Special Needs Schools

Lord Jamieson Excerpts

Thursday 24th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jamieson (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interests in the register, including as a councillor in Central Bedfordshire. I thank my noble friend Lady Monckton for this debate on the important contribution that specialist schools and colleges make to SEND education.

I want to focus a bit more on the broader landscape and the valued role that they play as part of the SEND system. As many noble Lords have mentioned, the SEND system is failing. It is failing children, parents, schools and local government. We have a system that is hugely expensive, is complex, is adversarial and delivers poor outcomes.

I say “system”, but I am not sure that it is a system. That is the problem. Although there are many good parts—noble Lords have mentioned some great special schools, individuals who work hard to deliver great outcomes and parents who do their best to support their children—it does not operate as a system. It is not coherent. Not all parts are working together co-operatively and coherently to achieve the best outcomes for children.

The facts speak for themselves. Since 2014, we have seen the number of children with EHCPs more than double. The national high needs block funding for SEND has increased from around £5 billion to nearly £10 billion. Councils are spending an additional amount of nearly £1 billion on top of that. School transport costs have ballooned. The cumulative high needs deficit has risen from £300 million five years ago to more than £3 billion now.

Despite investment in special schools, it has not kept pace with demand. One noble Lord said that there had been an increase in demand of 140%. We have seen a 51% increase in placements in state-funded special schools and a 164% increase in non-maintained special schools over the last 10 years. This leaves those special schools under huge pressure.

Despite the increasing numbers and a significant increase in investment, there have not been improved outcomes. If anything, it has got worse. Young people with SEN with achievement at level 2 at 19 are declining faster than the mainstream average. Other indicators such as employment have not improved, despite some great examples in certain places, as my noble friend Lady Monckton mentioned.

In a survey by Isos of people working in the system, 97% said that the system is not working well in supporting children and young people with SEN to achieve good outcomes. The system is broken. We have moved to an exclusive rather than an inclusive system, with more pupils attending specialist schools, which is appropriate for some but not necessarily for everyone, often some distance from where they live, increasing numbers of specialist payments and, as the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, pointed out, an alarming increase in the number having home education with specialist, bespoke packages.

It is a system based on legal frameworks that has driven a complete lack of trust. Schools find themselves lacking resources and specialist support for SEN pupils, and hence are incentivised to get an EHCP to get more resources or to offload a high-resource pupil. Parents seeking support for their child find that it is not available and can be achieved only through an EHCP. The noble Baroness, Lady Hazarika, mentioned the difficulties of navigating this complex process. Local authorities have responsibility but neither the resources nor the levers to support SEN pupils, leading to rationing. There is a lack of capacity in mental health support, educational psychiatrists, speech and language therapists, specialist SENCOs and so on to deliver what is needed. The legal framework is vague and open to interpretation. It encourages an adversarial and legal-based approach, with prescriptive plans delivered through legal argument rather than being focused on children.

The system is opaque and hard to navigate for parents. The pushing of pupils to special schools means that there is a shortage of capacity for those who most need it, and the financial costs are simply unsustainable. In short, it is a system with perverse incentives that has led to a vicious circle, encouraging a legal-based, specialist approach. It sucks resources away from much-needed mainstream support and support to enable those needing more specialist support to receive it, as my noble friend Lady Monckton pointed out.

It can be done differently. It happens in some parts of the country and there are many good examples in Europe, so it is not impossible. We know how to fix this system. We need a system where inclusion is the norm, where parents and schools do not need an EHCP to get the support they need, where local authorities have not just the responsibility but the resources and levers to deliver, and where there is clear understanding for all parties of what support to expect and the confidence that it will be delivered. We need a system that does not require resorting to legal process and with a clear focus on delivering improved outcomes.

This will not be easy, not because it is technically or financially difficult—as I said earlier, successful models exist—but because there has been a complete breakdown of trust in the current system from all parties, which understandably are very protective of what they have. This mould needs to be broken, and it needs to be done on a cross-party basis.

Fortunately, there are good proposals on the table as to what can be done, as outlined in some of the proposals from the previous Government’s SEND review and the recently published Isos report commissioned by the LGA and CCN. What do we need? The Government should set out a new national ambition based on two core principles—promoting inclusion in education and preparing young people for adult life. We need a clear framework that describes levels and types of needs, including reform of the statutory framework so that it is clear what support should be available for each level of need, whether that is mainstream or in special schools. We need a clear framework for how partners will work together, aligning responsibilities with delivery and aligning transition points, and including, as the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Lincoln pointed out, linking specialist schools to mainstream so that there is mutual support.

We should be ambitious for our children. All plans should seek to improve outcomes and support the transition to adulthood. As noted by the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, early identification is important and we need to get it right. We need to move away from a legalistic, tribunal-based system, which does not help anyone.

While it requires upfront investment to build capacity in mainstream schools and additional specialist support—such as for speech and language, with educational psychologists and in specialist schools and colleges—the savings from reducing higher-cost placements and transport, legal and other costs would more than compensate, while delivering better outcomes and sustainability. This will enable special needs schools and colleges to fulfil their important role as part of a positively functioning system. The Government’s proposals to require all schools to co-operate with local authorities on SEND admission, SEND inclusion and mental health support are a positive first step, but we need to go much further.