Will 10,000 new places for SEND pupils really mean “more inclusive classrooms in mainstream schools”?

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Last week, the Department for Education (DfE) pushed out a few bits of SEND data. They’re not each worth a post in their own right, so here’s a round-up of all of them.

The most headline-grabbing of these announcements was the government’s plans to allocate £740 million “for 10,000 new places for pupils with SEND.” According to the press release, this grant will create “more inclusive classrooms in mainstream schools” and mean “more children and young people will be supported to achieve and thrive in their local school.”

And, more promisingly, “over the coming years local authorities can use their capital funding for children with SEND to create places in local, mainstream schools – putting an end to the desperate battle to find a place that meets families’ needs.”

Big promises. Are they true? A bit.

It’s not “new” news

This is an announcement that’s been made before – we covered it here. The £740 million will be allocated by the Department for Education to local authorities in the 2025-26 financial year; LAs will most likely get it in the summer.

This grant’s not a new thing either: it’s part of a long-standing High Needs Provision Capital Grant (HNPCA). £740 million is a decent chunk of investment, but it’s less than the average annual investment made by the previous government over the last three years. Check the graph below for more.

Graph showing amounts from 2022-2024 were larger — SNJ graph from DfE data- click to enlarge

This is a capital grant. That means it can be spent on building new schools, building new units, fixing up knackered old provision, or installing new equipment to make things more accessible: ramps, acoustic treatment, assistive technology, and so on. But it can’t be used to pay for staff. You can find out what your LA is getting here

It’s also a high-needs grant. That means it’s mostly intended to improve facilities for children and young people with an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP) or those in alternative provision.

The government are super keen to emphasise local authorities can use their HNPCA grant to invest in more SEND infrastructure in mainstream schools. They’re strongly encouraging LAs to do just that.

Will councils spend it where the DfE wants them to?

However, a quick glance at the HNPCA grant guidance shows the DfE aren’t compelling LAs to spend it on mainstream SEND. As with previous HNPCA grants, this isn’t ringfenced money: LAs are free to use this money to expand or improve their special schools and this time round, they can also use it on provision in the post-16 sector too.

We’ve looked before at what LAs spend this grant on, using the financial returns data that they send back to the DfE. And in the past, they have mostly spent it on special schools, not mainstream.

Thus far, over two-thirds of the new places for SEND pupils funded by this grant have been in special schools.
Only about a quarter of these new places are in mainstream SEND units.
A lot of these new places haven’t been built yet – it often takes 2-3 years to get them up and running.
LAs are spending this grant on high-needs capital investment, but it’s largely fire-fighting acute placement shortages. Most of this investment is being used to try to plug gaps, and some of it is being used in ways that cannot possibly be inclusive. For example, we estimate roughly one in five of the new SEND places being created are being built in ‘satellite’ provision located off-site from a main school campus.

You can see this illustrated in our infographic from 2024 below:

Infoggraphic - accessible PDF available on page — Click to enlarge, Accessible PDF version here

Will more children be able to thrive in their local mainstream school?

So going back to the press release, will this £740m mean that “more children will be supported to achieve and thrive in their local school?” Some will, for sure. Eventually. That might be because there’s a new place more local to them, or it might be because an existing place might be more fit for purpose after capital investment.

Others might find themselves in a satellite site miles away from home—and a long way from the main school site. More still will be able to get a much-needed state special school place when they previously couldn’t—but that won’t necessarily be a local place.

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No more battles to meet a child’s needs?

Will it put “an end to the desperate battle to find a place that meets families’ needs”? That’s a lot more doubtful. As mentioned, the HNPCA grant isn’t new. The £740m is a smaller sum than the last government stumped up per annum under its final Spending Review. It’s being offered to LAs on pretty much the same terms as previous SEND capital grants.

And for all that capital investment is welcome, shiny buildings and gleaming equipment might look impressive, but by themselves, they don’t educate children and young people with SEND. For that, you need skilled and well-trained people. Good kit makes their job easier, but if you don’t have enough of the right human provision in the right place at the right time—and no one sane currently thinks we do—then this won’t be putting an end to the ‘desperate battle.’

