SEND Budget Funding

Lord Addington Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

I take the noble Baroness’s assurance that noble Lords opposite want to support the Government in reforming the SEND system; I believe that to be true. However, it is also the case that there has been a fair amount of misinformation being peddled, not least by some of her colleagues at the other end of Parliament, about the nature and source of the £6 billion, and the way in which it will be dealt with in 2028-29. As I made clear in the original Answer, in the Budget the Treasury was very clear, in careful wording, that future funding implications will be managed within the overall Government DEL envelope—not the DfE’s DEL—and will be part of the spending review that will start in 2027.

The other important point is that that figure assumes no reform of the SEND system, and of course that reform will be focused first and foremost on ensuring that children and their families get better outcomes than they are getting from the system at the moment, and it will be important to ensure that that happens. It will also make system more sustainable.

I hope that all those interested in SEND reform will, for example, take part in the quite extensive engagement activity that is currently under way to help to inform those reforms.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I applaud the intention behind the Government’s announcement, but does the Minister agree that there will be no real reform unless there is capacity within the school system to identify early? This will require training budgets and technology to back it up. If the Government can assure us that this is going to be there, they stand a chance of doing something here.

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

The noble Lord is absolutely right. To be clear, the objective here is to ensure better outcomes in a system that at the moment costs a considerable amount of money but is not delivering the outcomes that children and families need. The noble Lord identifies a couple of areas where the Government are already investing additional money, for example into teacher training from early years onwards; into the support available for continuing professional development for teachers; into initial teacher training and the early career framework; and into the national professional qualifications for teachers. All of those have had reform and investment from the Government to ensure, as the noble Lord accurately said, that we are in a better position to identify children’s needs at an earlier stage and to address them in our mainstream schools.