The DfE's EOTAS consultation, read properly

Every part of the government's new EOTAS consultation, once you strip away the different chapters and legislation, is really asking the same question. When a child isn't in a school building, who's responsible for them?

That question sounds simple. Across 13 years in school leadership, working with children who were excluded, at risk of exclusion, or on reduced timetables, I never once found it simple in practice. Someone was always meant to be accountable. It wasn't always clear who.

The scale of this has grown fast enough that it should worry all of us. Around 16,000 children and young people are now on EOTAS arrangements, a 90% increase in four years, most of them secondary age or older, with social and emotional mental health the single largest need. Alongside them sits a much bigger, less-discussed group: children who can't attend school for health reasons, and a growing number learning through online providers. The consultation covers all three, and reading it properly means seeing how the same accountability question runs through each one, answered differently every time.

Naming a school doesn't settle it

For children on EOTAS, arrangements made under section 61 of the Children and Families Act 2014, the biggest proposal is a shift away from local authorities arranging and managing provision, toward a named school or college holding that responsibility instead. Two versions of this are on the table: one where the local authority still decides whether EOTAS happens and the school manages it day to day, another where the school holds both the decision and the management. Neither is settled yet. The government is genuinely asking which works better.

I think the instinct is right. Somebody should hold the thread. But naming a school as responsible, without new funding attached, doesn't create accountability on its own.

Schools are already stretched thin. EHCP needs assessments alone can take months of a SENCO's time, chasing reports from professionals who are stretched just as thin.

Handing over EOTAS oversight on top of that risks becoming another job nobody's resourced them to do properly. It's the same gap I see constantly in the CPD sessions I run for SENCOs and DSLs: knowledge of what the SEND system now expects has grown enormously, but the hours in the week to deliver it haven't moved at all.

It also raises a genuine safeguarding question I haven't seen answered anywhere in the document. A named school might hold responsibility on paper for a child they see once a term, if that, while the actual day-to-day safeguarding sits with a tutor, a therapist, or a parent. If something goes wrong, where does accountability actually sit, when the school genuinely wasn't in a position to see it coming?

One thing I can clarify, since it's been misread elsewhere: this isn't about individual schools being Ofsted-graded on EOTAS delivery. The reference in the document is to area SEND inspections at local authority partnership level. Whether that eventually touches a school's own inspection experience is still open.

Eligibility is tightening alongside all of this, and I think it deserves more attention than it's had. Going forward, EOTAS would only be available to children assessed as needing one of the new Specialist Provision Packages. Not every child currently accessing EOTAS via an EHCP would necessarily qualify under that test.

So what happens to a child who doesn't? This is genuinely one of the questions the consultation is still asking rather than answering. What the document does say is that children who aren't eligible for a Specialist Provision Package, but still can't continue their education in a formal setting, for example because of health needs, would fall under the existing section 19 duty instead. That's a different, lower legal tier.

Section 19 support is explicitly time-limited and focused on re-engagement with education, set out in a new document called an Individual Support Plan rather than an EHCP, reviewed regularly, with the explicit aim of getting the child back into a school setting rather than sustaining an open-ended alternative arrangement. In practice, that's a meaningful step down from where these children sit today. An EHCP carries statutory weight and, currently, the right to appeal decisions about it to Tribunal. An Individual Support Plan doesn't carry the same protections. If your child is on EOTAS now via an EHCP and wouldn't meet the new Specialist Provision Package threshold, this is the detail to read most carefully, because the consultation itself hasn't yet worked out what "supported" looks like for this group. That's partly why they're asking.

A related proposal, mandatory national standards for non-school providers with local authorities restricted to approved lists, is a genuine accountability lever worth separate consideration.

The cost of getting the family relationship wrong

None of this happens in isolation from the families living through it. Most have already been through a placement breakdown, often after months of proving and re-proving their child's needs to people who weren't in the room the last time. Once EOTAS is agreed, it's frequently the parent holding the whole thing together: chasing the tutor, updating the therapist, flagging a gap to the school before anyone else notices it's there. Oversight built around institutions checking in on families, rather than working alongside them, risks repeating that exact pattern under a new name.

This isn't just instinct on my part. A recent UK systematic review of school-partnered approaches to emotionally based school avoidance found that successful reintegration consistently depends less on the setting itself and more on whether a child has a genuine sense of safety and a trusted relationship holding the process together, an ecological model of return that treats the child's whole system, home, school and any support around them, as connected rather than separate (McDonald and Pervez, 2025; Nuttall and Woods, 2013). Institutions checking in on a family are not the same thing as that relationship, however well intentioned the checking in is. It's part of why the children's coaching work I do sits deliberately outside the institutions involved, one consistent adult, not another professional the child has to get used to.

That's what makes one proposed change harder to sit with than the others. Families would lose the right to appeal to Tribunal specifically about whether a child gets EOTAS, or about a decision to change or end it. An early EHCP review would replace that route. For families who've already fought hard to get where they are, that's a real loss of recourse.

There is genuine reassurance sitting alongside it, though, for the majority of the cohort. Children already on EOTAS in secondary school or post-16 would keep their existing arrangement until they leave education, and that accounts for the vast majority of children currently on EOTAS.

Primary-age children are a smaller slice of the total, around 9% of the EOTAS cohort nationally, alongside a much smaller group of roughly 80 children in early years, but the document is honest that this group worries them specifically. Their stated concern is that some children, from the age of five or younger in some cases, could otherwise remain outside a formal school setting all the way through to adulthood, with no structured point at which anyone checks whether that's still the right call. So for this group specifically, the proposal is a reassessment at the end of primary phase rather than continuation by default.

