Both the Guardian and the FT cover a story today that I think is one of the most significant. I have gone to the story's source, the County Council Association. As they note:
Educational attainment amongst children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) has not improved since the introduction of landmark reforms in 2014, despite councils projected to be spending £12bn on these services by 2026, up from £4bn a decade ago.
I have had an interest in SEND for a long time. From 1988 to 2002, I was a primary school governor in Wandsworth, south London, where I lived. I spent most of that time as chair, vice chair or chair of finance at the schools I worked with (there were more than one). A young Sadiq Khan was a co-governor with me for a while. I had to be interested in SEND.
As a result, I am pleased to see that over the period under discussion, the number of children being considered to have such needs has grown from 240,183 in 2015 to 575,973 in 2023/24, an increase of 140 per cent over 10 years. More children are being noted to need help. That's a success, not a failure.
However, the system of support and funding developed when Michael Gove was Education Secretary is no longer working. That's not least because, to date, the cost has been kept outside council budgets, and from 2026, these costs will be moved onto their accounts. It is expected that deficits of more than £5 billion a year will arise as a result. That is roughly £8,700 per child right now. SEND is expensive until you realise how complex and personal it is to deliver.
We need better SEND provision. I leave others to debate how that is done. I am out of date on this one: it is twenty years since I had training on it. But I do know about funding government, and I do know that £5 billion can be found for local authorities that are supposedly going to be required to take on this task.
The County Council Association says:
If the statutory [support] came to an end tomorrow, 1 in 4 councils surveyed for the report said that they would cease to be solvent within a year or less, with half stating they would cease to be solvent in three years or less.
The resources to fund SEND do not exist within the current local authority set up. Central government has met this cost to date. It is not as if it is new. But, the question has to be answered as to how it will be paid for when the current period of support for these costs from central government comes to an end. I am quite sure government spending forecasts for the Department of Education presume the costs cease in 2026 when their legal requirement to provide funds comes to an end. There could very easily be a 'black hole' in the required funding for SEND as a result. That is why this report has been issued.
There need be no such black hole.
Firstly, that is because this money is found now.
Second, it is because if this sum is really not being budgeted post-2026 because of something stupid that Michael Gove did a decade ago (as seems likely) then £5bn can easily be found by taxing wealth more. The Taxing Wealth Report 2024 provides all the choices. I am not saying that the options for doing so are bottomless, but I am saying they are pretty deep.
And, third, this will be another moral question for Labour. Do you provide for the educational needs of more than half a million children, or keep capital gains tax rates artificially low so that the notional wealth of the wealthiest in the UK can grow faster than ever? The choice is really not that hard, is it?
Will labour do the right thing? I am sure a task force will be required to work that one out. Let's just hope it reports before 2026.
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Hi Richard,
” I am sure a task force will be required to work that one out”
There’s going to be a lot of taskforces running by the end of the year, isn’t there!
Regards
Oh, yes
Jobs for lots of ‘friends of Labour’
“I leave others to debate how that is done.”
In the USA, Special Education is funded by the Federal Government via monies given to states who in-turn pass it on it to local school systems and then monitor that Federal Requirements for Special Education are being meet by said local school systems. This system works very well in the USA.
Maybe we have something to learn
There are major issues about the quality of the administration of SEND in many authorities, my own being one.
‘
Improvement needs to start there
Accepted, but without funding nothing happens
Very interesting.
Again, here we have government pushing a naturally occurring liability onto local people – essentially. And doing this in contradiction of the power it yields – and never mind tax raising power.
With that then, you have to ask what the hell is the government there for?
Just to say ‘No’ to everything?
This is the governance of disunity, dis-aggregation. The governance of laissez faire even.
The governance that essentially protects wealth from its responsibilities whilst it fails to redistribute money fairly. That withholds money from the poor whilst making it really easy for the rich to gorge themselves. Money that it owns as the government, and which it has abrogated its responsibility for it terms of how it is dished out.
Is that a ‘government’?
I don’t think so, personally.
This is invalid government in my view, not worthy of any respect.
It is also sowing the seeds of its own destruction.
(Welcome back, PSR. I’ve missed reading your contributions.)
“What is government for?”
The central question of neoliberalism there in four words.
