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.

One reason is the services are statutory (they arent the only statutory service) so Local Government funding reduced 22% in real terms through austerity - bit they had to continue providing the service

The second is around not having enough special school places so private equity has been able to exploit this and make a profit at vulnerable chikdrens exoense (ditto taxi firms)

Thidly, it is expensive to provide sen education as its people heavy and the lack of early intervention has meant support costs escalate unnecessarily.

If you read a different article they will blame social care for bankrupting councils as thats another statutory service that costs a lot.

I wonder how much research has been done into what SEND provision looks like in other countries. Would be useful to know what else is out there-what works/doesn't work? If similar amounts are being spent. And what their accompanying mainstream offer/curriculum is like in contrast!

You have summarised pretty well. Councils are still incurring the expenditure (so cash out of the door) but the 'statutory override' means that the deficit doesn't show as reducing council reserves due to a technical accounting adjustment. If it did Councils would be bankrupt and need to declare themselves so via what are called section 114 notices (like Birmingham and others have done). The statutory override was due to end this year but has been extended I think to March 2028. Working in education finance the SEND funding crisis is real and we have to find a sustainable solution.

I never thought of this point, that the vast improvements in ante- and postnatal care is likely to have driven rates of learning difficulties upward as a downstream consequence.

But if 80% of councils go bankrupt because of this spending, 80% of the entire population - including these children and their families - will feel the repercussions in ALL areas of their lives impacted by their local council. The situation is completely untenable.

And what about the rest of these children’s lives, when they’re no longer of school age but unable to work? The needs will go on, potentially. The cost of them will just be transferred to central government for the bulk of the expense (unless they’re able to enter the workforce and live independent lives) and then the moaning will be about the benefits burden.

I do believe that as we collectively have created a society and economy where it’s nigh on impossible for anything other than a minority of people to start or raise a family with secure housing without two working parents, the burden of caring for these children (including when they become adults) should be a collective burden. But money is STILL being wasted and/or transferred to limited pools of shareholders and/or inefficiently spent and/or bandied about like a political football etc. That’s what’s objectionable. Equally, too many parents of these children are being forced to waste energy and time and money on fighting bureaucracy for what they need, resources they otherwise could have devoted to doing the caring or educating themselves.

It’s just upside down and back to front, and these poor kids and their parents are being vilified and falsely accused of things totally outside their control. It’s the system that’s corrupt, not people using it.

I think that one issue is that special schools were closed and the intention was to try to support children with special needs in main stream schools but this happened without adequate funding.

I recognise this posters style.

They will never engage with the fact that the education placements often cost less than the replacement 'baby sitting' social care placements that the peope age out into aged 19 to 25.

I see complex needs children (down syndrome, peg fed, non verbal, incontinent getting thier 'theatre of education' for 5 days a week at about £20k a year less than 3 days a week social care respite offered for them attend through adulthood.

The statutory override was due to end this year but has been extended I think to March 2028.

If it's already been extended, what's to stop it being extended again and again and again...to kick the problem down the road??

My SEN child doesn't get an education as the LA refuses to provide anything. I think your non send kid is getting significantly more education than nothing.
The LA won't even pay for the smallest package of support we asked for and that actually was a third of what is allocated per average mainstream pupil. So would have cost less but they refused even that. Not to mention all the times they failed to provide even the barest of access.

But yes the poor healthy kids who can attend school won't someone think of them 🤔

The last budget said that the treasury would take over send funding so it didnt sit in councils books from when that 28 override ends. Its quite a radical change and I dont know why the guardian hasn't included in the article. They are still to publish the white paper on how send will look though.

"And in those cases, those children are not getting any benefit from being in "education" and thus cheaper babysitting provision should be made for them."

I can see you have no idea how much social care provision would cost for young people with that level of need.

What happens at age 9, and what happens at age 7?

There’s jumps in this data and that’s interesting because it used to be consistent and now it’s leaping at certain ages.

