The SEND system isn’t working. Outcomes for pupils are poor and parents are tearing their hair out. All credit to the government; they have inherited a bin fire and they are trying to fix it.
Getting accurate spending numbers is tricky. On my back-of-an-envelope calculations, we spend around one-quarter of the schools budget (£15 billion) on the 5 per cent of pupils with the highest needs and another £4 billion of the mainstream schools budget on the 15 per cent of pupils who the school has identified as SEND. Health puts in £1 billion.
In 2011, I was a junior official working on SEND reforms, including introducing Education and Health Care Plans (EHCPs). Because these plans included a health element, we had to present the idea to officials in the Department of Health. They laughed at us, and the awkwardness of that meeting is seared into my memory.
They asked us to imagine what would happen to the NHS if we allocated health resources in the way proposed in EHCPs. It was a rhetorical question, because the answer is that the NHS would collapse. EHCPs are fundamentally at odds with how the health system works.
In the NHS, we trust medical professionals to make decisions about conditions, needs and treatments and they allocate the resources available based on these needs across the population.
By contrast, in our SEND system, bureaucrats (not professionals) lead a process that provides a legal entitlement to provision, enforced by a court, to be delivered immediately.
This approach and the incentives that flow from it are the foundational issue from which others arise. It makes the system:
Inflexible
Plans are written at a fixed moment in time rather than dynamically as children learn. Teachers are legally required to give pupils something today that they might have needed six months ago but don’t need now.
Impractical
The focus is on what pupils ‘have’ rather than what they ‘need’. But it’s knowing what a pupil needs (e.g. more help with reading) that best guides teachers’ actions, and we can understand needs quickly without lengthy diagnostic processes determined by a private market that can often feel like the Wild West.
Incompatible
Teaching is a collective endeavour, delivered in groups and dependent on shared routines, expectations and relationships. EHCPs, however, are grounded in an individualised model of intervention.
Inadequate
As exposed in these pages recently, too many interventions named in EHCPs are not grounded in any evidence about what works.
Allocating resources via professional expertise would go a long way to fixing these issues.
High needs funding for pupils educated in mainstream schools would go directly to those schools via a weighted formula rather than through EHCPs. This would be a fixed, nationally-agreed, per-pupil amount based on a number of factors like deprivation – a sort of Inclusion Premium.
Crucially it would not be an amount linked to the price tag attached to the EHCPs a school has.
From there, school leaders and teachers would be empowered to make swifter and more dynamic decisions about how best to provide the additional support pupils need. Ofsted would hold them to account for it, not the courts.
This isn’t a small step, and it’s a controversial one. Parents want a personal, legal guarantee that their child is going to get the support they need immediately, and the current system promises that.
But this promise is an illusion, and the gargantuan efforts that go into sustaining this illusion are causing havoc, undermining any chance of delivering the promise.
No policy change on this scale is all upside, and there is of course detail to be worked through. Should we keep the EHCP system as the gateway for special school places? Do we need a system of top-ups to support edge cases where support is exceptionally expensive? What about small rural schools?
But before we can bring forward the other good ideas to improve the system, we have to tackle this foundational issue.
Having thought about that meeting with the health department in 2011 many times, I’m convinced that other attempts to improve the system will fail unless we do so.
Next week, Matt Hood will explore how a better-funded system can deliver on its inclusive promise
With the greatest respect, Mr Hood, this is utter hogwash. The SEND reforms of 2015 that were supposed to help the system simply reinvented the wheel and made them square. On reflection those reforms were simply a means for the government to try and reduce the numbers of pupils being identified as having SEND. At the time, schools had a mult-layered system of identifying, prioritising and supporting students with the tools at their disposal and could call upon local authority specialists to offer support. That was of course until austerity and academisation destroyed the Local Authority support structures. Now academies have little option but to work towards EHCPs as this is the only way to acquire sufficient funding (because the SEN allocated budget in academies is ridiculously low) because there is nothing to help the SENCOs outside of their own immediate resources (even across MATs that are geographically close there is reluctance to give away support to others when you have so little). Now an EHCP can be applied for in under 18 months where previously it would require a longer period of intervention for a pupil. All we are seeing now is the fruits of that decision to try and eliminate children from the SEND register who have received insufficient support and are now in dire need. How does the % of children on SEND registers in 2014 compare to those now with One Plans and EHCPs? I suspect there is very little difference, it’s just dressed differently in more expensive clothes.
