To ask you to explain SEND funding and bankrupt councils to me?

[Myanna]

I've read a few articles like this one:

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2026/feb/05/send-costs-bankrupt-english-local-authorities

But I don't understand why the cost of funding SEND is so high that it's going to potentially/actually make most councils insolvent.

It's not like provision is generous or easy to get, from what I've read (I don't have a child who is supported).

Were these kids previously just not supported in any way by the state and was it left to families to cope as best they could?
Are these kids who previously wouldn't have survived, but now do because of better medical care and therefore need a lot of help?
Is this private equity running enterprises and charging huge amounts to local authorities?
Is it just inflation and the cost of employing people?

I really don't know much about this at all but I'm sure many on here do, so I'd really welcome your knowledge.

@TheThinkingEconomist
Who is the “you”?

I agree but I wonder how many kids are just pretty much getting childcare now

So there are a few things going on.

firstly local councils also pay for social care - so elderly people who need care homes but fo not have any money to afford them. This spending has been rising quite a lot aswell.

in 2014 the system for supporting students with send changed. Previously students got Statements (of special educational need). Under the new system they got EHCPs (education and health care plans).

in theory the two systems were not very different - children were assessed and then a plan was written stating what additional support was needed.

More and more children have EHCPs. In part this is because for children who have an EHCP have an entitlement to education until 25 rather than 18 for statements.

in part more children are starting school with an EHCP. However more are getting EHCPs over time.

this article is quite interesting.

https://ffteducationdatalab.org.uk/2024/07/the-rise-and-rise-of-education-health-and-care-plans/

From what I can see from having a child with SEN, but not an expert, its a perfect storm of things.

There are small numbers of children with very complex needs who will have very high-cost support packages. This is a small number but probably larger than in the past due to medical advances.

A lack of investment in services - both special schools but also professionals like occupational and speech therapists - mean many councils are contracting to private providers at high costs because they are legally obliged to meet support packages.

Private equity firms are realising that this is a guaranteed area of spending so are investing in special schools that turn profits. This is criminal imo, but also the government aren't building these schools and children need to be educated.

Delays in accessing support and diagnosis, especially via the NHS but also within the school system, mean that some children are presenting with higher needs than they might have done, had they received support sooner.

Parents have come to understand that because everyone is so strapped for cash, time and resources, most schools/services can only meet the needs of children whose EHCP legally obliges them to do so. I've heard school speech therapists and educational psychologists say they are only allowed to work with children with EHCPs. So parents who might have once been supported within the school system and general budgets are now getting support packages, at higher cost. (To be clear, this is exactly what these parents should do.)

Schools in general are more academic, the curriculum is much larger, and there is more pressure on children to "succeed" - and there is a subsection of children whose needs make this environment impossible for them. There's less time for lessons these children might have thrived in - creative subjects, sport, learning outdoors - especially at secondary. Larger classes, and teachers who are having to spend more time on planning, data, record keeping etc. leaves less time for the kind of small group work and 1:1 attention that some children with SEN need.

On the other hand, schools are probably better at identifying children's needs. 40 years ago, a kid with ADHD might have spent a lot of time bunking off or getting into trouble, and failed all their exams, but no one would care because they might have got a (low skilled) job anyway. Or maybe the dyslexic child was directed to woodwork and PE and people just accepted they were failing English and anything where they had to write an essay. Now, schools notice and care. This is, again, a good thing but supporting these children comes with a cost.

Given we are one of the richest counties in the world, given other rich countries do support their SEN kids I would say it’s not unsustainable

we need to move to a more equal society

we need to
move away from neoliberal economics

So you’re going to be happy with SEND kids without provision or support in your children’s classes?

Some of the problem is schools refusing to take some children with EHCPs who then end up privately educated instead. It’s crippling for councils to fund.

Personally I think they need state sponsored transport companies for example. If the taxi firms can't be trusted not to add tens of thousands on every year, you need to create a company that is safe to transport kids at the true cost.

I think quite a few children who won’t ever live any type of independent life are still
in the wrong private schools. My friends son is a prime example.

They will never live alone. They will never work. They cannot be left unattended at all. Not even to get changed. They are secondary aged. Over 120k a year on private school council funded.

It’s basically childcare for my friend a local “school” would be much cheaper and provide what he’s actually learning for him and others like him.

Don’t get me wrong his a lovely lad can be hilariously funny. But can scare the shit out of you because he just has no sense of anything at all. Would wonder naked down the street and step out in front of a car and hand you his bank card and pin. Is still at year 1 maths and English. But should be getting ready for GCSEs. His private school hasn’t given him an education.

There’s been some weird funding rule
in place for several years now which has meant that local authorities haven’t had to really account for what they have been spending on SEND. It’s as though there was this magic, imaginary pot of money to pay for SEND. That rule changes at the end of this tax year and so, once local authorities have to add what they actually spend on SEND to their outgoings, it will bankrupt many of them. The explosion in social care in recent years as well as general things like local authorities (along with all other employers) having to pay increased minimum wage salaries, increased NIC, increased utilities etc means that their costs are ever increasing and increasing at a rate greater than council tax rises and now there is going to be the SEND funding too.
There will be someone who comes into this thread soon and knows how the financing works and can hopefully provide a much better explanation than me of the funding rule I have referred to but I think I have explained the gist of it properly.

