We welcome the Government’s provision of an additional £1 billion in funding for SEND at the recent Budget.
Key Messages
- The Children and Families Act 2014 changed the legal framework in which statutory agencies must work to support children and young people with SEND from birth up to the age of 25. These reforms introduced Education, Health and Care (EHC) plans (replacing Statements of SEN) and duties on local statutory partners to work together to design and deliver a more coordinated system of support for children, young people and their families.
- Since 2014, the number of children and young people with education and health care plans (EHCPs) has risen by 140 per cent from 240,183 in 2014/15 (which includes EHCPs and statements) to 575,973 in 2023/24.
- We welcome the Government’s provision of an additional £1 billion in funding for SEND at the recent Budget. However, given that the SEND deficit is estimated to rise to £5 billion in 2026, this money is likely to be consumed by partially plugging existing deficits.
- Despite record investment, the SEND system continues to fail too many children and families, and rising costs are becoming an existential threat to the financial sustainability of councils. On behalf of the LGA and County Councils Network (CCN) the Isos partnership produced a report, that analyses the drivers of the current SEND crisis and sets out comprehensive proposals to improve support for children and families quickly sand sustainably. The report concluded that the SEND system is systematically broken and nothing less than fundamental reform is urgently needed. Crucially the problems in the existing system are not anyone’s ‘fault’. The root causes of the crisis in SEND are systemic, and any attempts to improve the outcomes without altering the national rhetoric and policy framework are destined to fail. All stakeholders-including parents, schools and councils- are behaving in a rational manner according to their respective responsibilities, but the system creates perverse incentives that are leaving everyone engages with it frustrated and disappointed.
- During the same period, national high needs block for SEND rose from £5.3 billion in 2014-15, to £9.4 billion in 2024-25. On top of national funding, councils have spent an additional £950 million on SEND support in 2023/24 alone. We estimate that nationally local government’s cumulative high needs deficit now stands at £3.15 billion, which is now threatening the financial viability of some councils.
Background
Children and young people with more complex needs which cannot be met through existing and universal provision may need an EHC plan to ensure their needs are met and they make progress towards their identified outcomes. Councils are responsible for ensuring the EHC process involves families and that EHC plans (where assessed as necessary) are finalised within 20 weeks of an EHC needs assessment starting. Education, health and social care partners must be involved in providing advice for EHC needs assessments and so it is important Special Educational Needs and Disability that all partners are involved in reviewing and developing the EHC process in a local area. An EHC plan includes the right to have a personal budget. Parents and young people have the right to request an EHC needs assessment.
The purpose of an EHCP is to:
• record the views, interests and aspirations of the parents and child or young person
• provide a full description of the child or young person’s special educational needs and any health and social care needs
• establish outcomes across education, health and social care based on the child of young person’s needs and aspirations
• specify the provision required and how education, health and care services will work together to meet the child or young person’s needs and support the achievement of the agreed outcomes.
As part of the EHC process, parents and young people can make a request for a particular school or college, including academy schools, further education colleges and sixth form colleges, non-maintained special schools and independent special schools and colleges. EHC plans must not be ceased simply because a young person is aged 19 or over. Young people with EHC plans may need longer in education or training to achieve their outcomes; this will happen at different stages for individual young people. EHC plans extended beyond age 19 will not all need to remain in place until 25, nor is there an expectation that young people will remain in education until aged 25. Plans for young people aged 19 or over must be reviewed at least annually and must contain outcomes to help the young person move onto the next stage of their lives. Nationally, approximately 2.9 per cent of the school age population have an EHCP.
The scale of challenges within the SEND system
Since 2014, the number of children and young people with education, health and care plans (EHCPs) has risen by 140%, from 240,183 in 2014/15 (which includes EHCPs and statements) to 575,973 in 2023/24.
The year-on-year increases in EHCPs have not been below 9 per cent since 2016. This increase has outstripped the rise in the overall population. In 2014/15, 1.4% of the population aged 0-25 had a statement of SEN or an EHCP, but by 2023/24 that figure had risen to 3.3 per cent. There was a sharp rise after the introduction of the 2014 reforms – 3.9 per cent in the five years before 2015, 47 per cent in the five years after. The increase in the identification of SEND appears to have been greater in England than in other similar European nations.
