Public Accounts Committee
Oral evidence: Support for children and young people with special educational needs, HC 353
Monday 18 November 2024
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 18 November 2024.
Members present: Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (Chair); Mr Clive Betts; Nesil Caliskan; Mr Luke Charters; Anna Dixon; Peter Fortune; Rachel Gilmour; Sarah Green; Sarah Hall; Lloyd Hatton; Chris Kane; Sarah Olney; Rebecca Paul; Michael Payne; Oliver Ryan.
Questions 1 to 87
Witnesses
I: Susan Acland-Hood, Permanent Secretary, Department for Education; Juliet Chua CB, Director-General, Schools, Department for Education; Alison Ismail, Senior Responsible Officer for SEN, Department for Education; Jonathan Marron, Director-General, Primary Care and Prevention, Department of Health and Social Care.
Education Committee member also present: Helen Hayes.
Gareth Davies, Comptroller & Auditor General, Head of the National Audit Office, and Marius Gallaher, Alternate Treasury Officer of Accounts, were in attendance.
Examination of witnesses
Witnesses: Susan Acland Hood, Juliet Chua CB, Alison Ismail and Jonathan Marron.
Q1 Chair: A very warm welcome to everybody, especially to members of the Tibetan Parliament in exile—we have their Speaker here, so a warm welcome, Mr Speaker—and to members of the public. A particularly warm welcome to our witnesses, who I will now introduce. We have Jonathan Marron, who is the director-general of primary care and prevention from the Department of Health and Social Security. A warm welcome, Jonathan. You have been before us before, I think.
Jonathan Marron: Good afternoon. I have.
Chair: Judith Chua is the senior director-general of schools, so a warm welcome to you. You have been before us as well. A particular welcome to Susan Acland-Hood, who is the Permanent Secretary at the Department for Education. You have appeared before us many times before, so a particularly warm welcome to you. Alison Ismail is senior responsible officer for SEN, so a lot of it falls on your lap.
Alison Ismail: That is correct.
Q2 Chair: It is your first time before the Committee, so a very warm welcome to you. We look forward to hearing from you as and when questions come up. Thank you all very much for coming.
I now have to introduce this session. This is the first session of the new Public Accounts Committee on Monday 18 November, on the subject of support for children and young people with special educational needs.
We welcome Helen Hayes, although she is not yet here. In spirit, we welcome Helen Hayes, chair of the Education Select Committee, as a guest member of this inquiry. Guests from other Committees are extremely useful because they have a lot of specialist knowledge. Helen will be back, but she has just had to go into Parliament for a statement.
Around 1.9 million children and young people in England are identified as having special educational needs. The Department for Education’s SEN system aims to improve outcomes for these children and young people. While the Department for Education has increased high needs funding over the last decade, the system, sadly, is still not delivering better outcomes for children and young people.
The NAO’s Report found that the SEN system is financially unsustainable without reform, with local authorities facing serious financial risks as a result. Families and children lack confidence in an adversarial system that is often falling short of statutory and quality expectations.
Today, this new, keen Committee will question our witnesses on the overall performance of the system, the outcomes achieved for those with SEN, and what action is being taken to create a sustainable system.
Without any further ado, I will pass on to the first question and ask Ms Acland-Hood, if I may, and Jonathan Marron what specific improvements you would expect to see for children to know that the SEN system is working effectively for them.
Susan Acland-Hood: Thank you very much indeed. I wanted to start by saying that all of us are here because we care profoundly about children with special educational needs and their parents. We know that the system is not working well enough and we want to change it. I wanted to make that very clear at the outset.
I also wanted to show appreciation and say thank you to teachers, to colleagues in local authorities up and down the country, and to others who work closely with children and young people and their parents every day to make the best offer that they possibly can in the current system.
On the question of what we would see that would show us that the system was working, we look at the relatively obvious educational outcomes for children and young people with SEND, all the way through the system, from those assessed as meeting a good level of development at age five. All the way through the system, we look at outcomes for children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities.
We also look much more widely at wellbeing outcomes and at readiness for work. There is a helpful set of expectations set out in the SEND code of practice, which says that all children and young people with SEND should be supported to develop independence, to contribute to their community, to develop positive friendships, to be as healthy as possible, and to be prepared for higher education or employment.
That links really closely to the mission-based approach that this Government are taking, where, for all children, we look across a number of dimensions, thinking about giving every child the best possible start in life, every child achieving and thriving, giving people skills for opportunity and growth as they come through into the workforce, and an underpinning focus on family security, looking at both child poverty and safety. There is a really important link there for children with special educational needs as well, because we see significant overlaps between children with special educational needs and those in contact with the children’s social care system.
Q3 Chair: Thank you for that opening remark. On behalf of the Committee, I echo your thanks to our very hard-working teachers up and down the country. We all visit a lot of schools. These people with special educational needs and EHC plans are some of the most vulnerable children in the land. What we do here is, hopefully, going to make a difference, so thank you for that remark.
Can I just turn you to paragraph 7? The headline of that paragraph on page 6 says, “Since 2019, there has been no consistent improvement in outcomes for children and young people with SEN”. Going further down in that paragraph, it says, “DfE is not achieving its ultimate ambition relating to what young people do after school”. The 2014 Act says it is intended to put children and parents at the heart of the system, but it is not, is it, Ms Acland-Hood?
Susan Acland-Hood: If we look back at attainment outcomes for children and young people with SEND, we do see some improvement, particularly over the last 10 years. In key stage 2, in 2015-16, 14% of all pupils with special educational needs were meeting the required standard. Fast forward to 2023-24, and that is 21%. Similarly, if you look at those meeting the expected standard in the early years and foundation stage profile, you do see an improvement for children with special educational needs and disabilities.
As the NAO Report points out, although, again, in each of those measures you have seen a small improvement this year on last year, as with a lot of other children in the system there was a dip during the pandemic, which we have not fully recovered from. You also still see issues in the attainments of children and young people with SEND, as they go out after compulsory schooling, in their employment rate. There is still a significant gap in the employment rate between children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities and their peers, so there is still a lot more to do.
About 67% of parents of children with SEND in the state system feel that their child got the support they needed, but that means that somewhere around a third did not, and that is nowhere near good enough.
Q4 Chair: Thank you. Alison Ismail, the next sentence in that paragraph says, “In 2021/22, 69% of those with SEN at key stage 4 were in sustained education, apprenticeship or employment after leaving 16 to 18 study, compared to 85%” in mainstream schools, basically. One of the things that we are concerned about is the sustainability of the system to look after people when they move from the world of school and college to work. It does not seem to be working as well for those with special educational needs as for those in mainstream schools. What are you doing about that?
Alison Ismail: I would just point out, first of all, that the overwhelming majority of children and young people with special educational needs are educated in mainstream schools. Some are in special schools, including independent special schools; overwhelmingly, though, up to about 80%, or even slightly more, are in mainstream. In terms of measuring destinations, that will include a large and quite heterogeneous group of young people, and that is probably really important in terms of understanding how they fare when they move on from education.
The code of practice does state very clearly that a key part of the SEND system should be about preparing those young people well in advance of transitions. For example, in year 9, around the ages of 13 and 14, secondary school should start to be thinking about the next destination for those children and young people.
How we tend to look at it is in two ways. There are some measures that we take specifically to support children and young people with SEND into appropriate destinations for them when they move on from the education system, whether that is further education, training or employment. Our supported internships programme, which we described in last year’s improvement plan, set out an ambition to offer supported internships to 4,500 young people. That is a structured programme enabling young people with additional needs to be supported into a sustainable role in the workplace.
Equally, in terms of making sure that that broad cohort of young people are well equipped to go on to the next destination for them, lots of that will be about much earlier support, whether that is early intervention in terms of picking up needs that might demonstrate themselves in the primary phase, or making sure that the curriculum is suitable and accessible for them, and other considerations like that. To close that gap, we need to be focusing well ahead of that transition out of education.
Q5 Chair: I totally agree with your sentiment about early intervention. I am sure that other members of the Committee will want to come back to that, because it is a really important part of this whole story. How do you measure positive outcomes for children with SEND beyond academic attainment? We have seen throughout the NAO Report how important things like autism, speech and those sorts of social difficulties are, so it is not just about academic achievements. How are you measuring that?
Alison Ismail: I was not sure if Juliet or Susan would like to pick up the broader picture.
Chair: Juliet, I would be very happy to bring you in on this.
Juliet Chua: I am happy to come in. As the NAO say in the Report, the term “special educational needs” is broad and reflects a tremendous diversity of different primary need among children and people who are identified. That can change over time and, indeed, it is quite important to reflect that it is a dynamic engagement with children and young people as their needs change, and also can vary hugely in severity.
The data that we look at brings back and shows what the primary need may be, so we can see educational attainment presented by different types of primary need and how that then interacts with specific educational outcomes. We look quite closely at understanding, for example, the interaction between low prior attainment and how that then plays into educational outcomes, where, in some of the areas where we are seeing greatest growth in primary need, such as autism spectrum and social and emotional health, there is not necessarily a correlation with low prior attainment. We need to look quite carefully at the data and understand both different need and then how it translates into educational outcomes.
Q6 Chair: This Committee, as you can imagine, is very keen on measuring things. We are very keen on baselines and on collecting data digitally, so that you are able to track precisely. I mentioned only two or three categories there, but are you in possession of sufficient data to be able to track precisely all the different components of people who have special educational needs?
Juliet Chua: We are developing our data strategy overall in relation to understanding the full picture across the country in terms of children and young people with special educational needs. We get survey data, both through the school census and through particular census data in relation to children with special educational needs.
We have been investing in a longitudinal study, which is looking in more detail at the sorts of different experiences that children and young people have in the system. We also want to build our understanding in more detail, working with experts through, for example, our neurodiversity taskforce, looking particularly closely at some of the areas where we are seeing the greatest growth in need. We can say some more about that, if that would be useful, in terms of some of those underlying factors.
Q7 Chair: We may come back to that a little later in the hearing, because it is really important that we know precisely how your interventions are affecting each of those needs, as it were.
Can I perhaps come to you, Jonathan Marron, for my last question in this section, and ask you the same question? Do you have sufficient data to be able to measure health outcomes as a result of people who have severe education needs and EHCPs?
Jonathan Marron: Yes. We are also working hard to improve our data. Clearly, we are interested in the needs in the service of all children with needs, some of whom will have special educational needs and some who will not. There are 1.1 million children in contact with mental health, learning disability and autism specialist services in the NHS. Some of those will have special educational needs and some will not. We have broad data on those.
Our data on our range of community health services is improving, but is not as good as our hospital data. We have some services where our data is particularly poor. In terms of ADHD assessments, there has been a very significant change in practice, with expansion. Again, the data is not very clear there at all.
We are working with a taskforce in the NHS to try to define roles, and have worked with the National Institute for Health and Care Research to commission primary data on how we should measure that in the first place. In another project with the NIHR, we are looking at how we might track the need for therapists to support SEND children, which we do not have any really clear metrics on. These are really significant things to help.
We are doing the more rough and ready stuff with the NHS benchmarking service, really getting into what we know collectively about these services and whether we can get more information out.
We are in a much better position than we were five or six years ago, but there is definitely more to do on really fixing the data in some of these community health services, which this Committee has talked about previously.
Chair: Since this Committee is so keen on data, could I ask both of you, perhaps after this hearing, to let us have a note on what data you are collecting, so that we know precisely what baselines you have?
Q8 Nesil Caliskan: This is really on the back of the Chair’s question about health data and the data on children and young people sustaining employment beyond key stage 4. From a slightly different perspective, it is well documented that those in long-term employment have better health outcomes. That is true of everybody, but it is particularly true of those who have special educational needs, and NHS England reports state that over and over again.
The disparity between the 69% of those with SEN at key stage 4 who sustained educational apprenticeship or employment versus the 85% that the Chair referenced earlier is of particular concern. I note some of the responses we have had already. I just wanted to probe a bit more. What should that 69% figure be? Do Departments have a view as to whether that should improve on an annual basis or if it should be 85%? What would good look like? Is there a trajectory and a timeline associated with what I can assume is an ambition to improve the 69%?
Susan Acland-Hood: Thanks very much indeed. I will start and then might hand over to others. It would be fair to say that we do not have a point target for what that number should be, although it should be higher than 69%. I just want to explain why that is not just because we have not thought about it.
It starts from the point that Juliet was making about the fact that the definition of SEND is a relative one. The definition of SEND is that you have a need that cannot be met by ordinary education provision, so you, almost inherently, start from a point where it is quite difficult to work out. Again, this links a bit to the questions that you were asking about in terms of the fundamentals in our data.
Typically, the challenges in our data are not because we do not track the outcomes of those people who have been identified as having a need, either at SEND support level or at EHCP level, but it is quite difficult to be certain that the type of need that is being identified this year is the same as the type of need that was being identified last year or the year before.
Such evidence as we do have suggests that there is a combination of better diagnosis and understanding of need, social and medical factors driving those changes, and, in some cases, shifting diagnostic criteria, which Jonathan might want to speak about. We see that particularly in autistic spectrum disorder and in ADHD. We have seen shifts in diagnostic criteria, and that means that it is really difficult to work out.
Even in the figures I gave earlier, where I said there has been some improvement in the educational outcomes, it is still quite difficult to work out if that is the system absolutely doing better for a very similar group of young people, or if it is identifying and catching a slightly different group of young people within those definitions.
