There are about 1.9 million children and young people with special educational needs because of disabilities or learning difficulties. The children who need the most help tend to have an education, health and care (EHC) plan, a legally enforceable agreement that sets out what they are entitled to. That group is about 576,000 – up 140% from 2015 – and is expected to reach 1 million within a decade.
Because EHC plans include things such as transport to a school outside the council area if no adequate provision is available locally, the costs can tot up quickly, and often run to thousands of pounds each year. But they are of crucial importance to the families concerned. “If you’re a special needs parent, an EHC plan is often the only bit of certainty you have,” John said. “It’s a legal document which, at least in theory, says that your local authority is committed to it. But even now, a lot of the time, those things just aren’t being delivered.”
Here’s what you need to know about what’s going wrong.
How we got here
The crisis can be traced back to 2014, and the Children and Families Act, which expanded eligibility for Send provision in both directions – downwards to preschool, and upwards to the age of 25. That would all be governed by an EHC plan. A document explaining the changes to young people set out a key provision with deceptive simplicity: “The Act says the council must make sure the child or young person actually gets the help with their education that their plan says they should get.” And, in the foreword: “It is about making children’s lives better.”
“It was a good thing on paper,” John said. “At least rhetorically, it was intended to ease some of the problems that children with special educational needs faced.”
But the act did not explain how all this would be paid for – and even as the government introduced major new obligations for councils, town halls faced savage cuts to their budgets. “The story of that bill is of good intentions completely shredded,” John said. “It is the story of the depth of austerity – and the part of the state that got the most brutal treatment was the councils.”
At the moment, councils are allowed to exclude these costs from their accounts, so that they do not breach their statutory obligation to set a balanced budget. If that accounting sleight of hand expires as it is supposed to in 2026, the cumulative deficit across English councils will be about £4.6bn, the NAO says, and 43% will be at risk of effective bankruptcy.
The effect on children
The NAO report largely casts the problem in financial terms, and maybe you can’t blame them – they are literally auditors, after all. But the first victims of the way council budgets have fallen apart are the children with a legal entitlement to support.
In order to access central government money to help them with their budget problems, councils have to show how they are going to make savings. And while former Conservative children’s minister Claire Coutinho said that the idea was “not about targeting a particular reduction in EHC plans”, there is lots of evidence that councils are setting reduction targets and refusing more requests for assessments.
“In a way, the numbers can obscure the human cost of all this, and what’s at stake in people’s lives, and the potential that is being lost,” John said. Only this week, he met the father of an autistic teenager whose crucial transport to school had been summarily withdrawn and only reinstated after endless panicky phone calls.
The ‘golden ticket’ myth
Meanwhile, the families struggling in a system that only issues EHC plans within the statutory 20-week limit 50% of the time are increasingly being made to feel as if they are pushy parents or making unreasonable demands, rather than doing exactly what the government told them they should do. EHC plans have been called “golden tickets”, and the parents who fight for their children have been cast as “middle-class parents pushing it”. Even in the NAO report, the need for special needs provision is strikingly described as “demand”, as if this was just a consumer marketplace. It’s hard to imagine any of that language being applied to social care, for example.
Last week, the Conservative leadership candidate Kemi Badenoch launched a pamphlet that claimed “being diagnosed as neurodiverse” (the wrong word) now comes with “economic advantages and protections”, with the rise in conditions such as autism cast as part of “a narrative built on fragility and medicalisation”. (John, whose son has autism, wrote an excellent piece dismissing that nonsense.)
We might ask why everyone is clamouring for this special treatment when research last month found that children with special needs have fallen further behind since the 2014 reforms, and on average are almost two years behind their peers in writing by year 6.
The truth is there is lots of evidence that disability and learning difficulties are the exact opposite of a path to economic advantage. “As I said in that piece, this has been in the culture for a while, this idea that autism is somehow got up,” John said. “But very often in these culture war things, you can eventually trace it to public spending. Nobody ever wants to say we’re making cuts because we can’t afford it. There is a drive to make the people with the needs look unreasonable instead.”
The cost of cuts
Perhaps the most bitter part of this story is how severely self-inflicted much of the damage is: while it is true that the number of children with EHC plans has risen more than anyone expected, it is also true that the expense of fulfilling them has been made vastly worse by the failure to fund good local services.
One obvious example: if more had been spent on ensuring adequate local provision for children with disabilities and learning difficulties, the vast transport budget – which the NAO says has risen by 80% in real terms to £1.4bn a year in less than 10 years – would be far smaller. (See this First Edition from March for more on that.)
“It’s always the same story,” John said. “Cuts are expensive. That is the cruel irony of the austerity years.”
He points to the demise of Sure Start, and how that led to a big fall in early intervention. “And councils’ children’s departments have been decimated. In Newcastle, for instance, at one stage there was only one educational psychologist to assess all of the children in the area for EHC plans. That means you end up having to hire locums on hugely expensive day rates.” And no parent wants to go to a tribunal – but when councils reject their assessment requests, they often feel they have no choice. The campaigning website Special Needs Jungle estimates that councils spent about £99m on defending these cases in a single year – and lose 98% of the time.
The slim hopes of a solution
The NAO report is pretty vague about the best way forward, but says the government should consider “whole system reform”. That might be code for ripping up the 2014 act and starting again – a move that would leave many families in anxious limbo. It also says that work needs to be done to understand the root causes of the increase in need for EHC plans, and that a more integrated system with a “vision and long-term plan for inclusivity” should be set out, hinting that mainstream schools should be used more of the time.
All of that sounds like it is more about the budgets than the children. “On an emergency level, the government should really put more money in to prop the system up, and then remedy the things that have gone wrong,” John said. “You might be able to get to a properly functioning system in a decade.”
The government acknowledges that changes will take time, and has responded to the report by promising “a greater focus on mainstream provision and more early intervention”. But, John said “I fear that removing EHC plans, or taking away the right to a tribunal, will be part of what they do. If that happens, there will be thousands of parents marching down Whitehall. And I will be one of them.”
