We come now to our public proceedings of the Education Select Committee. This morning, we will be taking oral evidence in our major inquiry on the SEND crisis. I would like to welcome our witnesses and members of the Education Committee. We are also joined by guests from the Public Accounts Committee, from the Treasury Committee and from the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee, such is the interest in the very important inquiry that we are undertaking today. I would like to ask our witnesses to introduce yourselves briefly for the record, please. I will start with Phil Haslett.

Hi, nice to meet you. Thank you for having me. I am Phil Haslett. I am the Deputy Chair of the F40 group and Assistant Director of Education at Gloucestershire County Council.

My name is Luke Sibieta. I am a Research Fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and I lead IFS’s work in education spending.

Good morning. I am Claire Dorer. I am the CEO of NASS, which is the National Association of Special Schools. We represent over 450 special schools in the non-local authority maintained sector.

Good morning. I am Rob Williams. I am Senior Policy Adviser at the National Association of Head Teachers, and we represent 38,000 school leaders across England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Thank you.

Good morning. I am Kate Foale. I am a Councillor in Nottinghamshire. I am also the SEND spokesperson for the County Councils Network.

Thank you very much. I am going to begin our questioning this morning, and I will start with a question to Phil Haslett, on which other witnesses may wish to come in. Mr Haslett, I would like to ask you how the current allocation and distribution of schools block funding, including the notional £6,000 per child for SEND support costs, is being spent in schools, and how could it be improved?

There are a couple of core issues to understand with the schools block. We would argue that the way in which the national funding formula works for schools is slightly flawed at the moment. That drives inequity in funding across the country. There is challenge around equity of funding and the way in which the funding formula works. I will briefly explain the funding formula because I think it is relevant to a range of different things in this space. At the moment, the way schools funding works and the national funding formula is intended to work, is that schools get base funding for their school. They then get per pupil funding. Then there is a range of proxy factors that recognise the complexity of the cohort. Those cover free school meals over six, low prior attainment, and a range of different proxy factors that are there to identify the complexity of the cohort. It includes deprivation factors. Then the minimum per pupil funding level is applied. The minimum per pupil funding level above those proxy factors means that we lose the benefits of it for many schools. We will see schools building up that funding to a point where they can be £4 or £5 away from the minimum per pupil funding level and get uplifted to it and because they are not receiving lots of additional funding through the proxy factors you will have schools that are £200 or £300 away from the minimum per pupil funding level but being uplifted to the same amount. In effect, we have a formula that is intended to provide, through those proxy factors, additional funding into mainstream schools to better reflect the complexity and SEN deprivation of their cohort, and many schools are not seeing it. The overall school block funding is driven by a lot of historic factors. What we have is quite a few local areas where schools have historically been funded significantly above the minimum per pupil funding level, and the funding formula is intended—I think over time—to close that gap. The local authorities that have historically been more poorly funded are closing the gap towards that minimum per pupil funding level and, for the authorities above it, it is intended to close. The reality at the moment is that every time we put funding into the system everybody is getting something, so minimum per funding levels are going up, the minimum funding guarantee, which is also important, so every school gets something. The authorities with the most funding are still up a little bit and the ones with the least funding are closing the gap more slowly than they should be. That locks in this historic issue around funding. The inequity bit is the point where we start in this space. If we are not getting the funding to children and young people that we are expecting through the national funding formula itself, and within those local areas, there is an inequity of funding. We are not funding the system in the way that was intended by those formulas. At this point, it either requires a significant injection of funding to close that gap or it needs some tough decisions to say that there are some parts of the system that either need to freeze funding for a period of time or we are actually bringing them much closer. To put that in context, the variation between some schools is £5,000 per pupil. That is the most significant variation. That was in our response. That is too broad a gap. Based on demographics and so on, we recognise that there would be some variation in funding based on context, area cost adjustments, and so on. We totally appreciate that, but there is too much of a variation. At the moment those flaws in the way the formulas are working are affecting schools in the round, but specifically in the SEND space. Specifically on the notional formula, there is still a national variation and that is a local decision on what a notional formula looks like. It is based on per pupil funding, deprivation and low prior attainment. You can make a decision locally on how that works. The reality is that it does not change the amount of money a school gets. All it does is move a piece of the pie around the school, and school funding is very tight. In this 2025-26 allocation we see a 0.5% increase in funding, so we are going into another year where probably most schools are making some adjustment cuts to start moving funding around. If I am honest, the notional formula does not have too many legs at the moment.

The SEND system at the moment starts with the expectation of parents because that is what is written down. It is policy in every area. When a child is identified as having additional needs, a school will identify £6,000 that will be spent to meet the needs of that child. Are you essentially saying that that system is completely broken, that the notional accounting does not work, that there isn’t transparency about it and anyway schools are so stretched that that money gets eaten up with other needs?

Yes, in essence. The £6,000 is a figure has not moved for a long time. It doesn’t carry a lot of weight because it has not been indexed, and it is not inflationary. From a school perspective, and the way we work, it does not necessarily work like that. Schools are looking at the universal target offer for SEND and how they can maximise that offer for all children with additional needs. The £6,000 for those with an education, health and care plan is there and schools will obviously ringfence that and be clear about how they are using it. As we have seen demand rise in the system—and we have seen a significant rise in the demand for education, health and care plans—it is increasingly challenging for schools to be able to identify £6,000 per child on that basis. They are then looking at the cohort and what their provision looks like for all children rather than specifically around that £6,000.

Thank you. Luke Sibieta, did you want to come in on this and perhaps respond to what Mr Haslett said?

Of course. I think there are two key features of the current system. They almost made sense when they were introduced but are now basically arbitrary and contributing to the problem. The first is the £6,000 threshold and the second is the separation between the schools budget and the high needs budget. Both of these are basically arbitrary features of the system. The £6,000 threshold has not been updated with inflation, so it creates incentives for schools and parents to apply for EHCP to get top up funding so they can cover the costs. Local authorities apply a £6,000 threshold in quite arbitrary ways in how they count £6,000, whether it is the number of hours or this type of support, that type of support. It leads to arbitrary differences. The separation between the schools block and the high needs block is also quite problematic. I have gone back to when the consultation was introduced in 2013 and it makes perfect sense in terms of keeping things transparent and clear. It made perfect sense for a system where special educational needs levels were stable. They were stable at 2.8% exactly for 15 years and that system made perfect sense. It makes absolutely no sense in a system where needs are increasing year on year. The high needs funding element is largely based on a basic amount per pupil, some top-ups linked to deprivation but also a large amount linked to historic expenses. That is not a good way to allocate funding in any way, shape or form. The Department has always looked to get rid of it but has not got rid of it because it is very hard to get rid of as it has no good objective factors for allocating high needs funding. As a result, you have a system whereby funding is allocated quite arbitrarily. You are seeing increases in need and, as I said at the start, it contributes to the problem as well. The local authorities with the biggest deficits are those with the lowest levels of funding for high needs pupils. The fact that the system cannot respond to increases in need and different increases in need across local authorities means you have the system as it is at present.

Thank you. Rob Williams, do you want to come in?

Yes. Building on what has been said before, notional funding particularly is clearly for specific provision for those with SEN support and also before you kick in for with the EHC plans. All the costs associated with the provisioning you put in place have increased over time whereas that notional amount has stayed the same. What schools put in place before they get top-up funding has been reduced over that period of time. We think that is what has particularly been driving the EHCP numbers. It is one way of trying to secure the provision on that. Another thing is within the guidance itself; it talks about how there is currently no national approach to the calculation of the school notional budget for pupils with SEN through the national funding formula. There is a risk that with all those things that were mentioned by colleagues around the table here, it perpetuates the historical inconsistencies that are already in the system. From our members’ perspective that does not make any sense at all and from the parents’ perspective it doesn’t either. Particularly if they move between schools in two different areas their expectation of what their child might get may look very different if they move to a different school. That is difficult to explain in a system that is supposed to be a national SEN system.

Thank you. Councillor Foale, do you want to come in from a local authority perspective?

Yes. I agree with everything that has been said. These people understand the technical details of finance much better than I do, but certainly £6,000 notional goes nowhere when it comes to SEND funding. As we have said, that has not increased at all for many years. Another issue is the ability of local authorities to transfer money between schools and the high needs block is very restricted. Sometimes it doesn’t work at all. It is subject to the approval of the Secretary of State. Certainly, in Nottinghamshire it has to be topped up regularly. Fortunately, so far we have had money out of reserves but that clearly cannot go on forever. Not to be judgmental about some schools, but given that schools are encouraged to focus on academic achievement as a performance driver it is not surprising that many might be reluctant to spend £6,000 on pupils in the cohort who are less likely to achieve a high performance. It is quite brutal in schools now. Budgets are very tight, and they can be judged very severely as we know. In terms of ringfencing, certainly in Nottinghamshire—I am sure it happens elsewhere, but I suppose there is different practice across the country—schools are required to give clear evidence that they have spent £6,000 on these children. To add more bureaucracy is putting another burden on schools that do not necessarily have the levers to put it into action, particularly when it comes to holding academies to account.

I want to ask other witnesses about ringfencing. In our last evidence session, we heard arguments in favour of ringfencing of the notional £6,000. Can I ask for your comments on that? Phil Haslett, you are shaking your head.

I just cannot see the benefit of ringfencing it. You are effectively placing another burden into the system for schools to report on how they are using the funding. That would need to be administered and monitored in some way to have any efficacy. With the way that the funding systems are working at the moment, and where school funding is, it just does not feel as if there would be any tangible benefit to ringfencing it.

Given what we hear particularly from parents about the wide variability in how schools seek to meet the needs of children with additional needs, how would you seek to inject greater transparency and accountability for schools on how they are spending money that parents expect is there and is spent on their children?

