Last month, the Secretary of State for Education, Bridget Phillipson announced the government was delaying the announcement of reforms to the English SEND system until 2026. She said changes to SEND would be underpinned by five principles, as outlined in our post on the matter. One of these principles will be fairness:
“Every school should be resourced and able to meet common and predictable needs, including as they change over time, without parents having to fight to get support for their children.”
Over the last few months, we’ve concentrated a lot on potential reforms to Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs), and for good reason: they’re a key plank of our children’s legal rights.
But there’s been a lot less said about potential reforms to SEND funding, something that lies at the heart of most current problems. If you’ve experienced skulduggery from your friendly neighbourhood public servants, the chances are high that funding is involved somewhere along the line.
So what’s the current SEND funding situation, and what reforms are on the table?
Before we start, a warning: SEND funding can be really dull. So, to give you a fighting chance of getting to the end, this article contains more vivid mental imagery than normal.
SEND Funding 101
Education funding is complicated. SEND funding is even worse: borderline impenetrable and insanely complex by design. We have some older posts—starting here, and ending here (also linked below)—that walk through how it works.
But here are the simplified basics:
- Each year, Whitehall hands over education funding to England’s 153 upper-tier local authorities, in a package known as the Dedicated Schools Grant (DSG).
- This financial year, the DSG is worth around £69 billion.
- The amount each LA gets is defined by obsolete and incomprehensible funding formulae. Some LAs do well out of it, some do badly.
- Big chunks of the DSG also go immediately to school academy trusts for them to spend.
- Whitehall doles the DSG funding out to LAs in four blocks. Three of these DSG blocks—the Early Years Block, the Schools Block, and the High Needs Block—fund most education provision in state nurseries and schools, including SEND provision. You can see how it breaks down in the graph below.
- The High Needs Block (currently over £11 billion) is the DSG block that is only used to fund SEND. It’s sometimes referred to as ‘the SEND budget’, but it’s not because…
- …Most pupils with SEND have their support funded solely via the Schools Block. And if your kid is in a mainstream school with an EHCP, most of the funding used to educate them usually comes from the Schools Block, not the High Needs Block.
The Schools Block is huge. At the top level, no one really knows how much of it is spent on SEND provision, because it’s delegated down to individual schools and academy trusts to spend. The school sector says—plausibly—that there’s not enough money in the Schools Block for everything, but especially for SEND.
But system leaders focus on the High Needs Block, because this is where the financial problems are screamingly obvious. The High Needs Block helps pay for SEND support in mainstream schools, mostly for kids with EHCPs. It also helps fund mainstream SEND units and resource bases, and it helps fund post-16 SEND provision too.
- The High Needs Block also entirely funds state special schools, education in independent and non-maintained special schools, and education in specialist post-16 institutions.
Overspending the DSG
For the last seven years, most LAs have consistently spent more than Whitehall has given them via the DSG. That’s almost always been because there hasn’t been enough money in the High Needs Block to meet need, and that’s despite the grim and relentless LA demand suppression that SNJ readers know well.
Because of this, most local authorities have now built up chunky DSG deficits. The SEND financial intervention schemes that the DfE introduced from 2020 (via things like Safety Valve) have failed to tamp down the deficits.
This graph shows where we think things are now. Roughly 20% of LAs still have a surplus on their DSG account. But at the start of April 2025, the combined deficit across all the other LAs probably stood at £3.8 billion. That’s significantly worse than the DfE was predicting a year ago.
Unexpectedly large increases in high-needs funding requests from mainstream schools were the most common thing that blew LA high-needs budgets in 2024-25, with spending on independent special schools a close second.
Things look like they’re going to be even worse in this financial year. Council accountants are predicting that in-year deficits this year will be bigger than they were last year. By the start of April 2026, a combined DSG deficit of more than £6 billion looks entirely likely.
The SEND Override
This DSG deficit currently sits in financial limbo. People refer to it as a financial time-bomb, and with good reason: the DSG deficit is now so large that once it goes back onto council balance sheets, it might make some councils technically insolvent.
Until a few months ago, this time-bomb was all set to detonate next March. But over the spring and summer, a series of frenzied meetings took place. On the one hand, Whitehall officials. On the other, senior local government finance leads: a class of apparatchik who can not only afford to frolic in an “adult-only” woodland hot tub lodge, but actively enjoy doing it.
