Why is there a crisis in special educational needs?
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Among the several intense upward pressures on public spending that the Chancellor is faced with in her forthcoming spring statement, one of the most difficult is the huge recent increase in spending on SEND, Special Educational Needs and Disabilities. Ultimately, the bill ends up with local councils and becomes a headache for the government as debts mount.

But this isn't just a financial issue. Parents say they're struggling to access the support that their children need. So what has led to this explosion in demand for special needs help? How can we afford it? And how can we better help the children? Step into the briefing room and together we'll find out. First, I want to define some terms and find out how the system works. I'm joined by Branwyn Jeffries, the BBC's education editor.

Brownwind Jefferies, can you just tell us first what special educational needs means? What does it refer to?

What it means is any child or young person who, in order to access their education and to progress at a level that fits with their potential, needs additional support in the school or college that they're attending. And so it applies to anybody of whom this could be said, that they cannot attain their potential unless they are given this additional support.

That's correct. There are different levels to this. So there is a level which is a child, a young person who's identified as having a special educational need,

That's around 18% of the school population in England. Then within that, you have children who access some support within the school or college. And then the smallest but fastest growing potentially subset is children who have an education, health and care plan. This is a plan setting out their needs and it is legally binding on their local authority.

Right, an educational care and health plan, which we'll refer to now on as a plan. And that's the group that's growing the fastest. Can you give us a kind of idea about that growth? Well, what's really interesting about this is for about 10 years between 2007 and 2017...

The proportion of pupils with a plan, or as it used to be known, a statement, was fairly stable at about 2.8%. What we've seen in recent years is a very rapid growth in the proportion being identified with the highest need and therefore gaining a plan. So it's now 4.8% of all pupils.

That's around 430,000 children and young people who are in our education system. That's a steady and fairly rapid rise over the last five to seven years. If you get a plan, what might you expect to be given to you to enable you to work your way through the system? Essentially, this is all about the money.

So if you are a child with an identified special educational need, up to the first £6,000, your school would be expected to find that from within their budget. And there's a sort of rough calculation that allocates to schools some money for that. That would be for things like an additional teaching assistant to help you in class or

share of a teaching assistant or perhaps some additional support with specific needs.

Education, Health and Care Plan and EHCP is for the highest need of children. Amongst the largest categories are autism, social, emotional and mental health. So for young children, that could be difficulties with regulating their behaviour and their emotions. Those are two of the sort of categories which have been growing and fuelling an increase in

What about ADHD?

72% of these plans go to male pupils and that leaves around a third going to female pupils. We don't entirely know why. Who applies for a child to be put in one of these categories and who has to deliver it? So the Children and Families Act in 2014 was a big junction in how this whole system worked.

And under that, a parent can apply on behalf of their child. A professional can apply. So a SENCO in a school, the person who's responsible for particularly looking after the needs of these children or the school head teacher or indeed another professional.

Do you think that parents are more aware of their ability to ask for this support than maybe they were a few years ago? It's very hard to know. And certainly anecdotally, parents will often say they go to that stage because sometimes they feel they can't get access to adequate support within the system without it.

And, of course, there is an incentive for schools as well because if you get that legally protected right to have your needs recognised, the funding has to follow proportionate to the needs from the local authority. What is so striking is leave aside the money, no-one thinks it's working at the moment. Parents face delays in diagnosis, a struggle to get the recognition that they need of their child's needs.

Many resort to going to a tribunal to get the plan in place when 99% of them win. Councils are desperately worried that funding is not keeping up with their legal obligations.

And at the same time, schools are saying if we are going to adequately meet the needs of more children in mainstream, which is the stated objective of the last government and the current government, we need the resources and the staff in order to do that.

