It was all meant to be so different. Announcing sweeping reforms of the special needs provision in England’s schools a decade ago, the then children’s minister Edward Timpson promised a simpler approach that would put the needs, rights and choices of families and children first.
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“For too long, families have found themselves battling against a complex and fragmented system. These reforms ensure support fits in with their needs and not the other way round,” said Timpson.
Parents with experience of the special educational needs and disabilities (Send) system since then may smile ruefully. They have seen a system on its knees, locking frustrated families in lengthy and bitter battles with the authorities to get support for their children, its spiralling costs all but bankrupting scores of councils.
A Local Government Association report in July called it “an incoherent system that inadvertently perpetuates tension, creates adversity and sets everyone up to fail”. The education commentator Sam Freedman recently described fixing the Send system as “the biggest single problem” facing Labour’s education ministers.
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This month MPs on the Commons education select committee announced an inquiry into Send, with a focus on finding solutions. “There is absolute clarity that as a country we can’t continue with this endless cycle of failure,” said the committee chair, Helen Hayes.
As the Guardian reports today, record numbers of families are having to turn to tribunal courts – in 99% of cases successfully – to overturn local authority decisions to deny their children educational health and care plans (EHCPs). It is a vivid indicator of how dysfunctional and adversarial Send provision has become.
The chaos is partly a result of demand. Despite council attempts to ration the number of children with EHCPs – which put a legal duty on councils to provide the cost of support – the figure increased 140% between 2014 and 2023, from 240,000 to 576,000. About 5% of pupils in England now have EHCPs. In real terms, the cost of provision went up by 59% – or £4bn – between 2014 and 2024.
The increase reflects big rises in recent years in the rate of pupils diagnosed with autistic spectrum disorder needs (accounting for a third of EHCPs), special emotional and health needs (including ADHD), and speech, language and communication needs.
Some critics, including the Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, suggest much of this demand is confected: pushy parents seeking a “golden ticket” EHCP to gain advantages for their children, facilitated by an unthinking bureaucracy. A variant of this “culture war” view holds most children with EHCPs “don’t really” need support, but are simply “badly behaved” and requiring proper parenting and discipline.
The consensus, however, is that the rising level of diagnosed need is genuine (and common to all wealthy countries). There is greater scientific understanding of autism, and a pile of evidence indicating a clear impact of pandemic lockdown isolation on levels of anxiety and mental illness in young people.
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Increased demand, however, has crashed up against shrinking public spending budgets and the erosion of specialist support for neurodivergent children in mainstream schools. Some parents say they fight to get EHCPs for their children as the most effective way of getting even basic help for them in the classroom.
Meanwhile, spending on EHCPs has outstripped funding for years. The accumulated deficit in English councils’ high-needs budgets stands at £3.3bn, and is expected to reach £5bn by 2026.
The last government hid the debt using an accounting fix that kept the deficit off local authority balance sheets. When that fix, called the “statutory override”, runs out in March 2026, it will instantly push many councils into insolvency.
There are no straightforward way to fix it: writing off the debt or extending the override on an unreformed system will not stop multi-billion pound deficits quickly building up again.
The education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, has said her preferred solution is to reform the system by ensuring specialist provision in mainstream school is robust enough to cater for children with a range of additional needs. Regain parental trust, the theory goes, and EHCP demand will go down. The government announced an extra £1bn for Send funding in the autumn budget as a sign of its intentions.
But there are no quick fixes. As the Institute for Fiscal Studies has pointed out, all options for reform are extremely expensive, hugely disruptive and likely to take time.
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