Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, if she will make an assessment of the potential impact of the level of high needs block funding on educational outcomes for children with SEND.

We want all children and young people, no matter what their Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND), to be able to reach their full potential and receive the right support to succeed in their education and as they move into adult life. High needs funding, for children and young people with complex SEND, is rising to £10.5 billion in financial year 2024/25, an increase of over 60% from the 2019/20 allocations. This extra funding will help local authorities and schools with the increasing costs of supporting them.

Children and young people with SEND achieve a wide range of educational outcomes, in the context of a wide range of individual needs. This means that identifying the appropriate set of outcomes for each child and young person, and then the impact of funding levels on those outcomes, separately from other factors, is a complex question. The department has commissioned preliminary research on this question, The SEND Futures value for money feasibility study, further information is available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/send-futures-value-for-money-feasibility-study. This study found areas for data improvement to allow for a fuller assessment to be made.

The department aims to improve the quality and completeness of data on SEND, in particular through the SEND & Alternative Provision Improvement Plan, available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/send-and-alternative-provision-improvement-plan. This is in addition to recently moving from an aggregated return to personal level SEN2 data collection. We are also continuing to improve data on the experiences and outcomes of children and young people with SEND as they grow up and prepare for adulthood through our SEND Futures Longitudinal Study.