Will £740m make mainstream truly accessible? Plus SEND safety valve deals halted—we call that a win!

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Yesterday, the Department for Education announced two things about funding for special educational needs and disability (SEND) in England:

£740 million in new capital investment, “to pave the way for more pupils with SEND to achieve and thrive in mainstream schools”;
Confirmation that the government “will not enter any more of its Safety Valve agreements for councils in financial deficits, pending wider reform of the whole system to prioritise early intervention, properly supporting councils to bring their finances under control.”

The government also announced the appointment of a chairperson, Professor Karen Guldberg, to head up a recently-announced “Neurodivergence Task and Finish Group” – a team of “experts that will work alongside the DfE to drive inclusive education.” I don’t know enough about neurodivergence to say anything sensible about this group, though I’m sure SNJ will be writing more about it in the coming months. However, I do know a bit about SEND funding.

So what do the funding announcements mean?

Let’s start with the £740 million. This is capital funding, which means it’ll be spent on school buildings, equipment, and specialist facilities, rather than the human beings who educate our children and young people. There have been similar capital funding grants injected into the SEND system each year since 2018.

Funding for teaching staff, therapists and training comes out of a different pot – revenue funding – and you might remember that the government announced a £1 billion increase to revenue funding in the budget a few weeks back.

A written statement to Parliament makes it clear that the £740 million will be doled out in the next financial year, which starts in April 2025. The same goes for the extra £1 billion in revenue funding.

The written statement also makes it clear that government will hand the £740 million over to local authorities to allocate. The guidance for how LAs will allocate the money isn’t out yet, and probably won’t be out for the next few months.

In keeping with its other recent statements on SEND, the government has made it pretty clear that they would like LAs to invest this £740m to boost specialist capacity in mainstream schools. But the language in the statement falls short of directing LAs to do that.

“This new funding can be used to adapt classrooms to be more accessible for children with SEND, to create specialist facilities within mainstream schools that can deliver more intensive support adapted to suit the pupils’ needs, and create special schools places for pupils with the most complex needs.”
Stephen Morgan MP, Education Minister

Less than previous capital allocations for SEND

At this point, it’s worth noting four things:

Firstly, while nobody is going to turn their nose up at £740m, it’s less SEND capital investment than the previous government averaged across their 2022-2025 Spending Review. Check the graph below for more detail.

Secondly, if the new government wants to see this £740m directed mainly at new mainstream SEND capacity, then they’ll probably need to compel LAs to do that.

Why? Because we’ve tracked how LAs have allocated previous SEND capital grants, and we’ve written about it here and here. Check the infographic below for an old snapshot of this, taken in late 2023. LAs have previously used SEND capital funding like this to plug their biggest provision gaps. That’s mostly meant boosting state special school capacity, particularly for autistic pupils and those with social, emotional and mental health (SEMH) needs, with Further Education barely getting a look-in at all.

Infoggraphic - accessible PDF available on page — From January 2024

More than two-thirds of the new places created by previous SEND capital grants have been in special schools, and there still aren’t enough places.

The new government is very, very keen on putting more SEN units and resource bases into mainstream schools. Thus far, looking across over £3 billion of SEND capital investment in the last six years, we estimate that LAs chose to invest less than 20% of this funding in units and bases. That suggests that someone in central government will need to do a bit of directing.

Thirdly, there will be a long wait—probably years—before much of this £740m will be converted into shiny new SEND provision. LAs have to plan, they will probably need to consult, they will need to find willing academy trusts, and (for once) they will have to navigate someone else’s labyrinthine bureaucratic hellscape to get things built.

And finally, shiny new buildings and equipment don’t educate SEND pupils. You need people to do that, and you need skilled, properly trained and properly paid people to do that well. And while new capital investment is a good thing, if it’s not possible to fund, recruit and retain enough people, this funding won’t make as much difference as it could.

No more new Safety Valve schemes

If you’ve been reading SNJ for a while, you’ll know that we’ve been covering the Safety Valve SEND financial intervention programme ever since its birth in 2021, and we were the first SEND outlet to report on it in depth.

Under Safety Valve, local authorities that have racked up big financial deficits on their education spending get financial bailouts from the DfE: in return, the DfE require these LAs to manage demand for SEND provision in very specific and oppressive ways.

It’s fair to say SNJ has never been a fan of the Safety Valve scheme. SNJ co-directors and some of its columnists have been campaigning relentlessly against it for years, so the news yesterday that the government will not be asking any other LAs to join was welcome.

Many of the local authorities in Safety Valve have struggled to stick to the terms of their agreements. Some LAs have been put into a ‘double secret probation’-style enhanced monitoring scheme, some have had their bailout payments withheld for not meeting financial targets—and this year, most LAs in the scheme are falling behind.

No LA has had their Safety Valve payments withheld for failure to run a decent SEND service.

Two years ago, the DfE asked LAs to share “good news” stories from their Safety Valve scheme work. If those good news stories exist, they haven’t been published. If you’re keen on breaking the record for the world’s shortest Freedom of Information response, it might be worth a go (and if you do, let us know!).

Promoted

SV stopped, but is it scrapped?

So can everyone affected by the Safety Valve agreements celebrate? That’s probably premature.

For one thing, it’s unclear what’s going to happen in the 38 local authorities that signed up to Safety Valve. Yesterday’s DfE statements were oddly imprecise, saying the following:

“Over time, over 30 local authorities have been supported to manage their high-needs budgets through the Safety Valve programme. We will continue to work with LAs with Safety Valve agreements to deliver their plans.”

That’s not quite the same thing as saying the DfE will work with LAs through an operational Safety Valve agreement. It’s also unclear what will happen with several LAs who were in the process of renegotiating the terms of their agreements as recently as last month. And ‘over 30’ isn’t 38.

Roughly half of the Safety Valve bailout cash has yet to be allocated. LAs inside the scheme will be nervous about what happens next. And LAs outside the scheme with big SEND financial deficits will be wondering what happens next too. The government hasn’t said anything yet about whether they’ll write off those deficits, or keep them in their current accounting limbo state past 2026.

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SV or not, we’re still waiting for culture change at the top of councils

But the main reason why it’s premature to celebrate is this: even if the Safety Valve concept has been fired into deep space, the thinking and organisational cultures that powered it are very much alive and well on planet SEND.

It’s not clear at this stage why the DfE has halted further use of the Safety Valve agreement, beyond yesterday’s statement that it has “not been effective enough across the board given the scale of the challenge.”

But Safety Valve had four main objectives: to make local authority SEND finances sustainable, to reduce demand for expensive specialist SEND provision, to prioritise early intervention, and to create conditions for more SEND pupils to be supported without EHCPs.

Those were the stated objectives of the previous government. They are also the stated objectives of the new government.

If Safety Valve has been frozen because it wasn’t “effective” enough, it’s reasonable to ask ‘effective at doing what’?

If [by implication] Safety Valve wasn’t “properly supporting councils to bring their finances under control,” then what does ‘proper support’ look like?

We don’t yet have an answer to that. It might be that the government hasn’t got one yet either. But it’s likely that “Son of Safety Valve” will be with us at some point. And we’ll be right here watching and waiting for it.

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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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