Delivering better value in SEND? Much of a new review is based on deep and fatal flaws that may uproot the SEND system

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Last week, the National Audit Office (NAO) issued a damning report on the state of SEND in England. On the same day, the Department for Education also issued a report on what consultants had learned from one of their SEND financial intervention schemes, Delivering Better Value in SEND (DBV).

Understandably, the DBV report got far less media scrutiny than the NAO report. So what did the DBV report say?

What is Delivering Better Value in SEND?

DBV is one of two schemes that the DfE has launched to help local authorities bring their SEND finances back in line. The DBV scheme began back in 2022, and 54 local authorities are part of it. The other scheme is known as Safety Valve, which we have written about extensively, and we won’t be covering that here.

DBV promises better local authority financial engineering, while improving outcomes for children and young people with SEND.

The programme has been controversial. The £19.5m DBV contract featured some specific targets, including:

at least a 20% reduction in new EHCPs,
a 20% reduction in placements in independent schools, and
a 2% reduction in special school placements.

When questioned about these targets, the DfE spent some time assuring everyone that these weren’t actual targets, more like aspirations or indicators of success.

Anyway, the DBV scheme is organised into two phases:

a diagnostic phase, where consultants researched the issues and report back to the LA with solutions, and
an implementation phase, where each participating LA can use a £1m grant from the DfE to road-test the solutions that the consultants came up with.

This new DBV report summarises the lessons learned from the diagnostic phase. The consultants were due to produce this report in the spring. It’s unclear why the report has only been released now.

What does the DBV diagnostic report say?

You can find the DBV diagnostic report here. The DBV team has also provided a useful toolkit that LAs outside the scheme can apply to their own situation. You can find that toolkit here.

The authors listed some important caveats: the work was designed to help individual LAs in the scheme, with system-level findings a secondary priority and not necessarily generalisable. The potential improvements that the DBV report authors have identified apply to the current SEND system only. Although the authors note that the report might help stimulate discussion about future reform, the improvements in the report aren’t meant to be a blueprint for it.

We’d also add another important caveat. We’ve covered the DBV methodology in a previous post. A lot of the most eye-catching findings in this report are anchored in a case review process that has deep and fatal flaws.

So when you see anything in this report that’s based on these case reviews, apply a lorry-load of salt to it. But these findings matter, because these are the findings that system leaders are most likely to present as rigorously-researched fact – rather than the cheese dreams of fantasy panels, made up of practitioners whose actual decisions almost never withstand stringent external scrutiny.

On the other hand, the consultants have done an impressive job mining and marshalling data in the local authorities that they’ve worked in. There are a lot of genuinely useful insights here, although the flaws in the case review process mean these insights are sometimes refracted and reported through a very restrictive lens.

What are the DBV report’s key messages?

Based on the case review process, the DBV process suggests that almost two-thirds of the 1,652 children and young people whose cases they looked at in detail could have had their needs met in a more effective way if the system worked better.

This process identified that the main barrier to better outcomes is placement: that many are being supported in a provision that is not the most effective for them.

There’s no given definition of “effectiveness” here, and it’s been determined by local practitioners and professionals, with the individual children, young people and families having no say at all in what constitutes an effective placement or an ideal outcome.
It’s very clear from the analysis that mainstream placement is considered to be more effective than specialist placements. There is no reasoning given for this.

‘Parental confidence’ in mainstream SEND provision is listed as an issue, again and again – particularly when it comes to autistic children and young people. The conceptual clarity here is iffy.

When they asked families, the DBV team carefully unpacked what ‘parental confidence’ actually means, and they did it in a sensible way. They found that it’s a byproduct of the current system working properly:
- SEND support that meets children’s needs,
- responsive health services,
- an accessible local offer, and
- an EHCP process that actually works. The presence of these very real things drives up confidence – the absence of these very real things erodes it.
However, when they talked to professionals, ‘parental confidence’ was defined in opposition to these factors. And when you do that – essentially, painting parental confidence as flimsy, vibes-based sentiment that dominates decisions, rather than something powerless that’s a byproduct of effective practice – you paint families as part of the problem.
And the latter is the dominant strain of thought amongst system leaders right now. Far easier to believe that families just need to Believe Harder, rather than confront widespread failures of operational competence, strategic governance, and basic ethics.

Based—again—on the case reviews, the DBV report authors assess that if the current system could be made to work properly, then 30,000 children and young people with EHCPs could be supported well without a statutory plan.

The DBV authors also assess that around 35,000 children and young people who are currently in specialist settings could have their needs met well in a mainstream setting. They assess that around 15,000 of the 35,000 could be perfectly well supported in a mainstream SEN unit or resourced provision, presumably with the remainder overwhelmingly educated in vanilla mainstream.

One of the key findings of the DBV case reviews is that if the current system can be made to work, then many children and young people can be stepped down from more expensive specialist support to less expensive support – and in some cases, to no specialist support at all.

And doing this would, apparently, not just be cheaper, it would also lead to better outcomes for those children and young people.

