The schools white paper’s 鈥渆xperts at hand鈥� scheme is the largest overhaul of school inclusion in a decade. By the end of 2028-29, every primary school is to receive around 40 days of expert support a year, and every secondary around 160, through a 拢1.8 billion service built around educational psychologists (EPs) and speech and language therapists, alongside wider specialist support. The ambition is right, but a core part of the workforce who will deliver the ambition 鈥� educational psychologists 鈥� is one the Department for Education (DfE) cannot currently see, count or grow fast enough to deliver on that date. Educational psychologists are already stretched thin, unevenly distributed and partly invisible to the department now trying to expand their numbers. Three problems, set out in our new , go unaddressed in the white paper. These issues will determine whether experts at hand works. The timeline does not fit Training an educational psychologist takes a three-year doctorate. The cohort beginning in September 2026 will not qualify until 2029, the same year experts at hand is meant to be fully operational. For the whole of the intervening period, the service will have to be built from the workforce that already exists. In some local authorities, up to 75 per cent of statutory education, health and care plan (EHCP) assessments are now carried out by locums, at a substantial premium to in-house staff once agency fees are included. The gap to an effective EP workforce that can deliver the government’s ambition is larger than the white paper’s 拢40 million workforce commitment implies. Our analysis points to a shortfall of around 1,400 EPs against the current staffing levels achieved in local authorities with sustained strong outcomes, a 40 per cent increase on current capacity. The training pipeline can supply them. In 2024 there were nearly 1,500 applications for only 200 government-funded training places. The bottleneck is funded places, not interest in the profession. The white paper commits to more than 200 additional trainees a year from 2026 and 2027, with “further investment” beyond. But that is merely a continuation of the current funding policy that has left the profession with such a significant shortfall. If the experts at hand are to succeed, the government will need to attract more qualified EPs back to the profession or find another way to boost the pipeline. The department cannot measure the workforce The second issue is that DfE’s workforce data captures only two-thirds of practising EPs, because it tracks only those directly employed by local authorities. More than a third of the profession, largely working through independent arrangements, is missing from the official picture. Spending on EP services is not collected nationally at all. This is a serious problem because the white paper promises allocation on the basis of local need and our analysis shows the current system is not delivering that. Coverage ranges from one EP per 480 pupils in the best-resourced local authority to one per 9,400 in the worst. Whatever drives current provision, it is not local need. But a needs-based settlement cannot be built on a workforce the department cannot count and a spending picture it does not collect. Improved reporting should be a central commitment, not an operational afterthought. Expansion alone will not be enough The obvious reply to concerns about EP capacity will be that the white paper’s wider SEND reforms are designed precisely to move EPs away from statutory triage and towards the preventative work experts at hand promises, easing the pressure on numbers. But, during the 2025 to 2030 transition, existing EHCPs remain in force, and new assessments begin only from September 2029. Statutory demand on EPs will persist through the same window in which experts at hand is meant to be developed, and will likely intensify at the transition points. In most services we interviewed, EPs already spend 40 to 50 per cent of their time on statutory work, and our fieldwork suggests the narrowing of some roles to statutory triage is itself causing greater attrition. Without a protected non-statutory allocation inside the experts at hand offer, new trainees will be absorbed into the same reactive work as their predecessors. Beyond the statutory assessment workload, the white paper also implies much more pre-statutory assessment in schools. The risk is that expansion will buy more assessment, but not the early intervention the white paper envisages. This is particularly true when parents are incentivised to scramble for an EHCP before the transition. If high standards and inclusion are, as the education secretary has argued, two sides of the same coin, experts at hand is the test. The next year will show whether the department is willing to count the whole workforce, fund the pipeline to the level required, and protect time for prevention. Without those commitments, the right idea will arrive late, short-staffed and stuck doing only half of the job.