It probably plays to one of the concerns I have with the system and the way it has evolved over the last 10 years, in that we are talking more about the funding that is being provided to meet the children’s needs rather than whether their needs are being met in school. From a parent perspective, their focus should exclusively be on “What provisions will my child get and are their needs being met?” not, “What funding is associated with that and how they are getting it?” If their needs are being met in school, they should not be worried about the funding. If they are not being met, they should be holding the school to account through the mechanisms that are there. If it is a local authority-maintained school, the governors would be the first point of call. If it is a multi-academy trust, trustees, and then there is the regions groups and local authorities. If parents feel their needs are not being met, they should be pushing through those routes. If the narrative becomes about funding, it does not help anybody. This this has to be about what provision is being provided for those children and young people. Obviously, funding is a part of it but when it all becomes about funding I think it is the wrong narrative for parents. They need to be thinking about the provision, not the funding itself.

We have a system that is in crisis. That is why we are doing this inquiry. One of the things that parents will say, again and again and again, is that there is no accountability within the system for how needs are being met, and funding is obviously the most direct measure of accountability: is the resource actually being allocated to meet the needs? If you are saying schools should have discretion to manage their very tight budgets, with responsibility for meeting the needs of the child, I suppose it does beg the question as to how is there accountability and transparency for the differing approaches that different schools are currently taking?

Alongside what I have just said, the statutory process is the other part of that accountability system. As part of that process, there is a very clear plan laid out that in principle has very clear views from education, health and care about that child’s needs, the provision that should be being made and how it is being met—that kind of mechanism—and the review processes arrange different mechanisms within that statutory process to hold to account. Do not get me wrong, the system is under significant pressure. I think everybody recognises that. The significant level of demand means that that process can often be delayed and access to some of those things is not there in a timely fashion. However, they are the right mechanisms to hold to account. There is a clear plan there that should be talking about that child’s needs and the expected outcomes for them. I think we should be focusing on the child’s outcome and not necessarily what funding is there behind it. I understand where this conversation comes from. I spend my life around funding, but I think there is a real question in this space about making sure we are really focused on meeting the child’s needs, not how much funding is going in to meet the child’s needs.

Before I pass to other colleagues to begin further questioning, can I ask for any final comments from witnesses on the question of the schools block funding, and specifically whether enough is being done within the mainstream schools block funding around early identification of needs when a child first enters school? Is there at least a degree of accountability within the system for that, so that, as soon as a need becomes evident, schools are deploying resources appropriately to assist the family with getting the support in place that their child needs?

I have yet to meet a school leader who does not want to intervene earlier if they identify a child with special educational needs. One of the issues is that, when they turn for specialist support to unpick exactly what is required for that child, the capacity in those services is reduced. We have been part of a coalition called SEND in the Specialists, which has something like 130 different organisations. I think it is chaired by the Royal College of Speech and Language therapists, and all organisations like that sit within it. It sees itself as part of the solution within mainstream settings, as part of this kind of early intervention. When you talk about holding schools to account, which we would not be against in any way, shape or form, when we look at some of the funding surveys we have done with our members, and we did a study last year of 1,000 respondents, almost all school leaders—99% of the respondents—said that the funding for SEN support was insufficient. The same number said that for those who have top-up funding for those with EHCP, and the vast majority—we are talking 85% in relation to health and 88% in relation to social care provision—were offsetting costs in both of those two sectors because they were not getting it elsewhere. When you are talking about their ability to meet children’s needs, and about holding them to account, because the children are within the school every single day, of course, that is the place where parents engage but, fundamentally, there are not the levers or enough teeth in areas like health or social care to make sure that schools are delivering their roles within that inclusion, too. I think that does need to be stressed. Even with a tribunal system—which I am sure we will come onto later on—if a parent has a concern about health provision, they can only take that to the tribunal if they already have an issue with the education element. They cannot just take it on a health element, so I don’t think there is enough teeth within that and that does have a knock-on effect on how schools can be held to account to deliver their part.

I am sure we are going to talk plenty about the increase in the number of children placed in independent schools. In feedback from heads of schools that we work with, there is huge frustration from school leaders about children coming into school with needs that at the point of placement meant that they did require highly specialist placements. The feeling is that if intervention had been more effective earlier on, it would not have reached that point. There are huge consequences for not intervening effectively, and I would support what others have said, that identifying earlier is important, but we really do not have the infrastructure, particularly around health and therapies, to make effective interventions at this point.

Thank you. I am going to move us on now in the interests of time.

You have already referred to it, Phil, but we know there is disparity in how much funding schools get under the high needs block, depending on the national funding formula. How can the current allocation and distribution of high needs funding be improved to ensure that it effectively meets the current and future needs of children and young people with SEND?

As Luke alluded to, it is quite a hard thing to answer. There isn’t a very easy model around the distribution of high needs funding.

If you had a magic wand?

Disparity is significant at the moment and, on the point about locked-in inequity, you can compare Gloucestershire with another local authority—a shire authority, with similar pupil numbers and similar SEN people numbers—and find a £31 million difference a year in funding, and our budget is £96 million. You can see that if we were funded at their levels, we would not have a deficit. That variation in funding in the high needs block is massive. Would we be advocating for any dramatic changes to the way in which the formulas are working beyond trying to get those historic factors out? It does not feel to me as if there is a perfect solution. It is using area costs adjustments, deprivation, some of the proxy factors that we were talking about earlier, with the identifiers of need in a local area, low prior attainment, deprivation, free school meals. Those become part of a formula for high needs that works if we get past the historic factors. It is going to be very hard to pull those historic elements out of the system because the local authority I just referenced, which is comparable to us, is also in deficit. It is not as if they are in a better position. Our key priority with the high needs formula at the moment is to try to get those historic factors out. The only way to do that is through investment because we have to bring everybody up, the way the funding system is at the moment. We have been through the Delivering Better Value programme with the DfE, which was a really good experience, a great programme, but it did not provide any potential solutions to the ongoing high needs financial pressures. We got some mitigations out of it, but long-term, we are still heading towards a significant deficit if we don’t radically rethink the way the high needs block is working and get rid of those locked-in formulas. Luke made a point earlier about the link between the schools block and the high needs block. We do need more flexibility as local areas in the schools forums. We need the governance facilities through the schools’ forum to be able to manage these things locally. Given more flexibility between the schools block and the high needs block, there are some potential solutions in there. We are just very restricted right now in what we are able to do with the current funding. As for the formula itself, I do not think there is necessarily much in it that we would significantly advocate for change to, apart from losing those historic elements, which are the biggest cause of concern for the poorer funded authorities, as you can appreciate.

Luke, do you have any great ideas?

Yes. I definitely do. The way the formula can be changed could be described as hard—but maybe there are some easy ways as well, which is always attractive. It is important to recognise—I probably say this quite a lot—how we got here. The high needs block funding and the £6,000 came in at a point where we thought the system was quite stable at 2.8% of children with special educational needs statements, and not that much variation across local authorities in levels of need. We had some proxy factors, but we did not really need to rely on them that much because, in reality, local authorities were quite similar. That does not apply anymore because we have seen such rapid increases in measures of need. On the other hand, the fact that we have seen this very rapid increase in need across all local authorities means that to some extent you can just say the basic level of need across local authorities is already so high that you can allocate quite a large amount to a basic amount and do not need to use the historical factors that were there to iron out some small differences, but they cannot be used to iron out big differences. If we are in a world where everyone is seeing big increases in need, the basic amount just needs to be higher for most local authorities.

More money.

More through the basic amount rather than necessarily more money.

I have a couple of quick follow ups on this question, which is very pertinent to me because my local authority of Wokingham is one of the least well-funded in the high needs block, and the F40 is showing a disparity of about three times between the lowest and highest funded. Mr Williams, from the perspective of school teachers, what kind of challenges do you see this disparity in funding driving between schools, particularly between different local authorities when the level of funding is so different?

It doesn’t bring a coherence to the system at all. It is particularly interesting talking to school leaders who have moved from one school to another across a different local authority and hearing about the different ways in which they function and about some of the expectations they have of the way things were functioning where they were and then don’t where they end up. That goes back to the historical things that have been in place for some significant amount of time. We know there are more children with SEN. We know their needs are becoming more complex. It is a question of overall quantum as much as how it is distributed but, generally speaking, the basic core budgets are insufficient for our schools. Basically, before you talk about notional funding or, indeed, high needs, their basic level of funding is not keeping pace with the level of expenditure they need to provide an education to all the children in their settings. One of the big concerns that our members talk about is the current scale of debt in terms of high needs, and the deficits that sit within the local authorities. When they hear about and welcome additional funding coming from the Government, the concern is that it is consumed by existing debt and they never get to see it at school level. That is a real concern. From the school leaders’ point of view, when we look at SEND legislation, and the SEND code of practice, it is based upon a premise of a needs-led system. At the moment our members tell us that it feels as if they are working in a resource-limited system. They have to make decisions about what they can afford rather than what they actually want to provide for their children and young people. When we do our wellbeing surveys, it is the thing that is keeping our school leaders awake at night. They feel as if they are failing to do what their children deserve. That is the sense in schools anyway.

Would you advocate moving to a needs-based funding system?

Absolutely. It needs to be a needs-based system because, as Luke explained, we understood why we started where we started but the change has been quite significant over that period of time, and the quantum is simply not enough. However you cut that—it is a little bit like re-arranging deck chairs—it is not really going to meet the needs. More generally, we have not been clear about what inclusion means across the whole of the system, not just the mainstream. We need a better definition around that so that we understand what is described as “ordinarily available provision”. What does that look like not just in local areas but nationally? There should be some basis that is fairly common across the whole country. At the moment that is not the case.

Councillor Foale, anything you want to add to that?

