There is a crisis brewing in our schools and it’s not the one you might think. Yes, buildings are crumbling, music and art teachers are being axed, PE budgets slashed and class sizes are ballooning.
But behind all of this lies a deeply uncomfortable truth that few people want to talk about: a significant chunk of the money that should be spent on educating all children is being hoovered up by the special educational needs system, and it is increasingly being gamed by sharp-elbowed middle-class parents.
A report published last week by the think-tank Policy Exchange lays bare what many working in children’s services have suspected for some time. SEND (Special Educational Needs and Disabilities) spending has risen in real terms by 58.5 per cent in the last six years, with a greater rise – 65 per cent – in wealthier local authorities compared to poorer areas, where it increased by 51 per cent.
Seven of the ten councils that saw the biggest rises were in the most affluent areas, such as Hampshire, Kent and Surrey.
Since 2015, half of all new school funding has been spent on SEND. Let that sink in. Half.
Nearly one in five children in England are now classed as having a SEND need, and the number of EHCPs (Education, Health and Care Plans) has more than doubled since 2015.
An EHCP is specialised for each child’s needs but can include extra support such as one-to-one teaching assistants, special learning materials and speech and language therapy.
Councils are spending more than £2.6 billion a year on private school places for SEND children alone, a figure that has risen by 106 per cent since 2018.
Nearly 1 in 5 children in England are now classed as having a SEND need
Now, I want to be very clear. There are children with profound and serious special educational needs who desperately need support. Children with severe autism, significant learning disabilities, complex physical needs.
These children and their families deserve every penny of funding and then some. The system exists for them but it is failing them. And that is the problem.
The fact is, SEND professionals are being overwhelmed by a surge of referrals driven by articulate, well-resourced parents who know how to work the system. I have seen this pattern play out repeatedly in my own field of mental health.
Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services are chronically overstretched, yet colleagues tell me they are inundated, not with the most acutely unwell children, but with those whose parents are most persistent in demanding they are seen.
The children from chaotic homes, deprived backgrounds, families where no one knows how to navigate the system? They fall through the cracks.
Part of the problem is that some middle-class parents simply cannot accept that their child might not be that bright, or that sociable, or that talented. When two successful, high achieving parents produce a distinctly average child, the idea that their charge is just, well, ordinary is intolerable. There must be something wrong.
There must be a reason he or she is not top of the class. And so begins the frantic quest for a diagnosis, a label, something that explains why their offspring isn’t the genius they expected.
It couldn’t possibly just be that not every child is exceptional. Far easier to get an ADHD diagnosis than to accept that your child finds maths hard because maths is hard.
What makes this worse is a growing trend of parents bypassing the usual assessment routes altogether by going private. NHS waiting lists for autism and ADHD assessments can stretch to years.
A BBC Panorama investigation in 2023 exposed how some private clinics were diagnosing ADHD after rushed online consultations. One senior NHS psychiatrist told the programme that almost everyone who paid for a private assessment was being diagnosed.
There is, of course, a clear financial incentive for private clinics to do this: parents are paying customers, and a diagnosis is what they are paying for. No diagnosis, no repeat business.
Once armed with a private diagnosis, parents can then use it to support an application for an EHCP.
Local authorities are legally obliged to consider privately obtained reports, and many parents know this.
So they hire SEND consultants and commission independent educational psychologist reports at over a £1,000 a time, and if the council says no, they appeal to the SEND Tribunal.
It requires money, confidence and time – the kind of resources that affluent, entitled families have and that families in deprived communities do not.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies has warned that the SEND system is financially unsustainable.
Cumulative council deficits could exceed £8 billion by 2027. This is money that is not being spent on fixing leaking roofs, hiring teaching assistants, funding school counsellors, or keeping music departments alive.
Something has to change. The Government’s independent review into mental health, ADHD and autism services, launched in December, is a start.
But unless we are honest about who is really driving demand, and why, nothing will improve.
James’s wisdom on grief
The death of James Van Der Beek last week, aged just 48, was heartbreaking. The Dawson’s Creek star and father of six had battled colon cancer for two years before passing away in a hospice.
James Van Der Beek with his wife Kimberley in 2019
Van Der Beek leaves behind his wife and their six children
But what has struck me most is how, in the wake of his death, a video he filmed in 2023 has gone viral. In it, he talks movingly about grief, marking the third anniversary of his mother Melinda’s death. His advice is simple, wise and, I think, clinically spot on. ‘Be prepared for this process to make zero sense,’ he said.
One of the biggest mistakes people make with grief is expecting it to follow a neat trajectory, getting a little better each day. But grief does not work like that. You can be fine for weeks and then a song, a smell, the way someone laughs, floors you completely. The single most important thing you can do is exactly what Van Der Beek suggested: allow it.
Motor Neurone Disease is one of the cruellest diseases, progressively destroying the nerve cells that control movement and leading to paralysis. There is no cure. But two game-changing discoveries announced last week by UK based biotech company Vesalic may offer genuine hope.
The first is a blood test that can detect MND with high levels of accuracy, and the second relates to the specific way in which toxins damage motor neurons in the brain. Scientists are now developing antibodies to combat it.
