One of the toughest challenges for councils at the moment is special educational needs. There is a fundamental problem, which is that the budget allowed by the government nationally to provide support for children is nowhere near adequate. They talk about shifting money around, or about changing the right to access Education Health & Care Plans, but all they are doing is disguising the problem. There will still be the same number of children needing the same amount of support, who will still be missing out on what they need. It doesn’t matter how you cut up the cake if the cake is too small in the first place.
In Wokingham Borough we are doing what we can to improve our services so that we can help children as soon as it is recognised that they have an additional need. This is because it is better for children’s wellbeing and their life chances, but also because it should reduce costs by reducing the requirement for places in special schools. We are proud of what we are achieving and very grateful to our schools, who are working in partnership with us. We are very pleased that last September, we managed to open 2 more units for children who need some support, attached to mainstream schools and that there are more in the pipeline.
There is still a lot for us to do. We need to make sure that we get the funding for these units right. We need to make sure that when we assess children’s needs we are doing so in a way that is consistent, and that our annual reviews of their progress show that the steps we take to help them do actually make a difference.
But all the time we are worried about being able to afford what needs to be done. Noth the Conservative government and now the Labour government have delayed the delivery of the two special schools we were expecting. That means that instead of having more capacity in local state special schools from 2026 we will now be waiting at least 2 extra years for those places, meaning that children have to travel a lot further, it is harder to find them places, and in many cases we have to use the independent sector, where places cost on average almost 3 times as much. This is not a good use of public money. And it’s no good for the children either.
Meanwhile, the government’s promised reforms to the system have stalled. All they have announced so far is that council’s will be able to keep education-related deficits off their books for another 2 years. That is the very minimum change they could have made. Almost the whole of these deficits is the result of spend on special educational needs. I can’t help thinking the only reason they made this decision was because they didn’t think it would look very good if a large number of councils had to declare themselves effectively bankrupt at the same time because of their accumulated special educational needs deficit.
This is not a situation councils can solve individually or even collectively. We have to wait for the government to announce what they are going to do. And while we are waiting, we just have to try to keep calm and carry on.
Cllr Prue Bray, MBE, Deputy Leader of the Council and Executive Member for Children’s Services.
