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Special Needs Child Provision in Crisis as 40% of Local Authorities Risk Going Bust

There is a looming crisis of growing special needs requirements and threatened council bankruptcies, according to a damning new report by MPs

A learning support assistant with Special educational needs and Disability (SEND) child in a UK classroom. Photo: Roger Askew / Alamy
A learning support assistant with Special educational needs and Disability (SEND) child in a UK classroom. Photo: Roger Askew / Alamy

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Children with special educational needs are being offered “inconsistent and inequitable” support by the Government, which fails to meet minimum legal requirements, amid a growing financial crisis at local authorities, a damning new parliamentary report has warned.

A big rise in the number of children with diagnoses and the rising numbers of local authorities in severe financial difficulties, is creating a looming crisis, the report by the Commons Public Accounts Committee warns.

The Committee is demanding action from Whitehall within weeks and warning that a failure to adequately finance the system now risks contributing to over 40% of councils going bust by April next year when new local authority financing rules begin.

“When this arrangement [excluding SEND spending from council debts] ends in March 2026, 66 local authorities (43%) could be at risk of breaching their statutory duty to set a balanced budget, and so would be effectively bankrupt”.

Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown MP, Conservative Chair of the Committee, said: “Urgent warnings have long been issued to Government on the failing SEND system from every quarter. This is an emergency that has been allowed to run and run. Families in need of help have been forced to spend precious energy fighting for the support they are legally entitled to, and local authorities to bear an unsustainable financial burden.

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“The fact that 98% of cases taken to tribunal find in favour of families is staggering, and can only demonstrate that we are forcing people to jump through bureaucratic hoops for no good reason. It is long past time the Government took action matching the gravity of this situation. And yet our inquiry found no sense of urgency amongst officials to do so.”

He goes on: “The immensity of this situation cannot be overstated. As a nation, we are failing countless children. We have been doing so for years. At the same time, we are creating an existential financial risk for some local authorities, caused by that same failing system. This report must serve as a line in the sand for Government. Every day that goes by for families not receiving the right support is another day closer to a lost generation of young people.”

In an unusual move he has written directly to both the permanent secretaries of the Department for Education and Health and social care giving them eight weeks to reply to draw up plans to remedy the situation and six months to implement them.

The report is highly critical of the failure of civil servants to both understand the needs of children requiring special education when they are integrated into mainstream schools and for even being able to access the data so they can draw up a strategy to help them.

The report says; “It [ the Department for Education] has not defined or set out what inclusive education should look like, or provided specific funding for inclusivity, despite this being at the heart of its approach”.

The Department for Health, which plays a significant role in assessing the health needs of children with special educational needs appears to give this a low priority and also does not have enough data on handling cases which results in parents waiting years to get their child assessed.

Some of the statistics on the scale of the problem are startling. The number of children who need education, health and care plans has jumped by 140 per cent since 2015 to 576,000 while funding has not kept pace. Another 1.14 million children are receiving some special educational needs support in schools, up 14 per cent since 2015.

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It also reveals there is a postcode lottery dictating whether children receive support or whether plans are drawn up within 20 weeks as required by law depending which local council is responsible. The worst performing authorities were the Isle of Wight and Leicester, where not a single plan was completed within 20 weeks. Other poorly performing councils include Cornwall, Essex, Portsmouth, County Durham, Southend on Sea, Suffolk and West Sussex.

Some of the best performing councils included Southampton and the London borough of Barnet, where all plans were drawn up within 20 weeks and York, Lincolnshire and the London borough of Wandsworth were almost all were completed.

The Local Government Association welcomed the report. Councillor Arooj Shah, Chair of the Local Government Association’s Children and Young People Board, said:

“The Committee is right to describe the failing SEND system as an emergency, and its report reflects councils’ long-standing concerns over the need for more inclusive provision and the immense financial pressures on councils to be adequately addressed.

“This must include ensuring councils on a financially stable footing, with high needs deficits written off.

“Otherwise, many councils will face a financial cliff-edge, and be faced with having to cut other services to balance budgets through no fault of their own, or their residents.”

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Schools Minister Catherine McKinnell said: “The system we’ve inherited has been failing families with SEND children for far too long – this is unacceptable and that’s why we set out our Plan for Change to ensure no child is left behind.

“These problems are deep-rooted and will take time to fix but we remain steadfast in our commitment to deliver the change that exhausted families are crying out for by ensuring better earlier intervention and inclusion.

“We are already making progress by investing £1 billion into SEND, £740 million for councils to create more specialist places in mainstream schools and through our Curriculum and Assessment Review which will look at barriers that hold children back from the best life chances.”


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