The other day, I was chatting with some friends who still live in my old LA. They told me that the LA had decided to stop funding some of its mainstream SEN units, with the expectation that the kids would transition into vanilla mainstream school placements. It turns out that one of the SEN units for the chop is the one that my kids used to attend.
That sounded strange to me. We don’t know much yet about future SEND reform, although it sounds increasingly like changes will be seismic, and that “some” people will need to be “bold” and “brave.” But one thing we do know—plenty more mainstream SEN units and resource bases are supposed to be a big part of the answer.
So what’s going on back in my old LA? Is it just a local thing, or are loads of mainstream SEN units and resource bases closing? I spent a bit of time looking at the data. It shows that lots of mainstream SEN units and resource bases are being created across the country. But it also shows that loads of them are closing too.
What does the data show?
The Department for Education (DfE) categorise an SEN unit as specialist provision in a mainstream school where pupils spend most of their time. They categorise a resource base (or ‘resourced provision’) as a specialised source of SEN support for pupils who spend most of their time in mainstream classes.
At ground level, the distinction between a unit and a resource base is a bit hazier, but they’re both supposed to provide specialist SEN support for a given need (or needs) in a mainstream school.
I went back and had a look at the school census data on SEND that the DfE puts into the public domain each year. This includes data at school level, including whether a mainstream school has a SEN unit, a SEN resource base, both, or neither. Next, I compared snapshots of this census data for each year from January 2021 through to January 2024. I looked at how many schools still had their SEN unit or resource base, how many schools had started up new SEN units or resource bases, and how many had got rid of them.
The overall picture isn’t that surprising – there’s been a steady increase in the numbers.
- At the start of 2021, the school census says there were 1,015 mainstream schools with a SEN resource base, 301 mainstream schools with a SEN unit, and a further 51 schools with one of each.
- At the start of 2024, the same data collection process says that there were 1,116 schools with SEN resource bases, 340 schools with SEN units, and 52 with one of each.
That’s roughly a 10% increase over three years, although the overall proportion of mainstream schools with units or resource bases is still pretty tiny – 1 in 17 primary schools and 1 in 7 secondary schools have this type of provision, according to the DfE.
Things look weirder though, when you drill down a bit:
- One in six of the schools that had a SEN unit or resource base in January 2021 no longer had one in 2024;
- Over 360 new units and resource bases were created at some point between January 2021 and January 2024…
- …but over 220 SEN units and resource bases that were registered in the school census in January 2021 weren’t there in January 2024.
This is how it looks graphically.
Put another way, for every three brand-spanking new SEN units and resource bases that have been created over the last three years, two older ones have been shut down.
Why? That’s a harder question to answer, at least with public data.
Also read: Act now! Sign and Share the Parliamentary Petition to PROTECT SEND RIGHTS!
LA Fire-Fighting, or Something Else?
I asked the DfE statisticians if there was any extra light that they could shed, but they didn’t reply. :(
Luckily, the experts at FFT Education Datalab were a lot more helpful. They pointed me at some recent research they’d done into SEN resource bases – you can find that here.
FFT Education Datalab looked into the types of special educational needs being met by resource bases over time. They’ve found that the number of schools with resource bases for autistic pupils has grown by 26% since 2021.
But over the same period, the number of schools with resource bases to meet a whole range of other needs has fallen, including physical disability, deafness, visual impairment, and moderate learning difficulties. Check the FFT graph below:
So it looks like the deployment profile for mainstream SEN units and resource bases is shifting. There’s a bit more specialist SEN provision in mainstream schools for autistic pupils, but less provision for a whole range of less common (but no less important) special educational needs and disabilities.
Lower incidence needs losing mainstream “specialist” provision
Some of the data here is a bit tricky, so are we sure that this is what’s actually happening? We think so, because it’s corroborated by separate research we’ve done into SEND capital grant spending by local authorities.
Following the money tells us that over 70% of new SEND unit and resource base places funded through this grant are being funnelled towards ASD and social, emotional and mental health needs, with virtually nothing for less common types of SEN and Disability.
In practice, what this means is that specialist provision in mainstream for lower-incidence needs—Deaf kids like mine, for example, to declare my past interest, is being hollowed out. Units and bases that support these needs are being closed, and LAs are generally not building replacements. And for the most part, children who used to attend these units and bases have nowhere else to go that does a similar job.
When you read SEN unit and resource base closure notices, local authorities say that this is all part of the plan. They’re simply adjusting to changing profiles of need. When pressed, they sometimes say that there’s less demand, and that new technology now makes this type of provision less necessary anyway. That’s usually gaslighting. The needs of kids with low-incidence SEND tend to remain steady over time, as do their numbers. Technology isn’t a silver bullet; mainstream environments vary, and many of these kids have other types of additional needs too.
As they’re low incidence (less prevalent) needs, mainstream teachers tend to have had less practice in meeting them, which tends to make specialised support more vital to the mix. A sense of inclusion can also be harder to secure: pupils with low-incidence needs won’t often be around kids with similar needs in vanilla mainstream, so they usually get a lot out of being with others in the same situation as themselves.
