running costs.
Lee Lister, SEND lead at Education Partnership North East, said better co-funding could “easily resolve” many of those problems.
His group is discussing jointly funding a speech and language therapist with its council to work in one college three days a week.
“Any college that wants to deliver exceptional SEND provision… will have the places and expertise to do it,” he said, but highlighted the “disparity between the learners’ needs, the funding and what colleges can provide”.
Those relationships are about to change. Local government reorganisation will abolish county councils in several two-tier areas, with Essex, Hampshire, Norfolk and Suffolk challenging the decisions in court.
White’s former employer, City College Norwich, has around 900 learners with EHCPs, of which roughly 800 were issued by a council due to disappear in 2028.
He says: “At the moment most colleges know their local authorities, they know the people they deal with. If that’s going up in the air at the same time as the system’s changing, you’ve got a double whammy.”
The reforms offer colleges plenty to welcome: earlier transitions, better data sharing, more specialist staff in mainstream settings and legal recognition of support below EHCP level.
But the architecture remains more developed for schools, and the Local Government Association has warned of insufficient detail on preparation for adulthood.
Just over half of area SEND inspections published so far in 2026 have found “widespread and/or systemic failings”, against roughly a third previously.
Every part of the government’s plan assumes colleges will absorb more. Almost none of it was designed with them in mind.