That is a real challenge, because you do not want to move to a deep medical diagnosis-based model. It is right to have a model that is based on identifying challenges and gaps for people compared to normal provision. It also means that, for example, if you massively improve the inclusiveness of your normal provision, you would expect to see the number of people identified drop, but then you might see their relative outcomes get worse, because you are identifying a much smaller proportion of the cohort. It is properly challenging to work out what the answer to that should be, other than that you want, wherever you possibly can, to see convergence, and you want to test, wherever you can, like-for-like outcomes for similar people and to identify gaps and differences in different areas and between different institutions.
The other thing that we look at really hard is where we see differences in outcomes for children and young people who have broadly similar levels of need but have had different experiences in the system. There, you can say that you want everyone to get as close as possible to having the outcomes that the best have. I am sorry that that was a long answer, but there is a real challenge underpinning this about the relativeness of the definitions.
Chair: That is fine. It is a really important question.
Jonathan Marron: Is it worth me coming on to health?
Q9 Chair: Yes, but briefly, please, because we have an awful lot to get through.
Jonathan Marron: Our understanding of these conditions is changing. Our clinical understanding is changing. Indeed, as a society, the acceptability of talking about it has changed, so we are seeing a great increase in the numbers of people coming forward. The latest estimate out of NHS Digital for the number of children and young people who have a diagnosable mental health condition and have not come forward is a prevalence rate as high as one in five. That is a very significant challenge in terms of how we support people and make sure that our children are supported in school by the mainstream health services. One in five is not specialist, is it? That is the broad sense there.
I would say two things. In terms of autism, clearly, our practice has changed very significantly in the last 10 to 15 years. NHS England produced a national framework and a set of operational guidance on autism only in 2023 to try to pull together that practice—both the commissioning, strategic practice in terms of what you should be doing as a service, but also how you should run an autism service and how you should do diagnosis. There have been great strides there.
On ADHD, we looked in January of this year at a review of those services, again by NHS England, with quite a lot of concern about whether we are clear about who we are diagnosing for, what for, and what the balance of treatment is between therapeutic options and medicines. We have launched a taskforce to look at that, which will come back in spring of next year.
There is a great deal to do to understand what the right way of supporting these children is. That will then, of course, feed into the schools and the SEN debate too.
Chair: Thank you both for that. This is a very important part of it. We may come back to this, but we have an awful lot to get through, as I say.
Q10 Sarah Green: The NAO Report spells out quite clearly how too many families are waiting too long, not just for the support they need, but, in some cases, for the assessment in the first place. Can I ask Jonathan and Susan, in the first instance, what you are doing to reduce the time that families are waiting to receive the support they desperately need?
Susan Acland-Hood: You are right. We have seen a drop in the number of assessments for education, health and care plans that have been done within the 20-week time period that we seek to do them within. It improved very slightly between 2022 and 2023, but that is following a drop before that.
I would say a couple of things about waiting times. The first is that it does go back to the underpinning analysis that was set out in the Green Paper in 2022, which is that the changes to the system that were made in 2014 set up some incredibly clear and comprehensive entitlements for the support that you could attract if you had a statutory plan, but much less clear entitlements to the support you would get if you did not have a plan.
That undoubtedly, completely rationally, has driven more people to try to seek support through a plan, because it is clearer what they are going to get. That set up a vicious cycle in which more and more of the available resource in the system was going to people who had plan-based support, and there was less available to do early intervention and to give more comprehensive cohort-based support to groups of people who did not have an individualised plan.
Part of the challenge here is that we want more people to be having their plans done in good time, but we also want more people to be able to get the support that they need without having to go through that process at all. If you look at the numbers on plans being delivered within the 20-week timescale, the shocking headline statistic is that only 50% of those plans are being done within 20 weeks.
If you look at the absolute numbers, in 2015, when it was closer to 60% of plans that were being done on time, the total number of plans that were being written was about 11,675. The total number of plans in 2023 was 38,471 that were done on time, so there were more than three times as many plans done on time in 2023 as in 2015, but, as a proportion, it was significantly lower, because the total number of plans had accelerated so incredibly fast.
The overall level of special educational needs measured by SEND support as well as EHCP went up by about 14%. The proportion of EHC plans went up by about 40%. We must try to make sure that people are getting assessed when they need to be assessed, but it is also really important that it is possible for people to get more support without having to go through an assessment process.
When you look at the types of needs that we have seen accelerating, it is autistic spectrum disorder, social, emotional and mental health need, and speech, language and communication needs that have driven about 88% of that increase in education, health and care plans, so we also want to be putting in place really good-quality support that means that everybody can get straightforwardly identified, but also, more important than education is the support that gets put in place for people.
For example, programmes like Nuffield’s early language intervention have screened over 640,000 primary-age children in the first years of primary school to identify challenges with language, which goes directly to that increase in speech, language and communication needs. If we can do that, we avoid the need for people to go through a plan-writing process and to be sat in that queue.
The other thing that we are doing is looking, local authority by local authority, at the waiting times and the level of delay. They vary absolutely enormously. Helen Hayes’s constituency crosses two boroughs. In Lambeth, 71.5% of education, health and care plans are written on time. In Southwark, it is 19.2%. The circumstances in Lambeth and Southwark are a bit different, but probably not that different, I suggest. We are also doing really targeted work through our regional teams to work with those areas that have the biggest challenges in timeliness to try to improve what they are able to do. I will stop talking now so that Jonathan can talk about health.
Chair: We are going to have to have some quite brisker answers, otherwise we will still be here at midnight.
Jonathan Marron: Let us try not to do that. On health, one thing is really clear. The big rises in the required assessments of autism, speech and language and mental health are some of the most challenging services in the health service. We have long waits for access to these services generally. Of course, we are dealing with both special educational needs and children who have come through from the normal health pathway. We are trying to fix all of those with really quite a significant investment. Over the period of the Report, mental health spending has gone from £11 billion to over £17 billion. We have seen a 40% increase in the number of mental health staff. Just since 2019, speech and language therapy is up 20%.
Although we are putting lots of resource into these services, we are facing a level of demand such that we are running just to try to keep up. With ADHD assessments, we face a significant challenge, which is why, as I mentioned before, we are trying to look at what our service model is and whether we are getting that right.
With autism, again, there has been a very significant increase, both in children and in adults coming forward for autism assessments, and we are trying to work through what the right service is to do that.
Q11 Sarah Green: Can I ask specifically about educational psychologists? I am not quite sure whether they sit in the Department for Education or the Department of Health and Social Care. If you could clarify that for me, I would appreciate it. What specifically has been done to retain those educational psychologists within local authority employment and to recruit more? That is one of the biggest backlogs right now, if that makes sense.
Susan Acland-Hood: Educational psychologists who carry out assessments for SEND are employed by local government. In a twist, if you really wanted me to, I could tell you it was MHCLG, but actually it is us. We work very closely with local government to try to support retention of educational psychologists and to train additional educational psychologists. We put additional funding into the system to train a first chunk of 200, and then another 400 educational psychologists, who we have invested additional funding in to train and add to the system.
I would just say again, though, that it goes to that point about the huge rise in the absolute numbers of plans that need writing. What we see in some of the areas where we have worked either through our change programme or through Delivering Better Value or Safety Valve, all of which look at how we can try to pull more resource upstream into more effective preventative work, where we can get more educational psychologists’ time spent on supporting children and young people, and less overall on assessing them, we see better outcomes for children and young people. We also know that that is more rewarding work for educational psychologists to do.
There is something about putting the funding in to train and support them, and thinking about trying to make sure that they are deployed in ways that are focused on giving effective support to children and young people.
Q12 Sarah Green: I have a final question, if I may, Chair, and it is to both Alison and Jonathan. It is about where you find good practice, because it is certainly out there. We tend to focus on the negative, but, where you find good practice, how is that then rolled out and shared, not just with local authorities but with schools as well? How does that work across both Departments?
Alison Ismail: I will start off particularly with schools and education settings. That is an excellent point. As Susan said in her opening remarks, the fact that a majority of parents, if not enough parents, are happy with the support that their children get for their special educational needs shows that there are many settings that do a fantastic job on this already and that, sometimes despite quite significant headwinds, provide a really excellent service and really good support.
We are absolutely keen to be identifying those areas and spreading that good practice wherever we can. The variation that we see on all these different measures shows that, if we could support some of those settings and providers to come up towards the level of their most successful colleagues, we could make a big difference to children and young people.
In terms of sharing good practice, Susan has referred to our regional teams, which work very closely with not just local authorities but multi-academy trusts and directly with schools in different areas to help them improve their practice, share good practice, and work in the collaborative way we know we need to deliver in a joined-up way for families.
I would also mention our change programme, which was one of our commitments in last year’s improvement plan. That involves 32 local authorities in all nine of the English regions, where we have groups of local authorities working together both to test some of the interventions that we described in the improvement plan, but also, where they are successful in building up good practice, to be sharing and disseminating that.
Jonathan Marron: I will make three very brief points. There are some areas where practice is changing quickly. We are trying to make sure that there is national guidance to help people with autism and ADHD particularly. There are other areas, where, for example, in education, we have particular projects on the ground—the PINS project and the ELSEC project, which we will probably come to later—which are really great examples of how to get specialist support into mainstream early. That is a great way of spreading good practice.
Finally, I would just point to the CQC/Ofsted reports. They have now done 43, a quarter of which have come out in the best possible category. That is a great place to look for where the best performance in the country is today.
Q13 Rachel Gilmour: Could I ask Susan Acland-Hood and Jonathan Marron, how are you improving your collective understanding of the reason for the increase in SEND support and the demand for EHCPs, and what this means for the future? Do you have a prognosis that you can use the data that you have now? I accept that it is a very complex area, and that there are complex issues, but do you have the ability to do that going forward?
Jonathan Marron: On the level of need in the population of children, we have reasonable data. We are trying to work through the growth in need in terms of what is more people coming forward and what is changing in clinical practice. All those things are happening simultaneously, so we are working through that.
In some areas, there is definitely a need for more information and data. One of the areas that we have found most difficult is linking this rising need in the population to asking what that means for children with special educational needs. We are out for commission at the moment with the NIHR to try to do a specific piece of research there to give some in-depth knowledge, and this will be our challenge. There is a growth in the number of children needing help from health services, but then how that exactly plays through into what school settings should be and how much you can do in mainstream is a challenge for us.
Susan Acland-Hood: We have a good grasp of the key needs that are rising. Autism spectrum disorder, speech, language and communication needs, and social, emotional and mental health make up 88% of the rise in EHCPs, as I said. Within that, we can use international studies to look at what we are seeing relatively consistently globally. There was a meta-study by Talantseva et al. in 2023, which shows, across 29 countries, the global prevalence of ASD consistently increasing from about 0.25% during the period from 1994 to 1999 towards 0.99% in the period from 2015 to 2019. Some of this you can see globally, and some of it looks more different here than elsewhere, which suggests that there may be more systemic factors.
Again, those may be the areas where what you are seeing is more challenge in meeting need in the mainstream education system driving a perception that there are needs that cannot be met ordinarily, and so trying to put those two things together is, again, a really important part of the change programme that we are already running and of our future work. We will continue to work on it. We also have a joint taskforce specifically focused on neurodiversity, which was set up between the two Departments to keep working on that.
Q14 Rachel Gilmour: I have one quick question, but if I could just give you some feedback from my constituency, where there is a particularly high level of SEN and particularly poor provision, my constituents and their parents are crying out for this across sectors—social services, schools and the NHS. You are not going to achieve it if you do not do it.
That aside, what are you doing to build a robust understanding of the type and location of provision available and needed to support children now and in the future? This goes back to that off-piste comment that I made.
Susan Acland-Hood: If you will forgive me, I will not repeat the stuff on looking at need. In terms of what provision is available, over the last two years, we have done a more specific collection on special educational needs capacity across the system, and have started using that to drive some of our funding allocations as well in order to try to identify the places where we have the biggest gaps between capacity and need.
Again, we are doing that in the context of a system in which we see really strongly differing practice in what proportion of need—even of need within EHCP—can be met in the mainstream. Even within the membership of this Committee, 73% of pupils in Richmond Park with EHCPs are in mainstream settings, whereas in Burnley it is 45%.
You are seeing really different approaches to how those needs can be met, and so we are trying to catch the capacity and to keep working together to try to spread really effective practice on how to support needs really well. Again, there will always be some people whose needs will be much better met in a specialist setting. This is not about trying to put people in inappropriate settings, but about recognising that, because the definition is relative, anybody whose need is being well met in mainstream is likely to then be identified. You can address that either by, over time, massively increasing the amount of specialist provision or by trying to make the mainstream provision work better for more people.
Q15 Chris Kane: Can I pick up on a point you made earlier, when you said that you are working hard to improve data? What does that look like? What is the work that is being done? What is the timescale before you would expect to see improvements in data collection? Can I ask Susan and Jonathan that?
Susan Acland-Hood: As I say, to my mind, the most fundamental difficulty with data in this space is that you have a fundamental definition at the heart of this, which is relatively subjectively driven, and is driven differently in different places. To try to get underneath that, we are looking harder at experiences by primary type of need. We are also looking at how that intersects with low prior attainment data in order to try to understand the differences.
When you go beyond that, the other piece of work that we have been doing through the change programme is looking at much better data flows from local authorities, so that we can understand different experiences and practices across the country.
