Why investing £5m in special needs services could cost Lancashire County Council £15m in total

The authority has announced an additional £5.3m of SEND funding to get through the outstanding cases awaiting consideration by educational psychologists – which totalled 1,850 at the end of July.

The advice they provide will be key to determining whether the youngsters receive an education, health and care plan (EHCP).

Ofsted highlighted “unacceptable” delays in the process across the county council patch in an inspection published in February.

The personalised documents set out what assistance a child – or young adult up to the age of 25 – is legally entitled to in order to ensure they can access a suitable place in education.

County Hall says the extra money it is ploughing into the service will help complete a total of 3,600 educational psychology assessments - in order to keep up with new demand while working to eradicate the backlog - which it is estimated will then generate more than 2,200 EHCPs.

On that basis, it is forecast the SEND bill could increase by £10m – £5m as a result of more children being entitled to home-to-school transport, with the same amount required to cover borrowing costs to fund other support for which young people with an EHCP could be eligible.

Cabinet member for education and skills Matthew Salter said the Reform UK-run authority was “showing our commitment to children with SEND”.

“We’re committed to this journey to improve SEND services,” he told a cabinet meeting.

The county council has now recruited more than 100 agency educational psychologists and has also established teams dedicated to clearing all outstanding EHCP annual reviews by December. The documents have be reassessed every 12 months and updated according to any change in need. Ofsted found some reviews were years overdue.

New EHCPs should be issued within 20 weeks. There were 12,200 live EHCPs in the county council area as of January this year – more than double the 5,200 a decade ago.

However, cabinet member for resources, Ged Mirfin, warned that the government was “not giving us the necessary resources to fund delivery of this vital service”.

He said that the geographical spread of extra EHCPs would also determine whether the county council needed to consider investing in extra SEND provision in certain areas in order to reduce transport costs.

Over the past five years, the authority has delivered almost 350 SEND places in 22 new specialist units that it has opened within mainstream schools. One of the aims of that programme is to reduce the distances children have to travel to class.

The home-to-school transport budget for the county council has been set at £61m for the current financial year – and is currently forecast to be exceeded by £3.9m as a result of ever-increasing demand. It was also overspent by a total of £12.4m over the past two years.

The authority last year ordered 50 new minibuses to help alleviate reliance on solo taxi journeys for SEND children, who have to be accompanied by a transport assistant. Half of them are now in service.

County council leader Stephen Atkinson said there was currently a perverse situation whereby those local authorities whose SEND services “highly perform”, then generate “incredible financial challenges” for themselves

“The government really need to look at this carefully, because it’s not sustainable as it is,” he added.

The government currently permit councils to keep SEND debt off their books in an arrangement that comes to an end in 2027.

According to a report presented to Lancashire County Council’s cabinet, the SEND-related deficit on the authority’s dedicated schools grant pot is forecast to be £115m by the end of 2025/26.

County Cllr Salter said there had been "critical underfunding" of what is known as the 'high needs block' of education finance for local authorities , which he claimed was "still largely based on the needs and expenditure of 2017/18",

The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government did not respond to a request for comment.

PAYING THE PRICE OF ‘PLOUGHING INTO DISASTER’?

The ruling Reform UK group at County Hall has laid the blame for some of Lancashire’s SEND woes at the door of the previous Conservative administration, which ran the county council for eight years until May.

County Cllr Salter - who was a backbench member of the Tories for most of that period until defecting in March - said his former colleagues, who used to sit around the cabinet table at which he now has a place under Reform, had “ploughed into disaster” by ignoring “rising demand for EHCPs”.

Meanwhile, County Cllr Mirfin - who also defected from the Conservatives in March after a four-year stint on the backbenches - said the SEND pressures were part of a “deeply problematic inheritance" for Reform from his former party.

He claimed they had allowed “the costs of SEND and home-school transport to escalate, without having a plan in place to effectively control them”.

Speaking to the Local Democracy Reporting Service after the meeting, former Tory cabinet member Aidy Riggott - who now leads the eight Conservatives who remain on the authority - hit back at the criticism.

He said it was “a little surprising to hear County Cllr Salter’s disparaging references to the approach taken by the previous Conservative administrations, especially considering his loyal support to the leadership throughout the previous seven years - as well as a voting record which supported every budget the Conservatives proposed”.

"If County Cllr Salter wants to accuse previous administrations of ‘ploughing into disaster’’, I can only assume he is including not just himself in that, but County Cllr Mirfin, who also voted for every council decision and budget of the last four years.

“Perhaps County Cllr Salter is forgetting that even after he joined Reform, he voted for a Conservative amendment at a meeting where the council's response to SEND was debated,” County Cllr Riggott added.