They couldn’t agree on bomb disposal, but they did reset the timer. Instead of next March, the bomb is now set to detonate in March 2028. The bomb’s timer has already been reset twice. It can be reset again. But the DSG deficit is now huge, it’s growing faster than ever, and Whitehall still says it wants this money back.
That means pain gets transferred to local authorities. LAs are very effective conductors of pain, so in turn, that means education settings suffer—and in turn again, so do our kids.
Battle of the Bands
Let’s go to the front line. Although overall SEND funding levels are increasing, more children and young people need statutory special educational provision than ever before.
The schools sector says that the Schools Block is more than maxed out to fund mainstream SEND—a claim that sounds plausible, but we have no way of verifying it.
So more schools than ever are tapping up the High Needs Block—but in real terms, the amount of extra funding that they are getting per pupil is going down.
Almost all LAs dole out High Needs Block cash to mainstream and state special schools via banded funding systems. These systems—also sometimes known as ‘top-up’—are supposed to be based on individual pupil needs.
In theory, the LA calibrates each banding level with enough funding to meet a given depth of individual need. In theory, this banding system doles out enough cash to give a school the extra funding it requires to meet the needs of each pupil, and no more.
That’s the theory. In practice, it’s something else. Each LA has developed its own banding system, and after years of financial juggling, the banded funding allocations often bear very little relationship to the resources required for a school to meet an individual child’s needs.
Over the years, we’ve used Freedom of Information requests to track changes in local authority high-needs banding. This has shown that at the per-pupil level, almost all LAs have inflicted real-terms cuts on their high-needs banded funding allocations, and that they’ve been doing it for years.
We repeated the exercise recently, and the trend is the same. It’s harder to do over time, because many LAs—particularly those in schemes like Safety Valve—have made structural changes to their banding systems in an effort to staunch the financial bleeding.
But the graph below illustrates what’s happening. The horizontal dotted line on the graph shows the rate of inflation over the last three years. The red bars show the median (midpoint) changes (if any) to each individual local authority’s band values.
The relationship between the red bars and the dotted line is the key thing—if the bar is lower than the dotted line, it represents a real-term cut to an LA’s median high-needs band values.
Since 2023, only 4% of LAs have increased the value of their high-needs ‘top-up’ bands at a median rate that’s kept up with inflation. The rest—on the graph, every LA with a bar below that black inflation line—will have inflicted a real-terms cut at per-pupil level on schools.
Median Changes to LA High-Needs Banding Values, April 2023 to March 2026 Click to enlarge. Accessible PDF here
It’s worse with state special provision
On top of that, the leaders who run state special schools and mainstream SEND units have been doubly shafted.
This is because some of their budget is made up of ‘place funding,’ set at levels that haven’t changed for over a decade. The place funding levels were already out of date when they were set in 2013. Worse still, they’re based on 2009 calculations by an unnamed private sector consultant, whose previous major deliverable was probably organising the annual Deep Heat frottage event at their university rugby club.
Because of inflation, the place funding is now effectively worth only 60% of what it was worth back in the early 2010s. Keeping place funding static has deprived state special schools and mainstream units of several billion pounds worth of funding since 2013.
All of this is why SEND funding feels tighter than ever at the frontline, and it’s why the government’s messages about SEND investment land so badly.
So what does the government plan to do about it?
Like the previous government, ministers, civil servants and their advisers describe the SEND financial situation as “unsustainable.” At this point, it’s worth noting a couple of things.
- Sustainability is determined by priority, and central and local government have been describing SEND finances as “unsustainable” for six long years now.
- The language of sustainability is not framing that officials use – ever – to describe the damage that is being done to our kids’ lives and life chances. By implication and by deed, they assume we can sustain it. We can’t.
The government says it wants to make the SEND system financially sustainable, without compromising outcomes for children and young people with SEND. That’s a laudable ambition. But there’s no detail yet on how they plan to do it.
The previous government set out an improvement plan in 2023. This included proposals to set national banding arrangements for high-needs SEND, and tariffs for some types of provision. The Department for Education tasked a group of consultants—many of whom could afford to support an addiction to adult-only woodland hot tub frolicking—to work on developing these national funding arrangements.
We’ve no idea how far these consultants got, and this work seems to have been quietly dropped off their current work plan. We don’t know whether that’s because they completed it, or because it’s just not a priority right now.
So how hard would it be to create a national system of SEND funding levels without shafting children and young people? We crunched our way through the data. And given where things are right now, the answer is ‘close to impossible.’
