Lee Humber evaluates the crisis in provision for children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities

The education of children and young people considered to have Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) continues in long term crisis. According to the Guardian:

“Four in five English local authorities will in effect be bankrupted by rising special educational needs spending unless the government introduces significant reforms to the system, council leaders have said. Councils have called on ministers to write off special educational needs and disability deficits accumulated by local authorities over the past few years. These are projected to reach £14bn in two years’ time.”

A SEND White Paper, long awaited, is due to be published in the coming months. Unless it completely writes off local authority SEND-related debt – highly unlikely – the White Paper is likely to achieve little. In fact the problem is more profound than Local Authorities’ debt burdens, being rooted in the government’s continued reliance on a neoliberal economic model for running SEND and many other previously public services.

The most common narrative with regard to increased SEND costs is that the number of students with a variety of SEND-related diagnoses has ballooned. BBC research in 2025 estimates 1 in 5 students nationally now have a SEND diagnosis. This approach to the problem is, at best, naïve and needs to be questioned. How close to the actual number is this estimate? Why are so many more SEND diagnoses being made? Has the change from public to profit-driven systems of education affected learning and teaching relationships? The idea is full of holes. Instead, we need to analyse the structural and more fundamental changes in the provision of SEND services to fully understand why it is failing.

Key aspects of the send crisis

There are two key aspects of the SEND crisis: how services for SEND students are currently managed using Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCP) and how funding models for such services, increasingly dominated by the for-profit ‘independent’ SEND sector, massively inflate costs. 

Firstly, to look briefly at the on-going chaos which characterises EHCPs. This approach was brought in between 2014 and 2018 to replace the system of School Statements and Statements Plus, a short-lived approach used by previous Labour governments. The EHCP is claimed to be an attempt to bring together key ‘stakeholders’ around the needs of a child, to coordinate provision of services. As well as the child, their parent or carers, these ‘stakeholders’ include Local Authorities, schools – special and/or mainstream – health services and social care services.

Apart from the logistical difficulties of securing service agreements between these monolithic institutions, each of them continue to face severe and worsening financial constraints resulting from year after year of funding cuts.  As we know, Local Authorities have experienced huge budget cuts over the last 20 years. To illustrate the impact of this, average core funding per UK citizen has fallen by 26% in real terms since 2010. It was set to be another 18% lower in real terms per person by 2024–25. Councils have closed libraries, swimming pools and Sure Start Centres, and cut spending on planning, cultural services, housing, highways, transport and many other areas. Inevitably the most vulnerable in our society, including those with SEND and their families, suffer most. 

Social care services are also under intense financial pressure. In 2024 a report by the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services described the situation as the ‘worst financial outlook in years’. In response, the government has said it wants to improve partnership work between public and private care providers. Given the record of governments, Labour and Tory, over the last few years we can be sure ‘partnership work’ can be read as code for increasing the presence of private, for-profit providers further. 

Failures of the education, health and care plans (EHCP) approach

As a result of the above, the EHCP approach to coordinating social care, health, education and local authority institutions around the specific, unique and often complex needs of individuals, has proven to be a near impossible task. The past decade is dominated by stories of parents endlessly fighting for desperately needed services for their children, faced by a combination of cumbersome, under-funded and under-staffed institutions.  The EHCP system is failing those in need. A recent report from the University of Leeds showed that:

• In 2022, only 49% of EHC plans were produced within the 20-week statutory limit. The average wait for an ADHD assessment for young people aged 19-25 is almost four years in one local authority in Yorkshire and the Humber.
• In 2022 the percentage of EHC plans produced within 20 weeks in the North East of England was as low as 13%. Similar disparities are present in other regions, such as the North West.
• There is large variability in the extent to which local authorities run the Healthy Child Programme, which can facilitate identification of SEND before school entry. In one local authority, one in five children do not receive their two-year developmental check, and in another this is as high as one in three.
• By the end of secondary school, the achievement gap between pupils with no identified SEND and pupils with SEND support (but no EHCP) is nearly two years.
• Children with SEND are three times as likely to be suspended from school, nearly twice as likely to be persistently absent from school, and three times as likely to be ‘Not in Employment, Education or Training’ at 16-17 years of age.

https://www.n8research.org.uk/media/CotN_SEND-AP_Report_6.pdf

The broader context for EHCPs.

EHCPs sit within a broader approach to managing and funding education services. Over the past 30 years public services generally have increasingly been replaced by private sector, for-profit providers, whether that be in education, health or other sectors.  In education, the past decade has seen the rise in the numbers and influence of Academy Trusts, latterly in the form of Multi Academy Trusts (MAT). What these for-profit services have in common are funding models dependent on Local Authority contracts and debt-financing, embedding often long term debt repayments – and of course investor dividend payments – into running costs. In special education, increasingly dominated by the so-called independent sector, this makes SEND services increasingly expensive for Local Authorities. 

