Can we solve the special-needs crisis?

Dave Clements asks what's behind the rising tide of demand for special-needs education – and what the government can do about it. PLUS: Battle of Ideas debate on neurodiversity and over-diagnosis.

After the controversy over disability benefits, the provision of special-needs education might just be the next big furore to hit the Labour government. As the father of a child with ‘additional needs’ and a former school governor, this is an issue close to my heart.

The education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, has failed to dispel rumours that the government will withdraw the legal right of children who need extra support to Education, Health and Care Plans. These EHCPs – long, dry, supposedly legally binding documents that spell out what these children can expect in terms of support – have become the focus of a backlash from backbench MPs, parents’ and disability groups and celebrity special-needs campaigners.

THE RISING TIDE OF DEMAND
In England, the latest figures show that of the over 1.7million children in England with special educational needs, 482,640 have an EHCP. That’s more than a 10 per cent increase on last year’s number. So, not only are vast numbers of children being categorised as in possession of special educational needs, but more and more are qualifying for this extra level of support, too. It is not surprising, in this context, that local authorities are issuing less than half (46 per cent) of these plans (on which families depend) on time, despite having 20 weeks to do so. The situation is so bad that local-government leaders have warned of bankruptcy, and a financial fudge (or ‘statutory override’ to use the official term) is in place to keep an estimated £3 billion of SEND-related high-needs deficits off their books until at least 2028.

As John Harris, journalist and parent, argues, at least part of the reason for the massive uptake in EHCPs is that ‘informal special-needs provision in schools has become so unreliable that the only way of having any chance of securing what a child needs is to apply for one’. Most of the time, it's hard-up or struggling schools (with the blessing of hard-up or struggling parents) that apply for them. Harris is one of the co-signatories to a letter published in the Guardian expressing the worry of parents like him that ‘many thousands of children risk being denied vital provision, or losing access to education altogether’. But for many families, this is already the case. Children aren’t getting the provision they need now.

Kids with very significant needs are on part-time timetables because schools can’t cope. Some children aren’t attending school at all.

I’m less minded than Harris to defend the EHCP or the bureaucratic regime of which it is a part. A lot of time, effort and resources is spent writing these documents. Parents, schools, local authorities, the health service and others are involved and, when the legal disputes begin, advocates and lawyers, too. The plans draw on the expert opinions of psychologists, psychiatrists, occupational therapists, speech and language therapists, and others. And yet, in my experience, these documents sit on the shelf. The experts, for some reason, don’t write the plan and few of our kids see them again.

Schools are typically left to get on with it. The importance of EHCPs – especially for the 43 per cent issued to children in mainstream schools – seems to boil down to the extra money they unlock to help pay for half a teaching assistant to support the child, or at least help manage the potential disruption to their peers’ learning.

The government has been promising reform since it came to office and has announced it will publish a white paper in the autumn. And far-reaching and radical reform is urgently needed. The system is badly broken and in need of a serious shake-up. Not only is it an overly bureaucratic mess that is failing to meet the needs of those children and families that need it, this failure is compounded by the fact that it is massively oversubscribed.

THE PROBLEM OF OVER-DIAGNOSIS
The problem, in my view, is that too many kids are being labelled special-needs kids. To be blunt, there’s nothing ‘special’ about special educational needs if every child has one. Phillipson’s approach looks likely to make the situation worse. Not only has she suggested that support should be made available even before diagnosis, presumably in recognition that families can wait many long months for their children to be assessed. She also takes the view that ‘a vicious cycle of overwhelmed local services’ and ‘children's support needs escalating to crisis point’ are a consequence of children ‘not having their needs identified at an early enough stage’. The trouble is early intervention creates even more needs – more needs that can’t be met.

What most commentators seem to miss – at least those who lean left and tend to be more sympathetic to the claims-making (often quite literally) around these disabilities and disorders – is that this is at least as much a social and cultural phenomenon as it is a clinical or educational one. There is a complete absence of scepticism about what’s behind the massive and rapid growth in need – whether its rising disability claims, rising diagnoses for ‘neurodivergence’ or rising SEN and EHCP numbers. Those of us with an interest in advocating for our children are in danger of losing credibility and fuelling a growing, and understandable, cynicism about the very existence of their sometimes debilitating conditions.

A parent interviewed by the BBC complains that her child can’t cope with the class sizes in mainstream schools, that her sensory issues are such that she won’t wear the uniform, and that behaviour policies are inflexible. If EHCPs were to go, the only way her child would cope would be if there were a ‘complete rethink of how mainstream education works’.

MEETING NEEDS VS EDUCATION ORTHODOXIES
While I might roll my eyes if I were not a parent of a child with special needs myself, I recognise from my own experience that what she is saying is true. But it also happens to go with the grain of today’s thinking (or lack of it) in the education sector: a distaste for discipline, a commitment to the orthodoxies of ‘inclusion’ no matter what, and to teaching to the particular needs and identities of each and every child, regardless of how impractical or detrimental to their learning.

