Autumn, it seems, will begin on Tuesday, with a set-piece speech by Keir Starmer. The sunny anthem that serenaded New Labour to power has been frostily remixed: “Things will get worse before we get better,” he will reportedly warn, while he serves notice of “tough choices” and “unpopular decisions”. To no one’s great surprise, he and Rachel Reeves will clearly be sticking to their promised parsimony. In the departments where Labour ministers are finding their feet, the only “reform” projects that have any chance of success will be those driven by savings. But as winter bites, they will face ever-louder calls for the opposite: money to fill deep gaps and repair 14 long years of damage.
One huge story embodies all this. At its heart are children and young people in England whose schooling and care fall under the category of special educational needs and disabilities, or Send. The system that is meant to help them is overseen by local councillors and public servants who often seem buried in failure, and unable to see a way out. As with so many of our national problems, much of the mess goes back to the Tory-Lib Dem coalition, and a story that Starmer, Reeves and their colleagues should bear in mind – about how imposing cuts not only ruins lives but soon results in the reverse of what was intended: costs go up, often uncontrollably.
Last month, an investigation by ITV found that nearly a third of parents whose kids have special needs have had to use the law to get them the support they need, and that well over half of Send pupils have been forced to take time out of school. The local government ombudsman, Amerdeep Somal, recently told the Guardian that the Send system is in “utter disarray”. In five weeks spent travelling round in the country during the election campaign, I was struck by the huge number of people I spoke to who either had direct experience of the crisis, or family and friends whose everyday lives were all but defined by it.
Over the past decade, there has been a near doubling in numbers of children in the system. Despite recent increases in funding, outcomes seem to be getting worse, while local Send deficits, which now total £3.2bn, are expected to reach £5bn by 2026. The result is mounting panic and a toxic commonplace that now crops up all over the news media: the idea that local authorities’ financial crises are due in large part to pushy parents, and excessive “demand”.
One key element distinguishes Send from other areas of policy. Thanks to legislation introduced in the 1970s, thousands of children and young people with special needs are entitled to their educational provision as a matter of legal right, enforced by an official tribunal. Since 2014, such entitlements have been set out in education, health and care plans, or EHCPs. These are not easy to get, and they are no guarantee that provision will actually materialise. But for families constantly battling officialdom – and I speak from experience here: I have a teenage son with autism and learning disabilities, and an EHCP – they offer a crucial means of holding institutions to account. At the last count, 98% of the Send tribunal’s decisions went parents’ way.
Over the past five years, the number of EHCPs has increased by 72%, to 576,000. This is partly because of a change that arrived a decade ago, when their reach was extended at either end of the age range. But there are other, even bigger factors at work. One is an increase in needs to do with speech and language, and issues categorised under the heading of social, emotional and mental health – some of which goes back to the pandemic. There is also the plain fact that as our understanding of child development has increased (the recognition of autism in girls is a good example), so has families’ need for help.
Any halfway functional system of support ought to be able to accommodate these shifts. But what gets in the way are the consequences of local austerity, and the failures of English schools policy. Starting in 2010, the closure of Sure Start children’s centres spelled the end of early intervention schemes, and left families to collide with the kind of crises that entail no end of expense. As cash-strapped mainstream schools have shed teaching assistants, families have been advised that they have no option but to formally seek help from local authorities – and, in many cases, to seek much more costly specialist provision. A schools system built around discipline and “attainment” has only increased the same problem.
So here we are. In his first Commons speech as prime minister, Starmer said councils were now “unable to deliver even basic services to children with special educational needs”. Bridget Phillipson, the new education secretary, talks about “a broken system in desperate need of long-term renewal”. Last month saw the publication of a new report commissioned by the Local Government Association and the County Councils Network. “Send represents an existential threat to the financial sustainability of local government,” it said, which is a classic example of the way that bureaucratic language sometimes masks horrible arguments: if anyone said that disabled children were an “existential threat” to anything, there would be a completely justified outcry.
Elsewhere in the text, there was talk of “leaders” in the relevant local organisations questioning whether it is “appropriate for a judicial body” – ie the Send tribunal – “to make active decisions about the educational provision and placements of children and young people”. The text also insisted that “the state must be clear on where the limits of individual choice and entitlement lie”, which is not difficult to decode: if councils cannot meet their legal responsibilities, it seems, the best answer is simply to sweep those obligations away.
The Send crisis could be solved. It would entail improvements in the training of teachers, a support-staff recruitment drive backed by pay increases, a decisive move away from the Gradgrindian practices of English education, the thoroughgoing restoration of Sure Start, and much more besides. A lasting solution would also involve the recognition of something fundamental: that there are things we now know about education and child psychology that cannot be forgotten, and that embedding them in the way government provides education and care is going to need extra money.
As the Treasury insists on yet more belt-tightening, those of us who depend on those systems may now be faced with a fight, for our basic rights and the kind of changes that will leave them intact. It might be best summarised by a slogan recently heard in the US. We are not going back. Who would?
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John Harris is a Guardian columnist
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