Everyone agrees that England’s special educational needs (SEND) system is broken. Earlier this year, the government said so itself. It argued that the current system does not “lead to better educational or life outcomes”, “leaves too many families fighting for support”, and that “too much time (is) wasted on bureaucracy rather than supporting children and young people.” One of the key proposed changes Labour made is that, by 2035, only children with the most complex needs will qualify for Educational Health Care Plans (EHCPs): a legal document that mandates additional support and funding for a child with additional needs.
If this government is serious about reform, it must be honest with parents as well as schools
Yet the pressures on this over-saturated system show no signs of alleviating: quite the opposite. Since the government proposed these reforms in April, headteachers and council leaders have seen an “unreal” surge in applications for EHCPs, and are anticipating that the proportion of students with one could double to one in ten. Bill Revans, the County Councils Network’s spokesperson on SEND and the Liberal Democrat leader of Somerset council, said, “Our previous analysis had predicted the number of EHCPs will rise to 840,000 by 2028-29, however, it is now likely these numbers will be exceeded.”
This is a problem. It’s a problem partly because the system is already bankrupting local councils, who spend just under £15 billion annually supporting students with SEND (three times what it did a decade ago). Due to a severe shortage in state school capacity, councils are increasingly forced to pay for places at private specialist schools, which cost on average £60,000 a year. Last year, local authorities spent £1.8 billion alone on transport to and from school for SEND pupils: one child in Buckinghamshire, for example, was sent in a specialist medical vehicle to a boarding school 59 miles from their home twice a week at a cost of £950 a day. In East Sussex, £160,000 was spent on one child’s transport across the year. These costs are not coming down anytime soon.
This is also a problem because it undermines the fairness and integrity of the whole system: when all children are special, no-one is. Already over 1.7 million pupils in England are now identified as having SEND, almost one in five of all school-age children (it is 43 per cent in Scotland); 42 per cent of private school pupils and 27 per cent of state school pupils receive extra time in exams, and waiting lists are now so long that the SEND tribunal backlog is more than 12 months, with the average wait time between a CAMHS (Child Adolescent Mental Health Services) referral to first appointment taking between one and two years.
There are many reasons for this diagnostic inflation. Some blame sharp-elbowed middle-class parents who game the system to secure extra support (interestingly, seven of the ten councils that have seen the biggest rises in SEND spending are in more affluent areas, including Hampshire, Kent and Surrey).
Some blame more negligent parents who use special needs as a scapegoat for their child’s behavioural shortcomings, and insist that developmental delays are because of a genuine neurological impairment rather than environmental factors like being zombified by iPads. How do you tell a parent that a specialist response is not always appropriate, and that their child just needs boundaries, consistency and consequences? Or that their child does not, in fact, exhibit “hyperactivity and oppositionality”, but just won’t sit still and do what they are told?
Others blame social media for the rise in self-diagnosis (there are plenty of content creators out there cosplaying as medical experts who pathologise normal behaviours such as “having a messy bedroom.”) Others blame the ever-broadening diagnostic criteria; as most neurodivergent conditions exist on a continuum, the boundary between eccentricity and condition is becoming increasingly blurred. This might explain why there has been a huge increase in the number of children with an EHCP for speech, language and ‘communication needs’ since 2015, but the number of children with physical-disability needs as the primary reason for their EHCP has remained relatively stable.
Action, rather than accountability, is now what is most important. The system has become so bloated that it betrays the very children it claims to help, by taking away resources from those most in need and undermining the experience and treatment of children with extreme, debilitating disabilities. It also puts immense pressure on teachers, who are leaving in droves: they cannot be expected to be subject experts, social workers, therapists, behaviour specialists and educational psychologists all at once.
If this government is serious about reform, it must be honest with parents as well as schools: honest about the role of home life, discipline and screens, but also the difference between behaviour that is caused by genuine “disorder” and behaviour that is exacerbated by social and environmental factors (if a child is dysregulated, surely the first question should be “how much time do they spend outside?” rather than “does this child have ADHD?”). SEND support should be a lifeline for children who simply cannot function without it, but at the moment we simply cannot tell the difference between those who are waving and those who are drowning.
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