Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, if he will make it his policy to calculate and update each year the amount of high needs funding to be allocated on the number of children being diagnosed with special needs; and what his policy is on directly correlating funding with need.

The high needs national funding formula allocates funding to local authorities through a range of proxy factors, including socio-economic deprivation, low attainment and disability. This is to avoid the perverse incentive to label children as having special educational needs (SEN) or a disability to secure additional funding, which would arise if the number of education, health and care plans determined the amount of funding allocated. As identified in ‘research on funding for young people with special educational needs’, a report by ISOS Partnership in 2015, there is a significant correlation between these proxy indicators and SEN. The use of these proxy indicators means that local authorities with higher proportions of SEN children typically attract additional funding.The research report can be found at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/445519/DFE-RR470_-_Funding_for_young_people_with_special_educational_needs.pdf.