I might hand to Alison on that, because we have been developing and testing much better data dashboards with local authorities as part of that work, so that people can see and understand the differences in practice and outcomes between them in order to help drive the sharing of best practice that we have been talking about. Alison, do you want to add to that?
Alison Ismail: Yes, absolutely, thank you. Before I say more about the change programme, I would say that some of this in terms of really understanding the picture that we are seeing, particularly given that the NAO Report talks about a broad and relative concept of SEND, so really getting under the skin of what we are delivering for children and young people, has to go back to what Juliet described in terms of a range of measures—for example, looking at academic achievement at different key stages, and particularly at low prior attainers, but also at other measures that tell us about the experience of children and young people in the system, whether that is school attendance, which is quite a good proxy for how at home and supported children feel in their school or their setting, and also, for example, Ofsted’s parent survey, which tells us something about family experience.
In terms of the change programme, this, again, goes back to some of the commitments that we set out in last year’s improvement plan. We have undertaken significant work in those 32 local authorities that I described in the nine areas to develop better measures for transparency in terms of dashboards that give us some of those key indicators—for example, not just the proportion of children accessing education, health and care plans, but, within that, the proportion of children with those plans who are supported in their local nursery, school or college, and other measures that show how well those different statutory services, particularly health and education, are working together.
None of that, in itself, completely helps us overcome the issue that Susan has described with data, which is that you are working with a shifting population that is defined in quite different ways at times, but that is all really important work that we have done, ever since our Green Paper publication in 2022, to work out the best ways to get transparency on the system and make sure that we are collecting data and measuring the most important things.
Jonathan Marron: On health, we are talking about information in community health services and mental health provision, which, certainly, as members of this Committee will be well aware, traditionally has not been as strong as our hospital datasets. Over the last few years, we have made significant improvements and will continue to do that.
On the community health services data, and particularly the waiting time data, we are working with NHS Benchmarking, which is a group of statisticians within the NHS who do data improvement—for example, practically, in the moment, can we make this better?
We are also looking at things that we do not know the answers to. The research work that we have under way is looking at, like I say, the connection between need for therapy and special educational needs, with the changes in ADHD and the therapeutical model, which, basically, asks the question, “What should we be collecting and do we have the right datasets?” We have both the, “In the moment, can we make what we have better?” and, “Are we thinking about whether we have the right information in the longer run?” It is quite a broad agenda on data in this space for us.
Q16 Chris Kane: If you will excuse me, I have just one quick follow-up on something that Alison was saying. Am I hearing that the problem is not so much with the way that you are collecting the data—the interface to get the data—but is to do with a broader societal problem of movement of people? Is it a problem that you can solve in data collection with the dashboards, or is there something much broader that makes it harder to get the data that you need, when you need it?
Alison Ismail: We can absolutely do better with our data in terms of really understanding the journey that children and young people are following, but even radically improved data collection in itself will not solve the issue. Some of that, as Susan has described, is because, at the moment, we are working with quite a relative definition of SEND, which makes it difficult both to compare like for like, but also to be confident in observing a trajectory year on year, if you like.
Q17 Chris Kane: Susan, can I ask you about paragraph 2.4 in the Report, which talks about the proportion of children identified as having special educational needs and how it differs across local authorities? There does seem to be some wide variation in some of the figures. Why does the level of support that children with special educational needs receive depend on where they go to school?
Susan Acland-Hood: Some of this comes back to the fundamental definition of SEND. SEND is inherently defined relative to mainstream education. The 2014 Children and Families Act definition of SEND is where someone “has a learning difficulty or disability which calls for special education provision to be made for him or her”, and so it is, to some extent, a little bit circular.
The history is that, over time, we have seen different local authorities take very different approaches to seeking to meet particular types or levels of need in mainstream schools, by working on their inclusiveness or by moving those out of mainstream schools. We also see very different levels in the extent to which, for example, schools have resource-based or SEND provision within them.
For some of those, whether they are in school or not, you will need to seek an education, health and care plan, but the system is not set up such that there is a single, simple threshold, either for SEND support or for an education, health and care plan, which can be written down. It is based on assessments against that criterion of whether they have a learning difficulty or disability that calls for special educational provision to be made for them. It relates to a judgment about the difference between their need and what is being provided in the local education system.
Some of that variation will be because of choices that have been made in the local area about the mainstream education offer, and some of it will be about different levels of judgment, which is why I say that, at the bottom of quite a lot of the data questions, there is a real difficulty that the fundamental underpinning definition of SEND is not necessarily consistent across time or place.
Alison Ismail: I know that you want to keep answers short, but if I may just build on that for a moment, as talked about in the Report, and as other witnesses have mentioned, the growth in SEND need that we see is overwhelmingly in three categories—autistic spectrum conditions, speech, language and communication needs, and social, emotional and mental health, which is a very broad category that includes ADHD, which Jonathan has referred to. It also includes children with behavioural challenges and, to some degree, mental health conditions that we see reported in young people.
All of those are broad categories that will include really significant ranges of need within them. Some of those may be more developmental needs that can be supported with quite short-term interventions. Others will represent a much more intrinsic, lifelong need, and so taking that into account also helps explain why we see such significant variation in the way that different local authorities present their need.
Q18 Chris Kane: How do you ensure greater consistency across schools in identifying children? Is greater consistency possible?
Susan Acland-Hood: It is possible. It is very difficult to think about identification without thinking about the provision alongside, because of the nature of that definition. What we would absolutely seek is greater consistency and improvement in the provision that is made to meet need, at which point that itself starts to improve your consistency of identification, because the identification is so closely linked to a judgment against what is available, if that makes sense.
Alison has described the work on the change programme to try to identify good practice and spread it, but there also is a set of programmes that we are running that are focused on some of those needs that we see growing most rapidly.
We have two programmes that are focused on speech, language and communication in slightly different ways. The Nuffield early language intervention, which I mentioned earlier, is focused on improving speech and language skills of children aged between four and five. It includes a screening element, so about 640,000 primary school children have already been screened, and over 200,000 children have had their language skills improved. We see about four months’ progress in oral skills for children who have that intervention, and about seven months’ for children who are eligible for free school meals.
Putting more children through programmes like that addresses some of the identification challenges, but, to some extent, it also makes provision. Speech and language needs are often not lifelong, but ones where, if addressed well and early, you remove the need for more expensive intervention later. Effectively, you remove the question of whether people are identifying correctly on an EHCP, because you are just putting children through a programme that means that, if there is a challenge, it is not just identified but is immediately met through the same programme.
Similarly, early language and speech for every child, or ELSEC, is funding innovative workforce models to look at early identification for children and young people with speech, language and communication needs. That is in early years and primary schools, so that is covering an earlier period than NELI work as well. The interim report on that is not due until December, but we are already seeing some really good examples through the change programme. For example, Barnet have supported over 1,000 children through their ELSEC universal and targeted offer.
The partnerships for inclusion of neurodiversity in schools programme—PINS—which is a joint programme between us and the Department for Health, deploys specialists from health and education workforces to strengthen training resources for school staff, and will upskill about 10% of mainstream primary schools by March 2025. I would expect that we would want to continue that beyond then as well, because, again, that is about trying to build capability in schools to meet need, but takes you a bit away from this definition that is against the deficit in the provision that is being seen, if that makes sense.
Chris Kane: It does.
Susan Acland-Hood: I am really sorry that these answers are long, but it is complicated.
Q19 Chris Kane: Thank you. Can I build on that? Paragraph 2.28 of the Report looks at the need to get in and do more identification before school. I do not know if this is for Susan or Alison, but can you talk a little bit more about what you are doing to make sure that providers are able to identify and support children before they start school?
Susan Acland-Hood: I might ask Jonathan to come in on this, because this starts with health checks in early life and, indeed, some of it starts at birth.
Jonathan Marron: One of the key elements of our health visitor programme is checks on children for their level of development at 12 months, and again between two and two and a half years. This really allows an early identification of children who might have speech and language needs, and then allows a referral to other services. Numbers of health visitors have reduced quite substantially, which is in the Report. We are still seeing just over 80% of children having that 12-month check, and just under 80% have that two-and-a-half-year check. Those numbers have been steady over the last six or so years, so we are managing that programme of making sure that children are assessed early on, with follow-up levels of support if needed.
With the Department for Education, we have also been rolling out a set of family hubs in 75 local authorities, backed by £300 million of investment over three years, which, again, is providing more of that opportunity for children to come with their parents to a centre and have access to a whole range of support. We are particularly interested in early parenting support, relationships, mental health and breastfeeding, but that opportunity to see other services is there.
Chair: We are really going to have to speed up, I am afraid, colleagues. I am afraid there is going to be very little supplementary. It is only going to be the planned questions, and really short questions and answers are what we are after, please.
Q20 Sarah Olney: Susan Acland-Hood, how are you building a shared understanding of where special educational needs fits across Government and individual organisations’ priorities? This is in relation to the system challenge that so many schools and parents are experiencing in terms of the gaps in provision between different organisations.
Susan Acland-Hood: I am going to ask Juliet to talk a bit about the governance and leadership of this in the Department, which stretches across the whole of Government. I would also say that partnerships with local authorities are absolutely key to this, and we do everything that we do on SEND in deep partnership with local authority partners, as well as listening to them on the pieces that they find it hard to put together on the ground to try to make provision at central Government level to address that.
Juliet Chua: Just after the election, we moved the special educational needs directorate into the schools group as part of the Department for Education, recognising how critical it was to make sure that we were thinking about mainstream education in all aspects in relation to inclusive practice in the SEN system.
A critical part of that is how we are working right across Government to support the whole system. We have created a new cross-Government portfolio board, which, essentially, has membership of all the key Departments that you would expect to be around the table, working very closely with colleagues from health, MHCLG, Treasury and others, and then, as Susan says, working very closely with local government partners.
As the Secretary of State set out in her speech last week, we will also bring together a number of experts to help us, essentially, build that deep expertise and partnership necessary for this next phase of work. We are working with Tom Rees, chief executive of Ormiston Academies, who will help us work on inclusive practice, working closely with a range of school leaders right across the system, and with Dame Christine Lenehan, with her role really drawing on deep expertise of working right across local systems, working closely with parents and families, and drawing on that lived experience as well.
We are really deliberately trying to create both formal governance, in terms of the way that we think across Government, and that sits as part of the overall opportunity mission and our approach to thinking nought to 25 all the way through, but also deep into the system as well.
Q21 Sarah Olney: Ms Chua, is this approach going to be effective in terms of chasing out some of the disincentives that currently exist within the system, particularly in schools, where they are not having to accept SEN pupils? The financial disincentive remains. Will this approach be effective in addressing some of those issues?
Juliet Chua: The Government have made really clear that a deep commitment to inclusive mainstream is absolutely at the heart of our approach. Learning from a lot of the programmes that have already been described today, in terms of the work on the change programme, we need to absolutely make sure that we are looking deeply at the different incentives and the levers that exist in terms of the way in which schools support children and young people with special educational needs.
We have already identified a number of key processes that will take account of how we promote best practice and change some of those incentives in the system. I am thinking about the curriculum and assessment review led by Professor Becky Francis. We will be looking explicitly at making sure that the curriculum assessment review is thinking about the barriers within inclusive mainstream and making sure that that is reflected. In parallel, Ofsted are looking at the way in which they will think about inclusion as part of the work that they are doing to look at the inspection framework and the relationship between that and a new single report card.
Q22 Sarah Olney: Will this be, dare I say, tinkering with the existing system or will this, in due course, be a whole new system?
Juliet Chua: There is a real opportunity to join these incentives up to create a very strong recognition for the work that mainstream schools do with children with special educational needs, and, as we talked about outcomes earlier, to recognise progress and outcomes for children with special educational needs but also to support schools and build the capacity and confidence of teachers and leaders to be able to make sure that they have the tools and interventions, which builds on what we have been learning in recent years into that approach.
Q23 Anna Dixon: Before I get into my questions, I would just like to declare an interest for the public record. I previously worked at the Department of Health and Social Care with both Jonathan Marron and with Juliet Chua. I also have a niece with autism, who was supported through an internship with the Civil Service recently.
I would like to get onto the subject of special school capacity and draw your attention to paragraph 2.23 in the NAO Report, which suggests that the demand for special school places is exceeding capacity by around 4,000 pupils, but, at the same time, there are also some special schools that are working at overcapacity, suggesting that there is a real imbalance there.
I wondered, Susan or Alison, if you could clarify what you are doing to ensure that special school capacity is right, whether that is within local areas for particular special needs or, indeed, across the country.
Alison Ismail: I am very happy to come in on that. Going back to some of what we have covered so far, we are really keen to make sure that we have the right balance between excellent special school provision for the children who need it, but also really excellent mainstream provision for those who can thrive in mainstream. In the best examples of local areas, we see those two sectors working very closely in partnership, but there is evidence that a high number of special schools are either at capacity or over capacity, with high demand for places. The most recent figure that we have is around 63%, so that is a very high proportion of them.
On your question about outcomes, we do, unsurprisingly, have some evidence that students in overcrowded settings, whether that is special or mainstream, may have lower attainment. That is not just in terms of academic attainment, but, given the Committee’s interest so far in transitions and preparation for adulthood, it is harder for overcrowded settings to provide that to the high quality that we expect and which the code of practice requires.
