From planning to practice: Four governance and delivery lessons emerging from Local Authority SEND reforms

As local authorities work to turn ambitious Local SEND Reform plans into meaningful change for children, families and schools, Nathan Turner draws on Mutual Ventures’ recent work supporting the development of co-produced local plans. He shares four practical lessons for building the governance, partnerships and accountability needed to move from planning to practice.

Since 2014, the number of Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs)[1] have doubled while local authorities face escalating high-needs budget deficits. Alongside this growth, families continue to navigate long waiting times for vital support, where late intervention can cause profound mental health distress for families and children. An increasing number of children are now also being educated entirely outside of their local mainstream schools, where they are disconnected from their peers and communities.

The recent Schools White Paper, Every Child Achieving and Thriving, has recognised the sustained pressure faced by the SEND system, and outlined the need for reform. These reforms intend to strengthen mainstream provision, introduce clearer layers of support before an EHCP is needed, and improve access to specialist support for children with more complex needs. As part of this, local authorities must design Local SEND Reform plans to help local partnerships understand their local system, set priorities for change, and track progress.

In recent months, Mutual Ventures has supported with the development of these plans, engaging with stakeholders across local authorities, health and care, and the school system, to create co-produced local plans. Collective ownership within these plans ensures that they are rooted in the real-world needs of the communities they are designed to serve.

The complexity of the SEND landscape, with competing interests and priorities, has generated a range of key learnings that should help local leaders to translate policy into practice during the following delivery stage of the reforms.

Lesson 1: Actively engage health partners during periods of competing priorities

Securing meaningful engagement from health partners was crucial to coordinate and deliver the early speech, language, and therapeutic support that aims to keep children from reaching a crisis point. This was initially challenging during the development of local plans, due to major Integrated Care Board (ICB) restructures alongside tight timelines for the review and approval of plans. It was crucial here to acknowledge the constraints faced by health stakeholders, and work around these. An effective approach involves establishing targeted, shorter, follow-up briefings for these stakeholders to capture their input without overloading them.

The takeaway for delivery: Local leaders and partnerships must remain mindful that other agencies may face external and structural pressures outside of their involvement within reform programmes. Engagement plans will need to be adapted to suit these shifts, and local leaders should build-in structures for stakeholders to contribute via alternative channels in these instances.

Lesson 2: Design governance structures to unlock accountability

Introducing a new reform programme can expose gaps in existing governance structures, where unclear ownership within existing oversight boards can risk slowing down decision-making, overwhelming already strained systems.

We found that local governance can lack the specific delivery arms, with the right people, skills, and capability, needed to drive effective reform. Addressing this required new governance structures focused specifically on programme delivery. This took the form of a new dedicated local SEND Reform Programme Board, supported by targeted Task and Finish (T&F) groups. The Programme Board membership was selected to bring together the right people with senior decision-making authority to unlock barriers, while the T&F groups consisted of delivery specialists who were assigned responsibility for specific intervention themes and key areas of reform. Board agendas were also reshaped, to focus senior leadership on key priorities, tracked through monthly data dashboards and shared outcomes.

The takeaway for delivery: Without clear governance structures, new reforms can risk draining LA capacity. Areas must ensure active management of delivery themes using designated points of accountability to manage progress. It will be crucial for governance structures to shield frontline staff from administrative strain, not to add to it.

Lesson 3: Build genuine co-production with families and young people

One of the most important elements of programme design involves engaging those stakeholders directly impacted by policy changes. In this case, it was crucial for any local plans to reflect the voice of both parents and children. Any reforms that fail to reflect lived experience risks reduced buy-in and increases in complaints and costly appeal processes during delivery. Therefore, it was crucial to embed co-production across all identified workstreams within delivery plans. We also proposed deepening partnerships with parent and carer networks and the establishment of dedicated structures to ensure feedback from youth groups would be escalated directly to the Programme Board. These deepened partnerships provided a forum for LAs to constructively engage with families and young people, increasing mutual understanding and ensuring that both sides understand what can and can’t be delivered within the reforms.  

The takeaway for delivery: During the implementation phase, local authorities must explicitly define what co-production means in their local context. It is important here for co-production to be understood practically rather than as a theoretical concept. Once this is decided, partnerships must ensure that they have clear structures built in for co-production, testing key reforms with families, through annual surveys, regular feedback loops, and consultation to actively monitor success.

Lesson 4: Establish structures for continuous data collection and input

Local authorities should be thinking about data collection processes from the beginning of reform planning. The existence of fragmented data or weak data-sharing protocols can risk creating gaps in insight, poor performance monitoring, and delays in identifying children’s needs. A key first step involves conducting a data audit to understand what was currently being collected across local area partnerships, looking at areas of duplication as well as what could be tracked going forward. Specific metrics were also matched with different intervention themes for future tracking during delivery stages of the reform programme. Data sharing protocols were also negotiated with health partners to align metrics and reduce duplication.

The takeaway for delivery: Local leaders and partnerships must remain cognisant that high-quality data relies on system-wide accountability. Local leaders will never have a full understanding of their delivery when data gaps exist and ad-hoc reporting is the norm.

Together, these lessons highlight that successful SEND reform will depend not just on strong policy design, but on how effectively local systems bring these lessons to life in practice. As SEND partnerships now shift their focus from strategy to delivery, local leaders must remain focused on the co-produced nature of their plans, resisting any drift towards siloed delivery. Success will depend on maintaining the shared ownership established during the planning phase, ensuring that health, education, and family forums remain equal partners in delivery.

If you'd like to talk more about local plans or the lessons shared here, please contact NathanTurner@mutualventures.co.uk

[1] An EHCP is a legal document for children and young people (aged 0 to 25) outlining their needs, the extra support they require, and the specific goals they want to achieve in education, health, and social care.