Commenting on the National Audit Office report, Support for children and young people with special educational needs, Daniel Kebede, General Secretary of the National Education Union, said;
“This NAO report must act as a wake-up call to the government about the scale of the crisis and the level of ambition required to fix it.
'After 14 years of cuts to schools' spending power, mainstream schools cannot afford to offer a good general level of support for pupils with special needs. Mainstream schools' spending power has fallen by £3.2bn since 2010.
‘The root cause of the problems are the catastrophic reforms of the previous Government under Education Secretary Michael Gove who weakened local authorities' powers to manage special needs provision, including banning them from opening new schools even where there was a high need. As this report points out, local authorities have now been forced to place children in independent schools at more than twice the cost of a state place. In 2022-23, local authorities spent £2bn on these places. Bridget Phillipson must end this ideological madness.
‘There needs to be a radical programme of reform that meets the needs of SEN pupils including timely access to support and a much more flexible curriculum enabling students to flourish in a well-resourced learning environment. All of that starts with a major funding commitment from Government”.