Neoliberals want major decisions to be made by the private sector, and the central bank to issue currency for *private* lenders alone. The power of the democratic state is to be permanently removed as an economic manager. There’s a terror of both the nation state and the electorate, rooted in the pre-WW2 growth of totalitarian dictators and spread by the likes of Hayek and von Mises who escaped Europe before the war. Unfortunately for decent people, the Socialist part of the Nazi Party title caused them to condemn all societal movements from the grassroots to improve lives, communities, our little corner of the planet.
The neoliberal aim really is to break any relationship between the nation and its population. And that will then leave all financial decision making in the hands of technocrats. It’s technocrats who now have control of finance, politics, education and mass media, even the think tanks like the IEA. (Who am I kidding? The IEA, the original think tank, is directly the child of Antony Fisher, godparents Hayek and the Ford Foundation.) Looking at names of political donors, and the utterances of Reeves, I guess even Labour has fallen for the poison.
Thatcher, 3 May 1981, for The Times:
“[…] And therefore, it isn’t that I set out on economic policies; it’s that I set out really to change the approach, and changing the economics is the means of changing that approach. If you change the approach you really are after the heart and soul of the nation. Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.”
She cast a heavy, dead hand on the UK. It’s a long road back. What does it say about our fellow citizens that Thatcher’s Great Lie still persists?
(Acknowledgement: the first 1½ paragraphs of these musings are largely based on the comments of Steve Hall on Facebook, concerning the growth of neoliberalism and the Chicago School.)
Thanks
Thank you very much Anne.
The process by which parents acquire the all important SEND classification paperworkfor an affected child seems very long, highly complicated and time consuming. Consequently, apart from anything else it is probably costly. At times, it seems highly arbitary. Some significant cost savings must be possible by simplifying the whole process.
Also, the emotional cost to the family is very high.
From personal experience I confirm the last
In the USA, parents of a special needs child meet with a school social worker or school educational counselor to complete all necessary paperwork and insure all necessary medical and/or educational assessment is present. The school social worker or school educational counselor then submits this paperwork wherever it is necessary.
When I was a child, children were simply labelled as backward or uneducable and left to rot in classes of 50 or so taught by people whose only qualifications, if any, were having been army instructors.
Corporal punishment was rife, and not just the official type which was recorded in the punishment book. You could have blackboard rubbers thrown at you or be randomly hit with a ruler, and it was the ineducable who bore the brunt of it.
The notion of special needs did not exist and, in any case, I doubt that my parents would have taken advantage of any special needs help that was available. Instead they would have thought it brought shame on the family to publicly admit that any of their children would need such a thing.
For me parents who are prepared to fight for the educational needs of their children are heroes. But there is another aspect of this. I gradually lost touch with my primary school classmates. On the rare occasions I have met any of them later they almost invariably turned out to have extreme right wing, if not out and out fascist, views. It is very sad because they had been my friends, some very good friends. If we want a better world, we cannot afford to fail any of our children educationally.
I so agree with your conclusion
And we really do not do it at all well
It beggars belief that we are arguing “where does the money come from?”. It either comes from Central Government or er…. Central Government in the form of a greater grant to Local Government.
The real issue is the huge rise (and therefore cost) of SEND children. I am no expert but the lack of resources in mainstream schooling is a major cause of demand; so, meet the Teachers pay recommendations without delay (to improve teacher recruitment/retention) and more generally, deliver schools the resources they need to educate ALL children to the level we aspire to for our own kids.
It won’t solve the issue…. but it would help and is a good thing to do anyway.
Agreed
“The real issue is the huge rise (and therefore cost) of SEND children”
In the USA more and more children are being defined as “Special Needs Children” as the definition of “Special Education” and “Mentally Challenged” has greatly expanded in the last 20 years.
The ‘trouble’ is that education has realised that average children are rare and that there is a normal distribution in play
@Richard Murphy – I am not sure what you are trying to say.
For a very long time edication assumed children were homogenous – and funding did too.
But they are not. Some are ‘normal’. Most are not, and some are far from normal – but that is not a problem – unless you are seeking homegeneity – and the ‘trouble’ is that this is whaqt has been desired.
@Richard Murphy – THANKS!
Twas ever thus.
My sister, in Wales (specialist SN adviser for multiple disabilities) had to advise parents from the 80s on, much off the record, to sue the LA just to get to the point of statementing.
Roll forward 30 years. My Scottish LA basically sacks all school based NTAs dealing with non statutory ASN, as part of austerity cuts between 2014-5.
Ten years ago I had several S1 and 2 classes with 2 of 3 students with ASN but virtually no support provided. This in a small rural secondary. Coincidentally, one of these students was convicted of child murder just a few years later.