There’s also something else that this ‘business as usual’ grant allocation signifies—the new(ish) government doesn’t yet have a national strategy in place for the supply of SEND provision. With this grant, they’ve simply repeated what their predecessors did, and left it up to LAs how to spend it.

That’s particularly bad news if your kid has a high-need, low-incidence type of SEN or disability. Despite almost £3.5 billion of SEND capital investment since 2021, it’s looking likely there will be less specialist provision for deaf pupils in 2026 than there was in 2021. This investment has also barely touched other types of need; visual impairment and physical disabilities, for example. These sectors are crying out for a national plan that simply doesn’t exist yet.

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Special schools bursting at the seams

So, what will LAs spend their collective £740m on? It’s up to them, but a new data release from the DfE last week suggests they’ll continue to invest lots of it in state special schools. Why? Because the DfE’s state school capacity data shows that most special schools are beyond full—they’re bursting. You can get at the data yourself here. It’s a snapshot of school capacity taken in May 2024. This is a relatively new dataset, so it needs to be handled with a bit of care. Digging down into the numbers reveals the following:

This data shows how many pupils are on roll at state special schools, and also the nominal pupil capacity of each school. The number of pupils reported as being on roll is 6,500-8,000 bigger than the pupil capacity figure.
At the local authority level, two-thirds of LAs have more pupils on roll in state special than they have places for them. Some LAs are more than 40% over capacity
At the school level, around 60% of state special schools are over capacity.

We’ve created an interactive map so you can see how things stack up in your own LA. Take care with interpreting it, particularly those that look under-capacity: sometimes, this’ll be because a new special school has opened its doors and is slowly filling up its year groups over time. Just because it looks like there might be space, it doesn’t mean that it’ll necessarily be the right space for your child’s needs or age group.

image shows special school capacity in LAs — Click to enlarge. View the interactive map here

It’s also important to bear in mind what this dataset doesn’t show—the number of pupils who are parked in mainstream awaiting a special school place, or the number of pupils who are out of school entirely until a special school place gets freed up.

And if SEND placement shortages are your thing, we’d recommend you also read this blog, from the stats folks at FFT Education Datalab – it shows, among other things, that the large increase in the number of pupils attending state special schools has not been accompanied by an increase in the number of those schools.

Visits with the Department for Education

The final bit of recent DfE data we’ll cover here is about senior meetings. Every three months or so, the DfE publishes ‘transparency data’ that shows who its ministers and most senior civil servants have been meeting.

The data isn’t completely up to date; it’s currently up to the end of 2024, and it won’t include every single interaction DfE seniors will have had with the outside world.

But the pattern of meetings is worth paying at least some attention to, particularly as the purpose of each meeting is described in the data, so it’s possible to tell where and when SEND was a major topic.

In the last six months of 2024—in other words, the first six months of the new government—we counted 17 senior DfE meetings with external stakeholders where SEND was a major topic of discussion, plus two SEND-related school visits.

At the ministerial level, there was a fairly even split of external stakeholders represented at the meetings: local government, school bodies colleges, the National Network of Parent Carer Forums, and charities.

But when you include meetings with senior civil servants (above Director General level), things are different. Local government officials get much more access time with DfE mandarins to discuss SEND than any other group does, and by a large margin. Half of all the SEND meetings were with local government groups, compared to (for example) one meeting with the Tribunals service.

Since then, there have been senior DfE meetings with a couple of parent groups (SNJ included), and those will show up in the next crop of data. But if you’re wondering why local government lobbying messages seem to be landing so well with the DfE, it’s worth bearing in mind who they get repeated access to and who doesn’t get the same access.

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Matt Keer

Matt (he/him) has two deaf children. He has over 20 years of experience grappling with the SEND system as a parent, and he’s seen the best and the worst that the SEND system offers.
Matt specialises in SEND stats, data analysis, and in-depth investigations of policies. He has given evidence to several Parliamentary Select Committee inquiries, and his articles for SNJ on SEND funding, local government policy, and the SENDIST Tribunal have been quoted in Select Committee inquiry reports and national media.

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