During the same period, national high needs block for SEND rose from £5.3 billion in 2014-15, to £9.4 billion in 2024-25. On top of national funding, councils have spent an additional £950 million on SEND support in 2023/24 alone. We estimate that nationally local government’s cumulative high needs deficit now stands at £3.15 billion, which is now threatening the financial viability of some councils.
Without additional investment through, for example, the Safety Valve programme, the cumulative national deficit would be closer to £4 billion. The scale of the debt is so great that half of LAs responding to Isos’ survey said that, if the statutory override was removed, they would be insolvent within a year (25 per cent) or within three years (25 per cent).
We welcome the Government’s provision of an additional £1 billion in funding for SEND at the recent Budget. However, given that the SEND deficit is estimated to rise to £5 billion in 2026, this money is likely to be consumed by partially plugging existing deficits.
Moreover, while additional funding is welcome and needed, in the long-term more funding alone will not lead to improved outcomes or address the structural issues within the system.
Fundamental challenges in the statutory framework
We have long highlighted that there is a fundamental misalignment of roles, responsibilities and accountabilities created by the 2014 SEND reforms. This means that local SEND system leaders do not have the powers or strategic oversight to respond to issues or improve support. LAs are, for example, held accountable for the effectiveness of local SEND arrangements, the outcomes of children and young people with SEND, and the delivery of provision specified in EHCPs, yet the majority of decisions relating to the identification of, and support for children and young people with SEND, takes place in education settings over which LAs have little oversight and no direct control.
There is limited accountability for inclusion in education settings (little join-up between local area SEND inspections and a focus on inclusion in inspections) of individual education settings, and no oversight and route of redress relating to support for children and young people with SEN Support in mainstream education. LAs are held to account for ensuring that there is sufficient provision for children and young people with SEND, yet do not have the power to open new or reshape existing provision.
Despite being a core aim of the 2014 SEND reforms, they did not foster a more joined-up approach across education, health and care. Councils have no powers to hold health partners to account for the support they provide for children with SEND. While health leaders note that a mismatch between the boundaries of LAs and local health services has not helped joined-up working, the reorganisation of integrated care systems (ICSs) has added complexity to the landscape.
The failure to create a single, joint, place-based budget for SEND partners had meant that debates and disagreements about who should pay for what have persisted. Fundamentally, in our research LA and health leaders argued that children and young people with SEND were often not prioritised in terms of service provision or resources relative to the other national policy priorities in local health, children’s social care and adult services.
Recommendations for reform
Our report sets out a bold vision to address these challenges and create a sustainable and effective SEND system, which can transform outcomes for children and young people. Our proposals are built on the two core principles of putting inclusion at the heart of every aspect of our education system and preparing young people for adult life. Central to delivering this ambition is building capacity within the mainstream system so that more children can access the support they need, at the right time, without a statutory assessment or plan. This would not only ensure fair entitlement to a good education for more than 1.7 million children and young people in this country with additional needs, but it will make our education system stronger for all learners. We propose eight specific recommendations, detailed below:
1. Government should set out a new national ambition, that embeds inclusion across all aspects of education and children’s policy and practice. A prerequisite of a future approach to inclusive education is that there is clarity about what “additional needs” means, how different needs are to be met, and clear and consistent expectations of inclusive practice in mainstream education (as well as the role of specialist provision). There should be support and guidance to fulfil those expectations to build capacity across the education system.
2. As such, our second recommendation is to establish a new “National Framework” for additional needs, which describes types and levels of needs, how needs should be met within the mainstream system, and sets out best practice to improve inclusion and drive-up standards. The National Framework would be accompanied by evidence-based best practice guidance and would be overseen by a new National Institute of Inclusive Education, which would act as an independent custodian of national expectations and evidence-based practice.
3. Building capacity in mainstream education settings to embed inclusive practice and expand access to support without a statutory plan. Building capacity for inclusion in mainstream education is the necessary condition for reforming support for children and young people with additional needs. We therefore propose a series of measures to enable inclusive practice in mainstream education settings. We propose the development of a new “core offer” of targeted, multi-disciplinary support – from therapists, EPs and other services – that all education settings can access without children and young people requiring a statutory plan.
