The staggering cost of England’s special educational needs and disability (Send) crisis shows no sign of easing. A Guardian investigation has revealed councils will overspend on Send services by nearly £2bn over the next year, pushing their accumulated deficits to at least £5.2bn by 31 March 2026. The date is crucial because that is when the £5.2bn debt, hidden away off local authority books using an accounting fix for seven years, is due to come back on to the balance sheets, threatening to instantly bankrupt scores of town halls.
They've had seven years of knowing this axe was going to fall, and what have they done, except spend like drunken sailors on DEI nonsense and pandering to every crazy activist in the area?
The government faces a massive headache: not just what to do about the rapidly increasing billions of historic Send debt, but how to keep a lid on future Send spending, which shows no sign of abating.
And is anyone asking why this is? Why are a growing number of children requiring SEND assistance? Wouldn't that be a sensible thing to do?
City of York council, the only authority surveyed by the Guardian that is projecting its accumulated Send budget deficit to move into surplus next year, was sceptical about keeping its head above water in future. “Unless the system is changed, we will go back into deficit quite quickly,” said Bob Webb, York council’s executive member for children, young people and education.
Bob doesn't seem too surprised or even concerned at anything about this, except the bottom line for his funding. He's not the only one.
Mike Cox, the deputy leader of Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole council, whose forecast deficit will hit £168m by 31 March 2026, up £60m in a year, predicts: “[Government] is going to keep kicking the can down the road. The only thing that will change is that the can will get bigger and harder to kick.”
Maybe you should be shouting about where the can came from in the first place instead?
In my years working in schools it became obvious that SEN was the biggest money pit in the place(s): every new set of initials or syndrome or sociologist's acronym had to be fully pandered to no matter what it cost. The minimal results they produce beggar belief and, when added to the general dumbing down of "education" must account for the abysmal literacy standards suffered by young people.
ReplyDeleteI fear you're right, my mother was a classroom assistant in one of these units set up in her local school (yes, there were enough of them to warrent a seperate unit) and some of the stories she brought home were mind-boggling.
DeleteEveryone these days needs to be (mis)diagnosed with something to get more cash out of the state (actually the shrinking minority paying taxes).
ReplyDeleteYes, I suspect that's behind the rise. Rather than 'something in the water'.
DeleteOne would think it is the job of the parents to see that their kids can read and write English, if they can't then the family should return to their country of origin. It is not the job of the English people to support them, they arrived uninvited looking for free handouts and very few of them are prepared to work for a living.
ReplyDeleteI could read and write before I went to junior school, because it was considered unthinkable at the time to send a child to school who couldn't. We need to bring that back!
DeleteI'm sure the Gurdian opinion is not to sort out the system and stop diagnosing every misbehaving child with some disorder, but to tax the 'rich' more to pay for it
ReplyDelete