It’s really very simple
theres been an actual rise in the number of children and young people with exceptionally high needs eg non verbal, non ambulatory, incontinent.

special schools which could meet high needs have gradually been shut down so LAs are paying other LAs or independent companies for specialised provision (this is the exact same issue they have with residential care and elderly care)

Curriulum and schools have changed so children and young people with moderate needs cannot access mainstream as they could before and therefore later in their educational journey tend to fall into needing specialised provision.

The cost of everything (wages, electricity,petrol) has shot up so the cost of this provision and transport to it is considerably higher.

LAs are caught in a catch 22 with no money to build appropriate local state provision but then stuck funding alternatives.

the exact catch 22 we have in children’s, disability and elderly residential care and in housing stock. The state pays fortunes to
private landlords and doesn’t invest in social housing.

Also in 2011 local councils were in effect banned from building new schools of any kind.

so they have not been allowed to open new mainstream or special schools for a long time now.

hence many of the schools that children with complex needs attend are private and extremely expensive.

https://www.ft.com/content/090a743a-08b5-4349-9355-99e431566692

I don’t know if you’ve noticed but the country is up to its eyeballs in debt. 10% of the country’s budget goes on debt repayments. That’s just like flushing money down the loo. The majority of councils budgets go on adult social care, housing, child social care, SEN education and transport to SEN education.

That’s why we’re closing libraries and public loos and swimming pools and we’ve got potholes and weeds everywhere. We cannot keep letting these issues suck all of the public money up. We need to spend on other things as well.

The safety valve and statutory overrides for councils means that a lot of the costs have been hidden for a few years which has disguised the extent of the debt. This will presumably all come tumbling into the public eye soon.

LAs are now paying out extortionate costs to independent SEN schools (100K per year per child), largely in part to the rampant closure of maintained SEN schools in the early-mid noughties. Look back at news articles from then and there were people screaming it would be a disaster for LAs and mainstream education. But here we are anyway.

Can anyone explain why we don't have a school transport system like America? Considering there aren't enough schools for children (I understand this will be getting easier as birth rates decline) but being able to send kids to meet a bus that collects all of them in the area for each school makes sense for working parents, congested roads, village parking issues etc etc.

I see that SEND kids would need specialised minibuses but surely setting up a nationwide transport company for kids education would solve a lot of issues?

I work in SEND. It’s complex, but my thoughts are that it’s due to underfunding the system as a whole, alongside making the curriculum very narrow, rigid and heavily assessment based. This has resulted in far more kids not fitting the system and parents pursuing statutory assessment to ensure their child’s needs are met.

What we need is a system that is more inclusive by design - well funded, less pressure in the early years, more play, more outdoors, less statutory tests in primary, higher ratios of staff to pupils and relaxed secondary school uniforms! (As a start) I think you’d then start to see a drop in the number of pupils who would need something additional to this and consequently less EHCPs.

So you’re going to be happy with SEND children unsupported and with no provision in your children’s classes?

It’s not about specialised minibuses, it’s about some children needing two adults to accompany them in a taxi to get them safely to school.

There's also an element of central government making legal requirements of councils to provide minimum standards whilst not giving them any funding for it.

"I don’t know but then I read posts on mn where posters say it costs the LA £375k a year for their one SEN child’s education so times that by how many children are in each LA I can see the expense"

Those of sort of prices are for residential placements which would be expensive regardless of education being provided or not.

What we need is a system that is more inclusive by design - well funded, less pressure in the early years, more play, more outdoors, less statutory tests in primary, higher ratios of staff to pupils and relaxed secondary school uniforms! (As a start) I think you’d then start to see a drop in the number of pupils who would need something additional to this and consequently less EHCPs.

Exactly this.

The current definition for SEND in English schools as per the Code of Practice is that a child is considered to have SEND if they need something 'additional to or different from' everyone else. If increasing numbers (15%, 25%, 33%) of the school population needs something 'additional to/different from' the curriculum, then maybe the curriculum is wrong!

@thethinkingeconomist we are already having to figure it out.
How much figuring out do you think parents need to already do if they have kids who have SEND needs. It’s a really hard, really long and often really costly amount of figuring it out for parents. It’s cost me thousands of pounds of which I’ve had to use credit cards and take loans to be able to do. Plus the cost to my mental health fighting the local authority for 4 years to overturn 2 refusals to assess for an EHCP, the provision of a tutor so my child got some form of education for 4 hrs per week,2 lots of mediation and a tribunal. Once I got all of that done, the LA sent referrals to 37 different colleges within a 40 mile radius of which only one was able to meet need. That college costs the LA £160,000 per year but they could have saved themselves the costs of 2 mediations and a tribunal.
I now drive my child to college, 24 miles each way, 4 times a day and still have to hold down a job and take my child to weekly therapy sessions and medical appointments. I feel like I’m having a breakdown and am definitely burnt out.
How else would you suggest I figure it out?

A quick Google showed me that councils have lost 40% of funding since 2014.

perhaps that is what's contributing.

We need to separate schools from this mess too. School staff are being worked to the bone to care for children with an increasing need. Alter the curriculum, create more of a range of schools. Accept that for some children, school is just childcare and that's enough.

What do other countries do? Do they have the same rates of disability as we do?

Would people think twice about having multiple children if they had to fund part of their care? We make the elderly pay, why not parents for their children?

I do understand there would be outliers, but I know the specialist school near us has 2 minibuses that they use for a large range of disabled children. Currently you could employ 2 carers daily for the cost of the transport in some cases, which also might be worth looking at. I am sure the schools would rather have 2 people supporting a kid on a bus and have them around to help for the rest of the day.