No, other than to support what has been said. Anybody who goes into schools these days and asks these kinds of questions knows that budgets are cut to the bone. Certainly, in terms of high-level need, the money has been well overspent in Nottinghamshire but again we have reserves. Other councils will not be in that position. Something needs to be done about that, and I would absolutely support the idea of a needs-led system. That has to be at the core of how we go about solving these problems.

My last question is to Dr Luke. If we were to move to some form of needs-based funding system, what would that mean for national budgets in different Departments and how would you allocate that if you could choose? Mr Haslett might have a view on this as well.

The kind of work the Department would have to do is to effectively try to find good proxies for levels of need across local authorities. It currently has a few in terms of bad health and levels of disability. It probably would need to collect better data through linking to the census and other health assessments. It would be largely a work of trying to find good proxies and special needs that are objective and then trying to assign values to those factors.

Has such an exercise already been done? What is the back-of-the-envelope scale of this?

I think only the Department can do it because it requires a level of data, and ministerial level priority to say, “We need to link this data and do this work”.

Right now, there isn’t enough data in the public domain for you to make that assessment?

No, absolutely not.

I think the DfE has tried to identify the right proxy factors over the years. It has struggled to do so. The challenge is to be able to identify them and to make sure that they link to the level of demand in the system. We talk about need but there is also demand in the system, and that is something that most LAs are probably struggling with. Yes, they are supporting a level of need but since the previous reforms we are also seeing a significant element of that need being based on demand from the school system. As schools’ budgets tighten, they are looking to access additional funding and support through this route. We need to try to make sure that the high needs block and the schools block are much more closely aligned. If we are using proxy factors in the national funding formula for schools, why don’t they translate into the high needs block as well? It is a challenging piece of work. As I said at the start, the key thing is to get the historic factors out first. They need to come out. Then, I think, you would be in a position to start moving forward with the needs-led element.

Do you have any sense of the magnitude of the uplift needed? Are we talking about billions, hundreds of millions?

You need to separate out the quantum from the distribution. The quantum has largely been determined by increases in numbers of the EHCPs and the Department has forecast the increase in spending at around £2 billion to £3 billion between now and 2027. That seems like a reasonable forecast. As for developing the formula, that is more about shaping the distribution.

The panel has already discussed the importance of early intervention in supporting children and young people with SEND. Should the high needs block prioritise this to improve the consistency and availability of early years SEND provision, and are there additional areas where high needs funding should be directed?

Whether we should be prioritising early years funding within the high needs block?

Yes.

At the moment, there is no part of the high needs block that is being ringfenced for anything, apart from hospital education. The way in which the funding comes through provides flexibility to local areas to be able to deliver and meet the needs of their local community. The challenge for everybody right now is that that investment in earlier intervention in early years is where everybody wants to be. I do not think anybody would disagree. You could go into any local authority in the country, and they would say, “We want to prioritise early years early intervention”. The problem at the moment is that everybody is spending all of their high needs block funding on the statutory process. Before you have started the financial year you have spent nearly all of your money supporting the system as it currently is. Making the case for early intervention and investment in early years that way is challenging because you are talking probably about a four to five-year commitment to be able to do that. In the context of the current deficits that would be really challenging. We would advocate significant investment in the early years. The recent investments in expanding the early years block and the entitlement is, in principle, a good step but the reality is that it is very focused on child care. The early years system does need to focus on high quality early education. In the kind of shift we have seen in early years provision, the ratio of staff to children changed. That is not going to help in the SEND space. If the number of children to staff shifts, which is what is being advocated at the moment in the early years space, that is really challenging for SEND. I would say that there is a real need to invest in the early years sector, but I think it needs to be through the early years block and it needs to focus on what we want a really good early education to look like. It is not that childcare is not important—and I understand the rationale for the expansion in entitlement around trying to get people back to work, and so on—but we need to make sure we have a sustainable early years system. Honestly, if there is a part of the education system that is most poorly funded at the moment, it is early years. They are really struggling, and we are struggling to keep a lot of providers open and sustainable in the current system.

Anyone else?

I absolutely agree with what has been said before about the need for investment there. One of the issues you will often see for early years settings—which are standalones and are not part of a primary school, for example—is the speed at which additional resource can get into that setting. Often you will see, even where additional needs have been identified, by the time the process is gone through to identify the scale of resource that needs to be put in, that child may have moved on from that setting. It takes that sort of length of time. There need to be better ways of getting the services around not just the school; there has to be a connection between all the multi-agencies across health, social care and so on, as speedily as possible, and being able to then get the resource in place that is required in order to provide them. If there is sufficient resource for early years settings to be able to do some of that work themselves, or at least initially start that process, it will be helpful. At the moment it is really tight in early years, but one of the problems is the speed in which that kind of process can take place when concerns are picked up. It would be helpful also to ensure that there is better connection between what could be picked up even before children have arrived in early years settings—health information that might be available—ensuring that the connection is far better and far more joined up to ensure that early years settings can get the support that is required in place as quickly as possible with the requisite resource.

The early intervention has to be right. I think we all understand that. Of course, as has been said, many SEND conditions are undiagnosed at the point of joining preschool, which is where they could, can and should be identified. I think that has already been alluded to. The childhood intervention settings are in the public, voluntary and independent sectors, where we are making accountability more difficult. Certainly, the county council network strongly supports the Government’s intention to rebalance the entire children’s services system towards a wider model of early help. I think that is really important. The idea of early intervention, early help and prevention, goes right the way across children’s services. However, we feel it should be particularly focused on disadvantaged children, which would be by far the best means to better identify, support and prevent the growth of SEND conditions at an early stage. Can I mention Sure Start? That was really working, and it was working on these principles and worked well. You have to remember that local authorities have had to reduce their early help spending. Again, it is non-statutory, isn’t it, statutory versus non-statutory? I do not know quite how you tackle that, whether you make early help statutory—I don’t know how you would do that but clearly it needs much greater emphasis. It is money well spent. However, reductions in councils’ budgets have meant cutting non-statutory services, which in children’s services are quite often prevention services. That is why we very much welcome the £270 million prevention grant that has been announced, but we need more money, don’t we? That is what it comes down to. It needs more resource, and it needs more investment in our children and in their life chances.

I want to continue the point on whole-system support. I agree with the need for early identification. That is very important, but sometimes it is not always about prevention. It is about getting timely support across the whole system so that it is more effective and cheaper in the long run. Certain therapies are helpful in the early years. Speech and language communication is an incredibly good example of where early intervention can be preventative and quite effective. There are other conditions that are just about understanding needs and ensuring they can be supported throughout a child’s life. A good example is autism. Early identification allows for pupils to be well supported early on, and procedures and support put in place to help throughout their school career, rather than being identified at age nine or 10 and then requiring quite intensive one-to-one support. That is also about providing support throughout a child’s life, and making sure that teachers are well trained to help pupils with autism. I don’t think that the training is of the sufficiently high quality that it should be.

Dr Luke Sibieta, has the IFS done any analysis on savings later down the system from early help spending?

My colleagues certainly did some work on the Sure Start intervention, which showed that—

I would be more interested if you have anything on the early help programmes. You mentioned social and emotional learning. They are class-based interventions. I am less interested in Sure Start, but the Nuffield has a relatively good evaluation case. However, is their evidence to suggest that investing in those programmes—delivered peer to peer by TAs predominantly—drives cost savings at the key 10 high-needs end of the spending spectrum?

No. We do not have any evidence on those programmes.

Why do you think that is? It seems to be a really good opportunity. The whole point about intervention—my understanding, and you alluded to this in the first thing you said—is that it will make savings in the long term. It is a massive opportunity if we can make the case. Why has the IFS not done that?

It would point to the importance of creating good trials on educational intervention. The Education Endowment Foundation is mostly focused on narrowing the achievement gap between children from rich and poor backgrounds. It has been trialling various general interventions. It is not currently focused on trialling interventions to make special educational needs provision more effective or less costly. You could find ways of creating trials to test different programmes, but those sorts of programmes have not been tested in a robust way that you could evaluate properly.

A quick follow-up question. Agree/disagree: do you think the current system where you have a notional schools grant next to basically high needs funding associated with EHCP is in itself inflationary?

I generally agree.

I will take that. Any other answers to that question? No.

I will start with Luke. The autumn budget announced £740 million for high needs capital. Given that 63% of special schools are at or over capacity, is this planned level of investment sufficient? How is it being distributed and is it being appropriately targeted to address the greatest needs and demand?

The £740 million was mostly about capital adaptations for mainstream schools to provide more support within mainstream settings, so adapting classrooms, and creating more accessible spaces. I am not aware that the Department has published any information on how that is being distributed yet. It is still ongoing, which is a little bit concerning given this money is meant to be allocated from April, which is not that far away. It is a little disappointing not to see any information on that yet. It is also not necessarily addressing the main challenges, in that the main challenge in providing effective support for people’s special needs is good staffing. What is lacking at the moment is proper support and funding to provide training for both teachers and TAs to provide better support. That would help provide good quality provision in mainstream settings.

Many of us will have parents who simply cannot get a school place for their child at all. As much as, yes, it would be brilliant to improve training, it does seem to me that actual places in special schools are the issue because schools may be completely at capacity or have waiting lists. Phil, do you have a perspective?