Bramman Jeffries, but why has there been this huge increase in children and young people being diagnosed with conditions such as autism and ADHD? Will Farr from Cambridge University's Faculty of Education is an expert in childhood autism diagnosis. Will, how far has the number of autism diagnoses gone up and by how much and why? Autism diagnosis over the last 24 years has roughly gone up by around about 780%.

percent. But this is more to do with a broadening of diagnostic categories than anything else, such that many people think that diagnostic categories have in some way lost a lot of the meaning that they used to have. Now, on top of this, there is actually clinically a doubling in the last five years of the number of people that are being referred. So it's sort of

A double whammy, as it will, coming from the number of people that want to actually find out whether they've got some sort of autistic autism spectrum. And then also the longer term trend associated with diagnostic categories and diagnostic criteria. At which point, I suppose the question would be, has the percentage of referrals turning into a positive diagnosis changed?

The recent data that I worked on for some work with NHS England, tracking from like 2015 to 2019, showed that roughly around about 60% of the referrals carry through to an assessment.

But in terms of NHS England's data and most of the data that we see on, say, recent reports, that number in the UK has tracked along roughly somewhere between about 1% to 2%. 1% to 2% of the population? We're different then to the United States and we're different than to other reports around the world. The United States reports around about almost...

3% of numbers, and some work that's come from Japan around about the same 3% also. We think that's highly likely to probably actually end up happening here as well. People have always been there in the background. They've always been there, but only now through public awareness and public understanding are many more people coming forward

And often, clinically, when children are diagnosed, families might look at one another and go, oh, haven't you got some of those tendencies as well? And so it's highly likely the number will go from around about 1% to 2% to maybe 2% to 3%. Does that mean that the sort of person we would have seen as having autism has changed dramatically?

in the last, I don't know, 30 or 40 years? Yes, I think is the short answer to that. If you go back through what are called the diagnostic statistical manuals, we're currently on the fifth version of that. And the second version of that that was around 1968, children that were diagnosed with autism were basically childhood schizophrenia, it was referred to. But in the latest version of this,

It was more to do with social communication and interaction and restricted and repetitive behaviour. But going back to the 1970s, the reason why it really changed was that there was a great professor called Lorna Wing, and she was aware that families were not getting the support they needed. And so she really, really wanted the diagnostic categories to broaden, as it were, because there are many families that weren't being supported anymore.

But you could argue that now it's possibly gone too far in that direction. And so we have this flood of referrals. There are other reasons why I think systemic reasons why I think referrals have gone up. But you could say the criteria, yes, you look different now than you would have done, say, in the 1970s if you're a child with autism. So essentially somebody from the 1970s with a 1970s understanding of what an autistic person would be like would not really recognise most of the people who are diagnosed as being autistic these days.

They'd probably recognise one end of the spectrum, which we now refer to as profound autism. Restrictive language, possibly non-verbal, possibly with low IQ. That's a relatively small part of what we call the autism spectrum today. That much more broader end has changed to actually encapsulate more people in terms of

the more kind of nerdy Silicon Valley, neuro tribes, people that are much more likely to have a particular job and a particular skill set that's very, very focused. That's been a broader category that's kind of like elaborated over time, I think. But there's still this category of profound autism that are still there. And in fact, now are less supported than they were in the past because we have this kind of burgeoning of the rest of the spectrum. And has the number of boys compared to girls being diagnosed changed significantly?

I'd say the number of boys has roughly stayed the same. It's always been around about four to one, three to one to four to one in ratios. But we think that girls are basically playing a little bit of catch up at the moment because boys with autism tends to be kind of recognised in external behaviour. Girls tends to be much more internalised behaviour. So girls with much more socially compliant, copy behaviour, have sort of like a small number of deep friendships.

have intense social acceptable interests, whereas boys would tend to be, you know, have problems with social communication, you know, extreme behaviours, challenging behaviours. You talked about increased awareness within families. Once you've had one diagnosis, you might look at the others and look at another. What about, if you like, the kind of socialised diagnosis, the fact that you just talk about it far more? In terms of autism clinical recognition, it's always been this category of what are called subjective observational inventories. So it's always to a degree been...

in the eye of the beholder and that makes it quite challenging. So yes, I think there is definitely a social awareness part of it and so I think that does further complicate things. Will Farr. And as we heard from Bramwyn earlier, this all puts a huge strain on council budgets. Tony Travers is Associate Dean of the LSE School of Public Policy. Tony, how much does the most expensive bit, the bit with the plans, the high-end special needs, how much does that cost?

