England’s special educational needs and disabilities (Send) system is mired in a “deep crisis” that is neither sustainable nor acceptable, according to MPs. Now, the cross-party education select committee is launching yet another inquiry to investigate the troubled sector and seek out practical solutions. But they caution that the “huge task” of reform will likely take years.
A System in Crisis
The scale and severity of the problems plaguing Send services was laid out by committee chair Helen Hayes. “It’s a huge task. If this task was easy to solve, it would not be such a deep crisis,” she said. “The situation as it is at the moment is not sustainable, neither is it acceptable.”
Hayes painted a desperate picture of a system where:
- Trust between parents and local authorities is broken
- Children are out of school and unable to access needed support
- Headteachers are in tears over inability to meet students’ needs
- MPs’ surgeries are full of distraught families fighting for help
“There’s such a sense of responsibility that we get this right across the whole of the House of Commons,” Hayes emphasized. “None of us confronted with the reality of these stories of families who are being failed, of children whose childhoods are being spent just fighting all the time for support that should be there for them, can ignore that responsibility. We have to do better.”
Short-Term Stabilization, Long-Term Reform
The education committee plans to focus their inquiry on two key areas:
- How to stabilize the Send system in the short-term to alleviate the immediate crisis
- Determining reforms to achieve long-term sustainability and improved outcomes for children and young people
Their investigation will span every phase of education, from early years up to age 25. It will examine how mainstream schools can become more inclusive of Send pupils, potentially through curriculum changes and improved teacher training and support.
The committee also plans to look at Send systems in other countries for insights and ideas, including Canada, where families report higher satisfaction, and Scandinavian nations.
Fixing a Broken Funding Model
Funding reform will be a key area of focus. Many local councils have built up huge deficits due to soaring Send costs, propped up only by a temporary accounting fudge called the “statutory override” that keeps the red ink off the books until 2026.
“There are also symptoms which blight local councils’ budgets – ever increasing spending on transporting pupils to settings far from where they live, and the chaos of money being poured into tribunals that parents are expected to win,” Hayes noted. “It’s widely accepted that many more councils could face effective bankruptcy if change doesn’t come soon.”
The committee plans to consider alternative funding models for Send services. They will also investigate potential alternatives to education, health and care plans (EHCPs) – the legally-binding documents that detail a child’s needs and provision – but “without reducing the level of support available”.
Tempering Expectations
While expressing optimism that solutions can ultimately be found, Hayes sought to temper expectations about the speed of change. “I don’t believe it’s realistic to say transformative change can happen very quickly,” she cautioned.
That slower timeline is likely to frustrate many Send families who are desperate for more immediate relief. Tania Tirraoro, co-director of Special Needs Jungle, questioned the need for yet another inquiry on top of the many that have come before.
“Why don’t they just read what everybody else has said? It’s nothing that’s going to improve things right now – right now is where the problem is.”
But Hayes insisted that this inquiry will be solutions-focused rather than just rehashing known issues. “We know that there has been a great deal of analysis of the issue,” she said. “What we are hoping to do is to focus on where reform is needed, what good practice could look like and where can we learn lessons.”
In a statement, the Department for Education said it is “determined to restore the confidence of families up and down the country and deliver the change they are crying out for.” It pointed to £1bn in extra Send funding, £740m for mainstream schools to create more specialist places, and an ongoing curriculum and assessment review as signs of progress.
But with trust so badly fractured and the crisis so deeply entrenched, it will likely take more than money and marginal reforms to stabilize the Send system, much less transform it. For the education committee, squaring the urgency of the situation with the slow grind of policy change may be their biggest challenge yet.
