The Department for Education has set out new guidance for Experts at Hand, telling local authorities and integrated care boards to plan jointly for specialist school support and to use workforce innovation without pulling NHS staff away from commissioned services. The service is meant to give schools in every area access to a bank of specialists, but the direct role of those experts will usually be time-limited.
The move matters now because the Dfe is also attaching major funding and sharper expectations to the programme. Experts at Hand will get £429 million in 2026-27, with Kent receiving £12 million and Essex and Birmingham each getting more than £10 million. The department expects funding to rise to around £750 million in 2027-2028 and £850 million in 2028-2029, making this the moment local areas have to show how they will turn the model into day-to-day support for schools.
The guidance says the grant should fund only speech and language therapists, occupational therapists, educational psychologists and specialist teachers. It also says local areas should build joint workforce plans around local need and national expectations, then expand on what they learn in the first year across the full 0-25 age range in the second and third years of the programme. If those plans do not explain clearly how schools will be engaged, the department says it will consider a more prescribed approach.
That expectation lands in a workforce that has already warned it is stretched. In March, experts told Tes that educational psychologists and speech and language therapists were already under severe pressure and that schools risked being left without the support they need. The new guidance tries to answer that by pushing repurposed resources from September and by saying specialist involvement should usually be short-term, so the point is to build school confidence rather than create a permanent dependency on outside staff.
The Dfe has already committed £40 million to developing the workforce, including £26 million to train at least 200 educational psychologists a year in 2026 and 2027, and £5 million annually to establish new advanced speech and language therapy practitioners in every integrated care board. A 2023 survey by the Royal College of Occupational Therapists found 63 per cent of respondents said their profession could not provide the level or type of input children and young people need. That is the gap this programme is meant to close, even as the department is asking the same overstretched system to deliver it.
The practical question now is whether local plans can prove there are enough people to make Experts at Hand work without draining other services. If they cannot, the Dfe has already signalled it may step in with a more prescriptive model.