At the moment, it's costing just under £11 billion a year. So it's a very substantial chunk of education spending. And it's not only is it big, but it's been rising sharply in real terms in the last decade. So in a sense, it's competing with all other education spending, but over time, eating a larger and larger share. So what was it just a few years ago?

Well, according to the National Audit Office, it was about six and a half billion was spent back in 2019-20. But if you go back further, it must have been under five billion sort of 10 or so years ago. So it's a big increase. What proportion of local authority budgets does it represent?

Well, if you look at the country as a whole, England as a whole, this total is about a fifth of the overall spending of nearly 50 billion on schools. Do councils actually have any choice in whether they fund SEND? Councils have a statutory duty, they're required by law, to react to parents who say their children, their young person, needs special educational needs. Can councils actually afford this substantial increase?

The clear answer is they can't. I mean, some councils can, but others run large deficits. And, of course, it's the sum total of the deficits that's become a political problem. Tony, what do you mean deficits? I mean, you've got the money to spend and you spend it. How can you have a deficit on it? The cost providing for children with special educational needs...

Once they've qualified, it's very much higher than for mainstream education, so per head. And that will lead to a total spending in the year, which, if you add it to all the other educational spending, in many cases exceeds the total of the dedicated schools grant. And that's where a deficit is incurred. So what do they do with that deficit? It just sits, this deficit, on the council's books.

but crucially they don't have to pay it off, I should say, in that year. Tony, what happens if this deficit keeps on increasing? Well, the deficits have been increasing and are projected to continue to do so, but there's a challenge facing the government and indeed councils, which is that next year, 2026-27, the government was committed in effect to requiring councils by some unknown means where they have deficits to pay them all off.

And that clearly can't happen because for many councils, their deficits on the dedicated schools grant are bigger than their entire reserves. Was this this government or the previous government that made this date? The previous government set the date when these deficits were going to have to somehow be paid off next year. Which the point you're making is they won't be. They won't be. There's absolutely no way of doing that.

It's worth remembering all of this began because the government, national government, changed the rules, making it easier for parents to ensure that their children qualified for special educational needs treatment.

The government has put more money into the system, but not as fast as demand has grown. So we are, the government is spending more on special educational needs than it was a decade ago, no question. It's just the demand has risen faster. And actually the spending per pupil, the young person, has dropped. So we've got the spending in totals going up, but per pupil is going down. And that means there's a squeeze on the system. Do you think that...

they will come up between them with a new funding model for special educational needs. Certainly the National Audit Office, which published a big report on this, recommends that the government does change its approach. The challenge, however, is, and this is exactly as with older people's social care,

In one way or another, you either have to reduce the number of children qualifying or find more money, which only the state can find, because local government's funding is ring-fenced for schools. They can't bring money across from the rest of them other sources. It's one of these intractable problems that has proved difficult for successive governments now, but this new one is trying to find a way forward.

Tony Travers, and before we go on, just a quick reminder that you can subscribe to the Brief England podcast by visiting BBC Sounds and you'll get access to the entire back catalogue, which includes the one about tariffs – the UK has just been tariffed – and the one about European defence in a post-NATO world. But now, to dig a little deeper into the way in which the SEND issue is handled by institutions and to look at possible ways out of the crisis…

I'm joined by Luke Sibieta from the Institute for Fiscal Studies and author of its recent report on SEND, and David Thomas, a former headteacher who now runs an education charity and was also an advisor on SEND for the Department for Education.