I would also point to Mr Hood’s career path of limited in school experience but regular stints in the DfE and then setting up and walking away from initiatives. It sounds like short term thinking has determined much of what has been done.
Wow what a terrible article which needs fact checking. An ehcp is not easy to get and are meant to be flexible, updated yearly and written by professionals that know what the child needs. Without them most children would not be able to access an education. This article is harmful and completely incorrect.
I agree.
If schools were meeting children’s needs, then the need for EHCPs would look dramatically different. Instead we have a crisis of school attendance and a huge increase in supposedly elective home education; both symptoms of unmet needs in many instances.
What about some of the small rural primary schools where I am sorry, but in my experience the teachers do not necessarily have the expertise to identify SEND, or sometimes to successfully support a child with SEND even when that child has identified needs on starting school. In these cases even the SENCO (who is usually a full time teacher in addition to their SENCO role) can lack the training and the experience required. Who is supposed to provide the professional input required to allocate resources for these children if non of the staff have the training to do so and there is no EHCP setting out the needs of that child? Currently, many EHCPs are so badly written that they are barely worth the paper they are written on, but without anything a child’s needs can be minimised and overlooked to the point where you “suddenly” have a child who can no longer cope with school at all.
Rather than removing the safety net of EHCPs that gives parents the ability to insist that their child’s needs are met when the school are not recognising those needs, or are unable to provide suitable support, we need to improve EHCPs themselves so that they are well written, flexible and accurately reflect the child’s requirements and the support required. It’s not an easy process to either persaude the LA that such is needed, or to get past the constant gaslighting, contentiousness and simple inefficiency to make sure that an EHCP is written to accurately reflect the child’s needs and make suitable, flexible provision; the system is set up so that everyone fails.
But something is needed because at the end if the day, schools can and do make mistakes. Parents know their children best and there must be a system that allows them to challenge a school that insists there is no problem when they can see a clear need.
Any funding given to a school without a specific reason, as you’ve proposed, doesn’t end up in any kind of SEND budget. Schools don’t identify SEN under the current system, let alone if there was no legal recourse for parents to ensure their child receives the help that they need. The whole education needs an overhaul, not just the SEND system.
This article is deeply out of touch with the reality faced by thousands of families and professionals working within the SEND system.
The current delays and frustrations aren’t caused by EHCPs themselves, but by a bureaucratic and underfunded system that fails to implement them effectively. Stripping away legal entitlements in favour of vague professional discretion risks returning us to a time when support was inconsistent, inequitable, and dependent on postcode or personality.
Children are individuals. Their needs cannot – and should not – be reduced to a formula or dictated solely by school budgets. The EHCP process, while far from perfect, exists because too many children were being failed by a system that lacked accountability. Removing that legal protection won’t create flexibility—it will remove a child’s right to be seen and supported as an individual.
We need reform, yes—but it should be focused on speeding up assessments, increasing funding, and reducing red tape, not dismantling the very mechanism that secures support for the most vulnerable.
This article reflects the thinking of a traditionalist rather than someone who truly understands the needs, rights, and lived experiences of neurodivergent and disabled children. Inclusion isn’t achieved through broad formulas—it’s built through understanding, person-centred support, and trust in the voices of those who live it every day.
If you believe that all EHCPs are in the terms you have described, you really have very little experience of properly written EHCPs.
How do you suggest children whose needs cannot be met within normal mainstream resources can have those needs defined and met without a proper statutory framework for the process, and enforceable funding? Experience over many years has demonstrated over and over again that leaving this to the offchance that a busy mainstream teacher will work it all out and ensure that all the right support is in place simply doesn’t work.