SEND Funding

Claire Young Excerpts

Thursday 12th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Claire Young (Thornbury and Yate) (LD)]

Schools in my constituency are among the lowest-funded in the country, and there is a lack of resource for early intervention work before children get to the point of needing SEND support or an EHCP, which means that more children will need a higher level of intervention later. It is a vicious circle. The lack of money to act early means that more money must be transferred from the schools block to the high-needs block, reducing still further the funding for early intervention.

South Gloucestershire is one of the local authorities that entered into a safety-valve agreement with the previous Government. It faces a cliff edge when that agreement ends next April, and as yet there is no certainty about what comes next. A great deal of work has been done by the council and schools working in SEND clusters, but the deficit has continued to increase. The agreement was signed pre-covid—we all know about the impact that the pandemic had on demand for additional support—and as a result the targets in the agreement are completely unachievable. Safety-valve agreements have not worked. Will the Government write off those historical deficits and find a new fairer funding formula?

I support the Government’s focus on inclusion, early intervention and preventive support to make that possible for more children. However, we need to recognise that there are children and young people already in the system who did not get that support, and schools need the funding to support them now. One of the reasons for the historical deficit in south Gloucestershire is the lack of specialist places locally, which has resulted in high numbers of expensive out-of-area placements. Those are bad for children, who would be better off being educated in their local community, so that they did not face excessive travel or need a residential place, and they are bad for the school budget.

[Iqbal Mohamed]

The hon. Member makes a really important point about early intervention. The current funding models respond only to high-level need and EHCPs, which leads to an over-reliance on costly EHCPs and new special school places. Does she agree that we should look to allocate a ringfenced proportion of the high-needs funding to early intervention in mainstream schools?

[Claire Young]

That is one approach, but we need to ensure that it does not take away from the high-needs approach. The point is that we have to fund both early intervention and the high-level needs that have resulted from the lack of early intervention.

The previous Government declined to fund an additional 200 special school placements when they signed the safety-valve agreement. When I met the Minister for School Standards, she did so too, saying that the focus is on providing places in the mainstream. Increased inclusion is a sound ongoing policy, but pupils cannot make the switch overnight. We need a fairer distribution of capital funding as well as revenue funding.

Another issue with SEND funding is the notional £6,000. To give one example, a headteacher locally told me that more than 60% of their allocation goes on the high number of children with EHCPs they have on roll, leaving less than 40% to support all the other children on the record of need. School funding does not recognise that there can be great disparities between communities and schools, even in the same local authority area. Some acquire a reputation for being good at supporting those with additional needs and suffer financial consequences, and some communities in an authority have greater need than others. The formula for distributing SEND funding and more general schools funding does not reflect that, and it means that schools in different parts of the country with similar cohorts are treated very differently.

[Ben Maguire (North Cornwall) (LD)]

This is clearly a national crisis. Cornwall ranks 144th out of 151 local authorities for per-pupil SEND funding, and children with SEND needs in Cornwall get almost half the funding of those in Middlesbrough. Does my hon. Friend agree that this gross funding unfairness should be urgently addressed?

[Claire Young]

Absolutely. South Gloucestershire is in an even worse position, and I am sure all the authorities in the f40 group would agree.

Yesterday, I raised with the Prime Minister one of the impacts that lack of support for SEND has on families. He did not take up my request for a meeting, but I hope he will consider meeting me to discuss this aspect of the issue, and meeting charities that represent parents who are in this situation. Of course, the lack of support for children with special educational needs has many other impacts; I simply do not have time to go into all of them today.

We need overall SEND funding to reflect the level of need. We need more funding during the transition to greater inclusion, to reflect the fact that we will be supporting people with a high level of need, as well as funding early intervention. We need a national body for SEND to end the postcode lottery, and to fund the very high-need cases that cost over £25,000 a year, and schools need funding to be distributed in a way that reflects their needs, not some overall and potentially flawed perception by their local authority.