David Thomas, we've heard about the rise in numbers and why that's happening and the cost implications and all the pressure it's putting on councils. We haven't talked quite so much about the consumers and the providers, the carers and the schools. Impressionistically, what's their experience? The word you hear most commonly when people are talking about their experience of special needs in the system is fight. Parents are talking about how they have to fight to be able to get what they need. Schools are talking about fighting for a place, fighting for support. And I think

That tells you something about the experience of kind of conflict and adversarialism that is how people experience the system. And most conversations people have about SEND are about what lawyer they want to use rather than about what's going to be right for the child. That's the experience people are feeling. And what about the providers? I mean, if we're talking about schools...

It's the same in schools. And if you are in a chat of headteachers and you start talking about special needs, it won't be long before people start exchanging details of lawyers who are effective in chasing up local authorities or the systems that people are using for tracking EHCP applications to know when to go to the ombudsman. And David, one further point before I turn to Luke.

Is everyone that needs support getting it? And is the system coherent? And I suspect I know the answer you're going to give to these questions. Yeah, the answer is clearly no, right? It's people aren't getting the support when they need it. And it's taking far too long to get it. Luke, are we looking at a system which operates broadly in the same way and to the same level right away across the country? Or is there a level of arbitrariness in who gets what and where? This

The short answer is no. There are huge variations in the practice of different local authorities. So some, particularly in London and the South East, have more education, health and care plans, EHCPs. And in the North West as well. But in the East Midlands and Yorkshire, there tend to be fewer EHCPs. So there's a lot of variation across the country in terms of the types of provision that local authorities make. And this isn't because, say, the East Midlands has a lower need for

these other areas, it's just that it's harder to get it. Some of it's different practices because some local authorities think it's better for children to have EHCPs and some think it's better to have more mainstream support.

But a lot of it is just the resources and the fight that parents make is associated with levels of parental resources and ability to go through the legal system as well. David, how would you characterise how governments have been trying to deal with this problem since it was first recognised? We reformed our special educational needs system in 2014 with the Children and Families Act and that came into force in 2015. And you can date back the start of the big increases in...

diagnoses of education, health and care plans of local authority deficits to the introduction of that system. And so that was a system that was brought in to try and bring education, health and care together to be able to give more control to parents, to extend care to 25. Lots of very well-intentioned causes, but it's developed a system that is not leading to better outcomes and is putting all sorts of strains on the system.

Luke, what do you understand the current government to want when it comes to provision? They've certainly recognised the problem and identified it as one of their sort of burning problems they need to deal with in the Department for Education. Their main approach is going to be trying to provide more support within mainstream schools. So ensuring that more pupils stay within primary and secondary schools and they don't have to go to special schools for support.

And that kind of makes some sense from a logical perspective, because we're seeing about 5% of pupils now with EHCPs and rising. So when it gets to that level of numbers, you kind of have to be providing support within mainstream schools. But a lot of it is currently done within specialist schools. And I'm just wondering what the cost implications of the one versus the other is.

Special schools tend to be more expensive. So the average cost of a place in a state-funded special school is around £24,000. The average cost of a place in an independent special school is around £62,000. David, can we look at the outcomes for SEND children compared to others? Would we describe that outcome as satisfactory? No, I mean, it's nowhere near satisfactory. So if you look at it in terms of academic outcomes, there's a very big gap.

But if you look at it in terms of other outcomes, things like suspension rates from school, things like attendance at school, you see very, very big gaps. So it all suggests to us that despite a system that is taking lots of effort and lots of money, we're not getting the outcomes that children need. Are the plans flexible enough?

So one of the problems is that they're relatively inflexible, right? Because they're statutory and they have to go through a very, very big process to be able to get them. And if you want to amend the plan in any significant way, that is also a very big and bureaucratic process. The contents of the plans themselves often are not what those children deserve. So very often, although we have the illusion of plans that are made for an individual child, you're really getting a copy and paste of somebody else's plan, um,

You're very often getting requirements to deliver an intervention that has evidence that it doesn't work or isn't particularly effective. Well debunked theories are well alive within people's EHCPs.

I'd like to ask you both why you think we're seeing so many children with SEND. I mean, one of the things we've looked at is additional diagnosis, particularly of autism. But there may be other reasons as well, Luke, why more schools are applying for ECHPs for plans. The increases in autism and ADHD and mental health are happening right across the world. So they're happening in almost all high-income countries. Whatever's driving the increase is kind of common for lots of countries.

