Renewed petition to SCRAP SEND Safety Valve and write off council High Needs debt

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SNJ first highlighted the SEND Safety Valve programme back in 2021. This Department for Education (DfE) scheme, essentially “blackmails” debt-ridden local authorities (LAs) into cutting services for disabled children in exchange for more funding. We’ve continued to monitor and raise issues with it ever since. But the scheme’s complexity, the lack of consultation with families, and the way information has not been transparent, often obscured within lengthy local authority documents, meant details were flying under the radar.

A quick safety valve recap

[If you’re already well-informed about Safety Valve, click here to skip to the petition link]

To recap, local authorities with the biggest or fastest-growing debts in their SEND budgets were “invited” to take part in the Safety Valve scheme. These LAs were required to devise a plan to cut their spending significantly, usually over a five-year period. Large spending cuts tend to result in cutting crucial support for disabled children. If LAs met their targets, they’d get government cash towards their “overspend”. “Overspend” doesn’t mean spending more than the service costs, it just means spending more money than they receive. There was no impact assessment for how rapidly cutting spending in an already over-stretched system would affect disabled children and their families, or of how LAs would manage their legal obligations to provide services. Yet for the councils with vast debts, many of which will effectively go bankrupt when these become due in March 2026, the safety valve scheme seemed like a rational solution.

Spoiler alert: it wasn’t. The Safety Valve agreements were never intended to address the debts. They were only meant to prevent the debts from growing, at the expense of our children’s provision. In fact, it was not actually possible for LAs to both meet their legal duties and their SV targets.

There are currently 38 local authorities in Safety Valve agreements, but some are suspended after (surprise!) failing to meet the impossible targets set. Many of the plans could only be achieved by significantly reducing the number of Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) issued or reducing support for post-16 learners. This could mean, for example, removing children from (hard-won) independent specialist schools and placing more disabled children into mainstream schools. In a massive shock to literally no one, LAs have not been able to do those things.

Raising awareness

In some safety valve areas, local parent-led groups began to form to challenge and spotlight these problematic agreements. My own local authority, Bournemouth, Christchurch & Poole (BCP) was the first to publish its proposed agreement, but only because it was forced to after a legal challenge and a petition that meant any agreement had to be voted on by the full council. Bristol council also made the news when it was revealed it had been negotiating a SV agreement in secret, keeping it from the public right up until the moment it was rubber-stamped. The council claimed it was advised by the DfE to keep it secret, something, of course, the DfE denied.

Local campaigns soon turned into the national Stop Safety Valve campaign. We produced videos, wrote articles, took part in interviews, contacted MPs and councillors and, crucially, started a parliamentary petition asking for the Safety Valve scheme to be suspended and for local authority SEND debts to be cleared. Things were going well and we gained 4,000 signatures…

Then the 2024 general election was announced, and as a result, all parliamentary petitions were immediately shut down.

Where are we now?

A lot has changed with Safety Valve since the general election. The new government recently announced the scheme had been suspended to new entrants, pending (ominously) “wider reform of the system”. Then the DfE announced it was to analyse the impact of the scheme, and, shockingly, awarded the contract to ISOS Partnership who are not only besties with local authorities, but were directly involved in the development of some of the SV agreements. So we’re all looking forward to reading that completely unbiased report.

SEND legal charity, IPSEA recently investigated the agreements. Its analysis found the agreements included all the things we’d been campaigning about: targets for refusing more EHC needs assessment requests, “managing demand” for statutory plans, and targets for placing disabled children in mainstream schools. Targets like these prevent LAs from meeting the needs of disabled children.

Parents from Bristol and Devon are now challenging those agreements via judicial review, with hearings happening this week. These cases argue SV agreements harm disabled children and young people by preventing access to EHCPs, and also that the councils did not consult with those who would be affected. The results could have a huge effect on the future of the scheme.

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The damaging impact on children and young people

We now know much more from families about how this scheme is affecting SEND services in their areas. The impacts are showing in Ofsted inspections of children’s services in these areas. It has become increasingly clear: not only do Safety Valve agreements harm disabled children and their families, they don’t even save councils from the debts caused, at least in part, by the previous government’s funding policies.

The Safety Valve programme exemplifies the attitude of the last government towards disabled children: cut spending regardless of the potential damage, these children are not worth our money. Forcing local authorities to make further cuts to barely-functioning, failing services, in exchange for a fraction of the funding they need to save themselves from financial oblivion, is grotesque.

There has been much talk from the new government about the broken SEND system and all the ways disabled children are being failed. But suspending new entrants to the Safety Valve scheme isn’t enough. If Labour wants parents to believe it’s serious, it needs to scrap it entirely, along with writing-off council SEND deficits that are causing even more unlawful decision-making.

This is what the petition is calling on them to do.

Sign the new petition…

If you agree that the Safety Valve scheme should be scrapped, please sign the new Stop Safety Valve petition. The continued existence of Safety Valve agreements puts councils in a position where they either deliberately fail vulnerable children or fail to meet the agreement terms, forfeiting much-needed cash. We need to be clear that we will not stand for schemes like this.

Find out more about the new petition and why you should support it.

Sign the Petition

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About
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Rachel Filmer

Parent Carer and Campaigner at Stop Safety Valve

Rachel Filmer is a SEND campaigner and parent of disabled twins boys, who are thriving in a specialist school following an arduous tribunal process in 2020.

Since then, Rachel has volunteered supporting local families through the EHCP and appeal process. She is passionate about the legal rights of disabled children and empowering parents to challenge unlawful decision making.

Rachel previously worked in publishing and international events before setting up her own business as an artist and tutor. For the last six years she has worked in co-production, predominantly within maternity and reproductive health, and strongly believes that SEND services should be designed alongside those accessing them.

Rachel founded local campaign group BCP Alliance for Children & Schools (www.BCPACS.uk) bringing together parents, education staff and unions to campaign against funding and service cuts within education. She also started the national Stop Safety Valve campaign