Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent discussions he has had with local authorities in England on potential changes to bandings applied to children with Education, Health and Care Plans.

We do not prescribe in detail how local authorities should allocate their high needs funding, including how top-up funding should be used for children with education, health and care (EHC) plans. However, local authorities and schools have statutory duties under the Children and Families Act 2014 to support children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND).

Paragraph 94 of the operational guide on high needs funding arrangements (available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/high-needs-funding-arrangements-2021-to-2022) says that: “Many local authorities have systems which indicate the range of top-up funding that might be provided for children and young people with a particular complexity of need (sometimes referred to as ‘banded’ funding systems). These can be helpful in providing clear and transparent funding arrangements for many types of need that may be met in a range of different institutions. Where a local authority makes a large number of placements at an institution or range of institutions, a system for the local authority and institutions to agree levels of top-up funding in advance can be a very efficient way of allocating this funding. However, the final allocation of funding must be sufficient to secure the agreed provision specified in any EHC plan.”

However, the department does not play a part in local authorities’ decisions on whether to follow such banded funding systems or not.

The government is committed to delivering real improvements to the SEND system, which will be taken forward through the SEND review, which has sought views from family representative groups and partners across education, health and care. We share a common ambition to reform the SEND system so that children and young people can have the support they need at the earliest possible point, whilst streamlining the EHC planning process, so that we can both improve these children’s outcomes and make the system more sustainable. We will consult publicly on the review’s proposals, so that everyone with an interest can have their say on the system of the future.