And you've already mentioned diagnostic thresholds changing and kind of lowering, and that's really important for autism and ADHD. But there are also other reasons particular to the UK. And so we could see genuine increases in need relative to high levels of extreme deprivation and reductions in speech and language therapy. There are also quite clear financial incentives for schools and parents to seek out EHCPs to ensure that schools have the resources to provide forms of support.

David, what's your answer to the same question? So I'd agree with Luke. There are clearly some things that are driving genuine increases in need and that we need to be supporting. There are financial incentives. The way you get more money for your special needs department is to apply for more plans. But there's plenty of evidence that there are other things going on as well. Boys born in the summer have a 40% chance of being registered as having special educational needs during their time in primary school. Whereas if they're born in the autumn, it's 20 or 25%. So there's a huge gap.

And that gap is not because there is a genetic difference between children born in the summer and children born in the autumn. That is reflecting something about how our schools are looking at children who are a bit younger, a bit less developed, maybe not quite caught up with their peers.

And rather than identifying that as something that the school can deal with, identifying it as special educational needs. Look, before we go any further, we ought to just look at whether or not the systems in the devolved nations are any different and their experiences are significantly different because we've mostly been talking about England here. Scotland's a really interesting example because they have more provision within mainstream schools and that was a deliberate policy from around 2000 onwards.

And so they've reduced the number of special schools and have more support within mainstream schools. And that's involved different physical infrastructure within schools. It's involved more training of teachers. But it hasn't really changed the financial pressures, really.

And Wales? So Wales had the new system from 2021 onwards called Additional Learning Needs. And that's meant to provide more funding within mainstream schools and less need to go for the equivalent of EHCPs. But again, it hasn't really changed the pressures on local authorities yet.

David, can we look at what might be done to reform the system? What might we look at? So at the moment, the incentives are for inclusion to not work. That's how you get more support. That's how you get more funding. We need to shift that. And I would be wanting to see a greater proportion of the funding go to schools just to provide support for children without having to prove that children are not successfully being supported in that school because I think it creates the wrong incentives.

The second thing is we need to be much more evidence-based around our approach to supporting children with special educational needs. We should probably have an equivalent to something like NICE, which we have in health, that sets out what support you should get for particular needs.

and how that should be given to you so that parents and children know what to expect, so that schools know what they should be delivering. And that removes some of the fight from the system because at the moment you have that fight because there is no external reference point. There is nothing saying this is what you should get. You just get whatever you can fight for.

Whereas I think if we move to a world where we were saying what good looks like, tasking schools with providing that, giving them the money to do it without having to prove that things haven't worked first, you move to a much more collaborative system that is much more evidence driven and gives children the support they need without them having to jump through bureaucratic hurdles first. Luke, would you agree? Yeah.

Generally speaking, yes. And I think there are some quite useful lessons from the Scottish experience. So Scotland went down the route of more mainstream provision and that's had some benefits and some costs. But I think one of the clear lessons from that is the role of teachers. Bringing teachers with you, including their training and the level of resources that needed to do it, I think is really important. I have to ask you whether you think that the ideas, even if they were implemented, would have any significant effect on costs. David? Yeah.

Yeah, I really do think they would. Move to a more collaborative and a more accountable and a more evidence-based model. Yes, and I think that delivers for you both better care for the children because the evidence at the heart of it means that we're only requiring things that we know work and we get more financial sustainability because it's clear what schools have to plan for and we're not having this kind of system of bureaucracy that just fights to determine the answer for children.

We have to go. My thanks to David Thomas and Luke Sibietta. We'll be back again at the same time next week. You've been listening to The Briefing Room with me, David Aronovich. The producers were Beth Ashmead-Latham, Kirsteen Knight and Caroline Bailey. The sound engineer was Rod Farker. The editor is Richard Varden. Another edition of this podcast will be along again really soon.

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