Downing Street should commit to education, health and care plans (EHCPs) to keep the trust of families who have children with special educational needs, the Labour MP who chairs the education select committee has said.

A letter to the Guardian on Monday, signed by dozens of special needs and disability charities and campaigners, warned against government changes to the Send system that would restrict or abolish EHCPs. More than 600,000 children and young people rely on EHCPs for individual support in England.

Helen Hayes, who chairs the cross-party Commons education select committee, said mistrust among many families with Send children was so apparent that ministers should commit to keeping EHCPs.

“I think at this stage that would be the right thing to do,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. “We have been looking, as the education select committee, at the Send system for the last several months. We have heard extensive evidence from parents, from organisations that represent parents, from professionals and from others who are deeply involved in the system, which is failing so many children and families at the moment.

“One of the consequences of that failure is that parents really have so little trust and confidence in the Send system at the moment. And the government should take that very seriously as it charts a way forward for reform.

“It must be undertaking reform and setting out new proposals in a way that helps to build the trust and confidence of parents and which doesn’t make parents feel even more fearful than they do already about their children’s future.”

She added: “At the moment, we have a system where all of the accountability is loaded on to the statutory part of the process, the EHCP system, and I think it is understandable that many parents would feel very, very fearful when the government won’t confirm absolutely that EHCPs and all of the accountabilities that surround them will remain in place.”

The letter published in the Guardian is evidence of growing public concern, despite reassurances from the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, that no decisions have yet been taken about the fate of EHCPs.

Labour MPs who spoke to the Guardian are worried ministers are unable to explain key details of the special educational needs shake-up being considered in the schools white paper to be published in October.

Stephen Morgan, a junior education minister, reiterated Phillipson’s refusal to say whether the white paper would include plans to change or abolish EHCPs, telling Sky News he could not “get into the mechanics” of the changes for now.

However, he said change was needed: “We inherited a Send system which was broken. The previous government described it as lose, lose, lose, and I want to make sure that children get the right support where they need it, across the country.”

Hayes reiterated this wider point, saying: “It is absolutely clear to us on the select committee that we have a system which is broken. It is failing families, and the government will be wanting to look at how that system can be made to work better.

“But I think they have to take this issue of the lack of trust and confidence, the fear that parents have, and the impact that it has on the daily lives of families. This is an everyday lived reality if you are battling a system that is failing your child, and the EHCPs provide statutory certainty for some parents. It isn’t a perfect system … but it does provide important statutory protection and accountability.”

The repercussions from the decimation of staff at the Education Department keep coming. Last week, the fallout led to a delay in releasing results from a national science test.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is best known for tests that track reading and math achievement but includes other subjects too. In early 2024, when the main reading and math tests were administered, there was also a science section for eighth graders. 

The board that oversees NAEP had announced at its May meeting that it planned to release the science results in June. But that month has since come and gone. 

Why the delay? There is no commissioner of education statistics to sign off on the score report, a requirement before it is released, according to five current and former officials who are familiar with the release of NAEP scores, but asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak to the press or feared retaliation. 

Related: Our free weekly newsletter alerts you to what research says about schools and classrooms.

Peggy Carr, a former Biden administration appointee, was dismissed as the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics in February, two years before the end of her six-year term set by Congress. Chris Chapman was named acting commissioner, but then he was fired in March, along with half the employees at the Education Department. The role has remained vacant since.

A spokesman for the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees NAEP,  said the science scores will be released later this summer, but denied that the lack of a commissioner is the obstacle. “The report building is proceeding so the naming of a commissioner is not a bureaucratic hold up to its progress,” Stephaan Harris said by email.

The delay matters. Education policymakers have been keen to learn if science achievement had held steady after the pandemic or tumbled along with reading and math. (Those reading and math scores were released in January.)

The Trump administration has vowed to dismantle the Education Department and did not respond to an emailed question about when a new commissioner would be appointed. 

Related: Chaos and confusion as the statistics arm of the Education Department is reduced to a skeletal staff of 3

Researchers hang onto data

Keeping up with administration policy can be head spinning these days. Education researchers were notified in March that they would have to relinquish federal data they were using for their studies. (The department shares restricted datasets, which can include personally identifiable information about students, with approved researchers.) 

But researchers learned on June 30 that the department had changed its mind and decided not to terminate this remote access. 

Lawyers who are suing the Trump administration on behalf of education researchers heralded this about-face as a “big win.” Researchers can now finish projects in progress. 

Still, researchers don’t have a way of publishing or presenting papers that use this data. Since the mass firings in mid-March, there is no one remaining inside the Education Department to review their papers for any inadvertent disclosure of student data, a required step before public release. And there is no process at the moment for researchers to request data access for future studies. 

“While ED’s change-of-heart regarding remote access is welcome,” said Adam Pulver of Public Citizen Litigation Group, “other vital services provided by the Institute of Education Sciences have been senselessly, illogically halted without consideration of the impact on the nation’s educational researchers and the education community more broadly.  We will continue to press ahead with our case as to the other arbitrarily canceled programs.”

