SEND Help: How children with special educational needs are being failed

The stakes are impossibly high, the backlash potentially nuclear, and only the most delicate balancing act will help the government tiptoe through its next minefield without serious and lasting injury.

Any government move perceived as saving money at the cost of undermining already fragile SEND (special educational needs and disabilities) rights will unleash a fury beyond Westminster, galvanising parents’ groups, campaigners and backbench MPs across parties. Keir Starmer’s shaky administration can hardly afford another welfare benefits-style rebellion right now.

One can only imagine the head-scratching and hand-wringing now accompanying the final revisions to the coming Schools White Paper, which will attempt to unravel the carnage left by years of under-funding of, and ineffective tinkering with, the SEND system.

On one side, councils, who say the explosion in demand for high needs provision is unsustainable on an existential level. EHCPs – legally binding documents for children and young people aged 0-25 with special educational needs (SEN) that cannot be met by a school's standard resources – have risen in England by 71 percent since 2018 to more than 638,000, but funding has fallen by about 35 percent in real terms.

SEND transport costs alone are getting close to £2 billion and local authorities would face a combined high needs education deficit of up to £10 billion by 2028 on the current trajectory, potentially pushing two thirds of them into effective bankruptcy.

On the other side, families are on their knees as they battle to keep their struggling children in school, and terrified of losing their precious plans.

Ellie Costello, director of parent support organisation Square Peg, says schools are pressured via perverse incentives such as performance targets and pressures from Ofsted to admit fewer children with additional needs while local authority budgetary constraints and shortages of expertise are leading to delays in assessments for EHCPs. 

She said: “There has been an increasingly authoritarian pushback against parents and, in the context of this culture war, we are collectively very concerned about the prospect of losing legal protection.”

The House has heard harrowing stories from 20 families, some of whom testified to the value of the precious, if precarious, lifeline thrown by EHCPs, others telling of their exhausting battles to win additional support for their children as they dropped out of school, sinking into mental health crises.

One, who has had to leave her NHS job under the intolerable stress of fighting for her three neurodivergent children, described the system as “archaic, punitive, outdated, and wholly unfit.”

Another told how she wielded her autistic daughter’s hard-won EHCP to fight for her all the way through to university and a degree, defying predictions that she would only cope with special schools and functional skills.

It should be a national scandal that there are thousands of children without an available school place.

The Department for Education (DfE) says its reforms will focus on inclusivity to “better identify and meet need earlier… and ensure more children and young people can receive their education in inclusive mainstream settings”, while supporting those with complex needs into special schools more quickly.

But parents fear these reforms will roll back their legal rights and shoehorn special needs children into underfunded units and mainstream classes.

In practice, special schools are grossly over-subscribed, sometimes tenfold, and costly – averaging £62,000 per year, three times more than mainstream EHCP-supported placements.

Campaigners say SEN children are too often removed from mainstream classrooms  rather than supported to stay in them, largely due to lack of expertise and resources, settings that do not support pupils’ sensory or mental health needs, and the Ofsted grading system which is weighted towards academic achievement.

Then there are the hundreds of thousands of children with SEN but no EHCPs, or with unidentified additional needs, many from families lacking the capacity to advocate for them, drifting out of education almost unseen. They are believed to account for a large majority of the 350,000 children missing from education, 1.3 million who are persistently absent and 148,000 severely absent.

Government data shows that over 150,000 were withdrawn from school to be home schooled last year. The Association of Directors of Services found in 2019/2020 that 54,646 children were electively home educated, which would suggest there had been at least a tripling of the numbers being home schooled since the pandemic, though figures pre-pandemic vary.

Tania Tirraoro, co-director of the Special Needs Jungle campaign group, said: “It should be a national scandal that there are thousands of children without an available school place. But somehow, it seems a child having SEND needs means it matters less.

“Government must look in particular at how councils too often fail to provide children with SEND either a suitable place or provision outside of school. It's very keen on cracking down on lack of attendance. Government needs to show the same enthusiasm for ensuring all children have suitable places to attend in the first place.”

More than 500,000 parents were fined for their children’s non-attendance last year, up 22 percent in 12 months and twice as many as in 2017. Hampshire County Council alone took in £1.5 million worth. Yet this punitive approach has not improved attendance.

Ellie Cook, from Cambridge, has two children with special needs. It took four years to get a diagnosis of autism for her younger child and she has now been waiting seven months for an educational psychologist appointment to kickstart the EHCP process, which is supposed to take a maximum 20 weeks but rarely does.

She has been unable to work full-time, spending her days coaching her daughter to try to get her into mainstream school – and keep her there – for just one hour a day, after she was “steam-rolled” back on to the curriculum.

“She desperately wants to go in but often freezes on arrival. She has been unable cope with the noise and the bustle and an ever-changing cast of staff, many of whom don't understand her needs. It’s traumatic for her and exhausting for both of us. She has joint pain and associated chronic fatigue so the burn out has been compounded."

When she missed a prescribed attendance schedule, Ellie and her partner were each fined £80. “It was a one-off, we paid it on a credit card and heard no more about it,” she said. “We all want her in school. What was the point of that?”

Aside from the emotional toll on families, suspensions, enforced home education or part-time curriculums and school “refusers” usually mean sacrificing at least one income. For lone parents, it can leave little choice but to claim benefits. For those who cannot find an appropriate place for their children in further education, child benefits are cut.

Most recent government figures show one in 13 children with EHCPs – more than 50,000 - have fallen out of formal education into patchwork provision such as home tutoring and forest schools or, too often, nothing at all. More than 2,000 are NEET – not in education, employment or training.

