Question to the Department for Education:

To ask His Majesty's Government, further to the Written Answer by Baroness Smith of Malvern on 27 January (HL13548), what assessment they have made of the causes of the increase in the (1) proportion, and (2) number, of school children educated in special schools in the past ten years.

Assessments by the Education Select Committee, Public Accounts Committee and National Audit Office highlight common challenges across the special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) system that mean children and young people do not get the effective early intervention they need and leave parents struggling to secure appropriate support.

As set out in our ‘Every Child Achieving and Thriving’ White Paper, the government is seeking to reshape the SEND system to make all mainstream early years settings, schools and colleges truly inclusive. We are also investing billions of pounds to adapt classrooms and corridors, train teachers, educators and assistants, and bring experts like speech and language therapists into settings.

We are consulting on these proposals and will continue to work with a wide range of partners to refine them and deliver them.

The department collects and publishes figures on the number and proportion of pupils in special schools. The number of pupils in special schools (State-funded and non-maintained) has increased from 109,177 in 2015/16 to 169,630 in 2024/25. This is an increase of 60,453. The proportion of pupils in special schools was 1.3% in 2015/16 and 1.9% in 2024/25, an increase of 0.6 percentage points.