Pulver is the lead attorney for one of three suits fighting the Education Department’s termination of research and statistics activities. Judges in the District of Columbia and Maryland have denied researchers a preliminary injunction to restore the research and data cuts. But the Maryland case is now fast-tracked and the court has asked the Trump administration to produce an administrative record of its decision making process by July 11. (See this previous story for more background on the court cases.)

Related: Education researchers sue Trump administration, testing executive power

Some NSF grants restored in California

Just as the Education Department is quietly restarting some activities that DOGE killed, so is the National Science Foundation (NSF). The federal science agency posted on its website that it reinstated 114 awards to 45 institutions as of June 30. NSF said it was doing so to comply with a federal court order to reinstate awards to all University of California researchers. It was unclear how many of these research projects concerned education, one of the major areas that NSF funds.

Researchers and universities outside the University of California system are hoping for the same reversal. In June, the largest professional organization of education researchers, the American Educational Research Association, joined forces with a large coalition of organizations and institutions in filing a legal challenge to the mass termination of grants by the NSF. Education grants were especially hard hit in a series of cuts in April and May. Democracy Forward, a public interest law firm, is spearheading this case.

Contact staff writer Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal, or barshay@hechingerreport.org.

This story about delaying the NAEP science score report was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

Under pressure from the Trump administration, the University of Virginia’s president of nearly seven years, James Ryan, stepped down on Friday, declaring that while he was committed to the university and inclined to fight, he could not in good conscience push back just to save his job.

The Department of Justice demanded that Ryan resign in order to resolve an investigation into whether UVA had sufficiently complied with Donald Trump’s orders banning diversity, equity and inclusion.

UVA dissolved its DEI office in March, though Trump’s lackeys claim the university didn’t go far enough in rooting out DEI.

This is the first time the Trump regime has pushed for the resignation of a university official. It’s unlikely to be the last.

On Monday, the Trump regime said Harvard University had violated federal civil rights law over the treatment of Jewish students on campus.

On Tuesday, the regime released $175m in previously frozen federal funding to the University of Pennsylvania, after the school agreed to bar transgender athletes from women’s teams and delete the swimmer Lia Thomas’s records.

Let’s be clear: DEI, antisemitism, and transgender athletes are not the real reasons for these attacks on higher education. They’re excuses to give the Trump regime power over America’s colleges and universities.

Why do Trump and his lackeys want this power?

They’re following Hungarian president Viktor Orbán’s playbook for creating an “illiberal democracy” – an authoritarian state masquerading as a democracy. The playbook goes like this:

First, take over military and intelligence operations by purging career officers and substituting ones personally loyal to you. Check.

Next, intimidate legislators by warning that if they don’t bend to your wishes, you’ll run loyalists against them. (Make sure they also worry about what your violent supporters could do to them and their families.) Check.

Next, subdue the courts by ignoring or threatening to ignore court rulings you disagree with. Check in process.

Then focus on independent sources of information. Sue media that publish critical stories and block their access to news conferences and interviews. Check.

Then go after the universities.

Crapping on higher education is also good politics, as demonstrated by the congresswoman Elise Stefanik (Harvard 2006) who browbeat the presidents of Harvard, University of Pennsylvania and MIT over their responses to student protests against Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, leading to several of them being fired.

It’s good politics, because many of the 60% of adult Americans who lack college degrees are stuck in lousy jobs. Many resent the college-educated, who lord it over them economically and culturally.

But behind this cultural populism lies a deeper anti-intellectual, anti-Enlightenment ideology closer to fascism than authoritarianism.

JD Vance (Yale Law 2013) has called university professors “the enemy” and suggested using Orbán’s method for ending “leftwing domination” of universities. Vance laid it all out on CBS’s Face the Nation on 19 May 2024:

Universities are controlled by leftwing foundations. They’re not controlled by the American taxpayer and yet the American taxpayer is sending hundreds of billions of dollars to these universities every single year.

I’m not endorsing every single thing that Viktor Orbán has ever done [but] I do think that he’s made some smart decisions there that we could learn from.

His way has to be the model for us: not to eliminate universities, but to give them a choice between survival or taking a much less biased approach to teaching. [The government should be] aggressively reforming institutions … in a way to where they’re much more open to conservative ideas.”

Yet what, exactly, constitutes a “conservative idea?” That dictatorship is preferable to democracy? That white Christian nationalism is better than tolerance and openness? That social Darwinism is superior to human decency?

The claim that higher education must be more open to such “conservative ideas” is dangerous drivel.

So what’s the real, underlying reason for the Trump regime’s attack on education?

Not incidentally, that attack extends to grade school. Trump’s education department announced on Tuesday it’s withholding $6.8bn in funding for schools, and Trump has promised to dismantle the department.

Why? Because the greatest obstacle to dictatorship is an educated populace. Ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny.

That’s why enslavers prohibited enslaved people from learning to read. Fascists burn books. Tyrants close universities.

In their quest to destroy democracy, Trump, Vance and their cronies are intent on shutting the American mind.

• Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com