Council highlights “urgent” need for action on financial sustainability of SEND system, warning it will be “forced into making cuts”

North Somerset Council has written to the Secretary of State for Education warning that the Government’s safety valve programme, which is designed to manage local authorities' SEND budget overspends, has “fallen short” in several key areas.

The local authority claimed it might be “forced into making cuts”, impacting vulnerable children.

It also warned that despite its commitment to meeting the needs of children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), escalating costs are placing an “unsustainable burden” on its budgets.

Cllr Catherine Gibbons, North Somerset's lead member for children's services, wrote: “This pressure is exacerbated by the failure of the Safety Valve Programme to deliver the anticipated financial benefits and savings that were intended to bring much-needed relief to local authorities like ours.”

Safety valve agreements are written agreements by individual local authorities with the Department for Education (DfE), agreeing that the DfE will “bail out” local authorities that have over-spent on their high needs budgets.

In exchange for financial assistance, local authorities are asked to agree to a plan which will eventually return them to a point where their spending is within budget.

However, the council said in its letter to Bridget Phillipson that the programme has “fallen short” in several key areas:

1. “Inadequate Funding: The funding provided through the programme has not kept pace with the actual costs of delivering SEND services. This has left us struggling to bridge the gap between funding and expenditure.
2. Implementation Delays: Delays in the implementation of the programme have prevented timely interventions, exacerbating our financial difficulties and leading to a situation where it is increasingly difficult to manage our deficit. This is particularly true for delayed capital programmes operated by the Department for Education.”

The council warned that without “urgent and substantial” changes to the way SEND services are funded, it will be “forced into making cuts”.

According to the council’s financial figures, its Dedicated School’s Grant deficit increased from £9.685m in March 2023 to £13.295m in March this year.

Since 2006, the Department for Education has funded local authorities for their current expenditure on schools, early years and children and young people with high needs through the Dedicated Schools Grant (DSG).

At the end of each financial year, a local authority may have underspent or overspent its DSG allocation.

In recent years, an increasing amount of local authorities have recorded DSG overspends, attributed to an increase in the number of new Education Health and Care (EHC) plans and the associated cost of delivering these plans for the duration of a child's or young person's education.

Cllr Catherine Gibbons wrote: “In the last 12 months we have seen the largest increase in the issuing of EHCPs in the South-West region, with our rate of assessments completed in 23/24 at 107 per 10,000 population”.

Nationally, the number of children and young people with EHC plans increased by 11.4% from January 2023 to January this year, bringing the number up to 575,963.

The Department for Education has been approached for comment.

Lottie Winson