SEN, like mental health, has been a poor relation for decades.
As a civilised society is judged by how it treats its minorities, especially the most needy, then the UK doesn’t even get E for effort.
Much to agree with. Your experience is common, I know
We actually do need a someone – a taskfoece or royal commission or perhaps (horrors) the elected government – to make decisions about the direction of local government and its funding.
Council tax needs reform or replacement. Ditto business rates. It is simply unattainable to land more and increasingly expensive statutory duties on local authorities without the funds to deliver them. Everything else gets cut to the bone or abandoned and then the statutory requirements can’t be done either.
And the movement seems to be towards directly elected strong men (aka metro mayors) rather than councils of representatives. Perhaps they can get the trains and buses to run on time but it is not democratic.
Agreed
“And the movement seems to be towards directly elected strong men (aka metro mayors) rather than councils of representatives. Perhaps they can get the trains and buses to run on time but it is not democratic.”
The idea of an elected mayor IS democratic. The elected mayor (an executive) is to lead the elected city commissioners in the same a president (an executive) leads the US congress and a governor (an executive) leads the state legislature. A strong elected executive who can lead is not a bad idea.
That is not the way it works here….
An elected king is still a king.
Who is Michael Grove? And Michael Give?
Bloody autocorrect….
Thank you, both.
Who, indeed. It’s not even Graham’s real name.
Who is Graham???
Not sure….
Graeme Logan is Michael Gove’s original name.
He was adopted by the Goves and named Michael Andrew
I regret posting that, then
In my circle of family and friends I know several instances of children requiring SEND help. The situation seems to be ‘you will get help in X years’ -just before they leave school! If at all.
The costs of NOT addressing this is IMO much more in terms of employment, opportunity, offending and health, mental and physical.
The cost economists cannot price is human happiness. That is partly a function of being able fulfil our potential as human beings, and that benefits the whole society in many ways.
As it stands many parents are ‘going bust’ fighting to secure provision for their child/children. We have accumulated huge debts and we know of parents who have had to sell their home to fund repeated tribunal fights. It’s absolutely scandalous, particularly when you consider the longer-term cost to society of tens of thousands of children missing out on years of education and therapy. Incredibly short-sighted.
I agree, entirely
So we have to get better funding
Local authorities are spending a vast amount of money denying access to special education.
It has become routine for nearly all applications to assess a child for an EHCP to be rejected on sight. The game is that you have to appeal, and because the bar to assess is quite low, virtually all appeals are upheld, often after a lengthy wait for tribunal…but a lot of parents don’t know you have to appeal and give up at this stage.
Local authorities routinely break the law and try to force children into mainstream settings where they are obviously not meeting need, even where schools say they cannot meet need. These cases drag on for years, many families take their children out of school in the meantime. When these cases go to another tribunal (after another lengthy wait) the local authorities lose ~95% of these cases and are often admonished by the judge for not following the law and delaying the child getting a suitable place.
There is no penalty for the local authorities doing this. So they just keep doing it, because the process enables them to stall helping the families/children out for many years, in some cases avoiding offering an education at all as the child is eventually too old. They are wasting vast amounts of taxpayer money that could have been spent on education, and there is a very large cost to society when a child’s educational years have been wasted. Also, some parents are taken out of the workforce by having to put so much time into home educating and fighting for their child’s provision.
There are educational specialists who charge thousands a day for reports on these children. They are in such high demand that local authorities can use their low availability as another way to delay the process. Some of the reports produced are absurdly low quality, because the people producing them know what the local authority want them to say (ie “This child can cope in mainstream”) and there is no mechanism to check if the reports are actually rigorous/valid. You might wonder if that set up would invite a degree of corruption between LA and “experts”
If I was in power, this side of things is where I’d be looking closely. I think there is a vast amount of money being wasted in a way that does long term harm to society.
But why is this? It is because funding is not available. So my point still stands. And, as noted in other comments, the whole basis of local authority funding needs to be reviewed.
Absolutely, it’s the LA’s coping mechanism for a fundamentally broken system.
From my tiny window on the world of state and SEN education, I think the chronic underfunding of state schools is causing a negative feedback loop of more children struggling in mainstream, which means school staff struggle to cope more, some of them resort to questionable methods (coping mechanisms) to try to contain the problem, which often do more harm than good. This leads to more anxiety in the classroom, more children flagged as struggling to cope. The situation is constantly getting incrementally worse and harder for everyone inside the system, pretty grim for the staff and the children.
