Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what proportion of the £780 million of funding allocated to special educational needs in 2020-21 will be provided to further education colleges to help them support students with those needs.

Next year, we are providing a cash increase of £780 million in the high needs block of the Dedicated Schools Grant, an increase of 12% compared to this year, bringing the total amount for supporting those with the most complex special educational needs to £7.2 billion.

Although the Department for Education allocates a small amount of this funding directly to further education colleges, the vast majority of this funding is allocated to local authorities. Local authorities are then responsible for securing appropriate support for children and young people with complex special education needs, including support provided in further education colleges. In 2021 local authorities will report information about their spending on high needs in 2020-21, including how much they provided to further education colleges.

The latest available actual expenditure data reported by local authorities, for 2018-19, shows that they spent £373 million on special educational needs provision in further education.