The root of the crisis in special needs education

Good morning. We write a lot about the economic and geopolitical consequences of Brexit. But public policy ones are neglected — the consequences of a prolonged period from 2016 to 2020 when the government didn’t concentrate all that much on domestic public policy, before being hit by a global pandemic which, necessarily, took up much of the government’s focus.

One particular example of that is the crisis in special needs education in England, the subject of an excellent piece by Amy Borrett and Peter Foster which you can read here. Some further thoughts from me about the political causes of the problem and how that will shape much of the new government’s choices, not just in special needs education.

Where next for Send?

Here are two things that sound like they ought to be more closely related, but aren’t: since the 1990s, diagnoses of autism in the UK have increased by more than 787 per cent, a trend that is prevalent across much of the rich world, while since 2015, the number of autistic pupils in England with a formal Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP) has more than doubled.

There’s a live debate about what is driving increased diagnoses of autism and other special needs — environmental, social, changes in diagnostic criteria — and I am going to go for the wet centrist answer of “it’s probably all of the above”. There are many contributing factors: our changing economy means that more people with various disabilities will need and receive diagnoses, the fact that in 2009 less than half of all local authorities had adult diagnostic centres and now essentially all of them do, environmental and social factors such as having children later, plus changing diagnostic criteria.

But the vast, vast majority of these diagnoses do not end with a child getting an EHCP. The big change is the passage of the 2014 Children and Families Act, which made almost all additional special needs funding conditional upon receiving a formal EHCP and deprioritised trying to educate as many children with disabilities in mainstream education in favour of special schools. (There is much more on this, plus an excellent dissection of Kemi Badenoch’s recent intervention on the issue over on Sam Freedman’s Substack.)

Obviously, when you make accessing funding conditional on passing a formal hurdle, you are going to increase the number of formal applications. And one problem is that meeting the cost of EHCPs has proved to be more expensive than the previous system, and it has not resulted in better outcomes for children with disabilities.

Now, it’s important to note here that the 2014 act had a lot going for it. To take an issue that is dear to my heart, it repealed the requirement of the Adoption and Children Act 2002 to give “due consideration” to race, religion and ethnicity in adoption. Of course, many people never consider adoption and many of those considering it are unable to do so. If you further restrict and discourage adoption on racial, religious or ethnic lines, you are going to, as the pre-2014 system did, end up with larger number of ethnic minority people waiting longer and longer to find their families.

There’s also an argument, albeit one that I am less sympathetic to than Sam is in his Substack, that the 2014 changes helped to usefully raise standards in mainstream education. I am dubious about this, but you know, I could easily be wrong! We can’t test the hypothetical here.

Now what should have happened in around 2018, and in the universe where the In-Out referendum had gone the other way, I suspect, was for the education secretary or the chancellor to clock that this aspect of the 2014 act was having a perverse impact and for a policy fix to be brought forward. This is what normally happens: to take an example in a very different area of public policy, successive governments have tweaked immigration legislation, usually with the same aim in mind as the previous government, whenever it has produced results it hasn’t wanted, or failed to produce the desired outcomes.

In some ways, from the perspective of the Labour government, this is a policy area where it has a real opportunity to get better outcomes for less money. It’s not like, say, healthcare, where there are global trends forcing healthcare spending upwards and thanks to the UK’s model of provision, an awful lot of the revenue raising responsibility falls on the state.

But it is a politically fraught topic and one with the potential for lots to go wrong.

Now try this

This week, I mostly listened to the soundtrack of the excellent new musical London Tide while writing my column.

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