Send debate is paved with good intentions

Good morning. Can Labour still deliver significant changes to how the state works and money is spent? Reform to how children with special educational needs are looked after this autumn are, I think, a big test for the government. Some thoughts on that below.

To reform or not to reform?

What is driving the increased cost of special educational needs and disabilities (Send) in England? The answer is that in 2014, the coalition government passed the Children and Families Act. This, as a conscious matter of policy, made the release of most funding for Send children conditional on receipt of a formal Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP), and prioritised educating as many children with special needs as possible in specialist, not mainstream, schools.

One consequence is that paying the school fees of children in Send education has become a growing cost for local authorities.

This increase in costs hasn’t happened in Wales or Scotland, which did not do anything similar to the 2014 act.

Now, I think it’s important to understand that the logic behind the policy wasn’t without merit. By switching the presumption that children with additional needs will be educated in mainstream schools, one argument goes, you free up staff time and resources to focus instead on the marginal child on the pass/fail border. Scotland and Wales have not had the hefty increases in Send spending England has. But they have also not had the same improvement in results for children in mainstream education either.

In addition, the post-2014 system is still difficult for parents to navigate. It requires them, as one parent said to me recently, “to be warriors”. This adds to the political difficulties of changing the system, because most parents will assume, not unreasonably, that “reform” is just a polite way of saying “cut costs and quality”. Emails and messages from concerned parents about these planned reforms are spooking Labour MPs.

This is, I think, a rare example of a policy area where you have a pretty good set of arguments on both sides of the debate. There’s a pro-reform argument that says we are all better off if children grow up and are educated alongside one another for the most part, because we all share a society and a country in the end. And there’s a case for the status quo, centred around the needs of the marginal child on the pass/fail border.

There’s a reasonable argument that when you have two options that both contain trade-offs, you pick whichever of the two is cheaper. (Politically, though, Labour would be wise to steer away from making a big thing of that.)

One reason why Send reform is not destined to become “Pip cuts 2.0” is because the government does have a good rationale for what it wants to do. Backbench MPs feel they have a good amount of engagement from Bridget Phillipson, education secretary, in a way they did not from the Treasury (the department every MP knew to be the real author of the Pip cuts).

But part of being able to make changes is going to be whether the government can overcome suspicion among MPs and stakeholders in the wake of the row over welfare cuts. If Labour can’t make savings when there is a good intellectual and practical argument, then it is hard to see how it will be able to sell radical changes of any kind to anyone.

Now try this

I had a lovely weekend: I read the FTWeekend on the train to and from Oxford to see friends in their lovely new(ish) house. I particularly enjoyed Leah Broad’s interview with the mezzo-soprano Aigul Akhmetshina, Jim Pickard’s lunch with Dale Vince, and Robert Shrimsley on what your streaming service says about you.

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