Welcome to the Spring 2026 edition of the Isos Partnership newsletter. We’re delighted to tell you about the work we’ve been doing in recent months, and to share some of the things we have in the pipeline.

If you want to chat to us about anything featured in this edition, or to engage with the discussions we’re having as a team, we’d love to hear from you.

Reports, blogs and announcements

The government published its Schools White Paper and consultation on SEND reform in February. We’re now working with the County Councils Network and Local Government Association to survey the sector and run a series of online regional seminars, to test the reaction of members and officers in local government and assess the extent to which the proposals put forward in the white paper align with the aspirations and recommendations set out in our 2024 report on how to create an effective and financially sustainable SEND system.

We welcome the statements in the white paper on the importance of local collaboration, the need for partnerships, and the role of local authorities in “driving place-based convening and collaboration”. We were delighted to work again with Ealing Learning Partnership at their 2026 leadership conference and join Professor Andy Hargreaves as keynote speakers. We’re working with Southwark and Southampton to support their development of local education partnerships, and we’re looking forward to discussions at the April AEPA conference about the future of local partnerships and how to develop stronger and more collaborative local systems.

While the white paper is open for consultation and continues its journey through parliament, local authorities will continue to support the needs of children and young people with SEND within the constraints of the current system. To support those efforts, we are producing a distillation of what we believe, based on practice in local areas and the ongoing material collected through the What Works in SEND programme, are the current ‘best bets’ in creating a more inclusive and responsive education system.

You can see all of our recent publications here.

Talking about our work

Sam attended the annual Children & Young People Now evaluation, evidence and impact conference in March, presenting the findings from our Funding Futures research on how to effectively target investment in the early years and discussing the ways we are currently supporting local authorities with their Best Start in Life strategies.

In January we ran a webinar presenting the findings of our report for the Local Government Association on ‘rising needs’ in the early years, and setting out the role local authorities can play in strengthening the system for supporting needs in the early years. We were delighted to be joined by over 150 attendees from local authorities across the country.

In March, Nat spoke to school trust leaders at the Confederation of School Trusts finance conference on the implications of the SEND consultation for school finances.

What we’re working on

For the past 6 months, we’ve been convening the What Works in SEND Youth Voice Learning Community – a peer support network for local authorities who are strengthening the role of youth voice in their local SEND systems. We met in March for our final learning event, where we were joined by colleagues from the Council for Disabled Children and young people from Voices United and the Multi Schools Council to summarise and feed back on each other’s work. We’ll be publishing a final report and video of the event soon.

We are supporting Hull City Council to develop their Best Start in Life local plan, as part of their strategy to meet the stretching GLD targets they have been set by the DfE.

We recently delivered workshops in London and Edinburgh as part of our work with Nesta exploring how services across early education and learning can be better integrated with family support provision.

We facilitated a discussion with SENCOs from schools across Portsmouth on the role of Teaching Assistants in supporting pupils with additional needs, as a follow-up to our evaluation of Portsmouth’s Ordinarily Available Provision resources.

We completed our independent review of Alternative Learning Provision in Bristol, which drew on primary and secondary school consultations, visits to alternative provision and special school settings, and discussions with LA officers and young people.

On the horizon

We’re pleased to be proceeding with a fifth year of involvement in the What Works in SEND programme, a learning and innovation programme designed to generate high quality evidence of what works (and what doesn’t) in SEND service improvement and practice models. We are currently developing proposals to convene further learning communities focused on particular aspects of local areas’ reform plans, following the success of our Youth Voice Learning Community.

Get in touch

If you want to follow up on anything we’ve covered in this edition of the newsletter, or discuss some ideas we might be able to help with, we’d love to hear from you. Or feel free to reach out to an individual member of the team.