Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how much (a) public money has been made available to fund SEND provision in English (i) mainstream and (ii) special schools in each of the last fifteen years and (b) he has budgeted to provide for each of those purposes in each of the next three financial years.

The department makes available funding for special educational needs and disability (SEND) provision though the Dedicated Schools Grant (DSG) to local authorities. Within the DSG, the majority of funding is for mainstream schools. When allocating funding to mainstream schools, local authorities indicate a notional amount that is for pupils with special educational needs, but schools decide how much of their overall budgets to spend supporting those pupils. The department does not collect that information from schools.

The DSG also includes high needs funding for children and young people with more complex SEND. Local authorities use their high needs budgets to provide additional funding to mainstream schools, for these pupils, and to fund special schools.

Table 1 below shows the amounts of high needs funding the department has made available to local authorities. This table goes back to the 2015/16 financial year. Figures for earlier years are either not comparable or not available because of the way that the DSG was allocated prior to 2015/16.

Table 1

Of the above amounts of high needs funding, local authorities have told us how much they have made available to mainstream schools and special schools in budget statements provided to the department under section 251 of the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act 2009. These amounts are set out in table 2 below. Table 2 does not include high needs funding that local authorities have made available for under 5 year olds, and for young people in further education and alternative provision: these categories of planned expenditure are included in the amounts in table 1.

Table 2

Due to some categories of expenditure changed from year to year, the amounts in the table above are not on a precise like-for-like basis. In view of the COVID-19 pandemic, the department did not collect this information from local authorities in the 2020/21 financial year.

Local authorities have not yet advised the department of their planned high needs expenditure in the 2022/23 financial year. Neither the department nor local authorities have yet budgeted for high needs spending in the 2023/24 and 2024/25 financial years.