Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what estimate he has made of the average cost to schools of a pupil on an Education, Health and Care Plan .

Local authorities are required to provide schools with sufficient funds to enable schools to meet the additional cost of pupils with special educational needs (SEN) and disabilities up to £6,000. When the costs of additional support required for a pupil with SEN exceed £6,000, the authority should also allocate additional top-up funding to cover the excess costs. This funding comes from the authority’s high needs budget. Nationally, high needs funding has risen from a total of £5 billion in 2013 to over £6 billion in 2018-19.

Local authorities recorded in their section 251 reports for 2017-18 that there was a combined spend of £2.3 billion on top-up funding in maintained schools and academies, and £1 billion in non-maintained and independent providers. This information can be found at: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/section-251-2017-to-2018#section-251-budget-data.

The great majority of pupils attracting top-up funding have an education, health and care (EHC) plan. In the calendar year 2017, there were 319,819 children and young people with active EHC plans.