John Williams, Cardiff Central Socialist Party
In the past decade in England, the number of school children entitled to Special Educational Needs and Disability (SEND) support has nearly doubled. This is mostly due to improved understanding about and tolerance of neurodiversity and mental health, there has been an increase of diagnoses of autism, attention-deficit disorders, and mental health disorders.
What we need is funding to match, so people can have the best help and support possible. Unfortunately, this hasn’t been the case for the past 14 years and that trend is continuing under Starmer’s Labour too. Councils have lost 26% of their spending power since 2010, mainly due to local authorities refusing to fight austerity coming from the Westminster government.
The recent Labour Budget, which in reality was a continuation of austerity repackaged, did offer an additional £740 million for SEND provision in mainstream schools. But that’s peanuts if you take into account what councils have lost – overall councils in England alone still face a total shortfall of nearly £5 billion by 2026.
It’s a broken system. The public spending watchdog warns special needs education is “financially unsustainable for councils”. But profits are booming for private providers, revenues for the three largest private providers have doubled since 2019.
Councils have increasingly turned to private providers, including large ones owned by private equity firms concerned with one thing – profit.
And big business has been lobbying the government over plans to cut costs as it would affect their lucrative money making. In its most recent accounts, Horizon Care and Education Group, which runs SEND schools and residential care homes, listed “changes in government purchasing policy away from the independent sector” and “local authorities’ control of spending” among the principal risks to the business. That just shows where their priorities are!
What’s clear is when whenever there’s a funding crisis from central government, big business will try to step into the equation, but they only care about what money they can make in the short term. And councillors who are supposed to fight for us, don’t fight the cuts and the austerity agenda from Westminster.
We need socialist councillors prepared to fight and to tell the truth – that there is enough money in society to meet everyone’s needs. Even just the councils with elections this May, a minority, together have over £7.5 billion in reserves. That money could be used to fund the services we need, while buying time to build a mass campaign to force Keir Starmer’s Labour government to pay up.