Demand for places in special schools increased significantly. We are seeing more and more children and young people, particularly in the secondary age range, going into specialist education. That is where the most significant rise is. We see many kids being able to access primary education, but the shift towards secondary creates more challenges for those with SEND. Certainly, the feedback we get locally is that parents feel more comfortable with specialist education at that point in their child’s education as well. The demand is really high and £740 million is not really scratching the surface in the capital space, I am afraid, and you probably won’t be surprised to hear me say that. We do need to invest rapidly in specialist provision across the country. I totally take Luke’s point that we need to make sure of the quality of teaching in mainstream and adaptability, and that reasonable adjustments are made in mainstream so that we can affect that curve, seeing that more children and young people are having to access specialist education. Yes, we want to drive mainstream inclusion but at the moment the system is struggling for capacity around specialist and that needs to be put back in. Even if that goes a bit too far, so many schools are over number or are full-full that you could take some pressure off the system. We need significant investment in this area. It is an area that would have a significant revenue benefit as well for the high needs block because, ultimately, we are using more independent placements than we would want to in the system at the moment. That is not because there isn’t a really good place for independent provision. There absolutely is, but at the moment, because of the lack of local authority state-run special schools, we are sending more children into higher cost independent placements than we would want to and there is a significant revenue benefit to that. We are talking about mainstream inclusion. Environment is a critical part of that. If you do not have nurture space, sensory space to be able to support children to access their education, those things will mean that children and young people will be coming out of mainstream. I had a recent conversation with a head who is looking to take their library out so they can have a nurture space. It is not really a compromise we want our schools to make. There is a need to invest. The money that is going into mainstream is good. We need to find a way to get the specialist provision up quickly. I will say, with all due respect to it, that is not the free school programme. That creates delays. We have bid for free schools twice now. It has delayed us building our own schools because some of the money is locked up in the free schools programme run nationally. You bid for it; you wait. You find out that you are not successful and then you go and build yourself. We bid twice. We were successful both times, but our need wasn’t high enough to be awarded a school. That means we are building ourselves. That probably created 12 months’ delay for both of those schools. Not that there isn’t a place for a free schools programme at some point, but I would say that is a hard pause for me at the moment. Try to get the money into local authorities. This an area where LAs are best placed to respond quickly and get the right provision in, if we can get the right funding into them. I think it brings significant benefits to the system if we can do that.

I want to make the point that the £740 million was not aimed at creating extra special school places. It is aimed at creating resourced provision specialist units. I don’t think it has been made clear what the intent of that policy is. Is it to reduce numbers in special schools? Is it to mop up the demand that is coming up in the system? It is difficult to start a policy without a clear end point or aim for it. I support Phil’s point about the difficulties in creating new specialist provision. The free school programme has been very successful in some cases, but there are too many cases where schools are green lit and six years on they are still not open. There have been lots of examples where over market price has been paid for sites. There have been sites that have been bought but free schools have not actually opened, so the public purse has lost money in that way. At the moment, the effective way to create new provision is through the independent sector, because there is no risk to the public purse. They are bearing the full responsibility of investing tens of millions and opening new provision. That is in part accounting for why we have growth in the sector. The last time the Government had a strategic review of the role of special schools was in 2003. It has been a long time since we all sat down and set out our vision for special schools. We keep talking about there always being a need and, of course, it will be for the most complex children, but we do not actually get beyond that in terms of thinking about the clear role that we expect special schools to play and how they fit with that wider system in supporting mainstream schools in hub and spoke models. I think that is a real policy gap.

We have heard evidence that the cost of places is quite high in the independent sector. It is perhaps £65,000 on average compared to £24,000 in the state sector. Clearly, it is providing extra capacity but how can those extra high costs be justified?

You need to look at what you are comparing with the two types. So, £23,000 is often quoted for maintain provision. It is the nominal teaching and learning budget. It doesn’t include any other therapies that go in for that child, any other support that goes in for that family and it doesn’t include any of the local authority management support costs. An average of £61,000 for the independent sector could also include residential provision. It will include all therapies. Everything that that placement costs will be reflected in that price. There is an issue that we are not comparing like with like. If we are using the independent sector effectively, we are recognising that it is highly specialist and should be for those children with the most complex needs. The point at which children are reaching our schools is for 70% of children at least the third school that they have attended. For 10% of children, it is at least the fifth school that they have attended. Their needs are high enough to warrant specialist input. There is a lot to the sense of the independent sector being the end point of systemic problems building up further down the line.

My next question is particularly for Kate to start with. In what ways can the high needs capital funding process be improved to ensure long-term stability while remaining flexible to evolving local SEND demand? For example, there has been a suggestion that mainstream schools should be mandated in some way to have a specialist space or unit as they are being built.

Can you repeat that question?

In what specific ways can the high needs capital funding process be improved to ensure long-term stability while remaining flexible to evolving local SEND demands?

That is a huge question. We certainly need longer term funding settlements, and I also take the point from the previous speaker. One of the recommendations in the County Councils Network report is around market shaping. It says that we need a new strategic relationship between the state and independent sector; we need a sensible discussion about how that is delivered. A lot of what we have been talking about here is to do with local authorities needing more powers and funding to better manage SEND placements, including to establish some new specialist schools and homes. We need to be able to direct academies as well as maintained schools to take pupils with SEND. That is one of the big issues here. Local authorities in their frustration have a lot of accountability for this but none of the levers and powers to make it happen. If we could get a more equitable take up of children going into mainstream schools—although that does not apply to every child—more children going into mainstream schools where the provision is more inclusive is better will meet their needs, and I think we would be in a much better place. One of our senior education officers at Nottinghamshire told me that we have to bear in mind that increased complexity is the new normal. We have to think that through a little bit more and decide how we tackle it because it is a very big issue.

There are a couple of things around the capital funding that would really help us as a local authority. Some longer-term planning and clearer commitments over an extended period time to capital funding would help. As Luke said earlier, it is still not clear what 2025-26 looks like and we are almost in March. We need longer-term visibility. It plays to a funding issue across the education system as a whole. We have been working year-on-year. We need longer-term budgets and capital would be an area where we would want to see that happen. The idea of building mainstream schools with resource-based specialist provision within could be good but those decisions need to be taken locally. Does it fit the local strategy for sufficient specialist provision? What is needed? What is the school culture ethos around it? You could end up imposing a system nationally that might not work for some systems that have gone down a different pathway. It is definitely something that we would look at if we were building new mainstream schools. Bear in mind that we have falling rolls at the moment, so we are not looking at building too many mainstream schools right now. In this space I would emphasise the benefit of local decision-making with the long-term commitment of funding. Most local areas would make a really good job of planning their sufficiency. They know what their needs are. They know what their demands are. We have the data. We would be able to do that pretty effectively if we had visibility and the autonomy to make some of those decisions, not as a local authority, but as a local schools forum, which is all the key stakeholders. That is what I would advocate.

One problem about how we spend capital funding in this space is to do with the granularity of the data available. We talk about SEND and numbers but SEND is a hugely generic term, and we don’t really understand it. The Government could look at the current provision, the mixture of mainstream SEN units, special schools and so on, against what we know about the type of need. The school capacity survey data does not attach the type of need to the setting. There needs to be better connection in that area. I think it uses pupils census data, but it is a best guess if you like. We need to be far better aware about that to know what is required. We know 4,000 more children are being supported in specialist schools than there is space for at the moment. We know that mainstream schools are being asked to support SEND children who should be in a specialist place. We are not very good at the moment at understanding what the mismatch is exactly, what is required and where, because the data is not granular enough to allow us to do that. There needs to be some work on that, which will allow more effective allocation of capital funding.

Thank you. To accommodate colleagues who may need to leave the meeting early, I am going to cover the questions that we have on alleviating financial pressures and encouraging savings. I will bring in Sureena to ask question 13, if that is okay. Then we will go to Lloyd.

My question is around statutory override, particularly with the financial difficulties faced by local authorities, exacerbated by the SEND crisis. This question goes to Councillor Foale, Luke and Phil to start with. According to DfE estimates, 43% of local authorities will have deficits near or above their reserves when the statutory override ends in March 2026. This is going to put many at risk of bankruptcy. When do local authorities need a decision from the Department on how it plans to deal with this situation? What support is needed to help local authorities maintain stability before and after March 2026? I will start with Councillor Foale.

I think it may be a question more for some of my colleagues but the key thing is that it needs to happen soon and county councils are extremely worried about it. This is a serious situation for a lot of county councils and could literally bankrupt a county council overnight. The £4 billion deficit that is there at present is money that has already been spent and that is what we must get our head around. It is money already spent so realistically it is unlikely to be ever paid back by local authorities given the scale of the crisis in local government funding so they are going to need some help.

I think it is important to state at the start that it is a total farce. One of two things is going to happen in April, that local authorities will get partly bailed out or the statutory override will continue. One of those two things will happen because the Government are not going to let that sheer number of local authorities go bust overnight. I think it is just about reasonable not to be setting out a solution until the spending review because it is reasonable to be able to use any changes in funding that happen after April 2026 to incentivise the differences in provision and how local authorities provide provision. I think anything beyond the spending review gets to unacceptable levels because I suspect there are local authorities that are already making financial decisions on the default assumption that it will not continue and because they have to, but the politics of it are just ridiculous. I think the spending review is the appropriate time for setting out a solution.

Phil, to you, if you could, could you share any consultation that has taken place, if any, between the Department and local authorities regarding the ending of the statutory override and what engagement would local authorities like to see?

