There's a blind spot with the SEND reforms which could push more families into poverty

Nearly one in five pupils in England are identified as having some form of special educational need or disability (SEND). This includes children with autism, ADHD, severe anxiety, speech and language difficulties, learning disabilities, sensory processing disorders and trauma-related needs.

It covers children who struggle to regulate their emotions, who cannot cope in noisy classrooms, who shut down under pressure, who lash out when overwhelmed.

And around 5% of pupils in England have an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP), a legally binding document setting out the support they are entitled to in school.

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These are not small numbers. In most classrooms there will be several children with additional needs.

The government finally published its long-awaited schools white paper in February, setting out reforms to the special education system. It seeks to rebalance the system by reserving EHCP for the most complex cases and expecting mainstream schools to support more children with additional needs.

Ministers say the system is broken. Most parents would agree. But there is something missing from the conversation: poverty.

It is not only budget lines in Whitehall but also the quiet financial erosion that happens when support for these children breaks down and families are left absorbing the consequences.

For families raising children with complex SEND, school is not simply education. It is the structure that makes parental employment possible. When that structure breaks down, employment often breaks down with it.

If a child cannot cope in mainstream, if exclusions rise, if attendance dips, someone must step in. Someone must attend emergency meetings, fight for assessments, manage distress and absorb disruption. That someone is usually a parent. More often, it is the mother, who reduces her hours, steps back from her career or leaves the workforce altogether.

Parents of children with complex SEND across the country are reshaping their working lives around unmet need.

These challenges are greater for certain groups. For families like mine with adopted children, where SEND prevalence is dramatically higher, the financial impact is amplified.

Adoption UK’s data shows that around 82% of adopted children in England are identified as having SEND, compared with roughly 17% nationally. They are significantly more likely to need EHCPs. Many live with the impact of early trauma on brain development, attachment and regulation.

The 2025 Adoption Barometer provides one of the clearest illustrations of how widespread this dynamic can become in high-need families: 84% of adoptive parents report that either they or their partner has changed jobs, reduced hours or stopped working altogether in order to meet their children’s needs.

And the financial impact deepens over time. While only 14% of new adopters report household incomes below £39,999, this rises to over a quarter once children reach their teenage years, and to 65% among solo parents.

As needs intensify, incomes fall. More than half (56%) have been in receipt of benefits at some point since becoming adoptive parents, and 59% worry about their financial situation. This is not marginal strain. It is structural pressure.

The government points to £1.6 billion in additional funding for SEND inclusion in mainstream educational settings. It is a large number on paper. It makes for a strong headline. But this is funding for the entire education system, spread across tens of thousands of schools, over three years.

The Department for Education says this equates to “thousands of pounds extra every year” for each school. That is technically correct. But thousands of pounds does not fund a specialist unit. It does not cover a full-time teaching assistant. It barely covers a few hours a week of additional teacher time.

If children who would previously have secured specialist placements are expected to remain in mainstream classrooms without meaningful increases in staffing, therapeutic capacity and trauma-informed training, the strain will not disappear. It will spread.

Attendance will falter. Exclusions will rise. Parents will be called repeatedly. And when a child cannot safely remain in school, someone has to remain at home. That is how SEND reform becomes a poverty issue.

I am an adopter myself and know many families who are already in poverty because the system that promised support quietly stepped away, and post-adoption provision has been steadily dismantled.

Families report paying privately for tutoring, tribunals, therapy and specialist assessments when statutory support falls short.

Clare, an adoptive parent describes what happened when her children’s SEND needs were not met in mainstream.

“When my children’s complex needs meant the mainstream school system could not meet them, we found ourselves with two six-year-olds who had EHCPs, and no school. It took three years and more than 20 refusals before a specialist school would admit them,” Clare told me.

“That meant my 20-year career as a paediatric nurse in the NHS ended. We had to move home because we could no longer afford our mortgage. My children lost three years of education.”

Three years without schooling. A professional career gone. A forced house move. That is not just educational disruption. It is economic shock.

Research by Newcastle University and the Belay Foundation, a charity of which I am a trustee, describes “adoptive poverty” as hidden, complex and often lifelong.

Families report using savings, taking loans and remortgaging homes to cope with reduced income and increased costs. Parents describe working into their 70s to compensate for lost earning years. Complex needs, and financial dependence, can continue into adulthood.

The research also found that professionals, lawyers, accountants, teachers and other skilled workers, were giving up established careers because managing their children’s needs within an unresponsive system became impossible.

This is not short-term disruption. It is a structural shift in a family’s financial trajectory.

The former health secretary Alan Milburn recently spoke on BBC Radio 4’s Westminster Hour and described what he called a “downward escalator”: poor health, poor education, a SEND diagnosis, disability living allowance (DLA), and eventually “a world of benefits”.

But the escalator many families experience runs the other way. Unmet need leads to school instability, parental workforce exit, income decline, financial strain, and greater reliance on state support.

When SEND provision is inconsistent, diluted or delayed, poverty can follow. And when Department for Education spending is constrained without depth of support, the costs do not vanish.

They move to DWP budgets as parents leave work and claim support, to NHS budgets as chronic stress takes its toll, to local authorities when placements destabilise.

The strain does not stay where it begins. It spreads. At a time when the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, is clear that the priority is getting more people back into the workforce, this policy risks pushing more parents out of it.

I wonder whether any policymaker has seriously considered this. I doubt it. No single department owns SEND poverty or adoption poverty. It falls between education, welfare and health. It falls through the departmental cracks.

And because parents are too exhausted from fighting for their children to mount coordinated economic arguments, we are overlooked.

The SEND system needs reform. Parents know better than anyone how adversarial and exhausting it has become. But reform that focuses narrowly on tribunal numbers and local authority deficits, without accounting for the labour-market consequences of instability, risks shifting cost rather than reducing it.

SEND reform is not just education policy. It is poverty policy. And unless those systems are joined up, families will continue to carry the burden, quietly, and at growing cost.

Lisa Mainwaring is an adopter and journalist. She is also a trustee of the Belay Foundation.

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