How is the Government going to change provision for neurodivergent children?

A budget-week announcement with big implications

The news was announced in the same week as the budget. I was suspicious of the timing. Is there something behind it that the Government does not want too much public discussion about?

The release of a full paper on the school’s strategy is delayed until 2026. So why make any urgent decision now?

Rising SEND numbers in Kent and Surrey

One clue was given with the announcements. The number of children needing special provision is rising across England.

In Surrey, 46,000 children of school-going age (out of a total of 229,700) were classed as SEND (Special Educational Needs and Disabilities), a number that doubled between 2018-2025.

In Kent, 6.8% of school-going children needed an EHCP (Education, Health and Care Plan). The local authorities are running up debt because of overspend on SEND.

KCC spent £84.18m on private special schools, and £70m on transport for SEND children. There has been almost a 40% increase in such expenditure from 2021-2022.

Local authorities receive national grants for SEND expenditure. For Kent, this was £316m in 2023-4. Most of this is spent in county-maintained schools, or academies, as the policy for many years has been to support divergent children in mainstream, using specialist teachers for impairment, along with advisers and support services, and the assessors who provide the EHCPs. Out of the total school grant to Kent of £1.2 bn, £12m was spent on high-needs children, and £60m on adapting buildings. Each school is expected to spend £6,000 per child of its budget on the SEND children it has enrolled.

Surrey has also responded to rising demand by launching the UK’s first apprenticeship for staff who coordinate EHCPs – a Level 4 course delivered remotely and designed to raise skills and consistency across England. The pilot began with 30 SEND professionals and could eventually support thousands of coordinators nationally. With EHCP numbers more than doubling since 2016, Surrey leaders say this training is essential for improving outcomes, alongside wider investment in specialist places and staffing to keep pace with growing need.

Why the government is taking back financial control

The national government is responding to the increased expenditure by setting aside more money and by taking back financial control of this part of the education budget.

This has become necessary, especially in the south-east, where all local authorities are undergoing major reorganisation. Surrey County Council will become two unitary authorities from 2026.

KCC will dissolve into three to five unitary authorities (with ongoing consultation on the boundaries) by 2028. So, the financial state of these former education authorities is coming under scrutiny. It is prudent to take SEND provision out of the argument while also exploring how to improve it, both nationally and locally.

How SEND provision has transformed over a lifetime

In my lifetime, I have seen big changes in how English society treats divergent children. In my childhood, I do not recall interacting with any such child for any length of time. But then, because my father was working overseas, I went to boarding schools, where intake was highly selective. Some of us were probably masking our distress at the parental separation. I do remember one child at the prep school trying to throttle herself in the dormitory, and she disappeared shortly thereafter. And at the senior school, there were rumours of a child of 14 dying of leukaemia in the hospice.

Thus, when I signed up in my early twenties for teacher training, I was totally unprepared for meeting divergent children. The course included a visit to an ESN school (educationally subnormal), a visit to SSN (severely subnormal), to a school for physically impaired (blind) children and a ‘borstal’ for youth offenders. That was how it was in those days, with each child categorised and sent to a special school. I do not think there was any EHCP process.

Mainstream inclusion in the 1990s and 2000s

By the time my own children went to school, the policy had changed towards trying to provide for diverse children within mainstream education. Thus, at the small village school (n=69), there were three children with special needs. Each had an assistant to provide for their special and different needs. I liked that system, as my children socialised with these children and so gained more understanding and sympathy for special needs. I can recall their accounts of adapting playground games to include them. These were children from local farming families who came to the school along with their ‘normal’ siblings.

My grandchildren, on the other hand, do not seem to interact in this way as much. They are in larger schools. One of them became very friendly with a Ukrainian child who was still learning English. As a TEFL-trained teacher myself, I am always delighted to see a school successfully providing special language classes for newcomers and then gradually bringing them into the main classes.

Current pressures: funding, staffing and training

So, on the whole, I think the government’s stated intention to improve the SEND provision within mainstream schools is the right policy. The financial cost is scary. The education press suggests a real bill of £20bn. It is not clear how the government will deal with the existing deficits, the £6bn hole in financing is already apparent on indebted local finance budgets. The shift to national management of this will only begin in 2028. Staffing will need to increase. Surrey has already increased the SEND team from 81 to 181.

Mainstream staff will require additional training to cope better with SEND children. A small example of this was a private member’s bill in the House of Commons recently, which asked that each school have designated plans, equipment, and leaders to assist physically disabled pupils when a school has to evacuate.

A story from South Africa in the 1990s

This brought back memories for me of school in Umlazi, near Durban in South Africa, in the 1990s. South Africa still operated the old system of schools segregated by need, but added to that the apartheid system of separation by race. So, this was a school for the physically disabled Blacks, and I heard about it through a friend who was an outstanding physiotherapist, working inter-racially by then. She was appalled to see that, during the period of rapid government change following the first free elections in South Africa in 1994, no particular local government body took charge of this school.

Education said it should be under the Department of Health, and vice versa. Some functions would have come under township rules, but that was changing into city-wide authority, etc. But the young people were still coming to the school, wheelchairs and all, and setting up in the dormitories. Sometimes they were even cooking for themselves in the kitchen. But there was a major security problem amid township poverty because the fence had been broken, allowing intruders to enter and steal equipment easily. Unpaid teachers and former staff were demoralised and staying away. It improved in the end, partly I hope because we, from the local university, started shining a light on what was happening by setting it as a project so that our students had to read through the pass-the-parcel official correspondence about who was responsible, and make their own suggestions.

I tell this story as a salutary tale of what can happen in periods of rapid political and social change. Something like that is probably occurring in several similar parts of the world. So, policy-making and financial provisions for SEND children really matter. In England, during this period of local government change, we must not lose sight of the details of what is being planned for them.