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When mental health entered the SEND Code of Practice in 2014, many worried it would stigmatise children. I felt the opposite.

For the first time, we were openly acknowledging a truth that schools, families and children already knew: mental health affects children, too.

The introduction of social, emotional and mental health (SEMH) as one of the four broad areas of special educational needs and disabilities was more than a technical policy change.

It was an awakening. It normalised conversations about mental health and wellbeing, and recognised that barriers to learning are not always academic or behavioural in origin. Sometimes they are rooted in anxiety, distress, trauma or emotional dysregulation.

Once mental health was recognised within SEND, it became harder to ignore.

If there was an identified area of need, then logically there also had to be support, intervention and expertise. The door opened to therapeutic thinking, mental health practitioners and more joined-up conversations between education and health.

The system was far from perfect, but it represented progress.

Now I worry we may be reversing it.

What practice teaches us about complexity

To be clear, the White Paper’s ambition deserves support - particularly the desire to build greater inclusion within mainstream education and end the exhausting battles too many families face.

However, while the proposed reforms redefine need around the categories of executive function; motor and physical; sensory development; speech and language; and social and emotional development, mental health no longer appears explicitly in the same way.

Under the 2014 SEND Code of Practice, SEMH needs were explicitly recognised as one of the four broad areas of SEND.

That wording mattered because it acknowledged mental health as a legitimate educational concern and encouraged schools, health services and therapeutic practitioners to work together around children whose distress affected learning.

The replace SEMH with “social and emotional” need, while suggesting that clinical mental health interventions should sit with health services where identified as necessary.

Mental health support teams and early intervention are rightly emphasised, but the language marks an important shift.

Mental health moves from being explicitly embedded within SEND towards something more clinically defined and externally determined.

For many families and schools, the concern is not semantic but practical: if mental health is no longer clearly located within SEND, who becomes responsible when a child’s distress affects education but does not meet increasingly stretched NHS thresholds?

A growing issue

As a trustee of the National Association of Special Schools, I am increasingly concerned that a profoundly systemic challenge - spanning education, health, social care, housing and even criminal justice - risks being quietly dropped into the lap of education, with vague promises of joined-up support but little mention of accountability.

The reality is that many NHS pathways remain under immense pressure. Why should families believe that a seamless and fully resourced mental health offer will suddenly emerge?

Removing explicit mental health recognition from SEND does not remove mental health need; it simply risks relocating responsibility into systems already struggling to meet demand.

The government must use the consultation response process to recognise this change and the issues it will cause.

Otherwise, the systems will create a real point of tension for schools.

Non-exclusion without support is not inclusion

After all, we cannot ask schools to become more inclusive while simultaneously weakening access to the therapeutic and multidisciplinary support that makes inclusion possible.

Non-exclusion is not achieved through aspiration alone; it requires skilled staff, family support, clinical expertise and sustained investment.

Schools supporting highly complex pupils often carry multiple layers of need at once, particularly among low-incidence, high-needs learners whose vulnerabilities place them at risk of inpatient care, family breakdown or the secure estate.

If we ask schools not to exclude but fail to provide the resources needed to support complexity, inclusion becomes rhetoric rather than reality.

I support reform. I support inclusion. But I also believe we should be honest about unintended consequences. The 2014 reforms helped normalise children’s mental health and opened the door to more therapeutic and humane conversations about support.

We should be building on that progress, not quietly stepping away from it. Renaming need does not remove need. And if mental health is no longer central within SEND, we must ask a difficult question: who, exactly, picks up the pieces?

Thomas Keaney is the founder of The Complete Education Solution (TCES), a provider of special schools, and a trustee at the National Association of Special Schools (NASS)