More money is definitely needed, but there are other structural issues that will take many years to fix, way beyond the scope of even two terms of a government doing competent things. Every year state schools are losing long serving members of staff with a lot of experience, who are generally being replaced with newly qualified teachers, who need time to learn how to get the best out of a very tricky environment. I suspect a lot of teachers leaving now would be horrified at the thought of starting out again in today’s climate.
Thanks
“Local authorities routinely break the law […] and are often admonished by the judge for not following the law and delaying the child getting a suitable place.”
Sounds like a case for the new Attorney General, Lord Hermer KC, whose maiden speech in the Lords on Tuesday set out a first principle:
“The Prime Minister and the Lord Chancellor have both made it clear that the promotion and protection of the rule of law will underpin our approach to legislation and policy. […] It is the rule of law that will serve as our lodestar.”
https://hansard.parliament.uk/Lords/2024-07-23/debates/BC575765-AF33-429A-A8AD-CF3D72B504B5/King%E2%80%99SSpeech#contribution-F321FA50-8F08-4C93-BDD0-5BC1CA39D0A4
“Promotion and protection”
That would be nice, as Ghandi once said of democracy, I think
It might be this quote you remember.
Gandhi was asked what he thought of Western Civilisation.
It would be a good idea, he replied.
He learnt something at the Inns of Court where he trained to be a barrister.
That was it…
But why isnt funding avalible?
Where are the MP’s and Council Leaders? Journalists?
The only time you usually hear about it is when The Ombudsman upholds a complaint and issues a withering statement
Another point is that there is a massive shortage of SEN places. So even if an infinite amount of funding was released tomorrow, it would take several years to increase capacity for SEN places, by which point we might have another change of government.
I suspect it would alleviate demand for SEN places faster if state schools were much better funded and had enough (well trained) staff to cope. Much of the problem is a lack of training, many school staff are just not able to understand the needs of the children in their care (they tend to deny this, often claiming it’s bad parenting, or these children are just naughty)
In terms of how much money is needed, and how much I think will be made available, I think there is going to be negligible impact on the situation in the next five years, and things may well deteriorate a lot further.
I think most teachers understand SEN
The system does not
@Rob
Teachers really are only too well aware of Special Needs, we all had supplementary training when I was teaching. However, when you have a class of 24 with 18 students (another group had 11 of 19) identified with ASN, and no NTAs allocated for support, then there is very little you can do.
That is very tough
NAT = ?????
I do think that SEND provision should be the reponsibilityof local government, in the same way that I think that all education below tertiary level, should be the responsibility of local government. Funding that provision can only be done by properly funding local government, which is the responsibility of central government. Not just SEND funding, or education funding, but full, proper funding for all local authority resposibilities. I can dream, I suppose.
I believe in local government control of education
I have no faith in the Trust system
In the USA, providing non-fee (this public school in the USA) paying K-through-12 education is the responsibility of the LOCAL school system or school corporation (different states have different names for the local school “authority”).
The LOCAL school systems or school corporations are financed locally through local property tax and financed on the federal level through federal-to-state flow-through grant monies.
Thank you, Richard.
Gandhi was talking about western civilisation, not democracy.
Speaking of which, I don’t think people in the west are aware of and understand the revulsion felt outside at the sight of Netanyahu’s speech to the US Congress, the record number of standing ovations for Netanyahu and, whisper it softly, attendance by UK, EU and NATO member state diplomats based in DC. The west really ought to stop lecturing people outside about their, er, um, accomplishments. That train coming into the tunnel is multipolarity.
Much to agree with
It was appalling…
the diplomats might be there but but we can’t assume what they think.
This post was last February -attitudes have hardened since then. We don’t know many of the names.
https://english.aawsat.com/arab-world/4830571-over-800-officials-us-europe-sign-letter-protesting-war-gaza
They will have noticed the rulings of the ICJ and ICC , both of which contain western judges.
The protest marches in Europe have been reported in India and elsewhere.
Even Jeremy Bowen last night more or less said Netanyahu was lying. My feeling is he’d like to say a lot more but is constrained by the BBC Top Brass appointments of the last 10 years.
I agree we are going towards multi-polarity. It may be quicker than we expect.
A great deal of what Netanyahu said was bvery dubious as to truthfulness.
But then what do you expect from a man directing genocide?
Ian Stevenson: “My feeling is he’d like to say a lot more but is constrained by the BBC Top Brass appointments of the last 10 years.”