That is why we have seen very significant investment in high needs capital, in particular since 2018-19, with investment of over £3 billion. A very high proportion of that—£2.4 billion—has been spent since 2022-23. The assurance data that we now collect, which we are now in our second cycle of, which Susan described, suggests that that has created around 50,000 new places in special schools.
The other point that I would make is that it is yet another area where we see very significant local variation. There are some local areas that have a high proportion of their young people with education, health and care plans in special schools. There are others that support a majority of them in mainstream. It may be that there is more that we can do to understand exactly what good looks like, particularly in supporting young people with those needs where we have seen the biggest growth—autism and social, emotional and mental health are great examples—in order to get that balance right and make sure that local authorities can get their provision on a sustainable footing.
Q24 Anna Dixon: Can I follow up? As you have already said, there is a dynamic here that, if you have the right support in mainstream schools, there is likely to be less demand for specialist school places. Indeed, I have evidence from constituents that parents are, in a sense, being forced to consider specialist schools even if they would prefer their child to be supported in mainstream schools. Even with an EHCP, they are not able to get the right support in mainstream.
You also talked about ordinary education and this effectively being a relative thing. If ordinary education were getting worse, this might be another explanation for why we are seeing the uptick in both demand for EHCPs.
I was talking to Bradford, which does reasonably well in the face of quite a lot of challenges in terms of maintaining children in more inclusive mainstream settings. They have invested in specialist teams and SEND school improvement advisers. I wanted to get down to what else you think you need to do and/or understand to make sure the capacity that we do have in specialist schools is there for those children who really need it.
Susan Acland-Hood: This comes back to that focus on really improving inclusive mainstream, which Ministers have set out as their core focus. That is not just about what is sometimes described as ordinarily available provision, in other words what every school should be able to do for a child with some needs that differ from their fellow pupils. It is also about recognising and supporting things like resource-based provisions, which are based in school and allow children to spend some of their time in mainstream classes and some of it being supported outside. We think that is a positive model, but, again, we see that very variably across the country.
The key ingredients are about using what we know already and spreading effective practice. It goes back to the comment that was made earlier about there being some really good practice on this. We have used both the change programme that Alison referred to earlier and our work through Safety Valve and Delivering Better Value, both of which, in different ways, work with local authorities to look at how they can shift provision from later intervention to earlier, more widespread and inclusive intervention.
We have some really good examples of the things that authorities have done using that Safety Valve and Delivering Better Value support, which have allowed them to support more children more effectively in mainstream schools in a way that is supported by parents.
You made the point that we should really be thinking about parental wishes here all the way through. I am very conscious that when we talk about inclusive mainstream there is a risk that parents may hear that as seeking to support children in mainstream who really need specialist provision. It is much more, as you say, about making sure that specialist provision is available for those children for whom that is undoubtedly the right place to be.
Again, I am conscious of time. I could give examples from some of the local authorities.
Chair: We need to keep going.
Q25 Anna Dixon: I have one final point on specialist school provision. We are going to come back to questions about cost-effectiveness and value for money. One of the consequences of not having enough places—as we have said, part of that is about inclusive mainstream, but there are not enough places in specialist schools—is putting children into alternative provision and pupil referral units. Do you have the data on the proportion of children with SEND who were in alternative provision and PRUs? Do you view that as a failure of the system.
Susan Acland-Hood: If you look at children with ECHPs, the proportion of children and young people with an EHCP—this data goes back to 2015; it was statements in 2015 and it then became EHCPs—has stayed relatively level at about 1% of the total cohort. Of course, the total cohort size has gone up. There is a higher proportion of those with SEND support.
We have seen less shift in that than we have seen from mainstream to specialist and indeed to independent. In 2015, about 58% of those on statements were in mainstream schools. It is now 42% of those with an EHCP.
Chair: We will go to Helen Hayes, chair of the Education Select Committee.
Q26 Helen Hayes: Thank you very much, Chair. First of all, can I apologise for my absence at the beginning of the meeting, which was due to attending the Chamber for the statement on children’s social care? Can I also put on record my interests as a vice-president of the Local Government Association and a member of the GMB trade union?
I wanted to drill in a little bit more on the question of SEND support in mainstream schools and around the Government’s definition of inclusivity and the plans to move towards a more inclusive mainstream. Please do not feel like you need to repeat things that you have said already, but I would like to dig in a little bit more detail, if that is okay.
We know that parents have very little confidence in the ability of schools to deliver SEND support, that schools are struggling to do so and that the Government are behind on the recruitment and training of SENCOs. First, I wanted to ask about the Government’s overall plan. You have spoken a bit about some of the things that you believe are effective, but we nevertheless are in a situation of great challenge with regard to the delivery of SEND support in schools. What are you doing to ensure that higher-quality SEND support is more consistently available in mainstream schools?
Juliet Chua: Just to start with where parents are, it is probably worth saying that 67% of parents with SEND in state schools feel their children have the support that they need. That is two-thirds, so obviously a third still feel they are not getting their support. We need to recognise that and that we are all here because we want to improve the support children and young people receive.
As the Government have made very clear, improving the offer through inclusive mainstream is absolutely at the heart of our approach. We have been talking to Ministers in some detail about this and we will be bringing forward further work in this space, but what I can describe today is some of the things that we have already set out very clearly.
We have described, as I said earlier, on the curriculum and assessment review, an expectation that we will look closely at how you remove the barriers for children and young people with special educational needs in the curriculum and assessment space, which is such a critical part. Too often, children and young people feel they cannot access the curriculum and that it does not work for particular groups who have special educational needs. We are also looking at the role that Ofsted play in terms of some of those incentives in the system and promoting and getting very good practice on inclusivity.
At the heart of this is the question, “What are the characteristics of a really good inclusive school?” There are a number of different sources of evidence for this already. The work done by the EEF and brought forward by other bodies points to the importance of the ethos of the school, the way the school operates and creates a supporting environment for all pupils, the way it understands the needs of all pupils and the way it thinks about access to high-quality teaching. We know that high-quality teaching is absolutely critical for all pupils. It is often quoted that what is good for pupils with SEND is also good for all pupils. Doubling down on high-quality teaching is very important.
We also need to think about some of the particular tools, drawing on work that the EEF and others have done about the types of interventions that work, such as using small groups, flexible working and different types of interventions in that space. This is also about effective working with teaching assistants, who play a really critical role in the current system to support children and young people with special educational needs. We need to look at how to deploy and work with teaching assistants effectively.
Those are some of the features of strong and effective practice, but we will need to develop that further. Tom Rees, as I mentioned earlier, is going to play a critical role working with us and with the system in terms of what really excellent inclusive mainstream practice looks like.
Q27 Helen Hayes: We know there are children with additional needs in every single classroom in every single school across the country, but currently only just over half of all teachers say that they feel confident to meet the needs of students with additional needs. What are you doing to boost the confidence, skills and capacity among teachers to be able to meet the needs of every child in their classroom?
Juliet Chua: This is an area where we have been putting in place a number of interventions to deepen the way in which the workforce has the skills, experience and confidence to work with a broader range of need.
We looked at the work done through the initial teacher training and the early curriculum framework and we revised some of the content to ensure that, when teachers are at the very earliest stages in their careers, they have that input and experience.
We have introduced a new national professional qualification for SENCOs, special educational needs coordinators, with the first cohort starting this autumn. That provides a really serious 18-month leadership qualification. SENCOs are an absolutely critical part of every school in terms of the role they play in supporting the work with the rest of the leadership and thinking about teaching quality and the range of provision. That is a new qualification. All SENCOs have to take this mandatory training within three years.
What has been interesting is that we have been seeing schools putting forward not just their SENCOs but teachers who are in training for leadership. Schools are seeing that as an absolutely critical qualification and development path on the way towards leadership. That is about growing the cadre of leaders, who will essentially increase the confidence of the school overall to be able to address some of that core professional practice.
Q28 Helen Hayes: To what extent are you expecting those changes to shift the balance from children who are currently seeking EHCPs back towards children who are supported in their mainstream school under SEND support? How are you keeping track of the progress of those interventions and how will you know whether they have been successful?
Juliet Chua: At the heart of the emphasis on inclusive mainstream is recognising that it is absolutely critical that you meet children’s needs where they are and that you remove the barriers to learning and education early. Indeed, a lot of the discussion today has been about earlier identification, early practice and all the key roles around a child and young person to be able to do that.
We will be working through—we talked about outcomes earlier—the way in which we track through impact and interventions through the course of this Parliament. At the heart of that is a very strong emphasis on recognising that what you need is a system in which a child’s needs are met as they present.
Q29 Helen Hayes: There is one final question from me, Chair, if I may. I want to ask about the capital budget. The Government have announced capital funding for school buildings. What are you doing to ensure that the specification for new school buildings, where they are delivered across the country, is an inclusive specification that builds the physical fabric better to meet the needs of children with additional needs in an inclusive way in mainstream schools?
Susan Acland-Hood: We have a set of core building designs that we use where we are building new schools. They are well adapted to accessibility in relation to things like level access and toilets. We need to keep revising those to make sure we are also thinking about, for example, the building in of small group workspaces.
Again, this goes to the point about the profile of need that we are seeing changing a bit over time. We would always keep those under review. It is also true that, although we have some standardised school building designs that we start from, we will always then work in partnership and in conjunction with the school to understand the way they work and to make sure the building will work for them.
Q30 Mr Charters: The proportion of EHCP appeals decided in favour of families is now at 98%. That feels to me like a two-stage process that inherently favours better-off parents with the financial means to go to tribunal and favours those with know-how of the system. The broken appeals system is making it harder for poorer families, is it not?
Susan Acland-Hood: That headline number is one that should give us all pause on what that tells us about our system more broadly. About 2.5% of appealable decisions go to appeals. It is worth remembering that that is quite a small proportion of the total decision-making. We are also working very hard with the Ministry of Justice and the SEND tribunal to do more work through ADR and other means because a very adversarial process is not a positive feature of the system or one we should build on. There is a risk that it favours those who have the capacity to navigate.
The only other thing I would say is that it is worth noting that the way this is recorded in the tribunal means it will be recorded as a win for the parents if it goes in their favour on any aspect of what is appealed, which does rather push that number up. You could have a decision in favour of the local authority on several parts, but, if it goes in favour of the family on any part, it is recorded in that 99%-plus figure. We are working with the tribunal to try to disaggregate that a little bit more, because that does not necessarily help us understand exactly what is happening.
Q31 Mr Charters: I will ask a follow-up on that and then bring in a new matter. Therefore, is that driving inegalitarian outcomes in terms of which children are able to access an EHCP? Secondly—you touched on this point—do you feel as though that is driving an adversarial system? How can that be tackled culturally with local authorities?
Susan Acland-Hood: I would go back to the fundamental analysis that was laid out in the Green Paper in 2022, which talked about that vicious cycle. You get very clear entitlements if you have an EHCP, but your entitlements are much less clear at the level of SEND support or at other levels. As more resource in the system goes towards supporting those who have statutory plans, it becomes more and more rational for as many people as possible to keep seeking those statutory plans because there is less resource left for the people who do not have them. Breaking out of that vicious cycle has to be an incredibly important part of what we seek to do.
That is why we are focusing so hard on the support that you can get in the system without having to go through plan-writing or assessment processes. It is about recognising and meeting need. As Juliet says, it is about meeting need where you are.
There are lots of reasons for that. First, it gives a better service to everybody. Secondly, it will make the system more efficient and allow us to use resources better. Thirdly, it will promote more egalitarian outcomes. The more you ask people to go through significant and substantial processes in order to get a good outcome, the more you are likely to favour those who have the capability, capacity and time to go through those processes.
Q32 Mr Charters: Ultimately, with one in 40 now going to appeal, it is not very good VFM for the taxpayer either, is it?
Susan Acland-Hood: No.
Chair: That is the sort of answer we like.
Q33 Michael Payne: Can I just declare an interest as a vice-president of the Local Government Association, a current member of Nottinghamshire County Council and a member of GMB and Unison?
Just probing on this point, you described it, Susan, as being relatively small, but the figure is 15,600 families in terms of those that go to appeal. These are 15,600 families of the most vulnerable children. Some 98% of them were decided in favour of the families. It is shocking and worrying that only 2% are defended by local councils.
I just specifically want to press this point about what the DfE and the Department for Health and Social Care are doing with local authorities to both learn the lessons about why 98% are falling in favour of families and what both Departments are doing with local authorities jointly to improve this situation. We heard a little bit earlier from Juliet about the cross-Government board and how you are trying to draw in respective Departments. I just want to specifically probe this point about what you are doing in a joined-up fashion with local authorities to turn this situation around.
Susan Acland-Hood: Yes, I agree with you. I did not mean to suggest at all that it was satisfactory. It is just worth setting it in the context of the total size of the system.
As I say, you have to be slightly cautious on the 98% because that is 98% where any element of it is decided in favour of the family, but that still suggests a system in which we are not, together, operating in a very sensible way, given that you are going through an extremely laborious and time-intensive process for the family and for the local authority in order to reach that conclusion.
I might bring out that we do everything we do on SEND in partnership with local authorities. It would be insane to do otherwise because they hold so much of the practice and the responsibility across this network. The change programme is a collaborative programme. It is really consciously designed to work with groups of local authorities and to have a presence in every region so that learning can be spread. We meet very regularly with the Association of Directors of Children’s Services and I also meet regularly with local authority chief executives because this is now on chief executives’ radar in a way I am not sure it was in the past, because of some of the challenges here.
