Planning SEND in the dark: how can councils invest when central government won't show its hand?

I'm going to say something that probably won't surprise anyone working in children's services right now: it is almost impossible to plan SEND provision properly when central government keeps moving the goalposts and the Department for Education won't commit to a long-term vision.

That's not a complaint. It's a statement of fact, and the numbers back it up.

The demand isn't slowing — and the DfE knows it

Let's start with what we actually know. As of January 2025, there were 638,700 children and young people in England with an Education, Health and Care Plan — a 10.8% rise in a single year, and the eleventh consecutive annual increase since EHCPs were introduced in 2014. Across the same period, the share of school-age pupils with an EHCP almost doubled, from 2.7% in 2016 to 5.2% in 2025.

That isn't a blip. Independent forecasting by Mime, working from DfE and ONS data, projects the EHCP cohort will grow to nearly 660,000 by 2026 — an increase of over 80,000 young people from 2024 — and to over 920,000 by 2040. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has been blunter still, pointing out that high-needs spending has already risen by 66% in real terms since 2016 to at least £12 billion, and warning that on current trajectories the 2026–2029 schools settlement headroom will be entirely consumed by SEND demand.

In Wiltshire, the picture mirrors the national one. As of 29 October 2025, we had 6,800 EHCPs in place — a 10.06% annual increase — with 1,185 new applications in the past 12 months alone.

So when the DfE talks about local authorities "managing demand" or "reducing reliance on EHCPs," they are doing so against their own statistics, their own forecasts, and the Office for Budget Responsibility's projection that cumulative high-needs deficits will reach £14 billion by 2027/28.

You cannot, with a straight face, tell local authorities that numbers will go down while your own modelling says they will keep going up.

The funding announcement that isn't quite what it sounds

Here's where it gets uncomfortable.

At the 2025 Budget, the Chancellor announced that from 2028/29 central government will take on responsibility for all future SEND deficits, with around £5.6 billion to cover 90% of historic deficits up to 2025/26. The statutory override that has been keeping deficits off council balance sheets has been extended to March 2028. On the face of it, that looks like central government finally accepting financial responsibility for a system that has been broken for years.

Look closer, though, and the picture is murkier.

The Institute for Government has pointed out the central tension: centralising the funding does not centralise the delivery. Local authorities will still hold the statutory duty for assessment, for issuing plans, for commissioning provision, for transport, for tribunal defence, and for everything else that flows from the 2014 Children and Families Act. What changes from 2028/29 is that any overspend lands on the Treasury rather than on us.

That sounds great until you ask the obvious question: what happens when the cost of meeting our statutory duties exceeds what the Treasury has decided to allocate?

I cannot see any version of this where the answer isn't: "Local authorities will be expected to absorb the difference, because the deficit must be down to your inefficiencies." West Northamptonshire Council are already a worked example — their access to historic deficit relief is conditional on submitting a SEND reform plan to the DfE by 19 June, with future support tied to "demonstrable delivery" against that plan, and the explicit threat that "persistent failure to demonstrate progress may result in formal intervention, including the removal of responsibility for SEND service delivery."

That isn't partnership. That's accountability without authority — the most uncomfortable position any commissioner can find themselves in.

The White Paper raises more questions than it answers

The Schools White Paper, Every Child Achieving and Thriving, was finally published on 23 February 2026 — after multiple delays and a separate consultation, SEND reform: putting children and young people first, that runs until 18 May. There are things in it I welcome: the shift towards mainstream inclusion, the proposed tiered model of universal/targeted/targeted plus/specialist support, the £200 million for teacher SEND training, and the £3 billion for around 50,000 new SEND places.

But the legislation needed to deliver the reformed system is not expected to come into force until September 2029. That means we have at least three more academic years of operating the current system — under the current law, with the current rising numbers, against a White Paper that explicitly tells us the future will look different.

How exactly do you commission a SEND specialist school satellite, agree a multi-year contract with an independent provider, recruit and train an educational psychology team, or invest in early intervention infrastructure when:

• The DfE's own forecasts say demand is going up,
• The DfE's own reform plan says it wants demand to go down,
• The legislation defining what demand even is won't change until 2029,
• The funding mechanism flips in 2028/29,
• And the conditions of historic deficit relief are tied to delivering reforms that aren't yet law?

