When the ‘Every Child Achieving and Thriving’ was published on 23 February 2026, I read it wearing two hats.
One is my professional hat. I work in this field. I understand policy language, system pressures, and how reform narratives are constructed.
The other is my parent hat. I am the parent of a child with an EHCP. I know what it feels like to lie awake the night before term starts, stomach tight with anticipation. I know what it means to understand the sector “all too well” and still quietly wonder whether the people shaping it fully grasp the lived context of the children inside it.
Recently, our research team analysed 657 parent responses about early indicators of school attendance difficulties (publication to follow, shortly). The message was remarkably consistent. Parents were not describing defiance or laziness. They were describing children who felt overwhelmed, dysregulated, and unsafe in environments that did not fit them.
That distinction matters.
The White Paper proposes significant reforms: an Inclusive Mainstream Fund, expanded specialist deployment, Individual Support Plans, stronger attendance frameworks, Early Years inclusion tools. On paper, these are substantial commitments. But our findings suggest something fundamental: if the environment itself remains overwhelming, procedural reform will struggle to deliver meaningful change.
Here’s the analogy I often use with students, because it makes sense to my brain.
Imagine a deep swimming pool. Some children are already struggling in the water. We stand at the edge and throw in swimming aids. We shout instructions about technique. We monitor how long they can stay afloat. If they panic, we send in a rescue team.
But we never question the pool.
What if the problem is not that children can’t swim, but that we’ve placed them straight into the deep end?
Before flotation devices and performance monitoring, we need a shallow pool. A space where children can stand, feel safe, build trust with adults, and gradually learn the skills required to move into deeper water. Without that, we are managing distress, not preventing it.
Our data suggest that environmental suitability, including sensory load, relational safety, predictability, flexibility is not peripheral. It is foundational. Over 40% of parents in our study noticed patterns of distress by Reception age. These are not late-stage issues. They are early signals that something in the environment is not working for that child.
The White Paper’s emphasis on Individual Support Plans risks becoming procedural if environmental mismatch is not assessed first. Attendance monitoring risks misinterpretation if we treat absence as a behaviour problem rather than a stress response. Teacher training, while essential, will have a limited effect if class sizes, curriculum rigidity, and structural pressures remain unchanged.
This is not an argument against reform. It is an argument about sequencing.
Environmental conditions should be the starting point, not an add-on.
I was also struck recently by Michael Charles’s comments on research cited on p.8 of White Paper, which stated that children with SEND educated in mainstream schools rather than Specialist settings were twice as likely to find employment and live independent lives as adults. The study cited, as he highlighted, was set in Norway. That matters. Norway’s education system operates under a different funding model, class-size structure, and welfare context. When we replicate the conditions such as relational time, lower pressure, and systemic support, we may well see similar outcomes. But importing conclusions without importing context is risky.
Children do not thrive because they are physically placed in mainstream settings. They thrive when those settings are designed to foster a sense of safety, regulation, and connection.
As both a parent and a professional, I feel the tension between ambition and realism. I want reform to succeed. I want inclusion to work. But inclusion is not a declaration. It is an environmental design challenge.
If we focus first on building the shallow pool: relational trust, sensory awareness, structural flexibility, then specialist support, monitoring frameworks, and professional development will have something solid to stand on.
If we do not, we may simply become more efficient at managing children who are drowning.
Our 657 parent study participants have given us a clear priority: start with the water.
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