SEND funding: the final boss of post code lotteries
We now have a very large amount of data on how LAs hand out banded high-needs funding to schools at a per-pupil level.
If you’re a charity or a state-funded school and you want to see this data, feel free to get in touch. If you’re a consultancy outfit, you’re out of luck—the law doesn’t allow us to pass on data for commercial purposes. And in any case, we’re not contributing to your post-frolic lodge cleaning bill.
As stated above, each LA has come up with its own home-grown high-needs funding allocation system. There are around 150 of these systems, each working in a different way, but typically, with all the integrity, transparency, and output consistency of a redneck meth lab.
Because of this, the amount of high-needs top-up funding mainstream and special schools get per pupil to meet a given level and type of need varies hugely. It’s governed by little more than which LA your child’s educational setting belongs to, and the depth of financial excrement your LA is in.
Here’s a graph that shows minimum, maximum and median bands for ‘top-up’ funding per pupil in mainstream schools in over 100 LAs this year. We’ve grouped it by region.
There’s simply no point trying to interpret this graph, it’s chaos incarnate – it looks like a crack-addled spider has crawled over the page.
Local Authority High-Needs Band Values for Mainstream Schools, 2025-26 Click to enlarge. Accessible PDF here
Here’s another one, showing the top-up funding per pupil for mainstream SEND units and resource bases across the country. Some are lavishly funded, receiving more money per-pupil than most special schools get. Other units get funded on levels that strongly suggest that LAs are paying schools to deliver the equivalent of a couple of TAs with some bean bags. Amazingly, some resource bases seem to get no extra cash at all beyond basic place funding.
Mainstream SEND Units & Resource Bases: General Top-Up Banding Ranges, 2025-26 Click to enlarge. Accessible PDF here
And here’s how it looks for state special schools that are set up to meet multiple needs. You’d expect some variety here, but it’s clear the budgets of similar special schools in neighbouring areas must vary by hundreds of thousands of pounds per year—for little other reason than individual LA policy.
State Special Schools: Multi-Need Banding Ranges, 2025-26 Click image to enlarge. Accessible PDF here
The processes that LAs use to design these banding systems are usually opaque. Some banding systems are now automated, providing a further layer of obscurity.
Each LA has its own Sorting Hat to assign its band levels – sets of banding descriptors completely riven with deficit language, backed by panel processes that, again, are hidden from view.
Nobody knows what the right amount of funding is to meet a given need.
No-one.
Safety Valve consultants have tried flattening this out a bit, but purely with the aim of cost reduction. What they’ve often done is compare a set of LA band values, point to a lower one, and then tell LAs that’s the target.
It’s basically no different to putting a wedding cake made from dried bullshit into a hydraulic press, pulling the lever, and then claiming the output is tasty, harmless, and legal to serve.
Key Content
What now for SEND funding?
The previous government’s aim was to create a national system of high-needs banding values, anchored to a national set of needs descriptors, so that everyone in the system would know what funding to expect.
We don’t know whether the current government has let the consultants continue their work, or what they intend to do with the work that’s been done.
But what we can tell is that the creation of a standardised national high-needs funding allocation system would create immense disruption.
The starting point is huge variation, so at school level, there would be tens of thousands of winners and losers: some schools potentially getting more funding, some potentially getting a lot less.
DfE ministers have previously said they don’t intend to remove special educational provision that is ‘effective,’ whatever that means.
But unless the DfE has managed to Jedi mind-trick the Treasury since the last Spending Review, any standardisation of high-needs funding will lead to some schools getting less. Given the huge variation, some could end up with a lot less. If so, that would almost certainly mean the reduction of effective SEN provision at some schools.
How will they manage to avoid that? It’s completely unclear to us, and it’s probably still unclear to them too.
Proper resourcing for SEND?
Going back to the fourth of the government’s five new SEND reform principles:
“Every school should be resourced and able to meet common and predictable needs, including as they change over time, without parents having to fight to get support for their children.”
That sounds great. But there’s lots of different ways that this could be done, and there’s a lot of fudgy language in that statement of principle.
Which needs are “common and predictable,” and who decides that? Who checks what schools do with those resources, and at what level are checks made? What happens to funding for the settings educating kids who have “unusual and less predictable” needs? Does “every school” mean every school, or has someone forgotten (yet again) that special schools exist?