Children with plans are three times more likely to be suspended or excluded, and seven times more likely to be severely absent – missing more than half their lessons – than non-SEN peers.  A quarter of autistic children were suspended last year.  

A spokesperson for the National Autistic Society said: “A lot of mainstream exclusions are the product of a school system that cannot understand or respond to the needs, behaviours and experiences of autistic children. The most cited reason for permanent exclusions is ‘persistent disruptive behaviour’.

“This pattern is often a sign that a child’s needs are not being met.”

Anxiety and neurodiversity are the biggest challenges today

Christine Lenehan, the government’s strategic SEND adviser, has admitted it is undecided on whether EHCPs are the right “vehicle” going forward, and was considering restricting them to children in special schools and/or those with NHS or social care input.

Her words sent tremors through the SEND community – and the government has said little by way of reassurance.

On September 15, 90 MPs asked to speak at an emotionally-charged Westminster Hall debate on “retaining legal right to assessment and support in education for children with SEND”, triggered by an e-petition now signed by more than 127,000 people, an early warning signal to the government of the strength of feeling.

New Minister for Send and Schools Georgia Gould was pressed for details of what the government’s plans were, but spoke only in vague terms about putting families and teachers “at the forefront” of SEND reforms. The DfE told The House a legal right to additional support for children with SEND would remain, but would not be drawn into what form it might take, or for which cohorts of children. 

A spokesperson added: “Through our Plan for Change we’re already making progress – investing £1 billion into SEND and £740 million in specialist school places, rolling out a new inclusion-centred training curriculum and improving early intervention for speech and language needs.

 “We will set out our plans to ensure all children get the outcomes and life chances they deserve later this year.”

SEND children also face a stark postcode lottery with central funding, EHCP approval and provision varying widely by local authority. One in five pupils have SEN support in Salford, compared to one in 13 in Rushcliffe, Notts. EHCPs have increased by almost 200 percent in North Somerset in six years, compared to 16 percent in Camden. Camden is the highest centrally funded, with £3,500 per year per SEN pupil, compared to less than £1,000 in East Riding, where the number of EHCPs has almost doubled since 2019.

Beverley and Holderness MP Graham Stuart, whose constituency is in East Riding, says, “Funding calculations are historic and bear no relevance to the level of need today, but once fixed, nobody has the wherewithal to recalibrate it.”

He was chair of the education committee when EHCPs were introduced as part of the Children and Families Act in 2014 but believes the system has turned into a “monster”.

He said: “Perhaps we need to move away from the current rights-based approach, from anyone being able to dictate to the local authority what the rights of their child are and let the authority analyse and decide within finite resources."

Campaigners fighting to maintain EHCPs, however, point to austerity-driven hollowing out of support services, coupled with the aftermath of the pandemic, which has seen special needs escalate to crisis-levels, demanding more intensive – and expensive – interventions.

They warn that removing them will lead to an even greater educational exodus.

Margaret Mulholland, a DfE SEND adviser, said: "Scaremongering around numbers is not helpful. In 2010, we had fewer children on the SEN register. However, core funding has shrunk while complexity of need and diagnostically-identified conditions have widened…

"Anxiety and neurodiversity are the biggest challenges today. Schools and curriculums need to be redesigned to make them more flexible and inclusive for all if we are to help more SEND children thrive in mainstream.

"We know more about sensory issues, poor working memory and executive function. It doesn’t matter so much about the label, we need to learn from the expertise in special schools to develop a better understanding of how to meet those co-occurring needs."

Private providers, particularly private equity firms, are exploiting the broken market

In mid-September, the education committee’s detailed report, Solving the SEND Crisis, squeaked in ahead of the white paper. It concluded the Department for Education (DfE) “does not appear to have a clear understanding of the timescale and level of investment that is needed to achieve a truly inclusive mainstream education system.” In a bid to ensure “inclusion is embedded” it recommends accountability systems that would see the proportion of pupils with SEND published and compared with other schools and multi-academy trusts.

Thurrock MP Jen Craft, whose daughter has special needs, said: “The report is excellent and covers almost every point I would like to see in the white paper.

“The focus on EHCPs can distract from the broader problems of identifying and supporting all children with additional needs at the earliest opportunity and preventing them escalating to acute crisis levels.

“If mainstream schools were truly inclusive, we would have a far lower need for EHCPs. Some schools and local authorities do it much better than others, especially those that work closely with health and social care and build trust with parents. The worry is, removing or restricting EHCPs without other drivers in place could leave more children’s needs unmet.”

The Centre for Young Lives founder Anne Longfield said reforms must look at early years provision and other support and community services to identify need before it escalates to crisis levels, pointing to the success story of London boroughs who have worked collaboratively to bring down exclusions, suspensions and absence rates to the lowest levels in the UK.

She said: “When I was Children’s Commissioner pre-Covid, we found 88 per cent of exclusions happened in 10 per cent of schools. Off-rolling figures weren’t published but it was the same mix.

“It’s clear there are some schools that choose that approach but we also know of some that haven’t excluded a single pupil for years. While Ofsted’s new inclusion criteria announced in the latest review is welcome, it shouldn’t be a tick box, it should be built into the culture of every school, with all indicators driving towards it.”

Lib Dem education spokesperson Munira Wilson said that she hoped to see a more strategic approach to SEND provision, with LAs collaborating to commission the expensive high needs provision: “We don’t have enough special schools: that’s why you have a ballooning transport budget and private providers, particularly private equity firms, are exploiting the broken market.

"Mainstream schools need more specialist units so children can be supported closer to home and a central commissioning body could coordinate provision for children with rare or highly complex,” she added.

It’s a towering list of problems the white paper seems unlikely to fix on its own.

Update 23/09/2025: This piece was updated to clarify a quote from Ellie Costello.

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