To my knowledge I do not think there has been any. There are obviously individual conversations with the DfE but there have not been any consultations specifically around the extension of it. The extension of the statutory override is just kicking this issue down the road. If we extend it again, we are just going to have larger and larger deficits to deal with. At some point we must make significant changes in the system and it feels to me at the moment that we are at the tipping point. I have been working on this for five or six years. This is coming towards the tipping point of when we decide about what we are going to do to make the system financially sustainable so that you can then have a sensible conversation about what happens to the accumulated deficits, which is what the statutory override is covering. From a purely financial perspective I do not think anybody can have a sensible conversation about how we treat the deficits until we are clear that there is a pathway to financial sustainability in-year because all that will happen is that those deficits will recur. It feels like we are at a point where we are talking and hearing about funding reform, we are hearing about mainstream inclusion as a priority and investment in mainstream is a key part of that, I would say. We have heard about how tight school funding is. That is important. We are talking about potential legislative change. I do not see how you move forward in this space without some degree of legislative change that is going to affect the system because it is out of control. From our perspective, the statutory override, if it is extended, is just kicking the problem further down the road. If in the coming months up to the comprehensive spending review we are seeing funding reform, a real commitment and an understanding of what this mainstream inclusion agenda is focused on and how we are investing in that—the 2025-26 funding allocation for schools did not suggest that there was a significant commitment to investing in mainstream education. Mainstream school funding was probably the lowest it has been for four or five years and we need to see what legislative change will look like. We could then have a conversation about how these cumulative deficits are treated. The other bit that our section 151 officer would want me to mention is that this money has been spent and it is costing local authorities interest or in some cases they are borrowing to fund it. It is north of £4 billion that we are talking about now. This is a significant amount of public money that has already been spent. The override itself if it is extended for another year, fine, but if we keep going down this pathway we are just creating more of a challenge for us at some point, so it needs to be resolved and from what I have seen now is the point where we need to do that otherwise the system will finally crash, I think.

On the Public Accounts Committee we recently had a report on SEND and we were concerned, in particular, about the safety valve agreements and related interventions—that they did not provide long-term financial sustainability and in fact it felt more like a piecemeal approach where we were just trying to pick off those local authorities that are in the worst position financially. What lessons do you feel have been learned from their implementation up until now and how can we amend and improve our approaches in the future, particularly so that we can see these interventions deliver the longer term financial sustainability that we clearly need? I will start with Councillor Foale on that one.

Tell me if I have the question wrong, but I think what you are asking here is what we do about this more broadly. Is that what you mean?

Yes. I think one thing I am sure members of this Committee share but that we felt on the Public Accounts Committee was that the valve approach was not one that was going to provide long term financial sustainability. It was very much coming in when the situation has already deteriorated quite substantially and trying to put back together those areas that are worst impacted. If we want to take a longer-term, more comprehensive approach, what can we learn from the mistakes made and how do we amend and improve that in future?

It might be seeping into another question here, but for me you can tackle the financial issue although it will be difficult and there is an awful lot of money that needs to go in, but if you do that and do not then do some reform and look at how the system can work better, this kind of very broken system, this is just going to continue. I think that is a lesson that really does need to be learned. We just cannot go on how we are at the moment without the capacity, without proper reform. There is a risk that a requirement to publish data on SEND provision versus need will create more bureaucracy within the system without any real benefit. Again we come back to the requirement for a needs-based system. That would create further financial pressure on the system at a time when resource is wholly inadequate. If the purpose is to hold local authorities to account it will fail as many of the problems with provision are out of direct control and it comes down to levers. We have the accountability without the powers to do very much about it, or the funds. For instance, we cannot just build special schools without a central Government direction so it is really difficult for local authorities. We think that there should be better data collection throughout for children and young people with SEND where there is very little information currently available, and again coming back to the idea that the statutory deliveries for local authorities is that we do not deliver and we do not have any money to do this. This needs significant reform. Inclusivity crops up a lot. It has not been mentioned head on at the moment. We need to provide more inclusive systems, more inclusive schools, so more of our children can get the broad curriculum and the broad benefit of being in a mainstream school. I think that is a message that needs to come across very clearly. If we incentivise schools to value academic achievement over inclusion —and I know they do not all do that—then we are not going to get anywhere with this.

I think on the DBV and safety valve we have learnt lessons. I think they were local solutions to a national problem. We were involved in the Delivering Better Value programme, which was the precursor for those local authorities that were not in as significant deficit as those in the safety valve and there were 54 other authorities with us. We went through that process. I suspect there was an expectation that there would be an opportunity to find lots of funding that could be used in other ways was or was not being spent in the right way but that was not the outcome of that programme. It found broadly that the funding is being used to deliver the statutory services. It is the demand in the system that is driving the issues. Trying to fix this financial issue at a local level, which is what the safety valve and I think the DBV programme were trying to do, is not going to work. It is a national system issue and from the reforms we have now started to see and hear, it does feel that it is being treated as a national issue, not a local one. The safety valve and Delivering Better Value did not provide the outcomes because the local authorities in those programmes were not able to effect the levers that would help address the issue. They are national issues, not local issues.

If we were to face into the quite catastrophic situation of the statutory override ending in March 2026, what protections could or should be put in place to ensure that SEND children and their families would continue to receive the support they are entitled to if local authorities were issuing section 114s?

That is a hard question.

Our position I guess is that we think there needs to be something that helps to cancel those debts, the high needs debts for local authorities, some way of doing that. As I said before, any additional funding that is put in place just gets consumed into that deficit so it is a problem. It is hard to find any evidence either within safety valve or Delivering Better Value schemes that they have substantively achieved their original aims particularly in terms of the pupil outcome element that they were talking about. Alongside that we know that the trajectory of need continues to rise so they have been battling a rising tide of the level of need. When you look at the fact that 60% of local authorities are in one of those two programmes it begs the question about the level of investment that has happened over time that has allowed that to happen. If you were talking lower numbers, you could scrutinise the local authorities and how effective they have been in those but we are talking nearly two-thirds of local authorities in that situation. That asks some fundamental questions. It was good to hear in November that Isos have been commissioned to start looking at some research about how those programmes impact on children’s, young people’s and families’ outcomes but that is three years after they were brought in. It would have been good in terms of lessons learned to start that alongside the schemes and follow them more closely. That report is due to be published in June. I think it will be really important that the Government respond to that quickly, because it will give some indication about the kind of impact that there has been on pupils’ outcomes by putting in that kind of programme. However, they seem to be short-term answers to a substantive problem and were not going to be something you could do over the longer term. If they do not do anything after the statutory override, it has been pretty clear what local authorities are saying about the risk of bankruptcy and then you are talking about doing away with anything non-statutory and that would have a huge effect on what happens within schools and in wider services. Allowing that to happen would result in a pretty catastrophic situation.

That last point is a key one from a local authority perspective. If we are put in that position, and I will take Luke’s view—it says 43% but it will probably be closer to 50% by the time you get there. I think that having 50% of local authorities in this position is probably untenable but if we were in that situation our responsibility at that point— and I think it would be taken out of our hands to some extent—would be just to deliver the statutory provision. We had a long conversation earlier about early intervention and its benefits. Those are the kinds of things, if they are in the system at the moment that would probably come out of the system, because they will be non-statutory. The statutory stuff would be protected. The EHCP process and all those things would have to continue because it is a statutory process but the earlier intervention, the wider work in the system through the Dedicated Schools Grant probably would have a material impact on other council services, frankly. Given the scale of these deficits it would impact on other services across local authorities that are not statutory.

My question is about data. Data driven decision making can be used for forward planning. The first question is to Councillor Foale, Luke and Phil. What adjustments are needed for local education authorities to efficiently plan and provide for new SEND schools and SEND places?

I can start, if it is helpful. We have good local data. With SEND provision the key is to look at more regional planning because specialist provision will often provide support across multiple local authorities. Whether it is independent or state-funded, there will be children accessing it from different authorities. There is a real need for better regional data. There is some collaboration in the regions. You could argue that you could scale that up at macro level to national data. Locally we know what our demand is. We know where the needs are rising. We talked about the rising level of need. The predominant element of the rise for us is in social and emotional mental health, speech and language and in the early primary phases of education. It was certainly exacerbated by the pandemic when children were out of early years provision. We know where the need is. In planning for SEND provision, we do need to start looking beyond local authority boundaries and start at a regional and national level to plan what our provision will look like if we want it to be as effective and efficient as it can be across the country.

It is not necessarily about better data. As Phil has articulated, there is already fairly good data on levels of need across local authorities and it is fairly consistent. If you look across local authorities in terms of the types of need that are driving demand it is autistic spectrum disorders, speech, language and communication needs, and social and emotional mental health needs including ADHD. It is really consistent across local authorities and regions. It then becomes about an articulation of the view of the role of different actors in the system. I would definitely support Claire’s view that there is a lack of articulation about the role of the specialist sector in the system and it has largely been about responding to EHCPs and deciding there is not enough capacity so we have that provision in the independent specialist sector when historically the role of the independent specialist sector was about providing for high-cost low-incidence needs. It has partly become about mopping up capacity constraints in the state sector. There needs to be a clear articulation of a view of when different types of needs should be provided by the specialist sector and when they are better provided for in the mainstream setting, what the role of parental preference is in that choice, and what the role is for the local authority direction in that setting. It is more about articulation of the different roles in the system and how the system can best provide the different types of need.

I think I would agree with Luke about we should have good access to data on need. What we are poor on is data around outcomes. The last Green Paper was entitled, “Right support, right place, right time.” We do not have answers to what is the right support in the right place at the right time for so many young people. That means that placement decisions are not always very well thought through and not strategically commissioned. If we are thinking about need and that a child with this need inevitably needs X it is not sophisticated enough to understand that making this intervention at this time returns this value for this child. I think that is what we are very poor on.

To add something that is perhaps another issue here, we must remember that we are not just talking about money; we are talking about children and that is something that can get lost in all of this. One of the suggestions in the Isos report is that we establish a new destination and progression service in each local area and that way you will be able to track children with SEND and see what the outcomes are and whether it is working and how well they are doing. That period of transition is a tricky one. It is where the SEND system at the moment is failing badly. Again, that is something we need to think about. When they approach transition to adult, the immediate period of a few years after this transition is a very difficult period for them. It would provide a better view of the effectiveness of the approaches to SEND and then you would have some valuable data where you can say, “Okay, this is working. We will continue to do it” or it is not and I think that is something that could be very good. We need to know what the outcomes are for our children and I do not think we necessarily have that data.

