Children with special education needs and disabilities (Send) have been victims of a “vicious downward spiral” of declining support over the past decade, pushing more families into crisis, said the former children’s commissioner for England as she urged the government to take action.
Anne Longfield, the founder of the Centre for Young Lives, said the government could not simply spend more money on the “status quo” of Send provision if it was going to tackle the soaring rate of tribunals brought by parents in battles with local authorities over support.
“I don’t think local authorities can just invest more and more and more on high-level complicated support plans,” said Longfield, who served as the children’s commissioner from 2015 to 2021. “We need a system that is much more inclusive, that can respond to children’s needs as and when.
“It’s clear to me that children’s needs have increased at the same time as the support that’s been available to them over the last decade has drastically decreased. We’re now spending huge amounts of money, from authorities that are on the edge of bankruptcy, on a very small number of children who fall into crisis, and on any level that’s not sustainable.”
Longfield called on the government to instead invest more money in universal support for early years, such as the expansion of Sure Start centres.
“Without early intervention, more complex needs are left to just escalate and more children fall into crisis, which has a huge social cost in terms of their life chances and also an economic cost in terms of the public purse, which ironically means less money to help children,” she said. “It’s a vicious and downward spiral. The amount spent on early intervention has almost halved at the same time that the amount spent on crisis intervention has just about doubled.”
Local authorities are spending a record £100m on tribunals brought by parents over Send support for their children, Guardian analysis has shown, with many fighting for education, health and care plans (EHCPs) or places at special schools.
Longfield said parents should not be forced to apply for an EHCP to get the support they needed for their children, and more focus should be placed on “inclusivity” in mainstream schools, “rather than having to jump through the hoops of getting a very laborious planning process in place”.
She also said children were increasingly spending months, if not years, in a “dreadful limbo land” where their education was put on hold while they were waiting for assessments and plans to be put in place.
In the autumn budget, the government announced £1bn of funding to improve Send outcomes for young people, but Longfield said this money “wouldn’t go that far” if it was spent on “the status quo”.
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“Of course, it’s not the whole solution, but if it can be used to drive a reform and resetting of the system towards early intervention, then it will be doing a really important job,” she said.
She also said urgent work was needed to tackle the growing number of children with Send falling into crime because of the failure of the state to keep them in supportive education.
“Children are falling through the cracks in education, are being educated at home, often not as part of a lifestyle choice by parents but because they are desperate, their children were very distressed and unhappy in school,” she said. “We’ve seen a generation of children whose support hasn’t been prioritised, who have been allowed to carry huge personal risk, and who have been the target of exploitation, violence and crime. For them, there’s been a lost decade.”