Everything we do and have done in this space we will co-design with local government and it is incredibly important that we continue to do that.
Q34 Mr Betts: I have a couple of issues. About a month ago, I went to a very good event. It was the opening in Peak Central, my constituency, of further education provision by Sheffield College for young people with special needs. There is a very good working relationship between the college and the council. I mention that because it is a rarity, is it not? All too often, children with special educational needs who have been through special schools or had extensive help in mainstream schools are almost left by themselves to get on with it in further education, which can be a bit overwhelming for them. Ought we not do more to make sure there is a better process for young people in this regard?
Susan Acland-Hood: I would certainly say that one of the things that comes through all our data is that we should be giving more attention to points of transition. You see people fall out of the system at points of transition between primary and secondary, on transition into FE and to some extent into HE and adulthood as well.
There is some incredibly good practice in supporting children and young people with SEND in further education colleges. To some extent, that gives a pattern for some of the things that we would like to replicate in a more inclusive mainstream system in schools. It is one of the things we talk about and share across the Department.
Children and young people are less likely to be in specialised provision from 16 to 18 than they are before 16 and they are more likely to be in a mainstream FE college. That is often in provision that is quite carefully tailored and targeted to them but which is part of the overall college provision. There is some variation in that. Some colleges do it much better than others.
We speak to the Association of Colleges and they regularly remind us that they have some incredibly good practice in supporting children and young people with SEND at 16 to 18, which we could learn from earlier in the system.
Q35 Mr Betts: What I mentioned was a special provision, and one of the challenges was that there is a bottleneck in the special school system, which means children are being kept on at school beyond 16 in inappropriate provision because there is not anywhere for them to go. Should this be an issue that is looked at more effectively?
Susan Acland-Hood: As I say, all the transition points are issues that we should look at. I am sure we can do more on it, but you are more likely to end up in mainstream provision as a child with special education needs post-16 than pre-16. Some of that provision is very good and supportive.
Q36 Mr Betts: I will come on to a pretty important issue now. Local authorities, as we all know, have some particularly serious financial challenges. One of the ways that local authorities have been helped, in terms of the significant extra spending on special needs provision, is the statutory override. Local authorities are overspending their school grant, but that overspending is not going to count in their general revenue budgets. They have been allowed to do this statutory override. I have never come across this before in local government. Is this not just an indication of a service that is completely broken?
Susan Acland-Hood: The statutory override was introduced in 2020 and extended in 2022. When it was introduced, it was introduced because it was clear that there were some challenges in implementing the 2014 reforms and the pressure that that had brought about. It would be fair to say that, when it was first introduced, it was believed that the deficits would be a short-term and relatively localised issue while those reforms were bedding in. That is not something that we believe anymore.
Mr Betts: You said that almost with a straight face.
Susan Acland-Hood: I believe it to be true. It was believed, but we need to recognise that that is not how it feels now.
You are right: it is very unusual. It reflects some really unusual circumstances around the growth in pressure. We have done a set of things. Again, the NAO Report recognises that we have worked to manage that with some of the local authorities most affected through the Safety Valve programme and Delivering Better Value. The NAO Report also recognises that the situation would be worse if we had not done those things. It continues to be really challenging. We are working very closely with MHCLG and the Treasury to look at the position for the future.
Q37 Mr Betts: That was my next question. You are starting to anticipate my questions. In the last Parliament, the DLUHC Select Committee looked at the issue of local authority finances and this was a key one. We tried to find out what was going to happen in 2026 when the override will come to an end. The deficits are still going to be there for local authorities, both historical and going forward. Do you have any idea what is going to happen? Are local authorities going to be left to fund them? Some of them do not have the reserves to do it. Is the Treasury going to come in and write them off?
Susan Acland-Hood: As I say, there is work going on between us, the Treasury and MHCLG to work with local government to look at how we can manage the impacts of DSG deficits on finances and what will happen when the override comes to an end in 2026. I cannot tell you definitively what the outcome of those conversations with MHCLG and the Treasury are going to be.
Q38 Mr Betts: Is it not really important that, in doing that, there is a fairness in the outcomes that are achieved? There needs to be a fairness to the local authorities that surely cannot make cuts to other services to fund this cross-service provision and a fairness to the authorities that have not had to go for an override. If the Treasury simply writes them off, effectively you be giving extra schools grants to some authorities and not to others simply because of this situation.
Susan Acland-Hood: Yes. The combination of those two fairnesses is why this is an issue that is going to take some thinking and work.
Q39 Mr Betts: Where will that decision be reported to and scrutinised?
Susan Acland-Hood: The answer to that depends a little on what the decision is. It will sit with Committees in other parts of Parliament depending a little bit on the answer that is found, but it is certainly something we would expect to be asked questions about in this Committee once the decision has been made. I would expect the Education Select Committee to take a view as well.
Q40 Chair: I am just going to come in there because this is one of the most important aspects of this entire hearing. A rural authority like mine that is well run and is balancing its books through this mechanism has had its reserves run down something terrific. They are going to be in a very parlous position going forward because of this issue. How it is dealt with in 2026 is going to be really important. At the moment, you are penalising authorities that have decent reserves. The others have had a section 114 notice and have called in the commissioners. This whole matter is putting the whole local government sector at risk.
Susan Acland-Hood: Yes. Mr Betts gave us a description of the need to be fair. It is a challenge. We need to recognise the challenge for those that have deficits and not penalise those that have managed their budgets very carefully or have managed this through reserves. We are going to have to think about that very carefully. Again, both Treasury and MHCLG colleagues will be alive to that.
It is also worth saying that we are not just waiting. We are continuing to do the work through the Safety Valve and the Delivering Better Value programmes. We have seen improvements in levels of deficit in both Safety Valve and Delivering Better Value authorities. We have seen that achieved—this is incredibly important to say—by helping them to serve children and young people better upstream rather than by diminishing the service given.
Q41 Chair: Can I just appeal to you not to leave this matter until 2026?
Susan Acland-Hood: No, we will not.
Chair: Local authorities cannot plan. The sooner they know what they are doing, the better.
Q42 Mr Betts: Are you putting any extra resources into those authorities in the meantime?
Susan Acland-Hood: Yes. The Safety Valve programme focuses on the local authorities with the very highest levels of deficits. The total Safety Valve budget is over £1.2 billion, of which about £750 million has already been paid out. Essentially, it works on the basis of reaching an agreement with the authority to help bring down their deficit in exchange for funding for a plan that allows them to move more work upstream, to do more in mainstream and to avoid high cost.
The Delivering Better Value programme is similar but is for the next tranche of local authorities, which have slightly lower deficits. It involves a slightly smaller amount of funding. We have some really good examples of the work that has been done both through Safety Valve and Delivering Better Value.
In Delivering Better Value, for example, I could talk about the work that Oldham has done. Their timeliness for the 20-week statutory threshold has risen to 83%. They have developed an early years toolkit to look at transitions and help people move. They are using a universal screening tool to identify children in year 5 who might struggle during the transition into secondary school. Through the combination of those things, they are supporting more children in mainstream and bringing down their deficit. That is funded by the Delivering Better Value work.
Q43 Mr Betts: That is only available to councils that have got into the statutory override in the first place.
Susan Acland-Hood: It is, but we are replicating the things that we are learning through Safety Valve and Delivering Better Value through the change programme. One of the things I would say—
Q44 Mr Betts: There will be extra resources in those cases.
Susan Acland-Hood: The change programme does come with some extra resource and support to implement the approaches that work. We have also put another £1 billion into the high needs budget this year through the Budget. We are encouraging local authorities to look at the lessons from Safety Valve, Delivering Better Value and the change programme as they spend that money to try to pull it further upstream.
Q45 Rebecca Paul: I declare an interest: I am a county councillor at Surrey County Council. With respect to the Safety Valve arrangements, I understand why you have put that in place, but it feels a little bit of a sticking plaster. I am not sure how conducive it is in terms of delivering improvements into our SEND provision.
I can see that you are looking to do a qualitative review in terms of the outcomes based on that, but what are your thoughts on that? What are your expectations of that? Are we going to see a decrease in EHCPs being issued as a result of local authorities effectively being encouraged to issue less in order to meet the efficiencies that have been set in the Safety Valve agreement?
Susan Acland-Hood: Reducing EHCPs is not the goal; meeting more people’s needs more quickly is the goal. We do find that when authorities do that it does help them to manage the budget. When you let needs go later, they become more expensive.
Again, we have really good examples from Safety Valve. I could talk about Blackpool, which is developing more resource provision in SEND in mainstream settings. Again, they are providing really good-quality support but at a lower cost than special schools and particularly independent special schools. They have redesigned their SEND support service, giving more training to mainstream schools, increasing their capacity. They have had positive feedback on that from both schools and parents. They are increasing the confidence of parents in the mainstream offer because they are skilling staff up more effectively. They are doing that using their Safety Valve funding and in pursuit of their Safety Valve plan.
Rebecca Paul: We will just need to see that review, so we can see that and see the data that supports it.
Chair: You have a terrific number of examples of good practice. I am just hoping, beneath the scenes, that you are pushing that out to all authorities so they can learn from those that have best practice, but I do not want a great long answer.
Q46 Nesil Caliskan: Just by way of declaration, I was a council leader for a number of years and on the LGA board.
It will be no surprise to panel members that, as already recognised, the cost of SEND is the thing that will tip hundreds of local authorities over the edge in the coming months. Alongside perhaps adult social care, it is perhaps the single biggest pressure, not just in terms of the spend itself but also the associated costs through transport. I wanted to ask about transport costs because this is not always included in the underlying budgetary pressure of a local authority when it comes to SEND, but there is a particular pressure here.
There is a mixed picture across the country, but, when some local authorities talk about the SEND budget pressures, they are talking about the transport cost. That is about the children who are being placed on buses to make a journey of over an hour. The cost of that journey has gone up something like 74% in the last five years.
How are Departments responding to that in particular? To what extent are we able to help curb that cost pressure in the short term? Of course, creating additional space in mainstream takes time.
Juliet Chua: Let me come in on that. As you say, transport for children and young people with SEND is a really critical part of the overall system that supports them in terms of their educational provision.
We have seen a very significant increase overall in the cost of home-to-school transport. It sits outside the high-needs budget. It sits within the local government finance settlement more widely. We have seen a growth from £0.9 billion in 2015 to £1.7 billion overall in the home-to-school transport budget. Within that, we have a growth from £0.6 billion to £1.3 billion in terms of the element that supports children and young people with SEND. That is a 77% real-terms increase. It is a very significant step forward.
When we look at it, we see a number of different drivers. Aspects of those costs are related to the changing cost of transport elements locally, which is about things like the support for passenger assistance, transport operators, supporting drivers and fuel prices. The biggest driver is essentially around the way in which more and more children are travelling further to their provision as it is being placed forward.
We are doing a number of things. We have worked closely with local authorities to both understand the pressures that are coming forward. Back to the conversation about data, we are also seeking to gather better data on this. At the moment we have expenditure data, but we do not have good granular data on the nature of the different types of school transport. We have just announced a further survey on it.
We have updated our statutory guidance, giving local authorities much greater support in terms of some of that decision-making and how they are working through the sets of questions with parents in their local area. We are working with local authorities on best practice. We have a bimonthly meeting where we work with the transport and SEND teams within local authorities on how they think about organising local transport.
Some of it is about buses, as you say, but it has also been grown significantly by the use of taxis and individual transport, which does mean you have fewer economies of scale. We need to do more thinking about the way in which current transport is organised.
Longer term, we will look at the wider reform conversation that we have been having here about how we make sure children and young people’s needs are being met in schools that are within their local communities, where there is less of a transport requirement. As you say, in the short term it is also really important that we continue to make progress in terms of best practice in the system as well.
Q47 Nesil Caliskan: It is the case, is it not, that the cost of a high-needs block in a mainstream school is a fraction of the price per head than what it might cost to send a child to a special school in the private sector?
Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.
Q48 Nesil Caliskan: It is much better in terms of value for money for the taxpayer to support our mainstream schools so they can adequately meet the needs of children in terms of SEND.
Susan Acland-Hood: Yes, again subject to being clear that there are some needs that will always need to be met in a specialist setting. Again, I just want to be very careful about not implying that we think literally any need can be well met in a mainstream school. We do see needs that are well met in mainstream in some places and not so much in others. In that case, we tend to see much lower costs for meeting needs in mainstream and similar or better outcomes.
Q49 Nesil Caliskan: I also want to ask about headteachers, teachers and teaching assistants. You gave us quite some detail around the need for additional data gathering and understanding, although I might say that there is already quite a lot of data that tells us the system is broken. I am not suggesting that you disagree with that, but we know it is not working.
Like many Members of Parliament, I visit schools on a regular basis. The conversations that I have with teachers, headteachers and teaching assistants are pretty much the same when it comes to SEND provision. I wondered what you have been told by educators about the need for support in schools at the moment. What is your understanding about what they think should happen so that SEND is better provided for in our mainstream schools?
Susan Acland-Hood: You are absolutely right. This is very near the top of the issues that are raised whenever I go out into schools and whenever I speak to teachers and heads. There is not a completely homogenous view. There are a lot of people in the sector. I talk to lots of them and they have different views on many of these things, but there are some really common themes that come through.
