Well-being, welfare, and unintended system effects for ALN children in Wales
What happens in complex public systems when every individual actor is behaving rationally within their role, yet the collective outcome still harms the very people the system was designed to protect?
This is not a question of intent. It is a question of system design.
In Wales, a deliberately well-being-centred legislative framework is now intersecting with new statutory mechanisms introduced through the UK Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill [1], [2]. While these mechanisms are intended to improve oversight and safeguarding, they also change how judgement, discretion, and relationships operate in practice. This has particular significance for children with Additional Learning Needs, whose educational outcomes depend heavily on stability, trust, and effective collaboration between families and professionals.
The issue is not whether children should be protected. The issue is how systems behave when pressure, process, and philosophy collide.
Rational actors and predictable system effects
In the ALN context, all key actors are responding rationally to the pressures they face.
Practitioners are managing safeguarding duties, attendance expectations, professional guidance, and increasing caseloads. Their rational response is to prioritise defensibility, compliance, and timely escalation.
Schools are balancing inclusion, safety, staffing constraints, and accountability. Their rational response is to escalate concerns when risk feels unmanaged or provision unsustainable.
Local authorities are operating under statutory duties, inspection pressure, and finite resources. Their rational response is to standardise processes, reduce variation, and evidence oversight.
Parents are responding to unmet need, distress, and exhaustion. Their rational response is to protect their child, avoid punitive pathways, and seek stability wherever possible.
None of these behaviours are unreasonable in isolation. Harm emerges when system design converts reasonable individual behaviour into collective failure.
Welfare and well-being as organising principles
To understand the current pressure point in Wales, it is important to distinguish between welfare and well-being as organising principles for children’s services.
A welfare-led system is primarily concerned with protection from harm and threshold-based intervention. Its core questions are whether a child is safe, whether statutory thresholds are met, and whether duties have been discharged. It relies on monitoring, escalation, and procedural compliance. Once minimum standards are met, the system often considers its role complete.
A well-being-led system asks broader questions about lived experience, participation, development, and long-term outcomes. It prioritises prevention, proportionality, relational working, and tolerance of complexity. Rather than asking whether a child is safe enough, it asks whether the child is able to live and learn well over time.
This is not a softer standard. It is a more demanding one.
The Welsh legislative direction
Wales has made a sustained and deliberate decision to embed well-being at the heart of children’s services. This is reflected in the Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act 2014 [3], the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 [4], and the Additional Learning Needs and Education Tribunal (Wales) Act 2018, supported by the ALN Code for Wales [5], [6].
Together, these establish a policy environment that emphasises partnership with families, professional judgement, and prevention before enforcement. Over time, this approach has shaped both professional culture and parental expectations.
Relationships as delivery infrastructure for ALN
For children with ALN, effective educational support relies on relationships. The most visible is the parent and teacher relationship, but in practice this extends to ALNCos, inclusion teams, therapists, educational psychologists, social workers, and local authority officers.
Where these relationships function well, escalation is less likely and outcomes improve. Where they fracture, outcomes deteriorate quickly. Relationships are not incidental. They are delivery infrastructure.
Welsh professional culture has historically treated partnership with families as the default unless and until clear safeguarding thresholds make this impossible, such as in cases of neglect, domestic abuse, addiction, or serious risk [11]. This has created a shared expectation that dialogue and collaboration precede enforcement.
What currently works in practice
Much of what works well for ALN children in Wales is not written explicitly into statute. It exists in professional discretion, sequencing of support, and time allowed for stabilisation.
For example, where consent is required for deregistration from special schools, current practice typically allows several weeks for planning and coordination. This enables continuity of NHS services such as speech and language therapy, occupational therapy, and physiotherapy to transition calmly into the home environment [6], [10]. Refusal of consent is rare and usually well justified.
This is not goodwill in a sentimental sense. It is informed professional judgement exercised close to the child.
What the new legislation changes
The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill introduces statutory Children Not in School registers, formal information duties on parents, defined procedural timeframes, and closer integration with School Attendance Orders [1], [7], [9].
Individually, these measures are rational. Collectively, they re-engineer where judgement sits in the system.
When discretion is replaced by duty, systems rely less on relational flexibility and more on procedural compliance.
The displacement of professional judgement
Under current Welsh practice, escalation decisions are shaped by professionals who know the child and family, with enforcement typically used as a last resort after attempts at stabilisation and support.
Under a more prescriptive statutory framework, judgement is increasingly constrained by procedural triggers, statutory timelines, and information completeness. Delay itself becomes a risk. Context is flattened into compliance. Judgement does not disappear, but it is pushed earlier, higher, and further away from the child.
Why ALN children are particularly exposed
Children with ALN are disproportionately affected by these shifts. Their needs are complex, often non-linear, and frequently expressed behaviourally. In trigger-led systems, distress can appear as non-cooperation, recovery periods can appear as delay, and parental protection can appear as resistance.
As a result, enforcement may occur sooner and on narrower grounds, reducing opportunities for relational repair and increasing system stress for families and professionals alike.
A cultural and philosophical clash
The Bill, as introduced through Westminster, is rooted in an English welfare philosophy that emphasises thresholds, monitoring, and enforcement as safeguarding tools [7], [8]. Welsh children’s services, by contrast, have been deliberately shaped around a well-being philosophy that treats relationships, lived experience, and long-term outcomes as central to safeguarding.
When welfare-led mechanisms are layered onto a well-being-led system, system behaviour changes even where intent does not. This clash plays out structurally, systemically, and at the level of school and home.
Design questions rather than ideology
If safeguarding is to be strengthened without increasing harm, system design must retain proportionality, contextual judgement, relational capacity, and space for prevention.
These are not ideological demands. They are design criteria.
Closing reflection
Safeguarding does not fail because people stop caring. It fails when systems prioritise certainty over proportionality and compliance over context.
When everyone is acting rationally and harm still occurs, the system rather than the individual is where attention must turn.
References (IEEE style)
[1] UK Parliament, Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, Bill 11, Session 2024 to 2025. [Online]. Available: https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3519
[2] Welsh Government, Legislative Consent Memorandum: Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, Senedd Cymru, 2024. [Online]. Available: https://www.senedd.wales/legislation/legislative-consent-memoranda
[3] Welsh Government, Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act 2014. [Online]. Available: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/anaw/2014/4/contents
[4] Welsh Government, Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015. [Online]. Available: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/anaw/2015/2/contents
[5] Welsh Government, Additional Learning Needs and Education Tribunal (Wales) Act 2018. [Online]. Available: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/anaw/2018/2/contents
[6] Welsh Government, Additional Learning Needs Code for Wales, 2021. [Online]. Available: https://www.gov.wales/additional-learning-needs-code
[7] Department for Education, Children Not in School: Draft Statutory Guidance, 2024. [Online]. Available: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/children-not-in-school-draft-guidance
[8] Department for Education, Elective Home Education: Guidance for Local Authorities, 2019. [Online]. Available: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/elective-home-education
[9] UK Parliament, Education Act 1996, sections 437 to 443. [Online]. Available: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1996/56/contents
[10] Welsh Government, Elective Home Education Guidance for Local Authorities, 2018. [Online]. Available: https://www.gov.wales/elective-home-education-guidance-local-authorities
[11] Welsh Government, Keeping Learners Safe: Safeguarding Guidance, 2021. [Online]. Available: https://www.gov.wales/keeping-learners-safe
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