The Government's proposed SEND reforms are pitched as a solution to an overwhelmed system. But for many young people with ADHD, there's a risk the reforms will make the situation markedly worse. In particular, the move to replace Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) with less legally binding Individual Support Plans (ISPs) means removing what has been, for many families, the most dependable means of accessing specialist support for their child.

Parents and carers don't pursue an EHCP because they want the paperwork. They do it because it is often the only way to ensure their child's needs are met with the proper degree of quality and consistency. When that support becomes less guaranteed, the gap widens — and it's the families with the least time, money and confidence to navigate an already complex system who are likely to be hit hardest.

We can change the criteria for care plans, but that's a choice about access — not need. It doesn't change what a child requires day-to-day to learn, cope and achieve their full potential.

Rising demand reflects increased awareness — not a rise in need

Central to the case for reform is the narrative that SEND demand is ‘out of control'. But this framing often fails to recognise the cause of increasing demand. Put simply, demand isn't rising because more children are developing SEND needs or because they're being overdiagnosed. It is rising because awareness has increased. We're finally recognising needs that have always been there — and because families have fought so hard for so long to be taken seriously.

Delaying support doesn't reduce cost. It moves it elsewhere.

If we're going to give families the support they really need, we have to concentrate efforts on early intervention. A lack of early intervention doesn't simply delay support — in the long term, it can permanently reshape a child's confidence, relationships and opportunities. A child who spends years struggling without knowing why, whose difficulties are misread as poor behaviour and who falls behind, doesn't simply catch up once a diagnosis eventually comes — if it does at all. By that point, the damage to self-esteem, life chances and the gaps in learning are real and often lasting.

NICE guidelines emphasise early recognition and timely assessment for precisely this reason — because identification and support produce better educational, mental health and social outcomes than if that support is delayed or deferred.

This is also the argument absent from the reform debate: restricting early support doesn't save the system money. It defers the cost — and by the time that cost reappears, it's considerably higher and likely to land in a completely different part of the system. When policy prioritises process over the needs of a child, the probability is not that those needs will diminish — it's that they will compound and surface later in adolescence or adulthood. The cost transfers to crisis support in children and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS), exclusion panels, unemployment and social care: services that bear the brunt of what early intervention could have prevented in the first place.

CARE ADHD's Under-18s Service

The launch of CARE ADHD's dedicated Under-18s service is a direct response to the scale of unmet need we see in the system. Our aim is to bring expert ADHD and ASC assessment, treatment and support within reach of every child who needs it — without the delays and inconsistencies that too often define the current experience. Assessments are multidisciplinary, drawing on information from home and school environments and consistent with NICE guidance. Support plans are tailored to each young person, with practical input relevant to classroom and family life.

Every aspect of the service is underpinned by robust clinical governance and is fully aligned with NHS compliance. At a time when scrutiny of private ADHD services is increasing, families deserve to know the care they access is safe, evidence-based and genuinely centred on their child's wellbeing. Early recognition, done properly, is life-changing — it reduces shame, helps children understand how their minds work and unlocks the support they need to thrive.

It's time to make early intervention the standard

Choosing process over the needs of a child is a choice. It's a choice with consequences that will inevitably surface somewhere else in our social and economic system — at greater cost, at a greater toll to families and at a point when intervention is far less impactful than it would have been years earlier.

If we want fewer children reaching crisis point, the answer is not to make early support harder to access. It is to make faster assessment pathways, integrated clinical and educational support, and consistent early identification the standard — not the exception. That is the reform that will reduce pressure on the system, rather than simply redistributing it.