First, there is a sense that the profile of need is changing rapidly and it is quite difficult to keep up. There is definitely real interest and enthusiasm for support to help teachers meet more needs more confidently. We have survey evidence on teachers’ confidence in meeting special educational needs. Interestingly, they tend to do better when asked about their knowledge rather than their confidence. Some of it is about supporting people with content training and some of it is about making sure they understand that they probably know a bit more than they think they do.
Q50 Nesil Caliskan: This is workforce development.
Susan Acland-Hood: Yes. Again, as Juliet says, we have revised the initial teacher training and early career framework to include more content on adaptive teaching and supporting pupils with SEND, including content on things like how to make effective use of specialist technology to support pupils with SEND.
We are also enhancing requirements on providers of training for early career teachers to make sure that, when they use examples and test, they are using examples that reflect how their content applies to pupils with SEND.
We have a thing called the universal SEND services programme, which provides continuing professional development to the school and FE workforce. A lot of that is online training that people can take whenever they like. We have seen a very large take-up of our units on topics like speech, language and communication needs and supporting sensory differences. The contract also offers autism training, which over 200,000 professionals have undertaken.
We then have the introduction of the SENCO NPQ, which, as Juliet spoke about, is being very well taken up, including by people who are not SENCOs. That is in addition to the early years SENCO, which was referred to earlier. I will just say this. The Report says we did not meet our target. We said we wanted to fund up to 7,000 spaces. That was not ever a target. That was to make sure we could pick that up. We have seen more than 4,000 people complete and we expect to see that figure go up significantly. More than 7,000 people signed up for it. The appetite for training is really strong.
Secondly, teachers and heads say they have seen less of the support around and outside the school that helps them to meet need well. They repeat back the analysis from the Green Paper that talks about this vicious cycle, where more and more of the resources are going in to meet very high-end individually specified need through plans, which leaves less resource available. For example, that might limit access to speech and language therapy around the school or the ability to plan for and meet cohort-based needs.
We are in a place now where it would be very reasonable for almost any school to say, “We know that in any year we are going to have a reasonable number of children coming through our gate who have speech and language needs, ASD or SEMH. Let us make cohort-based provision so we can meet that need rather than waiting for the individual identification child by child in order to be able to attract penny packets of funding”. That desire for a more cohort-based approach is quite strong. It is not universal, but I hear that quite a lot.
I do hear frustration on waiting times and the things that are not possible to get unless you have a plan, as well as around some of the funding. I would also say most schools think other schools are not taking their share of children with special educational needs and disabilities.
Nesil Caliskan: Finally, we have heard a lot about the frustration from headteachers and teachers regarding children who need to have a plan in place that cannot get one. If I might just take the opportunity to mention my constituents in Barking, Chair, 14% of people get their EHCP within the 20-week period. Not a week goes past without me being contacted by a parent who is at breaking point, who describes to me the process of trying to fight for a plan for their child.
It is the job of a parent to do the best they can for their child, but at the moment the system means they are fighting against it. It is causing a huge amount of stress and anxiety. Too often, the very families that need the most support are finding themselves not able to get the plan they need for their child. I know that you recognise that, but I felt it was very important to say, given that my constituency has one of the lowest figures in the whole country for parents being able to get a plan in place for their children.
Q51 Chair: Can I just come in on that question? Nesil Caliskan makes a really good point. The whole system seems to be so adversarial for parents who are just trying to get the best provision for their children. What can we do to make it less adversarial?
Susan Acland-Hood: It all comes back to making it easier to get provision without having to go through an individualised plan-seeking process for many more types of need.
As I say, one of the challenges is that the 2014 system set up this incredibly clear entitlement if you have a plan and a much vaguer commitment if you do not. It is rational to chase a plan. The single biggest determinant of whether you have an EHCP or not, when you control for other characteristics, is the school you attend. Some schools seek plans much more than others.
The question of the plan being the principal route to having your need met is going to have to be something that we look at, with Ministers, because there are clear groups of needs that we know are going to come through the system in large numbers. We could set ourselves up much better to deliver provision that meets many more of those needs without people having to go through a process in order to get there.
Q52 Mr Charters: I just want to ask around the future funding model. If you look at the NAO Report, at point 1.12 it goes into some detail about the current figures. It costs £61,500 per pupil to send them to an independent school, around a third less in a mainstream secondary school or £23,900 in a state special school. How can we move away from expensive independent provision in a future model to better value for money when we look at the state sector, which is doing some inspirational work?
Susan Acland-Hood: If you look back at both the 2022 Green Paper and the implementation plan, they identify that challenge and talk about trying to meet more need in mainstream and trying to free up space and create more space in maintained special so that there is less need to rely on expensive independent special school provision. That continues to be something that we are committed to and working on really hard as part of the implementation plan.
Q53 Mr Charters: Are you holding local authorities individually to account on this?
Susan Acland-Hood: We do look at differences between different local authorities. We do see significant variation in the extent to which local authorities will place in mainstream, specialist and independent non-maintained.
As I mentioned earlier, we also have the capacity collection that we do, which looks at the capacity available in specialist places. We have invested significantly in capital funding to local authorities, which is now driven by that capacity collection, to enable them to build more specialist places. That is both in special schools and in units and resource provision in mainstream schools.
Again, it is important that we both look at how we hold individual local authorities to account and take accountability and think about how the whole system is working and what the drivers are that have caused that shift over time.
Q54 Mr Charters: I will just pivot in the interests of time, Chair. On Friday I met Ken Merry, who is the chief executive of York College. They are doing some great work there. He shared one example that I do want to share. When a child was in year 11, their EHCP plan was for one-to-one provision. Because of a post-16 review, that changed to part-time one-to-three provision. It was a nine times reduction in the amount of support they were getting from literally July through to September.
Do you feel, as I do, that perhaps local authorities have a perverse incentive to reduce the amount of support when you are reaching that critical post-16 threshold? Have you seen any trends in this area?
Susan Acland-Hood: I cannot say I have seen particular trends in that area. We do encourage people to review plans regularly and look at the level of support provided. I cannot comment on an individual case. The EEF’s evidence says that straight one-to-one models of support are often not the best for children and young people’s outcomes because they can sometimes result in that one-to-one support effectively not encouraging the child to do independent work. Very crudely, in the worst-case scenario, the TA does the work and the child watches.
The EEF’s evidence would say that your best use of a teaching assistant to support a young person with special educational needs is through small-group, well-specified, well-evidenced and well-targeted programmes. I have no idea whether that is happening in this case. I could not possibly comment on it without understanding it better, but there is something about not assuming that the ratio of support is the thing that defines whether it is good or not.
Q55 Mr Charters: Do local authorities have an incentive to reduce support? Have they been actively doing so on purpose when EHCPs have been reviewed due to financial constraints?
Susan Acland-Hood: I have no evidence of that.
Q56 Anna Dixon: Just to echo the points that Luke has made, the public would be quite shocked to learn that a total of £2 billion is being spent currently by local authorities on independent schools. We have heard a lot about the challenges that local governments are facing, but indeed there is this differential in cost between those in independent school placements and those in the state sector, whether that be in mainstream or in state specialist schools.
I would just underline the need for greater assurance that those fees can be justified and to see whether there is any consistency at all across local authorities. Just to press on that matter, what further work could you be doing as a Department, and indeed with other departmental colleagues, to make sure we are getting value for money out of the independent sector? I do not know whether there is anything that you would wish to add to that.
Juliet Chua: Yes, absolutely. It is worth saying that independent specialist schools can play a key role in the system where there are particular low-incidence needs. As you have described, the significant growth in numbers suggests that there is a very high cost and reliance on the independent specialist sector.
As part of the improvement plan, we have started to look at work around things like the role of bands and tariffs and to think about models that would recognise cost in the system. We will need to work through with Ministers on where they want to be in relation to that. Nothing is ruled in or out at this point. Clearly, we will be thinking about national standards and being really clear that, where provision is offered, it is in line with expectations, it is part of the local pattern and it is good value for money.
Q57 Anna Dixon: One of the things that seems to be driving the demand for EHCPs is the lack of a requirement or any statutory powers that local authorities have over academies for academy trusts to take children with SEND support. Could you say a little bit more about some of the trends around EHCPs and academies? Do local authorities need to be given more powers to require academy trusts to accept SEND children? Would that rebalance the individualising of plans versus general support?
Juliet Chua: It is worth clarifying that local authorities can apply to the Secretary of State to direct an academy, through their funding order, in terms of making sure—
Q58 Anna Dixon: I am aware of that, but it is a very convoluted process. Talking to directors of children’s services, that adds further to the wait and uncertainty that parents have to go through. If they have had an initial placement for a secondary school place, but the mainstream school has then said, “We cannot meet that child’s needs”, that is often tipping over the level of delay. Having to go through that convoluted process, with no certainty of outcome, often means they are taking that EHCP either to the independent sector, thus pushing up those costs, or to specialist schools.
It is a very long and unsatisfactory process. Is there any solution to that other than going through a long and arduous process of direction?
Juliet Chua: There are a couple of different things here. The first is the wider incentives, which we have talked a bit about in terms of recognising schools and trusts that are performing and delivering really excellent mainstream inclusive support. The role of Ofsted, in the way they are looking at putting greater emphasis on inclusion as part of that, is quite material in terms of the way in which schools and trusts will be recognised for that work.
We are looking—it was in the King’s Speech through the Children’s Wellbeing Bill—at the role of local authorities and the powers they have around admissions and place planning and the duty to co-operate in this space, which is a critical part of the system overall.
Q59 Anna Dixon: Just finally, is there any data on refusals to admit by school type and local authority? Is there any data on the number of appeals that have been going to the Secretary of State and how many of those have been upheld? Just to get a handle on that process, what data do you hold?
Juliet Chua: I do not have the data with me today, but, when a local authority applies to the Secretary of State to direct an individual school or trust, we involve the Schools Adjudicator. We will have that in terms of looking at the different numbers of cases.
Anna Dixon: If you could perhaps follow up to the Committee with that data, please.
Q60 Sarah Hall: I am going to declare an interest as well. I was the cabinet member for children’s services in Warrington for about three years, so I know a little bit about this subject. I know how frustrated families and carers have been, particularly with the wait for the outcome of SEND review. There are a lot of hopes pinned on what that will look like.
For me, having spoken to so many families locally, I know this is one of the most critical issues at the moment. There is a huge amount of frustration from families who do not think the right support is there and there is not any consistency of support. There is not enough cross-departmental working between health, education and even the local authority, which I have also witnessed myself. It does not happen everywhere, but it does happen. It starts from waiting for an assessment. Even before you get assessed, it is whether you should have an assessment. Children are facing paper sifts before they get to that point, which I find baffling.
My question is to Susan and Jonathan. Why did it take so long to develop the 2023 SEND improvement plan given that significant problems were recognised as early as 2019?
Susan Acland-Hood: I will start on that. It is a joint improvement plan, but that is our accountability. The SEND review was launched in September 2019, recognising at that point some of the challenges with the implementation of the 2014 reforms. Essentially, through 2020 and the first part of 2021, we had to divert a lot of resource to the pandemic from more or less everything in the Department that was not pandemic-related. That is part of the answer.
In summer 2021, we were starting to share drafts of what would eventually become the Green Paper. We did not remove all resource from it. We did keep working on it, but it was slower than it would have been. It became clear that the work that had been done did not take into account the context change that the pandemic itself had brought about. Again, when you look at some of the increases in need, you see another enormous shift through that pandemic period. We were still in it in summer 2021 and the position was still shifting.
As we started to consult with stakeholders on it across summer 2021, they were saying, “We are not quite sure whether this gets the new context that we are coming out into, and we think you need to spend some more time on it”. We did not push a draft out in summer 2021. We paused and we listened to that feedback that we were getting from stakeholders. That is why the Green Paper was not published until the beginning of 2022. It was effectively going back around a group of stakeholders, who were giving us feedback on our emerging drafts and saying to us, “The combination of the pandemic and the other things that have happened means you need to think about this differently”.
From the publication of the Green Paper in 2022, it was a question of trying to make sure that we were really consulting widely and listening. I might have said this to the Committee before, but one of the bees in my bonnet as a senior civil servant is that that the traditional Government consultation document is a terrible thing and we should try to stop doing it. It results in feedback from the usual suspects and does not allow us to go and talk to the people who are most affected.
We did do a traditional Government consultation document fundamentally because the legislative framework requires it, and it is really important. I honour those people who did respond to it. I make no comment about the people who did respond to it, but we did not want that to be our only consultation. We wanted to make sure we were going out and talking to parents and children and really hearing from the widest possible range of voices. We were running very large-spectrum webinars. We were trying to bring people in. We were talking to representative groups. We were trying to hear the voices of people who would not necessarily reply to a traditional consultation product. That took a bit of time.
You then saw the publication of the improvement plan in March. Again, I do not want to rely on this too hard, but we also did have an element of ministerial churn over that period. During some parts of that period we were making sure that, where we had new Ministers, they were comfortable with the journey we had been on and what we were doing and moving that through. I will not say more about that.
Q61 Sarah Hall: Given that length of time, what impact has that had on children with SEND now?
Susan Acland-Hood: It is completely understandable that people feel frustrated that it took a long time. The one thing I will say is that we were not sitting on our hands and not taking other action during that period.
