Special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) is an area of public policy that is eye-wateringly expensive for local government. It is also, like adult and children’s services, failing to deliver on a spectacular scale. We are racking up an £11 billion bill, without getting the quality of service required, and without driving improvements in outcomes for those who really need it. We simply cannot afford to keep getting the solution to SEND so wrong.
The current system hinges on legally-binding Education and Health Care Plans (EHCP). But as SchoolsWeek recently reported, local education authorities (LEA) and schools are frequently not meeting the requirements of EHCPs. They are also often being forced to implement vague and poorly evidenced provisions within EHCPs.
As a result, the young people this system is designed to serve are being let down. Children with manageable additional needs start to exhibit worsening behaviour, demanding more interventions and further harming their life chances.
What are EHCPs?
An Education and Health Care Plan is a document that sets out the legal entitlement of a child with high-level needs to additional support to allow them to develop. An idea originally from the Children and Families Act 2014, the concept of EHCPs developed from the policy of a Statement of Special Educational Needs for young people with the most complex needs.
EHCPs have frequently been mischaracterised as only really being for learning difficulties. However, for a not insignificant number of young people, they are also for physical disabilities such as severe epilepsy and proportionate short stature (dwarfism), where additional support can be put in place to enable a young person to adapt to their environment.
What is going wrong?
It is not uncommon for a policy to be reviewed and adapted when it is having a different effect to the one intended. For example, the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act was changed to remove costs for Special Guardianship Orders, because it was blocking families and closely-tied people from being able to step forward in time of need.
Unfortunately, due to the political sensitivities of the SEND discussion, it is incredibly difficult to bring forward any meaningful change. Everyone can see the system is not working as well as it could be. Yet anyone who tries to propose reform risks being pilloried as anti-SEND.
Whether it be unacceptable delays in awarding EHCPs, to the very real issues with private diagnosis for ADHD, as revealed by the BBC in 2023, it is clear that the aims of the system are not being achieved.
Part of the problem lies in the poor evidence base behind some interventions that are being promoted for young people with additional needs.
For example, in SchoolsWeek’s investigation, there were examples of cut-and-paste EHCPs. By their very definition, these identikit plans fail to provide tailored support to individual students. There were also examples of debunked approaches such as fidget toys and ‘learning styles’ being implemented into EHCPs.
Fidget toys have a worryingly flimsy evidence base behind them. Learning styles, something that Sunderland Council has promoted in EHCPs seen by SchoolsWeek, have been exposed as false and potentially damaging to educational outcomes – including by the well-respected American Psychological Association.
Yet each student’s EHCP creates a legal obligation on the LEA and the school to deliver on its requirements. This means that they are bound to carry out these interventions, even when there is evidence that they do not work or (in the case of learning styles) that they may be actively harmful.
How can we reform the system to both save money and improve outcomes?
Over the past 15 years, we have seen some significant developments in education policy, with approaches such as behaviour hubs, school-wide approaches and the switch to a knowledge-rich curriculum. We are designing out some of the most evidence-light approaches that have permeated insidiously through the education system for years.
However, SEND is the last remaining bastion of Wild West education policy. As with many public policy initiatives, the road to bankruptcy is paved with good intentions. We are increasingly mandating LEAs and schools to make costly and time-consuming interventions without a decent evidence base behind them.
It seems self-evident that we should go back to first principles. It is time to reframe the SEND system around supporting young people to achieve better outcomes. Outcomes that allow them to grow up and be able to access society as well as possible.
The most practically effective – and cost-effective – way to achieve this is to look at how we can bring evidence-based approaches to the fore. That can be achieved through a national body within the Department for Education that works to coordinate and spread best practice, underpinned by an ability to bring in proven techniques and rule out interventions that we discover do not work.
Given the sensitivities around any discussion of SEND, this will not be straightforward or politically easy. However, longer term it will have the effect of transforming outcomes for some of the young people who really need it.
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