You can't. Or rather, you can — but you do it knowing that whichever direction you choose, there's a reasonable chance central government will move the goalposts before the investment has had a chance to land.

The risk nobody at the DfE seems to want to name

The LGA's January 2026 survey of council chief financial officers found that 95% of responding councils currently hold high-needs DSG deficits, and 79% said they would not be able to set a balanced general fund budget in 2028/29 if the override were withdrawn without further intervention. Most starkly, 94% said they would continue to overspend even if their existing deficits were written off, because the underlying drivers of cost — demand, statutory duty, market failure in specialist provision — would still be there.

Translate that into plain English: the system itself loses money. Removing the historic debt without fixing the system means the debt simply rebuilds.

And yet the implicit message coming out of the DfE — through the conditional deficit relief, through the "demonstrable delivery" tests, through the threat of formal intervention — is that local authorities are the source of the inefficiency. That if we just managed our markets better, processed our assessments faster, kept more children in mainstream, and resisted parental challenge more robustly, we could square this circle.

We can't. Not because we're not trying. Because central government's own numbers say we can't.

What I think councils should be saying — loudly

I'm a serving councillor and a Cabinet Member, so I'm not in the business of throwing rocks for the sake of it. But I do think the sector needs to be much firmer in three messages right now.

First, the DfE has to be honest about its own forecasts. You cannot ask councils to plan for falling demand while your own statisticians are telling Parliament demand is going up. Either the projections are wrong — in which case publish the working — or they are right, in which case any reform plan that assumes savings has to show, with evidence, where those savings come from without compromising statutory entitlement.

Second, the funding-without-delivery model needs to be challenged before 2028/29 arrives. If central government is funding, central government has to share the risk of demand exceeding budget. If local authorities are still delivering, local authorities have to retain the flexibility to commission to need rather than to a formula set in Whitehall. You can't have both — central control of the money and local accountability for the outcome — without local authorities ending up as the political shock-absorber for unrealistic central commitments.

Third, the transitional period needs proper investment, not conditional rescue. The years between now and 2029 are when early intervention infrastructure has to be built if the reformed system is going to work in 2029 onwards. Councils are the bodies that have to build it. We cannot do that if every penny of historic deficit relief is contingent on hitting national reform milestones that don't yet exist in law, and if our 2026/27 and 2027/28 deficit support is being doled out year by year against a White Paper that the sector has only just begun to read.

Where this leaves us

I'll be honest — I'd rather be writing about specific, deliverable things this week. The reopening of the Northwood Centre satellite. The Short Breaks redesign. The Adoption West partnership. Real things that change real children's lives.

But none of that local work happens in a vacuum, and right now the policy weather coming out of the DfE is the single biggest variable in whether the next three years of SEND in Wiltshire are a story of careful investment paying off, or a story of councils running to stand still while central government rewrites the rules underneath us.

If the government means what it says about putting children and young people first, the test is going to be whether they trust the local authorities who deliver the system enough to give us a long-term, predictable, properly resourced framework to plan against.

On the evidence so far, I'm not yet convinced that they do.

Sources

• DfE, Education, Health and Care Plans: England, Reporting Year 2025 (26 June 2025)
• DfE, Special Educational Needs in England, 2024/25 (12 June 2025)
• DfE, Every Child Achieving and Thriving (Schools White Paper, 23 February 2026)
• DfE, SEND reform: putting children and young people first (consultation, open until 18 May 2026)
• House of Commons Library, The Schools White Paper 2026: SEND Reform (CBP-10550)
• Institute for Fiscal Studies, Support for children with disabilities and special educational needs (December 2025)
• Institute for Government, Central government's takeover of SEND deficits raises the stakes for SEND reform (5 December 2025)
• Institute for Government, Performance Tracker 2025: Schools (November 2025)
• Local Government Association, SEND crisis: Vast majority of councils warn of insolvency (5 February 2026)
• Local Government Association, SEND reform: Parliamentary briefing (December 2025)
• Mime, Forecasting the Growth in England's EHCP Cohort (June 2025)
• Office for Budget Responsibility, Economic and Fiscal Outlook (November 2025)
• House of Commons Library, Local Government Finance Settlement 2026/27 to 2028/29 (CBP-10485)