If the case review process is accurate, if the current system can be made to work properly, and if the right capacity can be engineered—and to be clear, you’d have to be higher than a touring 1970s funk band to believe that—then the following could apply, whilst boosting outcomes:

The number of children and young people with EHCPs who are currently in state special schools could be cut by tens of thousands of pupils;
The number of children and young people with EHCPs in independent or non-maintained special schools could be cut by around 75%: in fact, some of the case reviews suggested that these pupils could be reintegrated into vanilla mainstream settings without difficulty;
The number of children successfully educated in mainstream SEN units and resource bases could be increased by around 370%; and
The number of pupils educated in alternative provision or hospital schools could drop by almost 50%.

Out of school? You don’t count in this report

One telling insight into this process: It makes no effort whatsoever to engage with the tens of thousands of children and young people with SEND who cannot currently attend a school, college or apprenticeship placement, because no suitable provision exists for them. It’s as if they don’t exist. And on council financial balance sheets, many of them don’t.

You might be tempted to bin the report off at this stage. But it does have some worthwhile findings, and some of these stand a good chance of driving better practice.

Promoted

What’s of value in the report?

For example, the DBV team’s numberwang specialists looked hard at what happens during a child’s key transition points through the SEND system. It’s theoretically possible for a child to receive an EHCP at any point between the ages of 0-25, but the DBV data suggests that 43% of initial EHCPs are produced at three key transition points: early years, primary-to-secondary transition, and the shift to post-16 education.

Better-targeted support well before and after these transition stages could make it more likely that pupils’ and students’ needs will be met more effectively and efficiently. Some LAs are using their DBV implementation grant funding to see how well this approach can work.

Some of the DBV report addresses problems with the supply of SEND provision, as well as the “demand” for it. None of this is rocket science, but the recommendations are decently evidenced.

For example, the authors recommend:

bolstering specialist training for mainstream staff to support autistic pupils,
recruitment and/or expansion of specialist teams to support mainstream staff, and
trying to bring down ASD assessment pathway waiting times so that needs can be met earlier and more precisely.

For children and young people with social, emotional and mental health (SEMH) needs, the report clearly and convincingly identifies the lack of early intervention as a major driver of problems, with gaps in service offerings the most commonly cited issue.

Similarly, the DBV report recommends that mainstream schools need to be better tooled up to meet speech, language and communication needs, and that strategic local area service commissioning needs to improve to make that happen.

But even in these sections, the report often tips over into parent-blaming language. For example, here’s how the authors summarise challenges with early years SEND:

“Children and young people at the start of their education have their outcomes impacted by a lack of parental confidence in mainstream educational settings to deliver the right support for their child, and a lack of capacity for specialist support services leading to their support being delivered too late.”

Why? Because this finding is driven not by solid data, but by the case review process, which was overwhelmingly dominated by professional practitioners.

What impact will this report have?

“All of this makes it much more likely that the SEND system is not just going to be reformed – it’ll be uprooted. If a new government adopts the DBV programme’s recommendations, it’s unlikely to stop there.”
Matt Keer

The Delivering Better Value in SEND programme was commissioned by the last government. Much of its work is now done. Does any of this matter, now that we have a new government in charge?

It probably does. The new government chose to release the DBV report on the same day as the NAO’s SEND value-for-money report – probably not to bury it, but to illustrate a potential new pathway for the SEND system to follow.

In Parliament, the Schools Minister described the headline findings of the DBV report as “light at the end of the tunnel,” also remarking that its recommendations “can pave the way for a sustainable system in which schools cater for all children, and special schools cater only for those with the most complex needs.”

It’s a dim sort of light, at best. And if the primary aim of future policy is to bring SEND costs down, then it’s not going to be enough for the bean counters.

As indicated above, the DBV programme identified that 30,000 children and young people with SEND could be successfully parted from their EHCPs if the current system worked better. That 30,000 figure was put together using assumptions that can be charitably described as optimistic, and less charitably described as ketamine-fuelled.

There are probably now somewhere north of 600,000 children and young people with EHCPs. According to the National Audit Office, the DfE is predicting that without further reform, there will be just over 1,000,000 children and young people with EHCPs by 2033.

A 30,000 drop isn’t going to touch the sides.

Similarly, the DfE has told the NAO that they think the DBV programme could deliver somewhere between £272 million and £520 million of savings over a 10-year period. But the DfE also estimates that over just the next three years, the high-needs SEND cost is set to outstrip the real-terms high-needs SEND budget by roughly £3-4 billion.

The savings that DBV has identified aren’t going to touch the sides of that either.

All of this makes it much more likely that the SEND system is not just going to be reformed – it’ll be uprooted. If a new government adopts the DBV programme’s recommendations, it’s unlikely to stop there.

Download the report here (PDF)

Also read:

The Unacceptable Truth: 20 SEND legal rights at risk from the Government’s SEND reformsSeptember 9, 2026

Dear Secretary of State for Education, Lucy Powell: an Open Letter from Special Needs Jungle and SEND legal charity SOS!SENAugust 4, 2026

Mainstream SEND Funding: A simple explainer, another consultation, and why it really mattersJuly 22, 2026

Research: SEND case officers are LAs’ “human shield” gatekeepers. But parents shouldn’t have to be their own key workersSeptember 22, 2026

Experts at Hand: When is an occupational therapist also a SEND expert?September 30, 2026

A council's "improvement journey"? How determined SEND parents catalogued the trail of their LA’s unlawful behaviourSeptember 29, 2026

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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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