The way SEND funding gets doled out to schools and colleges will probably change, but it’s unclear how. Some influential people in the SEND system want to break the link between individual EHCPs and individualised levels of funding. Instead, extra funding might be doled out to clusters of schools to distribute.
It’s unclear how this could work within the current SEND legal framework, but it’s pretty clear that current law is on the block, so cluster funding will doubtless be an option under consideration.
It looks likely that government will take steps to rein in both the use and funding of independent special schools. Spending in this sector has increased greatly in recent years, largely because state specialist provision is full to bursting.
Some of these schools are profit-making, but not all. Some are venerable charities that often represent the last hope and wellspring of expertise for kids with low-incidence needs. Others are run by people rich enough to have more luxury woodland hot tubs at their home than an entire Center Parcs for all their adult-only frolicking needs.
Children’s needs must be met from somewhere
But if pupils’ needs are to be met in full, reducing reliance on these schools would mean that LAs will need to commission much more specialist therapy provision from the state sector. When you ask the high-priced help whether this extra therapy commissioning is going to happen, all you get is a bovine stare.
And what about the £6 billion DSG deficit time bomb, now due to detonate in March 2028? This is what the government said back in the summer.
“We recognise that local authorities will need support during the transition to a reformed SEND system. The government will commence a phased transition process which will include working with local authorities to manage their SEND system, including deficits, alongside an extension to the Dedicated Schools Grant Statutory Override, which is currently due to end in March 2026, until March 2028. The government will provide more detail by the end of the year including a plan for supporting local authorities with both historical and accruing deficits. We will set out more detail at the provisional Local Government Finance Settlement.”
The Fair Funding Review 2.0
It’s unclear what the plan might be now, particularly now proposals for change have been pushed back. The provisional Local Government Finance Settlement probably won’t be announced until after the Budget, which is on 26 November.
That leaves LAs feeling very insecure in the run-up to the Budget. And when LAs feel insecure, they tend to crank up the lobbying machine. So over the next few weeks, we can expect plenty of vicious articles about the “burden” children and young people with SEND apparently pose, about “out of control” spending, about (non-existent) over-diagnosis, and the price of all this for honest, hard-working council taxpayers.
Funding is dull. Really dull. But this stuff matters, because it shapes the environment in which powerful people think about the value of our kids’ provision and our kids’ legal rights.
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Also read:
- Beyond EHCPs: Why Inclusion Needs More Than a Document
- The Unacceptable Truth: 20 SEND legal rights at risk from the Government’s SEND reforms
- How health and family support systems are failing children starting school
- WEBINAR RECORDING! The implications for children’s legal rights to EHCPs and EOTAS of the Government’s SEND proposals
- When things go right: Shining a light on SEND Practitioners making a positive impact [Giveaway!]
- From suspicion to support: why the Government’s child protection reforms matter for disabled children
- Have your say on the future of transport for disabled children and young people
- Unison voices major concerns over SEND reform health plans for sick and disabled children out of school in the EOTAS consultation
- Top Tips for the EOTAS & EHCP consultation: Protect your child’s rights to statutory SEND support
- Navigating constraints: Why a former PCF chair thinks the current model is missing the mark for families
- Dear Secretary of State for Education, Lucy Powell: an Open Letter from Special Needs Jungle and SEND legal charity SOS!SEN
- Research: Disabled young people define inclusive education as “learning in the place that’s right for them”
- Mainstream SEND Funding: A simple explainer, another consultation, and why it really matters
- Capital carrot, SEND steamroller: The Government’s evidence-light reform route isn’t waiting for anyone
- Schools White Paper: What do we know so far about funding for SEND?
- SEND cash splash: What does it all add up to—and will ditching debt improve provision?
- Inclusion bases: a new label, a big ambition, same unanswered questions
- Fix SEND our way for 90% of SEND debt write off, Government tells councils, urging swift action on change. So much for co-production…
What kind of government is “bold” enough to scrap statutory EHCPs from vulnerable children?May 16, 2025
The SEND reforms in the Schools White Paper reveal rights given, and rights stripped awayFebruary 24, 2026
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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.
- Top Tips for the EOTAS & EHCP consultation: Protect your child’s rights to statutory SEND support - August 19, 2026
- Mainstream SEND Funding: A simple explainer, another consultation, and why it really matters - July 22, 2026
- EHCPs 2026: A relentless rise, but who’s surprised? Plus SNJ’s annual LA Hall of Shame - June 27, 2026
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