Question to the Department for Education:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what consideration they are giving to the provision of additional resources to local authorities for specialist support for children with special educational needs and disabilities.

We want children with special educational needs and disabilities to be able to reach their full potential. That is why we have reformed the funding for children and young people with high needs to make it fairer. High needs funding across England has risen by £1 billion since 2013, and will be over £6 billion next year.

Previously underfunded local authorities are seeing significant increases to their high needs funding, up to six per cent per head of the 2 to 18 population in 2019 to 2020 compared to what they planned to spend in 2017 to 2018. The provisional allocations for 2019 to 2020 that we announced in July can be found at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/pre-16-schools-funding-guidance-for-2019-to-2020. These will be updated with the latest pupil number data in December.

We are monitoring the impact of our national funding formula for high needs on local authority spending decisions and keeping the overall level of funding available under review. Funding for 2020 to 2021 and beyond will be determined in the context of the next spending review.