Manuela’s question is about the information that county councils need to be able to plan effectively for the need in your area and commission services accordingly. Do you think you have access to that data at the moment or are changes needed?

No, I think there will be changes but that is one of the changes that I would suggest. We do do some of that in Nottinghamshire County Council but it would be good if it was in a better, firmer framework.

Rob, the National Association of Head Teachers previously called for the Government to publish data on SEND provision against SEND need. Why is the data needed in current and future capacity planning for the SEND system?

As I said before, it remains a bit unclear to us how the school capacity survey data is collected currently because it does not attach to need specifically. It is being aware of what provision is required; hence we said we need to see a published set of data that shows the range of need and as Luke says where it is best supported against the provision that is available to see where there are maybe mismatches. It appears to be a particular issue because the type of need does impact on the type of provision you require, whether that is in mainstream or wherever. Certain pupils might have specific physical needs, mobility aids or whatever, and the staff ratio required to support them. Clearly that effects capacity and how many children you could support in a classroom space. If you are looking at trying to have some kind of sustainable long-term plan that is able to respond to need even on a capital basis as much as on school environment, we think is essential to understand if we have the right type and mix of school settings, special mainstream SEN units and so forth, to meet the mix of the specific needs of the pupils. We think that it is going to prove absolutely essential for the Government if they are committed to this inclusive education agenda. When they describe that inclusion, there seems to be a lot of discussion about the mainstream element in inclusion. If we are talking about a really inclusive system, we need to include every single type of school, otherwise you immediately disenfranchise a group of children who will never, ever be supported in a mainstream setting unless you have a completely radical overhaul of the kind of provision we can provide. We need to be careful that in trying to be inclusive and mainstream we do not exclude certain groups of children and young people and their families. That is why we think the data is so important for how you connect types of need with the provision that will best meet those needs.

What are the key challenges related to the cost and efficiency of home-to-school transport for children with SEND and what improvements can be made to improve affordability and effectiveness? We hear quite a lot about students making very long journeys to get to their schools and so forth and concern that if only we could recoup some of those costs by making that provision slightly more local, we might be able to save money that way. What is your reflection, Kate?

I think it is true. The spending on SEND transport is a key factor in all this financial difficulty. The dramatic increase has been driven almost entirely by the growth in SEND home-to-school transport. I think the issue is that the SEND children need individualised travel arrangements. Once you have decided where the child is going to go, that stays in place. They are not commodities you can move about. You cannot rationalise it halfway through and say, “That child is going to that school.” You cannot do that. It is expensive. Sometimes passenger assistants are needed as well. It can get very expensive. We come back to the capital investment for councils to create more special school places. We have been there just now, considering a notional means testing policy perhaps where parents with over a specified income are required to make a financial contribution. I know that is controversial and some parents would not be able to afford it but if it was carefully means-tested it might be worth considering. Ensuring that SEND tribunals do not rule on cases until there is a full consideration of transport costs is one of the frustrations with local authorities. Tribunals do not have to consider the financial impact. They make decisions on a legal basis and that is quite difficult because local authorities have accountability but do not have the levers, the capital or the money to put it into practice. It is tricky.

There are a couple of factors around home-to-school transport. In the specialist space, we are talking about providing specialist education. In that context, it is very hard to make sure you have that very specific provision across every part of the county. Gloucestershire is both urban and rural. It is a big county. It can take quite a lot of time to get across the county and we do have children travelling long distances for some provision. However, it is not possible to have the same level of specialist provision in every part of the county because the demand is not sufficient. That is where regional commissioning can help to make sure that we have the right provision available. Given the nature of the support we are providing, we will always have some travel time for some children because we cannot feasibly fund levels of provision to ensure that it is accessible in every part of the county. It just would not operate. There is a challenge in the mainstream system as well. We are seeing a lot of children and young people with education, health and care plans not going to their local schools. Whether parents are getting them to school or whether they are looking to rely on or access home-to-school transport, we are increasingly seeing choice for mainstream schools. To the point that Rob was making earlier, if a particular school has a reputation for being particularly inclusive you will start to see that attract children from quite a distance and parents being prepared to get their kids to school, with 45-minute to one-hour journeys. We try to keep distances down but the reality is that across a county such as ours we would always have some travel time. On spend, the key thing is we are trying to avoid high-cost single-use provision and the private sector comes into it as well. We use a lot of private sector taxi-bus services. When demand is so high and supply is not there, the private sector is not optimum because they can charge what they wish because the competition is not there. The private sector works best when there is competition and there is not enough competition in that space so local authorities are commissioning from a very small pool and transport costs are driven up by the nature of the system we are operating in.

In the last evidence session, we heard about a loophole allowing local authorities discretion over funding transport for young people with SEND after the age of 16. What would be the impact on local authorities if this funding were made mandatory?

More cost, would be the short answer. We do provide post-16 transport for children with SEND on a discretionary basis where it is needed. We cover it in our policy and we are funding post-16 transport for over 350 children within EHCP. We do provide that support because fundamentally if there is a long distance to the provision and parents are not able to get their children or young people there, we would help and support them, not least on the basis that if they cannot get there and attendance goes down, we can end up funding high-cost provision, a £60,000 a year placement, that is only attended half the time. We do support in principle at the moment but not for every case. Support is discretionary when it is needed or when we feel it is needed.

Claire, the National Audit Office warned that relying on independent specialist schools for specialist provision “may lead to poor value for money.” What is your response to this and what role do you think independent specialist schools should play in SEND provision?

I do not think I have seen persuasive evidence that they are poor value for money. NASS commissioned research in 2023 looking at the value return to the public purse through meeting need effectively. Good independent provision is an invest-to-save intervention. I am concerned that statements are made about value for money. It tends to be on the basis that children placed in independent schools do not need to be there. At the point of placement I think there are very few schools that say they have children who would have thrived in other settings because they have been through multiple failures already. The wider issue is about are we ending up placing children in specialist provision whose needs could have been met at an earlier point. I think the answer is yes. There are also concerns about where specialist placements have been able to address need to a certain point and a young person could move on to a less intense setting but there are very few options to move a young person on. I have spoken to head teachers who are frustrated that they could move a child but the local authority has no options to find another placement for that child at a lower intensity. There are concerns about that. Going back to the National Audit Office report, what it said about the spend on independent schools was that it had increased because of the increase in numbers of placements, not because the price per placement was increasing. That is important to address Phil’s last point, which suggests that independent schools are somehow putting up fees to take advantage of the fact that there is no capacity elsewhere. The National Audit Office did not find that and I think it is important to note that this is a volume issue rather than a price per placement issue.

I largely agree with what Claire said. We have seen the number of pupils in independent specialist schools go from around 12,500 in 2016 to around 27,500 today. The volume has increased. Independent special school places will always be more expensive than state-funded special school places because historically and currently they are there to provide for high-cost, low-incidence needs that cannot be delivered very well in the state sector. They have an important role to play in the system and the price will always be higher. One of the reasons why local government have been using special schools more is because of the lack of capacity in state-funded special schools. When you try to find capacity in a very short space of time, what Phil has said about transport applies even more at the provision level. It is going to be expensive. If the Government want to save money, they would need to provide more state-funded special school places or better support in mainstream schools so they never go down that road.

There have been stories in the press about companies backed with private equity and wealth funds and so forth making profits out of social care and children’s homes and that kind of angle. That is where people start to get very worried about levels of cost, when they see children being educated in that kind of setting. For small numbers of children with very complex needs, by the definition of their education, health and social care provision it is going to be more expensive because they need far more complex provision to support their needs. I guess it is the checks and balances that you need to put in place nationally to make sure that there are not those potential risks to local authorities that we have heard about the kind of funding that they would have to then put forward if it was not regulated well enough or kept on top of. Generally speaking there is always going to be a need for that kind of provision. There needs to be some kind of national way of operating so that there is an expectation and an understanding of when the costs are high, what it is paying for and also that they are properly meeting those children’s needs.

There will always be a role for the independent sector. What I talked about before was that there should be a much closer, more strategic working relationship between the state and the independent sector, and also a less siloed system, a way where we can share experience and good practice. If we are going to do this cost effectively and in a way that meets the needs of most children, of course we have to look at how the whole system helps to move children back to the mainstream as far as possible, putting the support in place in mainstream schools so that more children can access mainstream education. The way to address the present dysfunction is to increase the supply of those low-cost specialist placements and improve the ability of mainstream schools to meet the needs of more of our children with special educational needs. The independent sector does have a role to play and they do some excellent work but clearly it is more expensive and that is one way that we could address it.

On the point about the private sector and the space, we do a lot of work with the independent sector and most of the providers we are working with are not in this to make excess profits but to provide high quality provision for children and young people. I definitely do not feel we are seeing that kind of exploitation from the private sector, if that is how my previous comment came across, because it was relating to transport and not to the independent placements. I take Luke’s point entirely. What we see across the region is due to a shortage of state-funded specialist provision. We have an overreliance on the independent sector to support a lack of capacity and it is by its nature more expensive provision. We have done the analysis that strips out all the really high-cost joint-funded placements and looked at the comparable placement between the local authority, state-funded placement and an independent placement. You are broadly talking £25,000 a year more cost in the independent sector. That is not a criticism. Their offer is significantly greater than we can make through the state sector but it is very clearly an area on which there is an overreliance. In our area, the use of the independent sector has probably doubled in the last five years and that needs to come back from a funding perspective and from a children perspective.

I must encourage our witnesses to be a little more succinct in their answers so that we can cover all the topics that we want to have evidence from for the remainder of the session. We are very pressed for time at this point.

To Claire again, what are the barriers to an effective collaboration between local authorities and independent school provision? What steps are needed to overcome these barriers?

