With a prime minister under extreme fire and unable to command a majority in the Commons on matters of personal authority, is politics too self-absorbed to fix a problem as broken as the system for special educational needs provision?
Plans to reform the 12-year-old approach to SEND are expected to be announced within weeks – but how bold will they be given the complexity and opposition ministers are likely to encounter?
That’s the question at the heart of a Sky News investigation revealing the scale of the political challenge around reforming the system.
Figures from the Department for Education found one in five children were identified as having special educational needs, with most supported by their existing schools.
But a growing minority of these children have been given specific funding and legally enforceable programmes to meet their needs, via education, health and care plans (ECHPs), which can provide access to special or independent special schools. The number of these has nearly doubled since 2017 and is due to rise further to the end of the decade.
This boom has led to long wait times – 6,500 children waited over a year for a EHCP in 2024 – and professionals who are overwhelmed with paperwork rather than directly supporting children.
Meanwhile, unhappy families who initially fail to secure an EHCP are increasingly going to court to secure support. In 2023, there were 21,000 appeals, with 99% going in favour of parents. The biggest rise of all in ECHPs is an increase in diagnosis of pupils with autism.
As a result, high needs spending by local authorities has exceeded funding for years.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies had projected the annual deficit to be £6bn in two years time, although the government has committed to paying off 90% of the deficits that councils have accrued over the last decade.
Without reform, however, the costs will continue to outstrip funding and the deficits would grow once more.
SEND system needs ‘root and branch reform’
Sky News was told the current system is unsustainable by the chair of the County Council Network – and leader of Suffolk Council – Matthew Hicks. He said “root and branch reform of the current system” is needed.
“There are many children who come into the system where the parents want to get the best for their child and that’s absolutely right,” he said.
“But the scale of the demand has grown. If I just look at my own county, we’ve gone from about 5,500 children with educational health and care plans to over 11,000 in a very short period of time.”
Asked if the government has got the stomach for this fight, he replied: “I think the government has to deal with this. If it’s not looked at [we] go back to 60 councils that won’t survive if that deficit sits on their books.”
Ministers have made clear they want to reduce the number of children with special educational needs going to special schools, aiming for more to be educated closer to home and in mainstream provision. But to provide sufficient levels of support will require considerable investment to stop children without help from dropping out of education altogether.
Sky News has been told ministers ultimately want to restrict the number of children with specific per pupil funding packages, and to curb the number of parents who end up taking their case to tribunal.
Under one plan discussed in government last year, the indicative threshold above which a council would fund a specific pupil would rise from around £6,000 to upwards of £40,000, £50,000 or £60,000.
A Department for Education spokesperson said no decision had been taken and that the changes were not being driven by the need for cost savings.
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‘Children would be failed’ by cuts in pupil funding
Andy Nowak, executive head of The Rise School in west London, which teaches 147 autistic students, told Sky News it would be a massive effort for mainstream schools to be able to deal with the needs of a wider range of pupils.
“It would take an increase in funding so that those teachers’ spaces are adequately equipped to meet needs,” he said. “I think it would require a change in perspectives and culture in the workforce.”
Asked what would happen if the system made it a lot harder for individual children to have money allocated to them, he said: “Lots more young people would be failed, families would be failed.”
Nicky Morgan, the former Conservative education secretary who oversaw the drive to greater reliance on special schools (now likely to be reversed), said the system 12 years ago was designed for a different era and levels of need.
It would be a “huge mistake” for the government to assume “mainstreaming” children with special educational needs would provide “rapid savings”, she warned.
Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey, whose son has a disability, said early intervention is key but that he would fight any attempts to substantially tighten the qualifying criteria.
“Those legal rights are critical” and must be protected, he said.
“But we need to organise in a much better way. They’re looking too narrowly at the thing that’s in front of them, they’re not looking at a transformation of the system.”