A report by Samantha Booth in Schools Week in December 2023, showed how this approach continues to grow in the SEND provision sector and how it affects provision. For example:

• In 2020-21 councils spent £1.3 billion on independent and non-maintained special schools (NMSS), more than double the £576 million spent in 2015-16.
• The number of pupils at these schools grew by 52 per cent over that time
• The average cost of an independent and NMSS place in 2021-22 was £56,710 – more than double the £23,224 average cost of a place at a state special school
• Delivery of new state special schools is poor with only one of 37 new special schools announced in 2020 opening by 2023. Six first approved in 2017 were still yet to open in 2023

Latest figures show the number of independent sector schools (which includes specialized, for-profit SEND settings as well as NMSS) has seen substantial growth, rising to 673 by August 2023. The rise in for-profit and much more expensive special school provision has come as state school development has been stalled.

By January this year, Local Authorities’ accumulated deficits were being projected to reach approximately £14 billion to £17.8 billion by 2029. As of early 2026, 95% of councils are reporting Dedicated Schools Grant (DSG) deficits, driven by a 165% increase in reliance on expensive, independent special school placements since 2015.

For example, Outcomes First Group, one of the largest private SEND school providers, is working with councils that had bids for new special schools rejected. In 2023 government approved fewer than half of the 85 applications by local authorities. That is, while local authorities’ attempts to build new special schools have been frustrated, previously by Conservative governments, private SEND providers are being enabled.

Profiteering costs spiral

John Pearce, Association of Directors of Children’s Services’ president, said there are ‘concerns’ about the ‘profiteering, costs spiraling and lack of control the local authorities have over the whole system’. For example, Sheffield Local Authority said in 2023 that the average cost for a SEND student in an independent special school was £70,000, with the highest being £111,000. This was a ‘significant pressure’ on the Authority’s high needs allocations, as well as being a 7 percent increase in costs in a year.

In 2025, to get an idea of the main providers of independent SEND provision, Special Needs Jungle (SNJ) asked a selection of councils in exceptional need for their individual placement costs. Of the ten independent providers shown to have received the most money by the SNJ research, five were owned by offshore companies. Another is owned by an Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund. A further three were charities.

It is difficult to establish how much profit firms are making from the SEND sector specifically, as many also profit from children’s social care placements. But a report commissioned by the Local Government Association on children’s social care in 2025 estimated four of the companies in the SNJ analysis made over £184 million in profit in the last reporting period alone. The biggest providers are:

Outcomes First

Outcomes First Group and its brand Acorn Education is estimated to have received a combined income of £81 million in the last six years from the 22 councils that responded to the SNJ research. The group, which has 56 schools in England and runs children’s homes, was acquired by private equity firm Stirling Square Capital Partners in 2019. Its ultimate controlling party is registered in Jersey, the Channel Island tax haven.

Witherslack

The company runs 24 schools as well as therapeutic learning centres and children’s homes. It recorded the largest profit margin of 26.5 per cent, according to the LGA report. It had an income of £148 million. Mubadala Capital, a subsidiary of Abu Dhabi’s second-largest sovereign wealth fund, owns the company. It was acquired from private equity firm Charme Capital Partners in 2021. Witherslack received an estimated £30 million from councils within the last six years.

Aspris

Aspris was set up by Waterland, a Dutch private equity firm, when it bought The Priory Group in 2021 for £1.1 billion. It runs 34 specialist schools and colleges in the UK as well as children’s homes. The most recent accounts for Aspris Holdco Limited show that the highest paid director received £1.1 million, including a one-off award of £305,000 ‘relating to the exceptionally high level of corporate transactions and reorganisation activity successfully completed’. Aspris received an estimated £33.7 million from cash-strapped councils.

As the research shows, millions of pounds are annually diverted from providing much needed provision for children with SEND into the pockets of individual shareholders or paying off interest on company debt. At the same time, the inflated costs of independent providers, along with broader, government-led political agendas, disable local authority SEND provision both by governments withholding funding for Local Authority schools building and by private capital bleeding councils dry.

Labour’s reponse

The Labour government’s response to this long-term crisis has been miserable. In 2025 their attack on disability benefits, with threats of cuts of up to £4.5 billion, was abandoned after disability rights groups’ protests were echoed by some Labour MPs. A promised SEND White Paper, setting out a new approach has yet to be published. Can we rely on Labour to make the changes needed? I won’t be holding my breath. The last Labour government of 1997-2010 under Tony Blair showed itself enthusiastic supporters of the kind of market-oriented approach to replacing public sector provision with for profit providers. The Learning and Skills Act of 2000 was instrumental in causing the tidal wave of school academies and the ‘education for profit’ ethos currently bedeviling mainstream and special schools alike.

Until public money stops being syphoned out of education, spending into investor dividends and private capital’s debt repayment, the crisis in SEND provision will continue. To achieve that would mean Labour abandoning a neoliberal economic model it has played full part in embedding.