There is a shortage of specialist provision. The government’s own figures show growing demand for it, and a state sector failing to keep up. There were 7,000 children with EHCPs attending independent special schools in 2010, but this had grown to 26,000 by 2024. And yet the focus is less on how to meet this growing need than on how to ‘ensure an inclusive environment’ in mainstream schools, with 54,500 such integrated places projected for 2028.

For Phillipson, what really counts is not the (admittedly expensive) specialist provision that is designed to meet the needs of these children, but that they are ‘educated locally with their peers and in their communities’. While some schools insist this approach has a ‘positive impact for the whole school community’, is that really the case?

The government is being advised by ‘inclusion tsar’ Tom Rees and his inclusion advisory group. Rees, too, claims ‘making mainstream schools more inclusive doesn’t just help those with special needs – it improves the quality of education for all children’. This is something you hear a lot, but the reality is more complex. As is the approach he is advising the government to adopt. It’s a kind of inclusion-lite with three tiers of provision - universal, targeted intervention and specialist support. Children would move between these tiers as necessary or, more likely, as arrangements break down or reach crisis point.

Having been a governor at a mainstream primary school with an unusually high SEN intake, I won’t deny that there is something to be said for the nurturing, community ethos that supporting these students necessitates. But there can also be considerable difficulties with trying to accommodate sometimes very challenging behaviour with a lack of specialist support.

FUNDING: BETWEEN A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE
The government has announced £740million to support 10,000 new school places for children with SEND, with a big focus on increasing the number of schools with specialist support in place, ‘breakout spaces where children can go to self-regulate’ and assistive technologies. A further £547million in 2026-27, and £213million in 2027-28, has since been announced to reform the SEND system.

That’s either too much or not enough. It’s too much if you think, as some commentators do, that we’re already indulging families whose kids don’t really have special needs. It’s too little if you believe that there are so many in need of support who aren’t getting it that, frankly, a few hundred million quid isn’t going to make much difference.

So, what are these needs that have become such a problem that they are threatening to bankrupt us and blight the futures of so many children? Of those with an EHCP, the most common need is a diagnosis of autism. For the larger group of children with special needs but no EHCP, difficulties around speech, language and communication needs are the most common. Then, for both categories, there are the various social, emotional and mental health needs that children increasingly present with. Behaviour is often an issue. So, you might think we’d be asking a few questions about the role of families and communities in raising this generation of increasingly troubled kids. But no, we’re not.

EXPLANATIONS: TECHNOLOGY, LOCKDOWNS, ASSESSMENT
There are other theories put forward to explain why this is happening, why so many children are so apparently needy. Academics, parents, commentators and policymakers alike are increasingly worried about the role of technology in creating some of the difficulties young people are experiencing. While I think there is something hysterical about the arguments they make, there may be something in it.

I’m far more convinced, though, about the role of lockdown and the impact that has had on everything from anxious non-attendance to kids’ developmental progress. A quarter of children with SEN have speech and language difficulties, with all the implications for their education and later life this entails. As the government acknowledges:

Developmental delays have been a growing issue since the pandemic, with more than 40,000 children waiting over 12 weeks for speech and language therapy as of June 2024.

What about the other arguments? Is there an over-claiming on the part of parents and schools alike with regards to their children’s special-needs status? Or are our schools being under-resourced and parents are just scrambling around for more support? Is there a knock-on effect from the ‘overdiagnosis’ of children with various disorders or is there a genuine escalation of, or awareness of, ‘real’ needs? Schools Week advises the government ‘to nationally standardise procedures, formats and thresholds for undertaking statutory assessments’. That this isn’t the case already is odd, but more rigour in the way special needs are determined would at least help establish the nature and extent of the problem and may even slow its expansion.

But it won’t solve it. The debate about special educational needs is far too narrow and technical to do that. We need to be asking far more searching questions. Why is it that nearly one in five children have a special educational need? Why are the needs of one in 20 children deemed so significant that they have been issued EHCPs? What’s going on?

It is a good thing that the education secretary has committed to ‘think differently about the system’. The government must be bold – not because I want to see the support that families need cut, but because this is a deep-seated problem that needs debate not defensiveness. My fear is that the government will run scared of its own supporters, that it will be short-termist, media-driven and risk averse – that it will be shamed into inaction by those who cynically weaponise ‘the vulnerable’ against any attempt to address the underlying issues. I hope I’m wrong.

---

---

NEURODIVERSITY & GENDER DYSPHORIA:
A PROBLEM OF OVER-DIAGNOSIS?
Watch the debate from Battle of Ideas festival 2024, with Dave Clements, Dr Jennifer Cunningham, Dr Az Hakeem and Sophie Spital.