How does Labour plan to reform SEND provision for young people?

On Monday, the government is due to publish its plans to reform the SEND system of support for children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities, and there’s been a seemingly accurate leak of its intentions. The plan seems to be to strengthen the system in some respects, but also make it more flexible and tighten up the criteria, and save money in other ways.

The Department for Education has said that the SEND reforms will be confirmed in the new schools white paper, which they said would provide “an expansion of children’s rights” and build on the work being done to create a “truly inclusive system”.

That’s the idea, but how convincing the reforms will be remains to be seen. It will be a huge challenge, such is the rate of growth in demand for SEND-related support and the political sensitivity of making reforms that don’t take anything from parents and children who qualify for help under the existing Education Health and Care Plans (EHCPs), and those hoping to do so in future.

Everyone agrees that reform is needed. Parents think so because the process of securing an EHCP and then SEND care can be arduous and distressing. The Treasury, along with those in power in local councils, who administer and partly pay for the system, want it to be less expensive and provide better value for money. Many MPs attest to the huge amounts of correspondence they receive from families worried about how they can look after their child. The system, as the fashionable saying goes, is “broken”.

Financially, there are two big problems. The first is the scale of the demand, and the speed at which SEND spending is growing. Policy Exchange, a think tank, has claimed that total SEND spending by councils might rise to some £18.2bn a year by 2028, because it is rising by about 10 per cent a year in real terms. For perspective, that £18.2bn figure is the equivalent of the NHS drugs budget for England, and rather more than the increase in schools spending since before the pandemic.

The second issue is that local authorities have had to find the money at a time of acute strain in their budgets, and SEND, whatever its merits, is crowding out almost everything else and pushing councils towards bankruptcy. Under the Local Government Act 1972, EHCPs carry legal force, and a council is obliged to spend the money. Such is the size of the “SEND deficits” being run up that the government is already relieving some, and all will be taken over by the Treasury in 2028. That makes sense for local government, but the question of funding remains.

In England, some 482,000 children now have an EHCP, which sets out in detail their individual legal right to support, rising to around 639,000 up to the age of 25, when eligibility ceases.

Whether because of increased awareness, modern pressures (poverty and social media for example), or overdiagnosis, or some mixture of these factors, there are many more cases of autism and poor mental health requiring EHCPs. A consequent lack of capacity in state schools has led to more spending on fees in the private sector, and the general surge in inflation since 2022 has increased the cost of local authority transportation. EHCPs can also create extra administrative costs and legal costs during litigation.

We don’t have a full picture yet, but one idea would be to reassess EHCP eligibility when a pupil moves from primary to secondary school, and for schools themselves to assess children’s needs under the EHCP system. In return, the legal rights of parents and children would be extended. The education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, has previously indicated that she’d like to see clearer criteria used to determine eligibility for the various levels of specialist support needed. Whether that is just a euphemism for cuts will be tested in the coming days. Means testing, as such, hasn’t been mentioned yet.

It’s there, but pretty flexible, and total spending on the entire social security system is heading towards the £200bn mark in the coming years. Please note, though, that this doesn’t include the state retirement pension or jobseeker’s allowance. The grand total will be closer to £350bn, around 10 per cent of national income and representing a quarter of public spending. More than half of it will be going to pensioners.

Probably not. The SEND lobby – not a term of disrespect in this context – is as vocal, passionate and powerful as can be expected from hard-pressed parents trying their best to bring a child up in difficult circumstances and fight for their future. As the welfare reform rebellion last year proved, Labour backbenchers are prepared to defy their own government if they feel the cause is just, and SEND kids are among the most vulnerable of all. The prime minister, meanwhile, is weak. Reforms will likely be modest, for fear of a violent parliamentary and public backlash.