It currently relies on people having time and goodwill, both of which I think are in quite short supply at the moment. There is no formal structure that supports schools and local authorities working together strategically. That is something we have had in the past. In the early noughties we had the SEND regional partnerships, which were an effective way of bringing together schools and local authorities from all sectors to think strategically about what regions needed. That morphed into the regional commissioning partnerships, which again provided dedicated resource and a real task for providers and local authorities to come together on. I would love to see something like that back again because with the best will in the world if it is left down to necessity being the mother of invention, she ends up being quite a poor mother; it just does not happen. We have seen that the dedicated resource makes a difference. Notwithstanding that, there are some great examples of independent schools offering training to schools in their area, offering outreach where they would go into a school, and offering in-reach where staff from mainstream schools come in to see how they do things. We have seen fewer examples of dual placements particularly between mainstream and independent special schools. They are not going to be right for a large number of children but they would be possible for some. We need some sort of structure to make it happen because it does not seem to occur organically.

There are some good informal relationships, certainly in the south-west, and there are some emerging regional structures coming through the DfE now as well. In the south-west there is some good engagement around joint commissioning both at a state-funded and an independent level and that has been helpful but it is not yet properly formalised and we would advocate for something similar to that.

Thank you for your answers so far. I absolutely accept that there are many private schools that are not in it for excessive profitmaking. They are in it to help children and to teach them properly but it still does not get away from the fact that the cost of a private school place, specialist provision, is over £60,000 and a state school place is about £24,000 and that some council leaders do say that the biggest pressure on their high-needs costs comes from the fact that they must place children in these independent schools. My question is quite specific. I understand that we are short on time so I will keep it brief. Do collective commissioning frameworks and regional price agreements have any role to play in curbing what some describe as excess profitmaking? This question is specifically for Kate, Claire and Phil but I will take answers from anyone.

We have heard quite a lot of examples of regional procurement frameworks that have tried to set prices. They have generally set a price that is not deliverable so people come on to the framework but then could not make placements under it. If we focus only on procurement solutions, we are not going to have success. There would be more hope if there was a commissioning framework where we were strategically thinking about likely current and future need and could then think what that would cost to deliver and if there was a collaborative relationship between providers and local authorities rather than a procurement—“We are the purchaser; we do unto you as provider”. In 20 years, I have yet to see a procurement framework for SEN that has been effective at securing involvement from providers and/or realising cost savings. Economically it is a very imperfect market. It is not quick to enter the market; it is not easy to leave the market; it is very highly regulated. Particularly with an excess of demand over supply it is very difficult to effect change.

I did not expect this question but that kind of procurement, more regional and more strategic procurement, has worked to some extent in some of our provision at Nottinghamshire County Council. It could work and it might be worth looking at. When you have a free market in this kind of situation it is very difficult. One of the things that perhaps would be helpful is the idea of a price cap mechanism. Certainly the County Councils Network is very supportive of the idea that we cap excess profits and we do it that way around. The idea of doing it more regionally so you have more clout in terms of procurement and strategy, working with the market in a more strategic way, sounds very sensible to me.

The joint commissioning arrangements and procurement frameworks are challenging, as Claire said. Probably the key thing in this issue is to solve the cause of the issue itself. It feels like a sticking plaster, to be honest because the cause is the fact that we do not have enough state-funded specialist provision. That is why most local authorities are overusing in the independent sector. That is why most authorities will say the rising cost is one of their biggest concerns because they must fund more placements in the independent sector than they would wish. That is the route to try to address the issue. As for our experience working with providers, this comes back to the point around some of the guidance that comes with the Dedicated Schools Grant, when we get it, and the National Funding Formula. We started off with school funding, and the National Funding Formula is very heavily prescribed. The high needs block does not often, apart from a couple of times, prescribe what inflationary uplifts we should provide for specialist top-ups for education, health and care plans but most times it does not come with guidance around an inflationary uplift into special. As a consequence it then becomes hard to have a conversation with the independent sector of what increases look like in the independent sector. Our approach locally has always been to try to mirror at high-needs block level the EHCP uplifts alongside what the National Funding Formula is doing. If the National Funding Formula, as it did last year, went up 2.4%, we were looking at 2.43% uplift for EHCPs. That was our starting point with the independent sector. In the main, we negotiate fairly close to those numbers but often it is 4% or 5% rather than 2% or 3% because staffing costs are generally higher and the inflationary uplifts are therefore a bit higher for them. Some degree of control within the system around what inflationary uplifts look like in the specialist space would be helpful for most, not that we are then in a position to control that with the private sector, but it forms a basis for a conversation, which is what we have been trying to do.

Very briefly to the same three people, do you accept the premise that some organisations are driving excessive profits, taking excessive profits out of the situation?

Can you give us your definition of “excessive profits”?

Essentially going above and beyond what they need to deliver education to children.

I think it is very difficult. I have heard a number of people use the term “excessive profits” but they have not yet defined that in terms of percentages. The social care people were looking at the LGA-commissioned report by Andrew Rome and the EBITDA for the top 20 social care providers. I know people were concerned. I think the highest in the year in question was about 26% but that does not tell you what happened with that money. I think people assume that there was 26% somehow going to shareholders or owners and did not look at what was done with that in terms of reinvesting. We also do not have disaggregated figures that look at special schools. All we have is the social care provider data. It is very difficult to start meaningful discussions about whether something is excessive without having that basis of what we are talking about, what it looks like, and what happens to that money. If the real concern is that some money is going to shareholders, that is a very different and specific issue from looking at what happens across independent schools as a whole. If we go back to thinking about who is meeting capacity at the moment and who is able to build new provision, we have acknowledged across the panel that is the independent sector at the moment. If someone is going to take the risk of investing £30 million or £40 million in setting up a new school, that capital is going to come from someone who wants to see some return on their investment. In a sense that explains why we are at where we are at now and if we do not want it to be like that I think we have all talked about investing at a different point in the system so that we do not reach that point.

Yes, I understand. So you would want to see a clear definition. You mentioned shareholders there, though. Would that fall outside of the definition? If somebody is paying dividends to shareholders is that automatically excessive profitmaking?

I do need to encourage brevity, I am afraid.

Apologies, sorry, Chair.

It is fine to answer but be brief, please.

I think it is a question that I would hand back to you. It needs to be clear. What is the element of profitmaking or surplus that is problematic? Considerable amounts of it are invested in new provision or improving provision.

Okay. I promise I will leave it there, unless there are any final comments.

Can I come in briefly? I am going to put my Labour councillor hat on now. I have a very firm belief that private investment companies should not pay money to shareholders out of the public purse. That money needs to be spent on our children. I am not saying that companies should not be into it and not be able to provide a good service and provide it properly, but I had two investment companies ring me up when they saw my name on this invitation to ask me if I would be interested in some consultancy around SEND so that they could get help to design their services, which I must confess I felt very uncomfortable with. That is not where we should be going. We should be looking at, in the main, good, low-cost, state provision for our children in inclusive schools. That is where I think we should be.

We are going to come back to the question of accountability of the independent sector, which I think may get us back into that territory in a moment, but I am going to bring in Caroline for a question about accountability of local authorities.

The entitlements of children and young people with SEND are explicit in the Children and Families Act 2024. A question to Kate and Phil: why do you think local authorities continue to allow cases to escalate to the SEND tribunal despite the financial and reputational costs and what role can early intervention and dispute resolution play in avoiding this? We see from some local authorities that they lose virtually every tribunal they go to, so what is the point?

The problem is nobody’s fault but because of the way the system is set up. Parents quite often see that the only way they are going to get the very best for their children is by going to a tribunal. You can try mediation and I know they certainly do in Nottinghamshire and I am sure they do elsewhere and sometimes I am sure it works, so you get that graduated response that was set out in EHCP. However, if parents foresee that they are not going to get a very good deal out of that, or they get a better deal by going to a tribunal, then that is what they will do.

I am sorry to interrupt you on that point but many parents would say their child’s entitlement in the law is very clear. The tribunal is a part of the legal system; it is there to adjudicate under the law as to whether local authorities are meeting their strict obligations under the law. Many parents would find it concerning and distasteful to talk about the tribunal system as a way of getting a better deal for their child. We are talking about a part of the legal system adjudicating. The question we are interested in is why local authorities keep forcing parents to go to the tribunal to get what their children are entitled to in the law when they lose at such a high rate because the legal system determines that the local authority is not meeting their strict legal obligations.

I am sorry, I did not mean to offend anybody and that was not what I was saying. You cannot blame parents for wanting the very best for their children and clearly that is what they are fighting for. What is happening here with tribunals is that county councils have no budget for some of the support that parents are getting written into their EHCP. That is the argument. I am not saying parents are wrong and that local authorities are right. That is absolutely not what I am saying. What I am saying is that that is the situation and mediation will only work if there is an element of leverage between the local authority and the parents and that is not happening at the moment.

But surely the cost of repeatedly going to tribunal is not helping county council budgets either.

In that case, I do not know what the solution is, to be honest. Going back to the point I made before, if mediation is not working as far as the parents are concerned, and they go to tribunal, if the local authority says, “We do not have this provision” or, “We cannot afford this” what happens next? They go to tribunal.

The tribunal space is challenging because of the outcomes. I can only speak locally for what we do but also from conversations I have with other local authorities, I do not think anybody is going to tribunal frivolously. The work, the cost involved, will tell you that. Why would anybody want to do that? It is a stressful process for everybody involved, including local authority officers, but most so the parents. Nobody is doing it frivolously. The challenge becomes where you see the difference between what the local authority and I guess through the EHCP process is being decided is needed versus what potentially is wanted. If those two things are at odds that is generally when we end up in a tribunal.

In 98% of cases, the tribunal finds that they are at odds and that the local authority does not have the judgment right. The question that we are interested in, because it is so prevalent within this debate, is why local authorities do it. You must know that you are likely to lose because the statistics say that you are likely to lose. Was it Einstein who said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting to get a different outcome? That is not what is happening.