We also propose wide-reaching reforms of early years, school and post-16 education that aim to build educating institutions’ inclusive capacity, and enable and recognise inclusion. These would include reforms of key aspects of wider education policy relating to curriculum, qualifications, assessment, performance reporting, accountability, buildings, workforce development, funding, access, strategic planning and transitions. We also propose a new role for special schools. This would see special schools continue to provide placements for pupils with the most complex needs, but we also envisage the creation of a more porous boundary between special and mainstream schools, allowing for sharing of expertise and outreach, and staff and pupils moving between settings. The aim of our recommendations is to add to the support available to children and young people with additional needs, and make it easier to access without the need for an EHCP.
4. Our fourth recommendation is to reform elements of the SEND statutory framework so that the state can set out a clear, consistent, equitable and sustainable offer of support for children and young people with additional needs. This should enshrine the practice behind the original idea of EHCPs, in the form of regular, personalised assessments, planning and reviews of what we are calling a new Learner Record. It should provide clarity about what we mean by additional needs, and how those needs are to be met within the education system, including the role of mainstream and special education settings and of statutory plans.
A reformed SEND statutory framework should maintain a role for parental preference in admissions – and indeed that of the child or young person – so that parents and carers of children with additional needs can exercise equivalent choices to parents and carers of children without additional needs.
In order for the system to be equitable and sustainable, the state must be clear on where the limits of individual choice and entitlement lie. A reformed SEND statutory framework should include new, independent, non-judicial mechanisms for dealing with disagreements about decision-making (where we see a role for an ombudsman) and about access to specific provision (where we envisage a role for the National Institute, as opposed to the Tribunal).
5. Improving outcomes for young people beyond school, and better preparing young people for adulthood, will require greater joint working between education, children’s, adult and community services; more tailored support across the transition for young people; and better tracking of progression and long-term outcomes. As such, our fifth recommendation is to create a new Destinations and Progression Service in each local area.
This service would have oversight of all children and young people with additional needs as they approached the transition from children’s to adult services and in the years after that age of transition. To improve transition and align the responsibilities of key partners and services, we recommend that the age at which young people move from children’s to adult education, health and care services should be standardised across education, health and care. The Destinations and Progression Service would be responsible for providing additional support to young people who needed it for two years after the age of transition (which could be extended if the young person needed it), tracking long-term outcomes and destinations, and co-ordinating the work of partners to create a broad range of options to support young people to pursue their aspirations as they move into adulthood.
6. Our Sixth recommendation is to reconfigure the role of local partners, so that they are coherent and provide a robust foundation for joint working, with responsibilities aligned with powers and accountabilities. Furthermore, we propose strengthening local partnerships themselves by creating statutory Local Inclusion Partnerships. These would include named partners from the LA, health services, the education sector, the local PCF and local strategic groups representing young people with SEND. The Local Inclusion Partnerships would have statutory powers and joint funding, and would be responsible for strategic planning and commissioning of a continuum of support to meet local needs (including the targeted offer of support and specialist provision) and decision-making regarding future statutory plans. Pooled budgets and indisputably joint powers, responsibilities and accountability for improving outcomes for SEND, will help all services come coherently together to provide timely, and integrated support for children, young people and families. Crucially, these reforms would help to avoid disputes between local authorities and health partners about who pays for what.
7. Our seventh recommendation is that there should be a new, more strategic relationship between the state and the independent sector should be established. This would see the independent sector involved in strategic planning in local areas, and used strategically for highly specialist provision and expertise that complements, rather than replaces, local state-funded provision. There should also be equivalence of regulatory standards and funding (including a prohibition on making profits for shareholders from state-funded placements of children and young people with additional needs) between the state-funded and independent sectors.
8. A change of the scale we are envisaging must be underpinned by a system-wide workforce strategy. As such, our eighth recommendation is for the new National Institute to lead on developing a cross-government, multi-disciplinary workforce strategy for inclusive education, additional needs and preparation for adulthood, specifying the skills and practitioners needed to deliver, for example, the core wraparound targeted offer. The National Institute would also advise on the content of initial training and CPD across the workforce involved with inclusive education and supporting children and young people with additional needs.
Contact: Zahraa Shaikh
Public Affairs Support Officer
Phone: 020 3838 4861
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Email:
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