On that point, see this from Media Lens recently:
https://www.medialens.org/2024/aligned-with-israels-propaganda-strategy-bbc-correspondent-challenges-the-bbc-director-general/
Yes! Like listening the BBC WATO discussing Meloni’s interference with Italy’s state broadcaster RAI.
All I could think was ‘have you taken a good look at yourself lately?
And that at the moment RAI’s employees appear to have a) some morals and b) backbones.
Just watched the ITV Lunchtime News and they were talking about SEND
Looks like they are doing a series of reports
Thank you for bringing this to our attention, it looks as if a real crisis will hit our schools in a couple of years.
The story reminds me of what happened to local public health. It used to be run within Primary Care Trusts (the organisations at the time responsible for GPs and other elements of primary care) which worked quite well. After the Lansley restructuring it was transferred to local authorities. Now it is true that public health has always needed a strong relationship with councils, but the upshot was that after the budget had been ringfenced for a few years it became part of general council funding – and most of the functions got sidelined.
The lack of good locally based public health networks was a big factor in how Covid hit the UK.
Agreed
Does the UK actually have REAL local government? It seems to me the “Councils” are really just a bunch of elected civil servants charged with carrying out unfunded impossible mandates from Westminster.
I have only seen one UK council in action and that was on an episode Clarkson’s Farm where supposedly four hours were spent by the council and public townhall-style arguing the merits of the Clarkson’s Farm restaurant. The real problem no one addressed or seems to want to discuss was that the “roads” are not fit-for-purpose and are dangerous, to a high degree, if only one car and one cyclist pass each other traveling in opposite directions. How this road handles busses and small delivery trucks traveling in opposite directions is impossible for me to fathom.
The problem is our councils have large statutory duties, only limited sources of funding of their own, and have suffered massive austerity cuts (probably the worst of all in government). The net result is they are incapacitated and can achieve little.
As a parent of 2 boys with high functioning autism, I can tell you that it is nigh on impossible to get the help they need. Main stream schools are far too busy and overwhelming, so not condusive to learning. I had high hopes for change with the Autism Act, but getting any help at all was problematic, until my younger child hit another pupil.
My older son was not diagnosed until he was 21. Both of them suffered with
their mental health, both were under-achievers at GCSE.
On works as a part time cleaner and the other is a benefit claimant. Both my husband and I also now have depression. We are a typical family.
My children are now adults, one still lives at home. My best friend is autistic as is her daughter and she has recently been very shabbily treated by the system also. Nowadays, schools are refusing to do an Education and Health Plan, and waiting for mental health support is horrendous and does not meet the needs of autistic people, even if you can get someone to do a referral.
Don’t even get me started on dealing with the DWP!
Something has to change. Intelligent people are being damaged and left traumatized with no prospects.
My council, since it changed hands to the Lib Dems, has announced the building of a specialist new school with 100 places, so I have some hope, but they will be oversubscribed I’m sure.
What is really scary is, as you by implicatiobn point out, is how normal this all is. Being neuro-divergent is the norm, and yet we do not recognise it. That is what is so worrying.
Additionally there would appear to be inadequate training of teachers designated as SEND specialists. This has been the experience of parents in my locality. Even formal written complaints about the inadequacy of individual SEND teachers who cause unnecessary issues for SEND children fail to achieve action.
To my mind the country appears to be deliberately afflicted with Missing Money Understanding Media (MMUM) largely owned by the rich who work with Shills for the Rich political parties like the current Labour Party to deliberately undermine democracy.In other words corruption is rampant.
One aspect of the funding crisis which I don’t think has been raised in this thread, is the privatisation of SEN Schooling.
LA’s are not allowed to open their own SEN schools but can only work to support a proposed Free School. This is creating a planning plight just at the time when the numbers needing places is increasing. Free school proposers are not very enthusiastic to get into SEN provision, as it “can be a difficult area to work in”.
As a consequence the number of private providers has increased , what’s more an increasing number of these new schools are being set up with overseas venture capital and other established schools are being bought up by the venture capital funds. The result is an increase in fees, which LA’s have to pay, as they can’t open their own provision. The fee increases have been well above any measure of inflation and the profits are going offshore.
Allowing LA’s to open their own SEN schools again would be a good start to solving the problem. It would remove the monopoly hold some private providers have on high need care provisions and prevent money from going overseas rather than being used to meet the needs of the most vulnerable in society.
I was not aware of that.
Thank you