Back in July, we told you the government had launched a consultation on Education Otherwise Than At School (EOTAS) – the arrangements in place for children and young people whose needs mean a school or college setting isn’t right for them, alongside proposed changes to alternative provision more widely.
We asked you to come and talk to us about it. You did, and with real honesty about what’s working, what isn’t, and what’s at stake for your children if these proposals go ahead as drafted.
Today, we’re publishing what you told us.
Over the summer, parent carers joined us across three live webinar sessions and written submissions to work through what these proposals would actually mean for their families. We were also joined by alternative provision providers, and a head teacher at a Worcestershire alternative provision setting – giving us a professional, sector perspective alongside lived family experience. We’ve pulled all of it together into one report, mapped directly against the government’s own consultation questions.
What came through most strongly
A few themes ran through almost every conversation we had:
- Personal budgets are missing from the proposals entirely. For many of you, direct payments are what make EOTAS work and the word barely appears in the consultation document.
- Real worry about handing EOTAS management to a named school, including a safeguarding concern about unfamiliar staff overseeing a child they’ve never met, and what several of you called a “perverse incentive” for schools to push reintegration to reduce their own workload.
- The proposed removal of SEND Tribunal appeal rights specifically for EOTAS decisions was, by a clear margin, the single most significant concern raised across every session.
- A “cliff edge” fear at the Year 6 to 7 transition, where an established, working arrangement could be lost simply because a child reaches a certain age, regardless of whether their needs have changed at all.
- First-hand evidence that the current system already fails children through delay and schools and local authorities disputing who’s responsible, sometimes for months or years.
- Strong opposition to the proposed 12-week cap on online provision, seen as arbitrary and disconnected from why children need it in the first place.
And running underneath all of it: a shared sense, expressed independently by parents and by our professional contributor alike, that these proposals don’t yet reflect how EOTAS and Section 19 alternative provision actually work in practice.
What happens next
Our report has been submitted to the Department for Education on behalf of all Worcestershire SEND families. But we’d still encourage you to respond yourself, too. Every individual voice adds weight, and the government has said it wants to hear directly from families, not just organisations like ours. If you haven’t already, you can find out how the proposals could affect your family, and how to respond, on our original explainer page: Understanding the EOTAS Reforms.
The consultation closes this Friday the 18th September 2026.