At the same time, LAs are fire-fighting. They consider the rising numbers of pupils with other types of need and the potential expense of special school placements. Then they set this against their state-ravaged budgets. The accountability vacuum means they can blind themselves to duty and impact, and deploy the investment pot they have accordingly.
It’s not just the local authority, it’s schools too…
So, when we look at why so many SEN units and resource bases are closing, is that all that’s going on? Are LAs just acting on strategic logic, reshuffling their local offer of SEN units and resource bases to meet a changing set of needs?
That’s probably not the only thing that’s happening. It looks like there’s something going on at school level too.
We took a look at the SEN units and resource bases that were listed in the January 2021 school census, but weren’t there in January 2024. And sure, pupils with low-incidence needs are disproportionately amongst those affected. But based on the profile of needs, most of the units and resource bases shuttered over the last three years are also those that LAs really don’t want less of right now: specialist provision for autistic pupils, those with speech and language needs, and those with SEMH.
It’s unclear why these have been sent to the educational knacker’s yard. We checked for things like primary / secondary mix, school academisation, and faith school status, but they didn’t reveal anything remarkable.
Someone with better access to better data sources than we do ought to look into it. But if we had to guess, then there are probably two things going on here:
- Individual school or academy trust leaders deciding, sometimes reluctantly, that offering this type of SEN provision just isn’t financially affordable any longer: check our previous work on real-terms cuts to high-needs top-up payments for a reason why this might be happening.
- Individual school or trust leaders deciding pupils with this type of SEN aren’t a good fit any longer for the things that matter more to them. They contaminate progress and attainment data, they’re sometimes incompatible with whole-school behavioural policies, or they otherwise generally get in the way of the pathway to (what was) an Outstanding rating. If you’re reading this, you’re probably not one of those leaders, but you definitely know some who are.
SEN Units and resource bases: The upcoming gamble, based on flawed research
The government looks like it’s going to be betting big on mainstream SEN units and resource bases as a way of meeting needs at a lower cost. Here’s a great article we ran recently from a base leader on how to run and oversee this type of provision well.
But there’s virtually no research out there that tells policymakers or school leaders about how effective mass mainstream deployment of SEN units and resource bases might be, or what factors make a difference.
Meanwhile, the research that seems to be guiding government thinking into how easily SEN unit and resource base provision can replace special school placements is hugely flawed. It’s based on fantasy case review workshops where resource constraints didn’t exist, where positive outcomes weren’t clearly defined, and where individual children or their families were not consulted.
Many of the teaching unions, whose members work in and with SEN units and resource bases, are deeply sceptical about the feasibility and value of wider implementation. And like everything in SEND, the implementation is where stuff tends to go tits-up. Right now, implementation of SEN unit and resource base policy looks like a bizarre game of Whac-a-Mole.
Closing almost as many SEN units and resource bases as are being created is a costly thing to do, for pupils and budgets alike. If you’re doing this properly, rather than cynically implementing a façade of inclusion on the cheap, then creating this type of provision means expensive capital investment, and it’s not necessarily much cheaper per place than special schools in revenue budget terms. So if the provision doesn’t last long, you’ll have flushed a lot of that investment away.
You can’t easily scale up this type of provision within a mainstream school, or implement efficiencies to it, without screwing over children and staff. All too often, the only way is down, and then out—which is what happened to my kids’ former SEN unit.
A while back, my old LA decided that they had better things to spend their hard-pressed budget on than deaf children with additional needs. They discouraged families from visiting my kids’ unit, and discouraged them from expressing a preference for it in their EHCPs. The LA only promoted it to families who were actively looking at out-of-area special schools.
A manufactured decline
‘Demand’, artificially suppressed by the LA, and then by a school leadership team who were borderline obsessed with getting an Outstanding from Ofsted, meant the unit’s skilled and effective specialist staff were steadily stripped away. Provision from NHS speech and language therapists flickered, then died.
Over time, it basically became a Potemkin provision. And that’s desperately sad. It was a really inclusive, well-run unit. Former deaf pupils would come back each year, and talk to kids and their parents about their adult lives. I used to think my kids would be able to do the same as adults: to be role models, to pass some sort of torch of hope on. The unit’s closing, and they won’t have that chance now.
But what’s far worse is that specialist support in this LA for the deaf pupils who would have attended the unit is now essentially homeopathic. In September 2025, there will be no deaf units or resource bases in this LA at all. The council employs, for now, a couple of peripatetic teachers of the deaf: they have a theoretical caseload of 160 pupils each, and they manage that caseload by focusing on early intervention and just not supporting half of the kids at all.
SEN units and resource bases can work—right up to the point where they don’t. And we all need to understand better why and how that happens, because it seems to be happening a lot.
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Also read:
- SEN Resource Bases and Unit Provision in Secondary—what are they and do they count as inclusion?
- What do school and college workforce unions want for the future of SEND?
- A Resourced Provision toolkit to boost mainstream SEND Inclusion
- Language matters: Why the definition of SEND is shifting, and why we should be worried
- Inquiries and injustice: the SEND Inquiry hears the parental perspective
- More “bold” reform for SEND and more children in mainstream—but how mainstream is it really?
- 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”
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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