Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps his Department is taking to increase funding for special needs education.

Nationally, high needs funding has risen by £1 billion since 2013-14, to just under £6 billion in 2018-19, and will rise to over £6 billion in 2019-20. The additional £1.3 billion announced last year for schools and high needs is above and beyond what was promised at the 2015 spending review, and means that local authorities received an additional £140 million in high needs funding in 2018-19. Allocations for each local authority this year can be found at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/dedicated-schools-grant-dsg-2018-to-2019.

Each local authority will attract a 1% increase in underlying funding per head of the population aged 2-18 years old in 2018-19 compared to 2017-18, following the increase of 0.5% they attracted last year. Underfunded authorities will continue to see higher increases – of up to 6% per head of of the population aged 2-18 years old, compared to 2017-18.

We are listening to the concerns that some have expressed about the pressures on high needs budgets. We are monitoring the impact of our national funding formula for high needs on local authority spending decisions, and are keeping the overall amount of funding for high needs under review.