Zachary Marsh

The unstoppable rise of Send

As students go back to school this September, headteachers across the country are being forced to confront a system in crisis. While children reconnect with their friends and swap stories of the summer holidays, an ever-increasing number will have a little ‘S’ next to their name on the register – for Send, or Special Educational Needs and Disabilities.

Startlingly, one in five students in England are now recorded as having Send. Policy Exchange’s new report, Out of Control, finds that the number of children given Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) – designed to support those with the most severe needs that schools cannot normally provide for – has increased by 83 per cent since 2015. As a former teacher, I saw this spiralling crisis first hand.

This has come at a tremendous cost. Half of all extra schools spending in the last decade has gone on Send. £11 billion will be spent this year – with taxis for children with Send set to cost more than £1 billion alone by the end of the decade. The system is at breaking point, with three-quarters of England’s councils facing bankruptcy over Send costs.

£11 billion will be spent on Send this year – with taxis for children with Send set to cost more than £1 billion alone by the end of the decade.

The popular consensus that the unstoppable rise of Send among our children is the product of better awareness and diagnosis has blinded policy-making for too long. In reality, while mental health and neurodivergence remain fundamental challenges for many young people, the system increasingly draws in many who do not need a label and do not benefit from having one – at terrible human and economic cost.

Child development is messy. Yet the desire of parents and teachers to ensure young people are happy and healthy has too often spiralled into an urge to problematise that runs counter to children’s interests. We used to be comfortable accepting that sometimes children might feel down or upset, or struggle to keep up with their peers in class for a period. Now widespread concern about mental health means that if you feel anxious, you must have anxiety. If you get restless in lessons, you must be struggling with ADHD. Yet a 2018 study at Cambridge University found that 25 per cent of children diagnosed with Send were in fact age-typical.

Worse still is an incentive structure that encourages families to seek out labels for their children in return for a host of benefits. Middle-class dinner party conversations now turn on what diagnoses will unlock extra time in exams. Send-based exam adjustments are twice as common in the independent sector as in state schools. The unlimited funds that can be unlocked by EHCPs have started an arms race of parents wanting to access more support for their children – crowding out those with genuine needs.

This diagnosis-seeking behaviour clashes with a Send system dominated by limited knowledge, poor evidence and woeful outcomes. Thousands of schools are offering forms of Send support without any evidence base in their favour. One girl I taught would insist she could not read without the aid of a transparent yellow slip – a ‘coloured overlay’, a dyslexia intervention which, I would subsequently discover, had been debunked in the 1980s. Yet Policy Exchange found these are still used in nearly a third of sample schools.

Many children in the Send system face very real difficulties with learning. Yet more and more young people are being unnecessarily labelled and then taking those labels to heart. I vividly recall one boy who, despite being very bright, had been laden down with supportive technology at the insistence of his overbearing mother. Once, when asked to complete a simple numbering task, he insisted he could not hold a pen and – despite being able to write very well, as I later found out – insisted on drawing the whole worksheet out on his tablet, rather than doing the task in front of him.

When a child is told they cannot do something by adults they trust, they tend to believe them. Instead, as Bridget Phillipson and Wes Streeting have both argued, these children require ‘much-needed grit’. The system needs to focus on what children can do, rather than damning children with Send through the poverty of low expectations.

Tinkering around the edges will not deliver the change we need. We cannot afford to throw more money into the pit, supporting a system saturated with demand which means help often does not reach those who need it most. Instead, we must scrap the perverse incentives, insist on good evidence and address over-medicalisation.

EHCPs should no longer come with the tantalising promise of unlimited funding. Schools should be required to commission only Send interventions that are cost-effective and backed by strong evidence – in the way that hospitals do for medical treatments. Resources need to be made available to help children earlier, breaking the link between diagnosis and support.

These proposals are radical but necessary. We cannot afford to remain locked on a path that is unsustainable and unaffordable – and which betrays the very children the system claims to help.

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