Budget 2025

The Budget didn’t set out any detailed plans for SEND funding, but it did contain one very interesting paragraph about future plans. It states that once the current statutory override expires in 2027/2028, Local Authorities will no longer be responsible for SEND funding. Instead it will be handled centrally by the Department of Education. 

The budget doesn’t say how historical debts will be handled. This is likely to be a tricky balance: if the central government absorbs all these debts, this would be unfair to local authorities who have made efforts to keep the debts down, but if it doesn’t it will still leave many local authorities facing bankruptcy. 

However, the more interesting point is what this says about plans for SEND reform. If central government is funding SEND, this suggests that it is going to take a much greater role in the SEND system. Possibly we’re moving to a national system, where one body makes decisions on SEND rather than each individual local authority. 

What would that mean for parents? We would hopefully see more consistency in decision-making, since we would no longer have each local authority training its own staff. It would also make life easier for parents who move between LAs. There’s also the potential for improved accountability for academy chains. Local authorities have very little oversight of academies and this creates a real issue where academies are providing most of the school places. 

The problem, though, is that it would create a split between responsibility for special educational needs and responsibility for education generally. This could result in arguments between central government and local authorities about who has responsibility in a particular case, leaving parents caught in the middle.  If mainstream inclusion is the direction we are heading, who is responsible for making sure mainstream schools meet need?