Keir Starmer’s government is heading for trouble – again. Last time it was welfare reform, now it’s SEND (special educational needs and disabilities) funding in schools. It’s being widely reported today that Labour MPs are kicking off over ministers’ refusal over the weekend to rule out cuts in SEND provision, by which councils are legally obliged to give extra support to such pupils, such as dedicated teaching assistants or taxi transport to and from school.
The parallels with last week’s row over welfare reform and PIPs are striking. Most obviously, both proposals for cuts are the result of an explosion in the numbers in receipt of funding. 525,000 adults now claim disability benefits for anxiety and depression – up from 461,000 just the year before. Psychiatric disorders comprise 39 per cent of PIP claims. Funding for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) claims alone has risen from £700,000 a year in 2013 to £292million today – a rise of more than 41,000 per cent. 3.6 million people are now entitled to a PIP.
There is a similar story with SEND. 1,673,205 pupils in English schools have SEND – 18.4 per cent of the school population. In 2016, that figure was 1,228,787 pupils, so there has been a 31.2 per cent increase since 2016.
A report last October by the National Audit Office (NAO) found that the number of young people with an education, health and care (EHC) plan – a deeper level of support than standard SEND – had risen from 240,000 in January 2015 to 576,000 in January 2024, an increase of 140 per cent, with a corresponding 58 per cent real-terms increase in high-needs funding to £10.7 billion overall.
But what makes these astronomic rises even more startling is that, as the NAO put it, despite the increase in funding, the system is ‘still not delivering better outcomes for children and young people’. So SEND funding is not even doing what it is intended for.
Plainly the system isn’t working and is in urgent need of reform. As with PIPs, one of the key questions that needs to be understood before any reform is why the number has exploded so much. More accurate diagnosis of such disabilities might offer one explanation and, post-Covid, greater need. But it requires an act of supreme blockheadedness to reject the notion that the criteria for classification have been widened to such an extent that the definitions have become almost meaningless. We need, in other words, to start again so that those genuinely in need of extra support receive it.
But blockheadedness has become the defining characteristic of responses to reform. As with PIP, and now with SEND, every day brings further evidence of how profoundly unserious Labour MPs – and the government – are about reform (and indeed the country as a whole, which seems to have no stomach for reality). We spend over £320 billion on welfare – disability payments, Universal Credit, winter fuel payments, Motability, child benefit and the state pension. SEND costs billions. The deficit is £137 billion. And the government couldn’t even stick to the £5 billion of welfare cuts it proposed – with a likely SEND retreat, too – because Labour MPs are unwilling to live in the real world and the Prime Minister has the backbone of a raspberry jelly.
It’s not just deeply depressing; it’s intensely worrying, because you can’t just ignore the real world when it all gets too much. Chickens are waiting to come home to roost.
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