Children with SEND 'worst affected' by school funding pressures
Neil Puffett
Monday, February 24, 2020
Children with special educational needs or disabilities (SEND) are "particularly negatively affected" by ongoing financial pressures in schools, a report by Ofsted has found.
Research conducted by the inspectorate, at the request of the House of Commons public accounts select committee, found that 80 per cent of primary school head teachers and 72 per cent of secondary head teachers who responded to a survey said changes to SEND provision had been made due to financial pressure.
Of these, 41 per cent of primary school head teachers and 27 per cent of secondary school head teachers described the changes as “major”.
The report, which looked at all the possible implications of funding pressures for schools, found that staff and leaders reported that pupils with SEND, and predominantly pupils with SEN support rather than those with education, health and care plans, have been "particularly negatively affected by schools’ responses to financial pressure”.
“School leaders who we spoke to told us that the cost of meeting the needs of pupils with SEND exceeds the funding that they receive to do so,” the report states.
“This especially affects schools with a high proportion of pupils with SEND or pupils with more complex needs. Leaders described an increase in the complexity and severity of the needs of pupils in mainstream schools.
“Some related this, in part, to a lack of capacity within special schools. They also reported decreased high-needs funding from local authorities and increased costs to schools for services needed for SEND provision, such as educational psychologist reports.”
The research found that cutting teaching assistant posts was the most common way head teachers responded to financial pressures.
Ofsted reported that some of the schools that it visited or spoke to have moved away from a “one-to-one” model, whereby a teaching assistant stays with an individual pupil with high needs all day.
However, some of the head teachers in schools said they had made these changes, at least in part, in order to improve provision, with Ofsted noting that there is some research evidence supporting a move away from a one-to-one model. But the report added that changes were also influenced by the need to cut staffing costs.
“In some schools, head teachers told us that intended improvements to provision through moving away from this model have been compromised by financial pressure. For example, one primary school head teacher said that the changes were ‘going further and deeper than we planned’."
There were also discrepancies between the views of different staff in some schools about the impact of this move away from a one-to-one model on pupils.
Although leaders in these particular schools felt that interventions by educational support staff were more targeted and of better quality, other staff felt that provision for these pupils had been reduced rather than improved.
In one secondary school that Ofsted visited, the head teacher said he did not want “teaching assistants glued to the side of a child” because he thought it was neither effective for the pupils nor financially viable. However, in the same school, another member of staff pointed out that the number of teaching assistants working with pupils with SEND had been more than halved and that the remaining staff could not “give the kids the attention they really need”.
The research also found that some schools have decreased their use of external services, such as educational psychology, behavioural support and alternative provision, because they cannot afford them. And some reported that special educational needs and disabilities co-ordinators have less capacity to manage SEND provision in their schools because their other workload has increased as a result of staff losses.
School leaders also described various ways in which reductions to local authority services have increased costs to their schools. One leader in a secondary school described how the school has increased how much it spends on staff with pastoral roles. The school has done this because of increased safeguarding issues among its pupils, which the leader related to decreasing capacity within the local authority around safeguarding.
Another secondary school has had a full-time on-site police officer, who the police force has largely paid for. However, the police force can no longer meet this cost and school leaders were considering whether the school could pay £17,000 for this service next year.
One secondary school head teacher said the school is “plugging gaps in the system that shouldn’t exist”, due to reductions in local authority services.
“Behavioural support and mental health referrals are put through but don’t go anywhere. We are concerned about some students and are putting in bespoke timetables, pastoral support, more meetings with parents. Ten to 15 years ago there would have been more liaison with the local authority and it would have been providing these services.”
The government has previously announced an additional £700m for SEND support, but there are concerns that this will not be enough to cover the cost of provision.
It has also pledged to carry out a review into SEND support and progress made as a result of reforms introduced through the Children and Families Act 2014.
Last week it emerged that MPs are set to consider plans for a new regulator to oversee SEND provision in schools.