Edit to say I have looked and this is Yr2/yr3 and yr4 or 5. I can’t tell because of the way the graph is. But are we having assessments at these points? (Have a young child so not sure about how it works at school)

This is a useful and rather scary report about future costs:
https://ifs.org.uk/publications/spending-special-educational-needs-england-something-has-change
in particular this bit from the summary:
‘7. The government’s own forecasts suggest annual spending on high needs will rise by at least £2–3 billion between 2024–25 and 2027–28, which largely reflects projected increases in EHCPs and need over the next few years. Even with the additional £1 billion announced in the 2024 Autumn Budget, these increases in spending would imply cumulative local authority deficits of over £8 billion by 2027 assuming high-needs funding is held constant in real terms. Given the statutory obligations attached to EHCPs, this should be the default assumption for the public finances. ‘

The severely disabled children simply wouldn’t have lived years ago. When you can save babies born at 23/24 weeks then you’re going to get a lot of disabilities.

Thanks again, this is so interesting and also so frustrating.

It has a lot in common with the housing crisis which is an area I know about, in that the state has not been spending money building homes which are affordable (and has been reducing the number through right to buy), and therefore has to spend a massive amount funding people's rent to private landlords and in temporary accommodation. And bad housing then has major effects on health, education etc.

Similarly it sounds like there has been massive underinvestment and a move to close some of the schools we now need. Plus increased demand as we have more kids who need more support, for the various reasons described.

The thought of this situation plus the adult social care issues plus a lot of people retiring without adequate pensions... And a smaller proportion of economically active adults. It's very worrying.

To be fair if you look at the graph - severely disabled babies are going to start with a care plan surely? And that’s looks like a very small increase - it’s not representative of the majority of the extra care plans

It's not about wanting the top school or "the best". It's about our children having access to education. As a parent, it's my legal duty to ensure my child is educated. If mainstream school isn't suitable, for whatever reason, and a mechanism exists to assess and provide for a suitable establishment for education, then you bet I'm going to utilise that mechanism.

They won't actually go bankrupt because the statutory override is in place until 2028, and then the funding will be taken over by central government.

Not all EHCPs are expensive. DD has one, and it's pretty low cost. She's autistic with moderate support needs but also very bright. She's in mainstream, and there are a couple of therapies in there that 20 years ago would have been provided by the LA to the school in the normal run of things. Except the LA doesn't do that any more (because academisation, so they don't actually run any services), and contract really really shit ones in instead. We have a tribunal next week for one that I've worked out the LA have spent more fighting us on than a few years of provision, and a lot less than if she ends up in supported housing without a job because she can't communicate.

The system is totally broken. We shouldn't need an EHCP. I don't want one. But there's zero other way to make sure a school provides even reasonable adjustments, which is why so many parents push for them. There have been huge changes in the way the education system in the UK is funded and run since the late 90s, and that's a core part of it. Most schools are essentially a private enterprise now.

It needs to be taken wholly out of the hands of LAs. It's a fragmented, unaccountable system that councils clearly can't sort out on their own. You can't remove the LA from every other aspect of schooling apart from SEND and expect the two systems to work together.

I wonder whether, given the crisis that is unfolding in funding, if SEND funding needs to be means tested? The social contract of the welfare state is perhaps no longer viable across many/ most areas of social care

See I’m not sure I buy this, in terms of overall numbers.

Think back to the past - not a million years ago, but, say, the 1970s.

There were no pregnancy scans. All babies with Down syndrome would have been born rather than terminated, and many other disabled babies that otherwise would’ve been screened out. Fewer vaccines and higher rates of measles, mumps, polio - all of which routinely left children disabled. Throw in the general lack of health and safety and kids playing out and I imagine there were accidents galore (compared to now).

It makes no sense that we ‘have more disabled children now’

How do you means test a child?

You means test a family?

It's interesting. My guess is that the jump at 9 probably comes from a few things. First, an end to "wait and see" as children approach secondary: sometimes children can get by in a nurturing primary but it's clear to everyone they won't in secondary. Second, ADHD and dyslexia can only be diagnosed after 6 and 7 respectively (in most cases); if you account for delays in diagnosis and having to appeal your way through an EHCP application, 9 seems about right. Similarly, for a lot of autistic children with lower support needs (but still enough to make school hard) this may not be noticed until they're older.

At 7, it'll be children who entered primary school without a plan and then school/parents realise they need one. The authors of the report also noted the timing of the pandemic.

This is the main reason. Tory government underfunded local councils for years and allowed them to run a deficit on SEND budgets. And then just before they got kicked out, they called it in and told councils it had to come back onto the books and be balanced. Delaying this is not going to fix the underlying central underfunding. It is merely going to delay the council going bankrupt.