One in twenty school-age children in England held an education, health and care plan in 2025. The Guardian reported on 6 September that the number of pupils with a plan has risen by more than 11% in each of the past two years, that local authorities are projecting similar increases for the next three, and that the same rate nationally would put just under one in ten children on a plan by 2029. One headteacher described the volume of assessment requests as unreal. Special needs coordinators worked through the summer to process them.[1]
The reason is a date. Reforms announced in February would, from 2030, reserve plans for children with the most profound needs, with a new tier of individual support plans and more specialist help inside mainstream schools for everyone else. The National Association of Head Teachers reads the surge plainly: families and schools are applying before the changes take effect. Ipsea, the charity that helps families through the system, has taken more calls about plans than anything else since March, and warns that the reforms risk removing the statutory protections families rely on when support is delayed or denied.[1]
None of this is irrational. In a system where the plan is what secures support, an announcement that plans will become scarcer is an instruction to apply. Behind the 530,000 children who hold one stand 1.3 million more with identified needs and no plan at all, and every one of those families has now been told the door is narrowing.
The pressure runs the other way here
An EHCP is an English legal instrument and binds nothing in the UAE. But the underlying question – when does a school formally recognise a child’s need, and who decides – is live in every Dubai staffroom, and it runs in the opposite direction.
The regulatory ground has been laid for years. KHDA’s Dubai Inclusive Education Policy Framework, launched in 2017, ended the practice of private schools declining students of determination; its 2020 directives added that schools may not charge additional fees for support without approval, and that entry assessment is there to plan provision, not to serve as a hurdle. Every student of determination has an Individual Education Plan.[2] This year the Ministry of Education, setting out registration for public schools, urged parents to disclose their child’s condition in full and reserved the right to act in the child’s best interest where a student is registered without disclosure.[3] Regulators do not write that sentence unless they have seen the alternative.
The regulation has moved faster than many families’ confidence in the conversation. A UAE-based study of parents raising autistic and ADHD children describes cultural stigma, inconsistent services and limited public understanding delaying diagnosis and complicating care;[4] older Dubai research found families avoiding early consultation for cultural reasons, with shame and denial delaying intervention.[5] And lest that read as a verdict on this region: the UK’s Millennium Cohort Study found that 79% of autistic children in Britain were diagnosed only after entering primary school, 28% not until secondary – and that three-quarters of the latest-diagnosed had been flagged by a parent or teacher at age five.[6] Late recognition is not a Gulf phenomenon. It is what parenting a neurodivergent child looks like almost everywhere, and Dubai’s version has its own shape.
Both accounts are true
There is a second reason a parent may not see what a school sees, and it is not denial.
A neurodivergent child at home is in a familiar place, with people they trust and a day they can largely shape. The routines are theirs, the sensory environment is known, and the adults around them have years of practice at reading the small signs. A classroom in September is none of those things: new faces, new rooms, hundreds of other children, a timetable imposed from outside, a level of noise and transition that no home reproduces. The child who is settled at the kitchen table and overwhelmed in the corridor is the same child, and both accounts are true.
I have sat in the meetings where those two accounts meet for the first time. The parent has a child who reads for an hour, plays happily, and sleeps. The school has a child who has left the room four times this week and cannot tell anyone why. Neither is wrong. What is missing is a shared picture, and the school usually has to build it.
Where the gap lands
That work falls to the inclusion team: the Head of Inclusion, the counsellor, the learning support assistants who see the child most. They open a conversation with a family who has seen nothing at home that worried them, and they keep it open without the machinery an English SENCO can reach for – no statutory plan a parent can enforce, no public funding attached to the child, no tribunal. What they have is the IEP, the framework, and the daily record of how a child is actually doing.
From practice, four things make that conversation go better. Lead with what was observed, not what it might mean – the four exits from the room, not a word for them. Share the record rather than the conclusion, so the parent sees what the teacher saw. Agree one small thing to try at home and one at school, and set a date to look again. And give it time: a family that hears something unwelcome in September may be ready in November, and a school that has kept watching in between has something to show them when they are.
When KHDA launched its guide for parents of students of determination, the chief of its inspection bureau put the footing simply: parents are the experts on their children. The best inclusion teams I have worked alongside start exactly there, and build the picture together.
What a daily record does
A shared picture needs a record that was kept before anyone was looking for one. That is the case for Ten Points in this work. Behaviour, mood and a child’s own journal entries accumulate day by day, in one view, so the conversation with a family moves from “we think” to “here is what we saw on Tuesday, and Thursday, and the week before.” No label is required to start it, and the record is there when an IEP needs writing, when an assessment finally happens, or when a parent who was not ready in September asks what the school has noticed. Safeguarding concerns remain a separate record with their own access rules, as they must.
If you lead inclusion in a school and want to see how that picture is built, the first step is small: a conversation. Book a call.
