Clarity is needed over the future of a mechanism currently keeping SEND deficits from bankrupting councils, a government adviser has warned, adding its impending end “dominates” thinking about reform.
Dame Christine Lenehan was appointed as ministers’ “strategic adviser” on SEND last week. She will play a “a key role in engaging the sector, including leaders, practitioners, children and families”.
Speaking at the County Councils Network conference today, Lenehan said “clarity” was needed on the statutory override, which has allowed councils to keep the deficits off their books, but is due to expire in March 2026.
It was introduced by the previous government but there was no update in chancellor Rachel Reeve’s budget last month on how Labour plans to proceed.
This is despite the National Audit Office warning that four in 10 councils may be at risk of declaring effective bankruptcy when the override ends.
Lenehan said: “My worry for that is it just dominates thinking. It stops us being creative, it stops us thinking what we need to do. All we think about is what’s going to happen… I’m not saying I know what that will be, but I’m saying it’s important we actually take it head on.”
‘Fear factor about reform’
Lenehan, former director of the Council for Disabled Children, urged the government to “articulate…an absolute clear vision about where we want to go to and how within that clear vision we take the different parties along the way”.
She said government “gets it, they know the crisis” but “what I think holds people back is what’s the end state?” Part of her role with ministers, she said, is “to tell them to be brave”.
Speaking to an audience of councillors, she said: “The reason for that is I’ve worked with people like you for years, with your director of children’s services, with your people and as members in particular you have also told me of the anger of parents, of the despair of parents and in some cases in some of the work that we have been doing, the sheer vitriol of parents.”
Lenehan said she didn’t “blame parents”, as she would also want “the very best for them” if she was a parent of a child with SEND. But she warned there was a “fear factor on reform”.
“There’s a fear factor that the minute we start to say ‘we are going forward’ there will be backlash.
“There will be parents who say ‘you’re taking our children’s rights away’. There will be schools who say ‘you’re not interested in attainment anymore’.”
She said it was “part of the role of everyone to hold consensus, and to me that’s going to be the key”.
Rising EHCPs ‘not good for children’
But Lenehan warned “we cannot get to a point in a SEND system where we are approaching 20 per cent of children needing” statutory education, health and care plans (EHCPs).
Currently, 4.8 per cent of pupils in schools have an EHCP, but numbers are expected to double by 2032 without policy interventions. It is not clear when Lenehan expected numbers to near 20 per cent.
“That is actually not good for children and it’s not good for the system. It’s that lack of early years support and intervention, that understanding of that whole school pathway.”
She also said government would need to set out “what do we expect an inclusive mainstream school to do with the right support in the right place? What do we expect out of special schools?
“What role if any does the independent and non-maintained sector play – what does it look like? Can we stand back from the noise and understand the system?”
Ministers also appointed Tom Rees, chief executive at Ormiston Academies Trust, who will lead an expert group to advise ministers on improving mainstream inclusivity.
