Problem Register - #6 · Education; Children & Families
Support for children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND)
Priority Score
- Scale3/5
- Severity5/5
- Cost of inaction5/5
- Tractability3/5
- Deliverability2/5
- Cross-partisan viability4/5
- Time-criticality5/5
Seven dimensions, each scored 1-5 and summed to a total out of 35. It is a triage and communication tool to compare problems - not a measure of truth. How it is derived is set out in The Method.
The problem
The system for supporting children with special educational needs and disabilities is failing the children it exists for, and is simultaneously bankrupting the councils that run it. Demand for statutory Education, Health and Care (EHC) plans is rising far faster than the system can absorb, the process has become adversarial, and accumulated council deficits are approaching a cliff-edge.
The evidence
638,700 children and young people had an EHC plan in January 2025, up 10.8% in a year; 97,700 new plans were issued in 2024. High-needs funding rose 58% in real terms over the decade to 2024/25, to £10.7bn, without a matching improvement in outcomes. Councils' cumulative high-needs deficits are forecast to reach around £8bn by 2028, held off their balance sheets only by a statutory override currently expiring in March 2026. SEND tribunal appeals rose roughly sevenfold between 2015 and 2024, and around 99% of decided cases went in the family's favour.
Why the market fails
This is not a market at all - it is a statutory entitlement - and the failures are government-created: the 2014 reforms expanded entitlements without a funding or capacity model to match. It involves acute information asymmetry - families cannot easily know or secure what their child is entitled to, which is why the system has become adversarial - and a coordination failure across education, health and social care, which are separately funded and seldom aligned.
Why it has persisted
The 2014 reform made the position worse, not better, and the funding model has not been settled since. The statutory override has been repeatedly extended - a textbook can-kick - deferring a reckoning that grows larger each year. The politics are hard: any attempt to control demand reads as taking support away from disabled children.
Who bears the cost
Children whose needs are unmet or met years late; families ground down by an adversarial process; mainstream schools without the resources to include; and every other local service, as SEND deficits consume council finances (linking to entry 1).
Policy direction - outline only
Proposed mechanism
A stronger, funded tier of support available without an EHC plan, so the plan becomes the exception rather than the only route to help; investment in mainstream-school inclusion capacity; aligned education-health-care commissioning; and a one-off resolution of accumulated deficits paired with a sustainable forward funding formula.
Must resolve
How to expand non-statutory support without simply adding cost; the deficit settlement and who bears it; and safeguards so "support without a plan" does not become "less support."
Main risks
Families' justified fear of losing hard-won legal protections; demand continuing to outrun supply; the specialist workforce not existing to deliver.