What that reassessment actually leads to depends on the outcome. A child assessed as eligible for a Specialist Provision Package moves into the new system, with a new-style EHCP, and EOTAS arrangements can continue where the named setting judges that's right. A child not assessed as eligible would move onto the roll of an alternative provision school instead, most likely one that hasn't worked with the child before, which then coordinates support and works with the family toward a future placement. The document proposes reviews roughly every three months to check progress and readiness, with no fixed deadline by which a child must be back in a formal setting. Decisions are meant to be individual rather than time-driven.

I think that's the right principle, but for a parent whose child has already been through one placement breakdown, a reassessment at the end of primary phase, with the possibility of moving onto an unfamiliar school's roll, is not a small thing to read about for the first time in a consultation document. If this touches your family, it's worth responding directly on what "supported" needs to mean in practice, not just in principle.

On standardisation more broadly, I'd hold the same caution I'd apply to any policy that tries to make something more consistent: EOTAS exists because the system, as it stands, isn't working for the children it's meant to serve. Push standardisation too far, and we risk recreating school in another name, for children the system has already told us don't fit inside one.

The same question, a different chapter

The accountability question doesn't stop at EOTAS. It runs straight into the much larger group of children who can't attend school because of a physical or mental health need, governed by entirely different legislation but shaped by the same gap. There's no legal deadline for when a local authority must start arranging education for these children. The guidance says that once it's clear a child will be away for 15 days or more, in a row or spread across the year, the local authority should step in. In practice, that threshold rarely feels clean. Long before day 15, most families are already navigating school contacts, GP letters and CAMHS waiting lists, often without anyone telling them clearly whose job it is to act. The consultation names this itself: a confusing, disjointed system where support tends to arrive once a child's needs are already acute.

A few proposals here are genuinely useful if they land well. Schools drawing on outreach support from their local alternative provision school before things escalate, so help arrives without needing a formal referral first. Practical guidance on reasonable adjustments, produced jointly with the Equality and Human Rights Commission, closing the current gap in what schools understand they're legally required to do. And a harder look at provision quality, prompted by an Ofsted and Care Quality Commission review that found alternative provision for health reasons isn't always matched well to a child's circumstances, sometimes isolated from peers, with no clear link back to their own school, risking a mental health difficulty getting worse rather than better (Ofsted and Care Quality Commission, 2025). That's a serious admission for a government document to make, and the right one. What's still missing is who holds the thread when a child's needs sit across a school, a GP, CAMHS and a local authority all at once. The consultation asks that question rather than answering it.

That's the same pattern the reintegration research keeps finding, the one I mentioned earlier: provision without a trusted relationship holding it together tends to entrench a difficulty rather than resolve it (McDonald and Pervez, 2025). A school running effective outreach, or a therapist who stays involved throughout, does more for a child's chances of getting back into education than the setting itself ever will.

Online education sits at the edge of the same problem. Providers are increasingly used for children who can't attend in person, and since 2023 a voluntary accreditation scheme has covered safeguarding, curriculum and leadership standards, sixteen providers currently hold it. But online providers were left out of recent alternative provision reforms, so a child can currently be placed with one full-time and long-term, without staying on any school's admission roll at all. The consultation proposes bringing them into the same three-tier model as other alternative provision: short-term placements of up to 12 weeks full-time, or longer-term part-time arrangements of up to two days a week, with children ordinarily remaining on their school's register throughout.

I think that instinct is right. Online provision can genuinely help, giving a child breathing room while other support is arranged. It becomes a concern when it quietly becomes the whole of a child's education, with no clear route back and nobody outside the family tracking whether that's still the right call. Keeping a child on a school roll, even while learning elsewhere, keeps that thread visible to someone other than the parent. In the CPD sessions I run on EBSA and attendance, this is usually the point staff find hardest to judge in the moment: knowing whether online provision is genuinely buying a child time, or has quietly become the path of least resistance.

Both sides of this

Read across all four chapters, the direction of travel is genuinely mixed. Clearer expectations around the 15-day point, honest limits on what individual schools will be judged on, and tighter rules for online provision are welcome. A narrower eligibility test and the loss of Tribunal appeal rights over EOTAS decisions are not small changes, and deserve to be read carefully rather than accepted at face value.

None of this is settled. The consultation is open until 18 September 2026, and whichever side of the gate you're reading this from, school leader or parent, it's a genuine chance to be heard before anything is decided.

Main survey: consult.education.gov.uk – SEND reform: education otherwise than at school

Children and young people's version: consult.education.gov.uk – EOTAS, children and young people

If any of this touches your family or your setting and you want to talk it through, get in touch.

Parents can read more about children's coaching, download the free guide When School Feels Hard, or book a free 20-minute discovery call.

SENCOs and DSLs can find out more about staff training or book a free school discovery call the same way.

References

Department for Education (2026) SEND reform: education otherwise than at school. London: DfE. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/send-reform-education-otherwise-than-at-school (Accessed: 14 July 2026).

McDonald, C. and Pervez, A. (2025) 'School partnered approaches to emotionally based school avoidance in UK primary and secondary school-age learners: A systematic review', British Educational Research Journal, 51(6), pp. 2871-2892. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.4205 (Accessed: 14 July 2026).

Nuttall, C. and Woods, K. (2013) as cited in McDonald, C. and Pervez, A. (2025) 'School partnered approaches to emotionally based school avoidance in UK primary and secondary school-age learners: A systematic review', British Educational Research Journal, 51(6), pp. 2871-2892. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.4205 (Accessed: 14 July 2026).

Ofsted and Care Quality Commission (2025) Beyond the classroom: the experiences of children with SEND who are not in school. London: Ofsted/CQC. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-experiences-of-children-with-send-who-are-not-in-school-a-thematic-review (Accessed: 14 July 2026).