We were working on many of the things that we have talked about during this hearing, such as the changes we have made to initial teacher training and the early career framework; the work we have done on universal provision; the development of programmes like the partnerships for inclusion of neurodiversity in schools, the ELSEC programme and the investment in NELI; and all of the work that we do individually with local authorities through Delivering Better Value, Safety Valve, the change programme and indeed the day-to-day work of our regions group colleagues, who go and work with local authorities through a range of stages of intervention.
It was not that we were not continuing to try to act to improve on the lived experience while we were doing that work. It was just that we felt that we needed to take a more radical look at the system alongside the day-to-day work of improvement. I recognise and hear the frustration of people who felt like it took a long time—and it did—but we were not passive while we were in the process of writing the document.
Q62 Sarah Hall: In terms of the end product or the perfect product, what does good look like? How will you keep that under review? If we look at ADHD and autism, we are identifying a lot of girls and women now. The diagnosis process is changing and we are realising that there is a bigger scope than we realised before with different presentations. What does that look like in the future?
Susan Acland-Hood: I would start with parents’ perception of whether their children are getting the support they need in the system. That is a really important metric for us. We should recognise that parents are quite good judges of whether their children are well supported. If you asked me to pick a single metric for our success, it would be an increase in the proportion of parents that say that their children’s needs are being well met in the system.
We also want to see continued improvement in outcomes of all kinds. I spoke at the beginning of the hearing about the range of outcomes, which is well set out in SENCO practice.
The other thing I would say is that there is something quite important—I know we keep coming back to this—about the ability to meet a much wider range of need in the mainstream system by making it more inclusive without asking people to go through a process. That is particularly important in relation to a set of conditions that are effectively spectrum conditions.
ASD used to be seen as discrete; it used to be described as autism. It used to be seen as a condition that you either had or you did not. It is now really widely recognised that it is a spectrum condition, and so it is not susceptible to a yes-or-no diagnostic process. It is much more susceptible to an understanding that there is a range of responses that you will see in the normal distribution of the population.
Sarah Hall: It is also about our understanding as a population. I have ADHD. We need to understand that we have different strengths and we may work in a different way. It is not the same for everybody, but for a lot of us being in that mainstream environment is incredibly important. In terms of the classes and the changes that are coming forward, that needs to be reflected. I absolutely agree with the parents’ feedback as well. That is the number-one thing, and it also needs to be under constant review.
Q63 Mr Betts: When the 2023 improvement plan was drawn up, apparently there were 136 internal actions, but the NAO, when looking at this, said there was not a fully developed implementation plan reflecting the interdependencies between different proposals and how much they would cost. Have you addressed that? That is a fairly fundamental criticism.
Alison Ismail: As the Committee is aware, our improvement plan was published in March 2023, almost a year after the Green Paper, following the consultation period that Susan has described.
That very long list of commitments within it, which we shared and discussed with the NAO as they were carrying out their review, contained quite a range of actions on different timeframes. For example, it referred to the change programme that we have talked about quite a lot today. At that point, we were seeking to get that under way very quickly to test some of the component reforms that we had explored in those documents. It also had some longer-term areas of interest and aspiration, which we have also discussed today, such as looking more closely at the relationship with independent special schools.
Within that long list there was quite a bit of variation in terms of how those were being approached and how they fitted together. With the Ministers that we had at the time, we identified those that needed the most urgent focus. An example was those measures pointed at post-16 transition, which we have also talked about today.
We subsequently had a review by the Government Internal Audit Agency, which found that our arrangements around monitoring and tracking progress against them was broadly effective. It is a fair observation, though, that there was undoubtedly more we could do. This is something we will learn from as we put a new programme in place, going forward with our current Ministers, around really understanding the interdependencies of all those measures. Crucially, as you say, we want to understand the costs associated with them—we are hoping that they may achieve effective savings for the system—and when those will fall and be really clear on what our assumptions are.
Q64 Mr Betts: There are some other comments from the NAO that I found quite worrying. The Department could not say what progress had been made on implementing specific commitments. It did not have clear processes to understand the potential and likely outcomes and benefits of its interventions. In other words, it thought the interventions were a good idea, but it could not really then go on and prove what was happening. The NAO said the Department should be clearer on how proposal would lead to benefits. Is not that pretty fundamental? You can have all the best plans in the world, but, if you do not know what they are going to achieve, it is not much use having them, is it?
Alison Ismail: I would agree that it is fundamental. Some of the actions set out in the improvement plan were about testing. Another thing that the NAO Report brings out really clearly is the importance of absolutely understanding the consequences of any interventions before you switch them on nationally. There is probably a distinction within that very long list of actions about those that we were putting into place regardless and those that we were testing, for example through our change programme. There is always more we can do to have really strong arrangements in place to monitor these particularly quite complex overall sets of actions that we are testing.
The other really relevant point here is another factor observed in the NAO Report, which is around some of the really complex levers and drivers and shared responsibilities sitting with different actors in the system, not all of which are within DfE’s remit. That is absolutely not an excuse for not having really clear tracking, cost-benefit analysis and a process for measuring whether we are succeeding, but it does reflect the complexity of some of that very extensive programme set out in the improvement plan.
Q65 Mr Betts: The NAO also said in the Report that you have the benefits dashboard, where you were tracking some of the key proposals. The latest tracking information is that only 12 were on track out of the nearly 37 benefits that were identified. The plan is there, but it is not quite clear what benefit it is going to provide. When you do the assessment of that, many of them are failing. Where is the improvement?
Alison Ismail: I absolutely take on board the feedback that this is urgent. We had delays even to get the Green Paper in the improvement plan on board. We know that for families and lots of others in the system demonstrating these improvements quickly is really important. I absolutely acknowledge that.
The dashboards, for example, were an example of something that we described in the improvement plan as something we would be testing through the change programme in terms of their efficacy in holding various players in the system to account and driving behaviour change. In a way, we can learn something from how difficult or easy it was to get them online—
Q66 Mr Betts: You can learn what is failing.
Alison Ismail: We can learn that some things may not be as straightforward for local areas to implement, for example, as we might have hoped.
Susan referred to lots of work that has very much gone on since the improvement plan, despite the general election and the change in the ministerial team. Again, without wanting to rely on that too heavily, there may be some examples where our initial trajectory had to change because of that factor. It is all still extremely useful learning—as we have heard, we are working very much jointly, particularly on that example, with local authorities—that we will be taking forward into our new programme.
Q67 Mr Betts: I have two quick follow-ups. Permanent Secretary, you mentioned the issue of responsibilities sometimes being joint between your Department and the Department of Health. Is that really working or are the things that need to be sorted out fairly fundamentally at a very senior level?
Susan Acland-Hood: Both things can be true. Fundamentally, it is working and some things need to be sorted out at a very senior level. Where we have things that need to be sorted out at a very senior level, we meet, talk and sort them out at a very senior level.
I will invite Juliet to talk a little bit more about the governance because it goes to the point about how we are addressing some of those things that were not going as fast as we wanted them to go and how we are bringing in cross-Government governance.
Juliet Chua: I have two reflections. First, when you look at those benefits, part of the challenge is about our recognition that the improvement plan did not go far enough. To realise those benefits genuinely, we needed to take some of the approaches that we have been describing in this hearing in terms of going further and understanding the levers and incentives around inclusive mainstream and looking more deeply at the ways in which local authorities were finding that, without some of the levers they needed, it was challenging to meet some of their responsibilities.
If you track back to some of those benefits, some of the actions were absolutely right and appropriate but nevertheless not sufficient in the context of the scale of the challenge.
Coming back to the question of cross-Government working, I spend a lot of time talking to Jonathan. The join-up with health is absolutely critical to this. It is critical both through our overall opportunity mission, where the health and education contribution to a range of outcomes through the system are central. Particularly in the context of SEND, I have established a cross-Government board. Jonathan’s colleagues are a key part of that. We will need to work very closely. HSE colleagues are also part of that.
Chair: We may have a question for Jonathan on this before we are finished.
Q68 Mr Betts: I have already declared that I am a vice-president of the Local Government Association, but, if we went to the LGA and said, “Have you been listened to? Are things changing, in your view, so that you have more ability to deal with these issues at local level?” would they say yes?
Susan Acland-Hood: I think they would. They have been saying to us, exactly as Juliet says, that the things in the implementation plan are sensible and would be good things to do, but they do not go far enough. As the NAO Report says, they would say that we need to look more fundamentally at some of the big levers across the system.
The Isos report that was published in the summer, which was sponsored by the LGA, was a really helpful contribution. That is something that we are looking at really carefully with Ministers as we shape the next phase of this.
I think they would say, “Yes, we have been listened to and, yes, some sensible things are happening, but the implementation plan did not go far enough. We are now having conversations with the Department that show it recognises that we need to go further in the next phase”.
Q69 Mr Betts: Jonathan Marron, I want to come back to the point about the relationships between health and education at a local level. The integrated care boards are now established in the health service. Is the engagement there appropriate? Is it good? Are the ICBs so focused on other things in health that this is an issue that is not really anywhere near the top of their priorities?
Jonathan Marron: We are working to make sure that our ICBs are focused on these issues. One of the things that we did in 2023 was make sure that every ICB appointed an executive director that was responsible for SEND to get that better working with the local authority and the education system locally. We have taken those actions.
Clearly, there is a challenge in delivering health services to the range of children and meeting their needs, both for SEND and in broader health. We continue to focus our work on that. We have made significant investments in resource over this period, but we have, as we have been discussing in this Committee, seen very significant increases in need. We continue to work on that.
Lord Darzi’s report, which colleagues may have seen, identifies this as an area where there is significant challenge. The Department is working on a 10-year plan for the recovery of the NHS. It probably will take us that time to see a full recovery, but we are trying to see immediate progress.
Q70 Mr Betts: If you looked at ICBs’ current plans, would every one have this issue as one of their top priorities?
Jonathan Marron: The planning guidance last year asked them to look at access to community health services, which includes speech and language and some other services. You might not see it as SEND, but I would certainly expect that you would see a focus on mental health services for children and young people and for community health services in all of their plans.
Q71 Anna Dixon: I want to probe on this briefly, if I may, Jonathan. In Bradford district, there are 7,000 children on CAMHS waiting lists. This is specifically about CAMHS. Some are waiting up to four years for an assessment for ADHD and ASD. Anecdotally, there are some areas where we are talking eight years for a child. When you are talking more generally about community health services, can you be specific about how those CAMHS waiting times are going to come down in sooner than 10 years?
Jonathan Marron: Clearly, there is a significant wait for CAMHS across the country. In the last three-month period, 130,000 children were seen for the first time. Of those seen, the median wait is 20 days. The high-priority children are being pushed through. There are another 300,000 that are still on that waiting list at the end of that period. There are much longer median wait times among those children.
We have a very significant challenge in making sure that our children and young people get access to services. We have been investing in CAMHS. As I said at the beginning, the mental health spend over this period is up from £11 billion to £17 billion. There has been a 40% increase in staff. We have been working to try to put more mental health services into schools. We now have nearly 500 schools-based mental health teams, covering about 40% of the school population. The Government have a commitment to take that to all children.
We have been trying both to find ways of boosting our existing services and to find new services that might help children earlier on. As I said earlier, some of these services are really very challenged. We are looking again at what our model is. We currently have a taskforce looking at ADHD because we are not really sure what the right answer is.
Chair: This issue of waiting lists is a complex subject, but it is absolutely critical. Anna is right. In my area, there are very long waiting lists. I suspect that the two of us are not by any means alone. Could you let the Committee have a note on this? That is a specific action for you, please. Thank you.
Q72 Peter Fortune: This builds on what Jonathan was talking about there because, throughout this session, we have seen that the real challenge, especially to local authorities, is that pressure and that increasing demand. In terms of the forward planning and the cost, what are you doing to make a plan to deal with this, while having an efficient SEN service, over the next five, 10 or 15 years?
Secondly—Susan, I will come to you with this—what are you doing to support local authorities in terms of managing those pressures?
Susan Acland-Hood: The forward plan is partly about that forward projection but, as I say, it has to be in tandem with the recognition that what we are seeing is a profound shift not just in incidence but in our understanding of some of this need. Recognition of that relatively higher incidence and understanding through our mainstream system has to be a really important part of that, and that will help us both to serve people better and to manage the costs more effectively.
In terms of the things we are doing to help local authorities manage costs now, I have talked a little bit about the two key programmes we have for doing that in areas where there are specific deficit relation challenges: the Safety Valve programme and the Delivering Better Value programme. We are also working through all of our good-practice sharing through the change programme and other means, because local authorities are acutely aware that the cost challenge is real.
We have also been investing significantly increasing sums of money in this. The latest budget increase invested an additional £1 billion in the high needs budget for 2025-26, which takes it to a total of £11.9 billion. That is a 7% real-terms increase on last year and builds on successive increases in each of the previous three years.
The challenge is that we as a whole system need to make sure that we are using that funding as efficiently and effectively as possible, not in order to penny-pinch but in order to get the best possible service to children. We have seen funding go up by spectacularly more than we have seen outcomes improve.
Q73 Peter Fortune: It is a combination of understanding the causes but also ensuring there is value for money at the point of delivery.
Susan Acland-Hood: Yes.
