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Sir Keir Starmer faces the potential for a second showdown with his MPs following this week’s humiliating welfare climbdown, when the issue of scaling back support for special needs support in schools comes before parliament later this year.
After the summer recess, ministers will lay a white paper setting out big changes to special education needs and disabilities (Send) that will include plans to push more provision into mainstream schools and increase the number of specialist state schools.
The most contentious aspect of the plan is likely to focus on changes to the eligibility criteria determining that Send children can receive full state assistance.
One senior government figure said “lessons had been learnt” from the disastrous rollout of the government’s welfare reforms, which saw the prime minister jettison the bill’s flagship measure to prevent a mutiny of MPs.
The issues set to be raised in the Send reforms — about changing eligibility to support for vulnerable people — have echoes of the welfare changes that led many MPs to oppose the measures even when heavily watered down.
Furthermore, a succession of U-turns, from welfare to winter fuel payments, has shown Labour MPs that they can force the government to capitulate by making enough noise.
The government is determined not to repeat the mistakes that led to a near rebellion of more than 100 MPs over disability payments.
“We have to make sure the argument for Send reform is not about saving money but about improving the care provided to children,” the senior government figure said, adding that the white paper in the autumn would include a consultation with disability groups.
The welfare climbdown marks the third damaging U-turn the prime minister has been forced to make over the past month and raised serious questions about his ability to command sufficient authority from his MPs in the coming months to push through other potentially contentious reforms.
Stephen Kingdom, campaign manager for the Disabled Children’s Partnership charity, said the forthcoming Send reforms were “going to be carnage if they don’t get it right”.
He added: “We hope the government has learned from the welfare bill that they need to develop policy with the people it directly impacts. In the case of Send reform that means young people themselves, their parents and the organisations that work with those families.”
The issue centres on “education, health and support plans” (EHCPs), which were introduced in 2014 and require local authorities to provide certain support to children with the highest needs.
EHCPs unlock extra help for those who are eligible, including one-on-one support, transport services and, in some cases, access to costly private education. More than 5 per cent of school children in England now have a plan, a level that has almost doubled in the past decade.
The proposals in the autumn white paper are set to include proposals for changes to the criteria for receiving the most comprehensive plan as well as for how mainstream provision will be improved to help a wider range of people with extra needs, although a final decision on the policies has not been made, according to senior officials.
Experts say changes are likely to affect children with conditions such as ADHD, autistic spectrum disorder and speech and language needs, who have accounted for the sharpest increases in EHCPs in recent years.
Earlier this week, education minister Catherine McKinnell told MPs “we won’t be removing any existing, effective support”, suggesting that any changes to eligibility criteria would only affect future claimants — another parallel with the planned welfare changes that were scrapped after MPs’ outrage.
The senior official said that the government was looking at where the line on the full suite of statutory provisions offered to children should be drawn, adding that there were some cases where children might “not actually need a full EHCP”.
“There are many children for whom one-on-one support is not necessarily the best thing,” they added, pointing in particular to support that could be provided to children with speech and language needs.
The Department for Education did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The growing reliance on outsourcing care to the private sector has driven a sharp rise in spending on special needs provision. English councils allocated £2.1bn this academic year for private school placements, up 15 per cent on last year.
As a result, local authorities have accumulated large deficits in their high-needs budgets, reaching about £3.3bn last year and set to rise to about £8bn by 2027, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
Luke Sibieta, research fellow at the IFS, said “there is absolutely a world in which you reduce legal entitlements and you provide a better range of support for children in mainstream schools”.
Sibieta said the government could theoretically exempt autism, ADHD and speech and language conditions from the need for a legal process — and contingent statutory support — and instead improve mainstream support for those conditions.
“But if there’s a perception that you’re taking support away from children — and that’s it — you’re in very dangerous territory.”
