Special Educational Needs: Per Capita Costs
(asked on 6th May 2025) - View Source
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether she has made an assessment of the merits of increasing the funding per-pupil for children with an Education, Health and Care Plan.
This government’s ambition is that all children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) receive the right support to succeed in their education and as they move into adult life.
From the 2018/19 financial year to 2023/24, the most recent year for which information is available, the average per-pupil expenditure on pupils with an education, health and care (EHC) plan in maintained special schools and special academies on the one hand, and non-maintained and independent special schools on the other, are set out in the tables below:
Per-pupil expenditure: Cash values (rounded) as at the time, not adjusted for inflation | ||||||
| 2018/19 | 2019/20 | 2020/21 | 2021/22 | 2022/23 | 2023/24 |
Maintained special schools and special academies | £20,000 | £21,000 | £22,000 | £23,000 | £24,000 | £26,000 |
Non-maintained and independent special schools | £52,000 | £54,000 | £54,000 | £57,000 | £62,000 | £63,000 |
To note:
1. Per-pupil expenditure is the average calculated from the national expenditure on place and top-up funding for the school types, per pupil with an EHC plan.
2. For maintained special schools and special academies the calculation uses the place funding rate of £10,000 per place plus the average top-up funding expenditure. by local authorities on those schools as recorded in their section 251 outturn data, per pupil as recorded in the January schools census.
3. For non-maintained and independent special schools the department has calculated the total expenditure from the £10,000 per-place funding allocated to non-maintained special schools and the total top-up funding expenditure by local authorities on those schools as recorded in their section 251 outturn data, per pupil with an EHC plan as recorded in our SEN2 data collection.
4. From 2023, the data collection for SEN2 changed from aggregated figures at local authority level, to a person-level collection. This has been a major change in approach and care should be taken with comparisons across this period because expenditure per pupil changes between 2021/22 and 2022/23 may include an effect from the EHC plan data collection methodology change.
The per-pupil expenditure amounts for children with EHC plans as set out in the table above are averages of a wide range of per-pupil funding levels that are different depending on the needs of the child and school they attend. It is the relevant local authority’s responsibility to decide how to allocate that funding and how much to allocate to each school.
Following the Autumn Budget 2024, the department is providing an increase of £1 billion for high needs budgets in England in the 2025/26 financial year. This brings total high needs funding for children and young people with complex SEND to over £12 billion. Of that total, Dudley Council is being allocated over £62 million through the high needs funding block of the dedicated schools grant (DSG), an increase of £5.4 million on their 2024/25 DSG high needs block, calculated using the high needs national funding formula.