Q74 Peter Fortune: I was looking at the school census data from 2024, specific to my borough, and this is one of those things that can be a real shock to the financial system. We have somewhere in the region of 1,200 young people in Bromley independent schools who are having some sort of SEN provision, but of those three-quarters do not have a plan. When you look at London, there are about 30,000 children having special educational needs provision and, of those, four-fifths do not have a plan, about 24,000 or 25,000 children.
If you think about some of the changes that may happen in terms of that independent sector, both this year and next year, and then some that may not ever enter the sector at all, that is an example of a potential huge financial wave that could hit the system. Is there any work going on about that?
Susan Acland-Hood: I think you are talking about the risk that there are children who are currently having needs met in independent schools who may move into the state sector as a result of VAT changes. Is that the question?
Peter Fortune: Yes.
Susan Acland-Hood: Overall, about 6% of the children in the country are educated in independent schools. Our best estimate of the impact is that we will see some relatively small flows into the state maintained sector. Where we have children whose needs are sufficient that they should be funded by the local authority through a plan, the local authority does not pay that, so that does not affect their place. We are not expecting to see particularly differential flows of those who are on SEND support compared to other children, no.
Q75 Peter Fortune: A low percentage are expected to apply for an EHCP.
Susan Acland-Hood: By and large, if you have a need that would be sufficient to get an EHCP, you are really strongly incentivised to do that already. The VAT is a fifth of the total cost. If you think you could get the whole of the cost made, you probably would have applied by now.
Peter Fortune: That is the point I am thinking of.
Susan Acland-Hood: I do not think we will see significant increases in EHCPs. We might see people trying.
Q76 Peter Fortune: Then it comes back to the 98%.
Susan Acland-Hood: 2.5% of the total going through the system go to tribunal.
Q77 Lloyd Hatton: One of the points that stuck out for me in the NAO Report was around this idea of insufficient capacity. It does go on to talk about what is being done to grow the number of places and the number of standalone schools as well. Would you be able to perhaps set out in a bit more detail what is actually going on to build those extra schools, where people are not in a mainstream setting and are going to be in a special school setting?
I only say this because I have a very interesting example in my constituency. We have an Osprey Quay school site, which I believe in 2019 was first given the green light by your Department to be a standalone school for SEND children, and yet we are still here now. It has not opened, even though the school building was built in 2019. It still is not operational. The reasons that were given in a note to me by the local council as to why these delays had gone on seemed to be quite low level.
I just wondered if you could talk a little about what your Department is doing to work with local councils to make sure that, where we have places literally ready to go, we are doing everything we can to get them over the line, to get these schools open for the next academic year. For me, it seems like there is a little bit of a miscommunication or a slow working relationship between the Department and local councils to get this done.
Susan Acland-Hood: I might turn to Alison in a minute on some of this. The starting point is, yes, we do work with local councils on the delivery of places. There is a set of different routes we use. The way we work with them depends a little bit on what route it has gone down. Alison said that we have been increasing the amount we have been putting out through special needs capital, particularly over the last couple of years.
Local authorities have some flexibility about whether they spend that on, for example, additional places in units or resource provision in mainstream schools, or on building whole new schools. We also have seen significant numbers of special and AP places created through the free schools programme. The free schools tend to be centrally delivered, whereas the ones that go out through the capacity-driven funding that goes to local authorities are delivered locally, by the local authority. We will be closer to those that are centrally delivered than to those that are delivered by the local authority but, if there are blockages or difficulties, we can talk to and support local authorities in that delivery.
Lloyd Hatton: That would be very helpful, because if that is one of the things that is stopping us getting schools open and additional places, it is quite a minor barrier. I do not expect you to have at your fingertips the specific example I referred to of the Osprey Quay school, but the note given to me said it was about a lease, a contract and a retaining wall. These seem like quite low-level concerns that would lead to a school not opening and offering—
Chair: Lloyd, can I suggest, rather than going back to a constituency issue, that we ask Ms Acland-Hood to give us a note.
Alison Ismail: We can take it away.
Lloyd Hatton: It is just that point around how we make sure that the small barriers do not get in the way of a much bigger piece of delivery.
Chair: We will get a note. Thank you.
Q78 Helen Hayes: I just wanted to come back to the question of delivery and monitoring of progress. The NAO Report that we have been considering today is really damning on the current state of the SEND system and the impact that that has for children, families, local authorities and for those working in education. The discussion that we have had this afternoon has focused on initiative and interventions that the Department is already making in relation to that system.
Feeling some of the frustration that lots of parents, families and professionals working in the sector would feel, listening to this discussion, where does the substantive change that steps up to the challenges laid out in the Report come from? Is it a case of just waiting to see on initiatives and interventions the Department already has in train or is there a bigger plan that is needed to address the scale of these challenges? Does the Department fully comprehend these challenges and have a plan that is equal to the experience of the people that this Report refers to in quite stark terms?
Susan Acland-Hood: I am always really conscious when I appear before this Committee that my role is to reflect and report on our delivery, not to talk about our future policy, because that is for Ministers. I will just say that.
What I would say is, as we reflect on the things that we have put in place so far, there are some things that are really positive, which we can learn from and we can build on. That is not to say that the current state of affairs is positive, but we are learning some things that we can put in place.
The combination of the work we have done on Safety Valve, Delivering Better Value and the change programme have shown that we are right to think that another way is possible, that we should be focusing on inclusive mainstream and that we can support children and young people better and earlier, helping to rebalance the system.
We also have a set of specific evidence-based programmes to support schools that we should be doubling down on. These are things like ELSEC, NELI and the PINS programme that I have spoken about, which are really targeted on those areas where we see need growing. The work that we have done to invest in workforce development is and will remain really important and needs to be built on and intensified.
However, it is also right that those people who have told us that the improvement plan did not go far enough be listened to and attended to as we advise Ministers on next steps. There are some things that I would pick out that we are being told, which we would be feeding into those conversations. Although the improvement plan talked about inclusive mainstream and did a set of things that went some way towards that, it did not look hard enough at the wider barriers and levers. Some of those have been raised by Committee members today, including wider incentives on schools.
To some extent, we did not look hard enough at some of the accountability incentives, and Ministers have already signalled really clearly that they want to look at those, as well as at things like curriculum barriers, which, again, we did not look at in that implementation plan.
The second is that local authorities told us that the plan and some of the work that we have been doing asked them to take responsibility for a much better and more consistent offer to those without EHCPs without the levers to deliver all of that. Again, some of those points have been made in the Committee today and Ministers have signalled really clearly that they want to look at how we could go back around and think about how we make sure we have levers that are proportionate to the asks that we make.
Parents told us that there was not enough clarity about what that ordinarily available provision and that inclusive mainstream provision would look like, and that they needed that in order to feel confident that needs could be met in mainstream and, in effect, that that might allow you to move away from reliance on plans for everything.
Then, as I said earlier, schools told us that it continued to rely too much on a model that looked principally at individual needs, rather than making it easier for schools to provide for cohorts or groups of children in a more predictable and predictive way. They told us that they could do more, more efficiently and effectively, if there was a better infrastructure of support around them, in order to be able to meet those cohort needs.
Overall, putting that all together, we accept the NAO recommendation that says that it is important to take a really fundamental look at the system from end to end. We did some of that in the improvement plan but, when you take those pieces of feedback from others, with Ministers we will be looking more comprehensively in the next phase.
Q79 Nesil Caliskan: I have a very quick question on speech and language support. Jonathan, from an NHS perspective, my understanding is it sits within the remit of the NHS to think about speech and language support and commissioning. There is a crisis in terms of the workforce and the number of individuals who are qualifying as speech and language therapists. I wondered what the NHS is doing to support a pipeline in that workforce, if anything.
Jonathan Marron: It is a really important area. We have talked about the increasing demand repeatedly over the course of the day. We are trying to increase these. Over the last period, there are 7,419 speech and language therapists in the NHS. That is a 20% increase on 2019, so we are making some progress. Clearly, there is much to do in order to get access to these services.
The work that we are doing with education on making specialist support available earlier in schools, through the PINS scheme and the ELSEC scheme, is about looking to use the specialist skills that we have in the most effective way. Can we help schools to feel confident in how they deliver? That is particularly aimed at early on in the journey, the early years and in primary schools. That may be the way we achieve better outcomes, but it is very important that the NHS continues to provide the specialists that are needed to help children be the best they can be.
Q80 Nesil Caliskan: There is an aspiration to have additional speech and language therapists qualifying, working for the NHS.
Jonathan Marron: As you will know, there is an existing long-term workforce plan, which will see a significant increase in the NHS workforce. The Government will be looking again at that as part of its 10-year plan, looking at the future of NHS staff across the board.
Q81 Nesil Caliskan: Does that include speech and language therapists?
Jonathan Marron: The plan includes the full range of services. Community health services are included.
Chair: You will be very glad to know, witnesses, that this is the last question. We probably have not quite got to the bottom of this financial issue within SEND. This is the last question from me. If I could take you to paragraph 2.35 on page 43, it says in there that, “DfE recognises that immediate action is needed to address short-term financial challenges, given the statutory override”. It then goes on to say, “Some 43% of authorities may therefore be at risk of needing to issue a section 114 notice”.
This is the most serious thing that can happen to a local authority, declaring that forecast income does not meet its forecast spending next year. That is a pretty serious paragraph. Can I ask what your Department is doing about that?
Susan Acland-Hood: This comes back to the question earlier about the end of the statutory override and we are working closely with—
Q82 Chair: Yes, it does, but it is a little bit sooner than that. It is saying by the end of the next year. Presumably they are meaning 2026. I do not know.
Susan Acland-Hood: It is linked. It says they might be needing to issue a section 114 notice if the statutory override ends as planned in March 2026, so it is exactly the same issue. We are working very closely with HMT and MHCLG to look at the propositions, and we are continuing to do work through Safety Valve and Delivering Better Value in the meantime, working with those local authorities that have the largest deficits and seeking to bring them down. We are seeing those deficits come down in the authorities we are working with.
Chair: Nevertheless, in an authority like mine, the reserves are gone. They will not have the reserves, so their whole finances are being put at risk. This is the seriousness of this issue.
Q83 Mr Betts: The Safety Valve is pretty opaque, is it not? It looks like an excuse to try to put some money into an authority without really saying, “This is an overall approach to the education needs of an area”.
Susan Acland-Hood: I do not think that is quite right. The Safety Valve takes the local authorities with the largest deficits and creates a plan with them for how they can manage that better, by intervening earlier. Again, that is by agreement. It is an agreement that is reached with the authority. We have seen, in the majority of areas where we have Safety Valve agreements, those deficits starting to come down.
Q84 Mr Betts: It is there for authorities that have the deficits, not ones that have particular education needs. It is skewed, is it not, and driven by something that is not purely education?
Susan Acland-Hood: It is in addition to the funding that goes through the main formula, which is driven by population and by a set of proxy factors that look at need. It is not the only funding that is going into the system—
Q85 Mr Betts: No, but it is in addition to and is not reflective of the assessments that are done as part of the main grant, based on need and population.
Susan Acland-Hood: It was a response to the fact that we had authorities with very large deficits, due to precisely this problem that is being raised. Your analysis earlier was exactly right and reflected the challenge of the problem. It is important both to be fair and to recognise that, if you expected authorities to end up with significant deficits to absorb, that would have an impact on the whole authority and the other services it was able to provide. Also, we need to try to be fair to those authorities that have not worked up deficits and that have used surpluses. That is a challenging problem.
The Safety Valve seeks to try to recognise, address and support those authorities that have run up large deficits, but not by allowing them to continue to do the things that caused the deficit. It tries to support them to shift to earlier intervention and to a more sustainable system. It has been very challenging and it relates to the point about needing to take a more comprehensive look. Although we have been successful in supporting the majority of the Safety Valve authorities to start to bring down their deficits, the list of limitations that I gave on the improvement plan has meant that it has been difficult.
We need to look at the whole system architecture and the incentives that have given rise to that position in the first place, as well as trying to work that down with each individual local authority. Some of this is about how we address the statutory override with MHCLG and HMT, but some of the answer to this is in the bigger look at the whole system. Fundamentally, the system does not give very many levers to a local authority once there is a plan with some need and a preferred provision specified. At the moment, the system does not give very many levers to look at cost at all.
Q86 Mr Betts: Have you identified the levers that they need and agreed them?
Susan Acland-Hood: That is the work that I am describing us doing with Ministers. We have identified some of them through the improvement plan. There are more that we need to look at, including around accountability, their levers with schools and things like curriculum change and other means that can support better inclusive provision.
We also need to look at the variation. Not all local authorities are in this place. There are local authorities that are successfully delivering good-quality provision without a deficit in the current system. We need to look at what they are doing and spread that practice.
Q87 Mr Betts: That would include the levers with regard to academies as well, would it?
Susan Acland-Hood: It could potentially. Some of these are policy questions for Ministers, which we need to talk to them about.
Chair: We are going to call a halt there and thank our witnesses, all of you, very much indeed. You have probably heard, Ms Acland-Hood, that we are very concerned, not only about the issue itself and the impact on children, but also about the stability of the local government finances and the terrific strain they are under. You say that some of them are delivering this. Very small numbers are not getting themselves into financial trouble because of this issue.
We will be watching this very carefully and I would be grateful if you would keep us well updated on your discussions with the Treasury, MHCLG and local authorities on this issue, because it is one of the issues that this Committee is most concerned about. Thank you very much. It has been a long session. There has been a lot to cover and I am very grateful for all your work and answers. Thank you very much indeed.