Tackling the SEND crisis requires bigger thinking.
It’s no secret that Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) is in crisis.
Nationally, there has been a 140% increase in children with an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP), or an equivalent statement of SEND needs, between 2015 and 2024.
And the total number of children and young people with SEND in the UK today is estimated to be 1.9 million.
But despite this growth in demand, there has been no consistent improvement in outcomes for children and young people with SEND since 2019.
If you don’t have children in education right now, you might not be aware of how real this crisis is, how much worse it’s become, and how devastating it is for so many young people and their families.
Here in Suffolk, the SEND system is broken.
Something that Ofsted and Suffolk County Council themselves acknowledge and know - indeed, the County Council’s ‘blueprint’ report this year tried to restore confidence in a system that has been placed into "special measures".
My own report on SEND, which I published this week, is based on the experiences of 97 families living in Suffolk Coastal.
It highlighted that nearly 60% of children with SEND had missed school because their needs were not being met, and of those children, almost a quarter had been off school for over a year.
I hope that when you read that line out, you are as angered by that as I am.
These are children who need more support, not less.
These are children who, with the right help, could flourish in education and later in society.
My own Freedom of Information (FOI) request showed that there has been a 200% increase in appeals lodged against the County Council over the past five years.
To be a parent of a SEND child, you must have extraordinary resilience.
Being a parent is a superhuman role at the best of times, but the challenges, knockbacks and exhaustion of fighting a failing system cannot be overstated.
One in two parents told me that they are themselves battling with their own mental health as they seek to fight and navigate a system that is letting their children down.
Since coming to power, the new Government has provided the largest ever investment in SEND funding that Suffolk County Council has ever received – and this should be celebrated as a very welcome start, and a good first step to tackle our local SEND crisis.
But it will be clear to anyone who works in SEND, or anyone who is trying to engage with SEND services, that funding is only one part of the problem.
Yes, we need a sustainable funding model for the future that can scale to meet the SEND demands.
When SEND demand grows, of course, funding needs to match it.
But if we are going to tackle SEND and provide an education provision that is fit and fair for all children, then we need to think bigger.
My report called for a national conversation about SEND, much like the national conversation and review we are having as a country now about the NHS.
Pumping more money into SEND won’t solve the fundamental problems with it, when the system wasn’t designed properly in the first place.
In rural areas, like Suffolk Coastal, we also have the opportunity to use excess school capacity, driven by declining school populations, to rethink and redesign how we deliver SEND support.
Many of the primary schools in my own constituency have declining populations, and headteachers are already modelling for fewer pupils year on year.
With additional space, that means schools could themselves host specialist SEND units within the schools and take on new SEND pupils from a much wider catchment area.
These priorities – and opportunities – are things that I am putting to the Government and to the County Council.
The crisis is urgent, but doing "more of the same" won’t solve this crisis.
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