Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how much funding his Department has allocated to children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities in (a) Sheffield, (b) Yorkshire and (c) the UK in each of the last five years.

Local authorities are required to provide mainstream schools with sufficient funds to enable them to meet the additional cost of pupils with special educational needs (SEN) and disabilities, up to the value of £6,000. This funding comes from the schools block of the Dedicated Schools Grant.

When the costs of additional support required for a pupil with SEN exceed £6,000, the local authority should also allocate additional top-up funding to cover the excess costs. This top-up funding, and all funding for special schools comes from the local authority’s high needs budget. We recently announced £780 million additional high needs funding for the next financial year, and every local authority will see an increase in high needs funding, of at least 8% per head of population aged 2 to 18. Sheffield is receiving £66.7 million next year. The schools and high needs allocations for Sheffield since 2013-14 are as follows:

For Yorkshire and the Humber:

For England:

*In 2017-18, funding was reallocated between schools and high needs, to better reflect individual local authorities’ spending patterns. This led to an increase in school funding, and a decrease in high needs funding, for Sheffield, which had been spending more of its overall funding on schools, and less on high needs, compared to previous years’ funding allocations.