Will my child lose their EHCP?
By Sophie Winby · Last updated September 2026
If you’ve been anywhere near a parents’ group in the last few months, you’ll have seen the panic. Someone shares a headline. Someone else says EHCPs are being scrapped. By the evening, forty people are frightened and nobody has read the actual document.
I have. Here’s what it says.
The short answer
Your child is not going to lose their EHCP.
EHCPs are being kept. The 2026 Schools White Paper proposes reforming how they work, not removing them, and it is explicit that plans will stay in place for children who need more support than a mainstream school routinely provides.
More to the point: no changes to the support a child receives through an EHCP would take place before at least September 2030. That is not my reading between the lines. That is what the government has said.
What’s actually being proposed
Three things matter.
Individual Support Plans
Every school would have to create a digital Individual Support Plan for any child with identified SEND. The idea is that far more children get a written, visible plan — not only the ones whose parents fought through the EHCP process.
A four-tier system
Instead of the current in-or-out arrangement, support would be graded: Universal, Targeted, Targeted Plus, and Specialist. An EHCP sits at the Specialist end.
EHCPs are reformed, not replaced
Plans would go digital and would set out practical day-to-day support — personal care, for instance — rather than only educational provision.
The timeline, which is the part nobody shares
This is where most of the fear comes from, and it’s the easiest bit to settle.
| When | What |
|---|---|
| Now | Existing SEND law unchanged. Proposals under consultation. |
| Not yet confirmed | The Education for All Bill, announced in the May 2026 King’s Speech, has no confirmed date to be introduced to Parliament. |
| September 2029 | The earliest any systemic change begins. |
| September 2030 | The earliest any change to EHCP support takes effect. |
Even then it isn’t a switch being flipped. Children in special schools in 2029 keep their placement rights through to the end of their education. Children in mainstream would only move from an EHCP to an Individual Support Plan at a natural phase transition — primary to secondary, for instance — and not before 2030.
If your child is fourteen now, they will have left school before any of this touches them.
What hasn’t changed
Everything. Today:
- Your child’s EHCP is legally binding.
- The local authority must deliver the provision in Section F.
- You keep your right of appeal to the SEND Tribunal.
- Annual reviews continue exactly as before.
A white paper is a statement of intent. It is not law. Nothing in it changes what your local authority owes your child this term.
The concerns that are worth taking seriously
I don’t want to be glib about this. Campaigners and legal charities have raised genuine worries, and dismissing them would be as unhelpful as the panic.
The threshold could rise. The proposals don’t clearly define who qualifies for a plan. If the bar for “complex needs” is set higher than now, fewer children get EHCPs in future. This is the most substantial concern and it is not yet answered.
A duty to write, not necessarily to deliver. Schools would have to create an Individual Support Plan. Whether they would be under a legal duty to deliver what it says is, at present, unclear. An EHCP’s power comes from being enforceable. A plan nobody must honour is a letter.
Tribunal powers may narrow. There are proposals that would reduce the Tribunal’s power to name a specific school. For families who have fought for a placement, that matters enormously.
None of these are reasons to panic today. All of them are reasons to pay attention, and to respond to consultations while they are open.
What to do now
If your child has an EHCP: nothing urgent. Keep going to annual reviews. Keep evidence of what is and isn’t being delivered. If provision is being missed, that is a problem with today’s law being ignored, not with tomorrow’s law arriving.
If you’re applying for one: apply. Don’t wait to see what happens. The current system is the one you’ll be assessed under, and a plan in place before any transition is worth considerably more than a plan you delayed.
If you’re being told to wait because “it’s all changing”: it isn’t changing yet, and that is not a lawful reason to delay an assessment.
If you’re also wondering whether the plan you already have could pay for one-to-one teaching, I’ve written separately about whether an EHCP can pay for a tutor.
And if school has stopped being a workable option altogether, my guide to what EOTAS is and how you get one explains the legal test your local authority has to apply.
One thing worth knowing this week
There is an open government consultation specifically on EOTAS — education provided otherwise than at school — and it closes this Friday, 18 September 2026. After that we wait for the government’s response, which will shape what ends up in the Education for All Bill.
If your child is educated outside school, or you are trying to get there after a long stretch out of the classroom, it is worth responding. I know that is one more thing on a list that is already too long. But EOTAS families are a small enough group that individual responses carry real weight — this is not one of those consultations where you are a drop in an ocean of fifty thousand.
Where this leaves you
The system is changing. Slowly, over years, and with a great deal still undecided. What isn’t changing is your child’s plan this year, next year, or the year after.
If the last few months have left you exhausted and unsure who to believe, that’s a reasonable response to a genuinely confusing situation — not a failure to keep up.
I’m Sophie Winby, a qualified teacher and former SENCO. I write these guides because I spent years on the other side of the table, watching families be told things that weren’t quite true. If you’d like to talk about your child, arrange a free call — twenty minutes, no cost, no obligation.
Last updated: September 2026