The System Isn't Broken.

OK – you might want to close your eyes while you read this… especially if you are the parent of a SEND child:

Requests for Education, Health and Care Plan assessments have risen 250% since 2014. Last year, fewer than half - 46.4% —-of EHCPs were completed within the legal 20-week limit. In some council areas, more than half of families waited over a year.

Not for a diagnosis.

Not for a full care plan.

For a legal document confirming their child is entitled to support they already, demonstrably, need.

While families wait, the system underneath them is quietly collapsing. English councils had accrued £4 billion in SEND-related debt by March 2025 - projected to hit £17.8 billion by 2029 without reform. Nearly three-quarters of England’s councils may be forced toward bankruptcy by 2027 because of it. This isn’t a funding gap. It’s a structural failure, and it’s been visible for years.

Now put a teacher in the middle of that. Not a villain, a person trying their best to do right by thirty-plus children with training built for curriculum delivery and behaviour management, not nervous-system regulation or SEND need, because that training was never funded either. In my own SEND secondary department, two of five classes were taught by teaching assistants for the entire year. Not a crisis. The norm. In some special schools, agency staff and TAs fill nearly two in five teaching posts. Schools supporting the highest-need SEMH pupils lose teachers faster than almost anywhere else in the system, and when those teachers leave, they don’t move schools - they leave the profession entirely.

So, when your child doesn’t get what they need - when the meeting gets rescheduled again, when the promised plan never quite gets followed up, when a good teacher who clearly cares still can’t hold it together for your child specifically - you are not watching individual failure. You are watching a system function precisely as its funding and staffing allow it to function. Under-resourced by design, understaffed by consequence, and quietly relying on parents to absorb the gap it leaves behind.

But… as parents, as providers and as a government, we keep asking: how do we get the school (and therefore the teachers) to do more?

The more useful question is: what do you, as parents and other interested parties, actually do while you wait for a system that isn’t coming to save you on any useful timeline? Because a 44-week average wait doesn’t move faster because you’re patient, and it doesn’t move faster because you’re furious either.

And in the middle of all of this is a child who needs support. As parents we know that while we wait, the needs take root and grow. That’s why I built the Four Pillars of Plan B Parenting – to give parents real tools to use while you are waiting for the system to hear you, believe you and actually help you. I’ll unpick that in forthcoming weeks

But there is one thing that is undeniable. The system does need to change, and I won’t pretend a parenting technique fixes an £8 billion structural deficit. The new Government White Paper on SEND Reform has devolved responsibility down to schools which, in turn means devolving responsibility down to individual teachers and all child-facing staff in schools - the same schools already running classes taught by TAs for a year at a time, the same staff already leaving in numbers the system can’t replace. Handing more responsibility to a workforce this depleted doesn’t close the gap. It just moves it closer to your child.

To significantly improve the mental health and wellbeing of our younger generation, we need to be far more disruptive and far more robust with systemic change.

But the burden falls on the child. And by default, then falls on the parents.

So what do you actually do while you wait for the cavalry - which may or may not be coming, and almost certainly isn’t coming on any timeline that helps your child?

That’s exactly what I’ll be unpicking in the weeks ahead.

🌿 Rebecca

Rebecca Briggs is a parent coach, author, speaker, and content creator with 35 years of experience working with neurodivergent children and their families. She is neurodivergent herself, and the mother of two neurodivergent sons. Her first book is published by Jessica Kingsley, a division of Hachette; she is currently writing her second, The Nutrient Poor Childhood.

For free support and advice, find her on all platforms @squarepegkids.

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^Sources:

• ^{IPPR, SEND Crisis report, 2025 — EHCP assessment demand and 20-week completion rate}

• ^{Policy Exchange, From Rates to Ruin, 2026 — council SEND debt figures and bankruptcy projections}

• ^{Schools Week, 2023 — special school agency/TA staffing rates}

• ^{NFER, Exploring the Special Schools Workforce, 2025 — SEMH teacher turnover and retention data}

• ^{Buckinghamshire Council, SEND service data, 2025 — average EHCP wait times}

• ^{Department for Education, Every Child Achieving and Thriving (Schools White Paper), February 2026}