SEND Funding

Local government finance has finally hit the top of the media agenda, but for all the wrong reasons. Across England, many local authorities are staring over the precipice of financial ruin. Some have already passed the point of no return, and now lean on Section 114 notices as a white flag of fiscal surrender. 

The narrative often blames ‘austerity’, but the reality is far more complex. Rapidly rising demand for social care, a lack of meaningful reform in service delivery, and a series of disastrous commercial property gambles have left local finances hollowed out.

Last week’s reprieve, a £5 billion debt write-off for Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) deficits, is a classic sticking plaster solution. While it will help local authorities to clear the balance sheet today, it does nothing to alleviate the growing structural crisis.

SEND diagnoses in England have reached an all-time high, and have almost doubled since 2016. Today, 1 in 5 children in English classrooms are classed as having an SEND need. While some attribute this to ‘overdiagnosis’, a more cold-eyed economic explanation exists: the explosion of SEND diagnoses in schools is, at least in part, a rational institutional response to a broken funding model. 

For schools, every SEND pupil brings additional funding. The more severe a pupil’s needs, the more resources the school can unlock. This creates a perverse incentive: in a cash-strapped sector, a SEND diagnosis provides a route for additional funding, alleviating the need for restructuring, efficiencies or systemic change within schools. 

Without radical reform, local authorities will soon be in billions of pounds of SEND debt once more. We must decouple the incentives. If we continue to treat an SEND diagnosis as the only ‘golden ticket’ to flexible school funding, we will continue to see the numbers and the deficits climb.

James Hodgkinson