University of Leeds Study Reveals Crisis in Special Educational Needs and Disabilities

The scale of the crisis facing many children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) has been revealed in a new report.

Highlighting how some families are waiting years for assessments, the report puts forward an evidence-based plan to tackle the poor identification of SEND, the postcode lottery of education, health and care (EHC) plans, and to reduce the huge numbers of children not receiving the support they need to reach their full potential.

The report’s authors are the  Child of the North research group of academics from the N8 Partnership universities, including the University of Leeds, and the think tank Centre for Young Lives. They say the plan within the report will help support the new government in its mission to widen opportunity.

The time has come to support every child to thrive in school and ensure the benefits of a healthy and well educated population are reaped by the UK.

The new research highlights how the current system is failing many vulnerable children and young people with SEND. Over 1.5 million pupils in England have SEND, meaning 40% of children are identified as having these additional needs at some point between the ages of five and 16.

Yet the current system cannot cope and has been unable to keep pace with advances made in identifying and recognising when children have additional needs and require extra support. 99% of school leaders have said that the funding they receive for pupils with SEND is insufficient.

As the report makes clear, thousands of children and parents are crying out for a faster and kinder process and better early intervention support. The report includes stark reminders of the impact on families of the stress of trying to receive an EHC plan, with parents describing a traumatic process that leaves them feeling helpless, ‘begging for solutions’, and that can have a huge impact on their mental health and finances.

Professor Mark Mon Williams, Child of the North series editor, said: “Our collective failure to support SEND is a millstone around the neck of the UK. The new government will improve the lives of millions of children and grow the economy by ‘following the evidence’. The time has come to support every child to thrive in school and ensure the benefits of a healthy and well educated population are reaped by the UK.”

 

Postcode lottery

The new report is the sixth in a series by Child of the North and Centre for Young Lives to be published in 2024. Each focuses on how the new Government can put the life chances of young people at the heart of policy making and delivery.

The report reveals how:

• In 2022, only 49% of EHC plans were produced within the 20-week statutory limit. The average wait for an ADHD assessment for young people aged 19-25 is almost four years in one local authority in Yorkshire and the Humber.

• In 2022 the percentage of EHC plans produced within 20 weeks in the North East of England ranged from 98% to only 13%. Similar disparities are present in other regions, such as the North West and Yorkshire and the Humber. There is a clear postcode lottery in the timeliness in which EHC plans are produced.

• There is large variability in the extent to which local authorities run the Healthy Child Programme, which can facilitate identification of SEND before school entry. In one local authority, one in five children do not receive their two-year developmental check, and in another this is as high as one in three.

• By the end of secondary school, the achievement gap between pupils with no identified SEND and pupils with an EHC plan is almost 3.5 years. The gap between pupils with no identified SEND and pupils with SEND support (but no EHC plan) is nearly two years.

• Just 30% of young people with SEND achieved a Grade 4 or higher in English and Maths in 2022/23, compared to 72% without SEND. In 2021, 57% of children with SEND aged 6-16 were reported to have a probable mental health disorder, compared with 13% of those without SEND.

• 32% of children with SEND are persistently absent from school and children with SEND are three times as likely to be suspended from school, nearly twice as likely to be persistently absent from school, and three times as likely to be ‘Not in Employment, Education or Training’ (NEET) at 16-17 years of age.

• The increasing demand for children and young people seeking assessment and support is placing significant pressure on the system. In 2021, councils faced a SEND funding gap of £600 million.

• Children with SEND were some of the hardest hit by COVID-19 and the associated lockdowns, and the transition to home learning was particularly challenging for children with SEND.

The report makes a series of recommendations which offer the potential to cut the long-term costs of not acting early enough, including the use of holistic measures of child development to identify pupils with increased likelihood of having SEND; improving and extending training for professionals and families, and improving connections between systems to facilitate earlier identification and the provision of more appropriate support.

The report highlights innovative approaches illustrating the incredible work that schools, universities, teachers, researchers, and others are undertaking to ensure the best possible SEND provision.

Anne Longfield, Executive Chair of the Centre for Young Lives, said: “The SEND system is broken. Many families talk about the traumatic impact it has on their lives as they struggle to find support for their children. They are often at their wits’ end, deeply frustrated at the waiting lists and the layers of bureaucracy and hoops they need to jump through, fearful that their children’s opportunities to do well at school and beyond are being held back by an inadequate, underfunded, and overstretched system.

“Tackling the delays, the poor early identification, and the postcode lottery they have inherited should be a priority for new Ministers. This report puts forward a new evidence-based plan to identify SEND earlier and cut assessment times.

“I welcome the new Secretary of State’s decision to give responsibility for improving SEND provision to the Schools Minister, and I hope this is the beginning of a fresh start for reforming a broken system.

“We need to level the playing field of support nationally, prioritising those areas of the country which are failing to meet the 20-week goal, and being much more creative about how to achieve it.

“Ensuring that children with SEND have the support they need will also be essential to tackling the school attendance crisis, supporting all children to flourish and succeed in school, and to meeting the new Government’s ambitions to widen opportunity.”