Dec 29, 2024, Guardian (opinion): The culture wars are coming for children with special needs – Labour must tread carefully
For millions of us who have children with special educational needs and disabilities (Send), 2024 was a strange and often unsettling year. For a long time, we have been used to quietly fighting our battles in a political and media vacuum. But suddenly, everything has exploded: as the crisis in provision seems to constantly deepen, barely a week goes by without some or other Send story making it into the news.
My 18-year-old son, James, is autistic and a student at a specialist school – so I watch all this very closely. Local councils in England say that “overspending” on special needs education – manifested in an annual funding gap of at least £3bn [$3.8B], even after the government put in extra money – now threatens more municipal bankruptcies. In the media,
meanwhile, culture-warrior columnists now habitually question whether the word “needs” is even appropriate. Increases in the incidence of such conditions as autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), they say, may be a scam partly perpetrated by the merchants of identity politics, and families who manage to get dedicated help are the recipients of “golden tickets”: by implication, if people in power want to save money, there is no end of waste and mollycoddling to tackle.
During her campaign for the leadership of the Conservative party, this was the apparent view held by Kemi Badenoch. In September, she triggered yet another burst of tedious notoriety with a campaign pamphlet suggesting that what the text called “a neurodiversity diagnosis” was now a quick route to “economic advantages and protections” – and, in the case of kids, “better treatment or equipment at school”. The essential problem, it suggested, was “a narrative built on fragility and medicalisation”: as she and her allies seem to see it, even children given extra help would be best advised to simply buck up.
Keir Starmer and his colleagues are set on something much more serious: drastic alterations to England’s Send system that will supposedly bring its spiralling costs under control. On 19 December, the prime minister’s appearance in front of the House of Commons liaison committee saw him talking about an area of policy now in “complete crisis”, and insisting that “all the relevant conversations are taking place” about remedying it.
The current Send meltdown, he said, was “the issue that has been raised at prime minister’s questions with me more than any other”. Then, a few days before Christmas, the Financial Times ran a well-briefed news story suggesting that the government is mulling over “sweeping reforms”.
For Send parents, this was not exactly the stuff of seasonal cheer. An unnamed “senior official” held out the prospect of ending entitlements for children at the “lighter” end of ADHD and autism, and “thousands fewer pupils” having access to the kind of provision set out in legally binding education, health and care plans, or EHCPs. . . .
In the meantime, a dysfunctional system grinds on. Last week, the Guardian reported that in the financial year 2022-23, a total of about £100m [$125B] of public money was spent in England – by local councils and central government – on legal battles with the parents and carers of children with special needs and disabilities. . . .
Of course, councils are often desperately short of money. But many of them have long histories of being institutionally hostile to challenge and scrutiny from people they tend to see as pushy parents. So they stubbornly fight, and usually lose. The result is the kind of Kafkaesque farce that has become so common during all these years of local and national austerity: the neurotic imperative to save money leading to millions being wasted.
A different but comparable story – of Whitehall belt-tightening causing its complete opposite – defines the crisis Starmer and his colleagues are now trying to address. Between 2014 and 2023, the number of children and young people in England with EHCPs rose from 240,000 to 576,000, a change that inevitably drove up costs. Some of this increase was down to changes in our understanding of human psychology: the jump in autism diagnoses among women and girls, for example, is hardly going to be reversed. But there is one big factor in rocketing EHCP numbers that could have been avoided: squeezed school budgets and the miserly pay and conditions of teaching assistants leading to a decline in help that used to be provided informally. Schools and families were thereby left with no option but to fight for the provision only EHCPs can guarantee, up to and including leaving mainstream education for specialist placements.
Send provision in ‘vicious downward spiral’, says former children’s commissioner
That change could be at least partly rewound. But it will need time and care, which is presumably why Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, has combined positive announcements (such as extra capital funding to make schools more Send-friendly) with the insistence that reform will require “a bit of patience”. Starmer, by contrast, recently talked about increasing the numbers of children with special needs in mainstream education – and unspecified “early intervention” – as things that need to be done “as urgently as possible”. . . .
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