The target date for the £1.8 billion “experts at hand” service has been called into question, amid concerns that the workforces involved are “severely stretched”.
The idea, which emerged in last week’s long-awaited schools White Paper, is that every local area will have a bank of specialists - educational psychologists, speech and language therapists, occupational therapists and SEND-trained teachers - that schools can call on when needed.
However, while the plan has been welcomed in principle by those professions, there are concerns that the target date is too tight, given that they are struggling to meet existing demand.
The Education Policy Institute (EPI) think tank, for example, has told Vlog that the educational psychology workforce will not be ready by the time experts at hand is due to become fully operational in 2028.
More applicants than places
James Zuccollo, EPI director for school workforce, told Vlog: “The commitment to expand the educational psychology workforce is welcome and overdue.”
But he added: “There are severe shortages nationally, with provision varying enormously across local authorities, and the pipeline of applicants is strong. Far more people want to train as educational psychologists than there are funded places available.”
Mr Zuccollo said that the timing of the implementation is problematic.
He added: “Training an educational psychologist requires a three-year doctorate; those who begin in September 2026 will not qualify until 2029. The experts at hand service is expected to be fully operational by 2028 - well before any additional trainees will have entered the workforce.”
In the interim, the service will need to rely on a “profession that is already severely stretched”, he warned.
National bodies representing other professions that will be part of experts at hand have backed the scheme in principle, but are seeking more information over allocation of funds.
Derek Munn, director of policy and public affairs at Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists (RCSLT), told Vlog that it had spoken with the government and NHS England about workforce challenges “for a long time”.
Mr Munn said last year’s annual RCSLT survey found that 17 per cent of English speech and language therapy posts were vacant, with many of the recruitment and retention challenges affecting more experienced and advanced practitioners.
“We also have a situation where the children’s waiting list for community SLT in England in December 2025 was more than 63,000 children, with more than 5,000 having been waiting for a year, so the challenge is to make sure that the available workforce matches up with the proposal that’s being made,” he added.
Occupational therapy ‘under sustained pressure’
Karin Orman, director of practice and innovation at the Royal College of Occupational Therapists (RCOT), told Vlog that the government plans offer the chance to “rebalance” occupational therapy towards earlier intervention, but only if this is “properly resourced”.
Ms Orman said RCOT surveys show that the occupational therapy workforce is “under sustained pressure, with [increasingly] higher demand and greater complexity of need”.
The , for 2023, found that 86 per cent of respondents said the demand for therapy had been increasing over the previous year; 63 per cent said the profession could not provide the level or type of input children and young people need.
“The commitment to £1.8 billion for experts at hand is positive, but we need clarity on how and where this investment will be allocated,” Mr Orman said. “The impact of the reforms will depend on whether the funding reaches the frontline teams expected to deliver them.”
The government committed in the White Paper to invest more than £40 million over three years to grow the educational psychology and speech and language therapy workforces, to address “longstanding” shortages and waiting times.
It says this will include training more than 200 additional EPs per year from 2026 and 2027, with extra investment to train more over the following three years.
However, the ability to meet the demand for the professions that will be part of experts at hand may be hampered by conflicting data.
In 2023, for example, a found that it was difficult simply to determine the total number of EPs in England.
The report found that a school workforce census reported 2,325 EPs working for a local authority in 2022, yet the Association of Educational Psychologists reported a membership of 2,989 EPs that same year, including local authority EPs, self-employed EPs and trainees. Meanwhile, the Health and Care Professions Council had 3,672 EPs on its register in 2020, the DfE report found.
Last May, similarly, Baroness Merron said that the Department of Health and Social Care in each integrated care board area in England, but that there were 7,739 full-time equivalent SLTs employed by NHS trusts and integrated care boards as of January 2025.
Vlog has asked the DfE if it now holds reliable data on the total number of EPs and SLTs currently working in England.
A spokesperson for the DfE told Vlog that experts at hand funding would be allocated based on local need, as children’s needs “are not identical across the country”.
The professional bodies’ hopes and concerns echo those expressed last week by the CEO of E-ACT multi-academy trust.
In a piece for Vlog, Tom Campbell welcomed experts at hands’ ambition to make “specialist support a routine part of schooling, not a prize to be won at tribunal”.
But he also said there were “legitimate questions about whether local authorities - already under severe financial strain - can commission and deploy this service at the pace children need”.
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