Certainly our rates of tribunal as a consequence have reduced but we go when we feel we have a case to be heard. We have recently agreed to pay a residential post-16 placement through tribunal, which we took through. That was an additional £300,000 over three years, £100,000 a year increase in the placement cost because residential provision was wanted and we did not feel residential provision was needed. It had not been needed up until the point of post-16 and then at post-16 residential provision was being asked for. That is £100,000 a year additional cost on that placement. We lost that tribunal but you can see potentially why we are going into that conversation saying that we do not think that that is the right use of the public money, given that we do not have it, which is part of the reason why we are here. I think it is a system that needs clearly rethinking as we look at legislation moving forward. We need to be in a position where we are not putting parents, carers, local authorities and the school system at odds with each other. The Isos report it is basically telling you that the system is not working, it is crashing, but it is not working for anybody. Nobody is happy. Local authorities are not happy, the school system is not happy, the parents and carers are not happy, so nobody is winning in this process and the tribunal system is just a final manifestation of that.

To build on that, the most common issue that we hear from parents and parent carers across the system is that we need to find ways to remove the adversarial nature that it has become. What we hear from parents and parent carers is that they feel that they are knocking on all these different doors. They must try to get the funding from education, or is it from the local authority, or what about the role of health and we have not heard much today about how we find our ICBs operating within the realm of what is needed. How can we change that dynamic? What solutions could there be in the future to how we could have a system where we can change that and can get shared agreement on how these budgets and this funding is agreed? How could we think ambitiously about how we could try to tackle this?

It does come back fundamentally to the amount of resource you have in each of the sectors and the capacity to deliver their respective roles. It is interesting that through the tribunal system, and I think I cited it before, they can make orders about educational needs and special education provision but they can only make non-binding recommendations to health and social care. There need to be teeth in those two areas as well. At the moment it comes back to schools, education and local authorities. We also have some concerns about that because not all families have the resource for or understanding of how to navigate that system either. It will exacerbate disadvantage within that setting and we need to be better at that. Fundamentally, unless we can be sure that each of the sectors that is involved have enough of a resource and sufficient resource to be able to deliver their duty and then be held to account for that, we are setting ourselves up to have the same perpetually going around in circles that we have now. Then you get that kind of terrible adversarial situation and relationship and because the children are within schools, that interface often happens at school because they are the ones the parents meet with all the time.

That is the key to it. I have met groups of parents who clearly are working very hard and are very concerned, very worried and really battled. They are doing their very best for their children, but if we had a system whereby the mainstream school was better supported, so they had trust in the local authority that they could provide that support in their mainstream schools—so they had educational psychologists there, they had speech and language specialists there, they had people in that school that could provide that for the children in the mainstream school with a broad curriculum and with their peers—the need for EHCPs might start to disappear. It is not about getting rid of them and we could never take away the parental right to go to tribunal and of course not all children will thrive in a mainstream school but we need to provide that first. That needs some early intervention first, to get that in place and then parents may start to say, “Well, okay, my child will thrive, they will do well, in this mainstream school, their local school.” I know that is a bit of a longer-term aim but there must be system reform, fixing the funding and getting more money into it. Clearly that needs to be done in the shorter term and probably needs to be increased longer term, too, but if you do not parallel that with system reform, it is not going to work and this is not going to go away.

I am going to move us on now to Darren.

Claire, I will start with you. Recognising that the ISA has acknowledged that there is some scepticism around accountability within independent SEND provision particularly around lacking adequate scrutiny and being held to different frameworks and so on, what is your response and how do we go about improving that accountability?

I think we need to drill down into what the concern is. Certainly across our membership, 95% are inspected by Ofsted so the same as academies who are also independent schools, using the same framework and to the same independent school standards. On top of that, when local authorities place a child most of them do quite stringent contract monitoring regularly where any concerns are raised at the time. I would say that often more effort goes into the contract monitoring than attending the EHCP reviews and finding out how the placement is working for the child. It is difficult to understand what the area of accountability is that local authorities feel is lacking as a starting point. If I knew that, I might be able to respond differently but they are certainly not underregulated.

Yes. I think it is around things such as whether they are held to the SEND code of conduct, different obligations, the code of practice and things such as that, so there are some things where they are held to account. Whether they are doing them or not, and that might be part of it, it is just knowing that they are following them even if perhaps they are not required to, but maybe that is the sort of issue I was getting at. Do you think they ought to be required to follow the SEND code of conduct if you believe that the standard is the same?

Special schools follow the SEND code of conduct. I am not certain what the assumption is about what bits they are not following or are not part of the statutory framework within.

I realise we are short of time. The final question from me—it has been partly raised already—is around accountability and recognising you said about the value for money. Some of that might be perception but how do we ensure that there is value for money for the public purse, not just on cost but on quality? The question is for Councillor Foale and perhaps Phil Haslett, if they have a brief comment on how we do better at holding independent provision accountable in that space.

We already work quite closely with our independent sector. We have a specialist commissioning team at school. A lot of our work does tend to be at contract monitoring level—so we will have a commissioning agreement with a particular school or group of schools and we will look at the arrangements for all the children there. In terms of the code of practice, the ability to deliver annual reviews and being there at a child level, the system at the moment is challenging at the moment. However, it is no different in the independent sector from anywhere in the system. The vast increase in demand for education, health and care plans means that the need to operate the annual review process itself and working at a child level around the outcomes for individual children is challenging across the system. It is no different in the independent sector from anywhere else. There is probably a lot of local variation in the way authorities work with the independent sector. We talked about regional networks and those commissioning agreements and there is definitely a space for local authorities working better together with the independent sector around the accountability outcomes for children and young people. I would not have it that it is different in the independent sector from anywhere else. There is a higher cost in the independent sector but we have already touched on that. I would not take a subjective view about value for money, other than that they are providing more in the independent sector than we would necessarily provide in the state sector, hence some of the increased cost.

When I asked this question of a senior officer at Nottinghamshire he just said that the Ofsted inspection regime is different for independent schools from state schools. Some parity there would be quite helpful. We have not touched on the Ofsted inspection regime, but it needs to be looked at. If you are going to change accountability, if you are going to change the way that we do things, if we are going to have system reform, we need to have an Ofsted inspection framework that values things such as inclusivity and all the things that we have been talking about.

This is a very brief question and you do not have to say anything that you have not already said. Are there any final suggestions or changes that you would recommend we make to the way that SEND is funded to improve the system?

The key message from us is about the inequity of the funding formula. Over the last few years our challenge has been that the funding reform policy has been detached from SEND policy. We have had the SEND and Alternative Provision Change Programme, the Green Paper, and so on, following one pathway. We have had DBV, safety valve, which we have talked about, all these things, following a different path. Moving forward, we need to make sure that we align funding reform alongside the SEND reforms. There has been a detachment. We have been involved as a local authority in both and they have felt detached. They are now starting to feel as if they are coming back together on investing back in our mainstream system and into the early years’ sector. If we can invest in early years and we can invest in our mainstream system, we will start to see the benefits. It will take time but we will see the benefits. We are in a position now where we have probably twice the number of kids out of mainstream schools that we had five or six years ago, whether it is into specialist education, alternative provision, education other than at school, elective home education. Too many children are not accessing our mainstream system so we need to invest in it and ensure that we are clear about what we want from our mainstream education system and not just leave them hanging out to say, “You need to be more inclusive.” We need to invest in them.

I agree with what Phil said. I think it is important to reflect on just how much the system has changed and how you deliver a better system. We have moved from a system where there are 2.8% of children eligible for state system special educational needs, the same every year, to one where there is now at least 5% of pupils with EHCPs and increasing year-on-year. That almost by definition becomes a system where you must provide more mainstream support because it is more mainstream almost by numerical definition. We have not really had a conversation nationally about how best to support children or policymakers in deciding what are the thresholds, how do we support children in different areas as well. It has been a piecemeal response to every single EHCP in terms of providing, “We have to legally provide that for that child, that for that child” without having any sense about how we provide nationally. So for example we have seen from 2.8% to over 5%, a near doubling in the number of people with autism. We have had a 4.8% increase in high needs funding over the last six years. We never had a conversation about how we could spend that £4 billion well across the whole system to provide good state support across the entire system. It was responsive to each and every child and it never made sense collectively.

I would like to see radical reform of mainstream education. I think we are still using teaching methods largely from Victorian times with 21st century children. We are now far more aware of the impact of trauma on brains. We are now far more aware of a neurodiverse population. I do not think we have a mainstream system that fits and I think that is part of why we keep othering ever larger groups of children and young people. Alongside that I would like us to make much better use of our special schools strategically to share and develop pedagogy that is going to help that process.

Looking more widely than just the funding, so looking at how curriculum, assessment, accountability performance measures within schools and all those sorts of things incentivise the kind of inclusion we are seeking and also understanding investment. Yes, of course we want more funding within schools but also in the wider workforce and the other than education areas, because they will provide part of the solution for being a more inclusive system including within mainstream settings. All the conversations we have with specialist staff will tell us that they see themselves as part of that solution, so thinking around educational psychologists, speech and language therapists and those sorts of areas too. If they are not part of the strategy it does not matter how much money you put into the school system. When they turn for that specialist help and it is not there it is not going to work. That would be my recommendation.

We need to remember here that the outcomes for our children with SEND are poor. They have flatlined and they are not getting better. We need to keep that at the centre of all our conversations. We are not doing right by our children with SEND. That for me would be promoting, supporting and putting more money into inclusive schools, early years and preparing our young people for adult life, a lot of which is set out in the report.

Thank you very much. Can I thank all our witnesses for coming today to give us your evidence in such detail? It has been really valuable for our inquiry and I thank members for their time and their questions.