SEND Crisis: Councils push children with poor mental health back into mainstream schools
Parents warn of lasting trauma as local authorities facing financial meltdown withdraw support from children too unwell to attend school - report Sarah Woods and Lauren Crosby-Medlicott.
Parents are being forced to send children with serious mental health issues back into mainstream schools — or pay out of pocket to home-educate — after councils across rural England overspent on support for children with special educational needs and disabilities [SEND].
In Devon, one of the hardest-hit counties, families say they are being left without any consultation or risk assessments before being told to return their children to school or face fines. This comes as a damning new Ofsted report warned that children are being put “at risk of harm” by continued failings in the county’s children’s services.
North Devon MP Ian Roome says: “I read with interest the most recent Ofsted report into children’s services at Devon County Council. There is clearly a lot of work to be done’.”
As part of a 'safety valve' agreement with the government, the council is only allowed to overspend by £31m however it has spent £38m, meaning the deficit stands at £7.4m. The way it intends to reduce this shortfall is by slashing support such as the number of educational, health and care plans and alternative provision such as tutors.
In Devon alone, several families whose teenagers with mental health issues had come out of mainstream school, were offered alternative provision with no time-limit given. Soon after, they were not consulted when the council told them that their children had to return to school or face the consequences, including fines and a barrage of letters and phone calls. This has forced parents to make the difficult decision to either send their children back into school or deregister and home educate at their own expense.
One family decided to deregister their child and home educate, causing a significant financial burden such as tutors, subscriptions and paying for exams.
Claire Coleman tells The Lead that she took her daughter Rachel out of school because she was being bullied and her mental health declined as a result. Sadly, this is not an uncommon theme with the disturbing figure that Government data from the 2021/2022 academic year showed that 21.2% of pupils in England were persistently absent, meaning they missed 10% or more of school sessions, usually due to illness.
Coleman continues that at first DCC offered alternative provision so that Rachel’s education didn’t suffer. Safe in the knowledge that Rachel would be given time to deal with her mental health issues while interestingly the family was given the advice to keep home schooling her with the support of the council since the school could not provide the facilities she required.
In late 2024, when the council made a desperate bid to save money, it became clear that it could not keep paying for alternative provision. Therefore, students like Rachel were told after October half term they were to return to school or face the fines, which range from £80 per day if paid within 21 days whereas more severe penalties , including prosecution and fines up to £2500 can be considered for repeated offences.
The council gave the reasons that it would be better for her future and social development and Coleman says “all we were sent were emails telling us the decisions. No risk assessments or mental health evaluations were carried out and we did not think they had any intention of doing so”. She continues “we were not offered any meetings, reviews or EHCP support.” Therefore, the family felt they had no other choice but to home educate Rachel.
Coleman adds about home educating: “we felt it was the only way Rachel could receive a decent education due to her mental health and anxiety”. Since doing this, “Rachel’s mental health has improved, and her confidence has increased.” However, they must manage the costs and responsibilities that come with this, and Coleman admits “we are struggling financially and we are having to rely on our relatives to help us and it’s very hard and stressful. We have not been offered any help at all.”
MP Ian Roome adds: “many parents have little choice but to go through costly tribunals with our local authorities. The number of SEND tribunal cases has doubled since 2014 and parents win 96% of them. Local councils are wasting more than £70 million a year defending these losing cases. This is far too high: councils should be getting far more decisions right first time.”
DCC’s own website says it has set up an Inclusion and Early Help work strand to “strengthen the universal and targeted support available to children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities.” This, it says, will decrease the need for EHCPs and special school placements by upskilling mainstream schools’ staff with SEND expertise.”
However, parents of students who are struggling with bullying, mental illness, anxiety and self-harm feel that their children are being coerced back into school with vulnerable young people being sent to isolation or even excluded.
MP Ian Roome continues: “I hear from parents every week about how badly children with special educational needs and disabilities are being let down; it’s a real and ongoing concern. In North Devon, there are not enough places at special schools, with many oversubscribed and overcrowded.”
But the council denied this is happening and responded saying “savings are being achieved by inhouse efficiencies around processes while also focusing on early identification of need; providing the right level of inclusive classroom support in mainstream school provision; having high quality specialist provision available where it is needed; and supporting children and young people in their local communities as much as possible.”
This doesn’t ring true with what parents are seeing first-hand. And the problems are not specific to Devon, this is a national issue.
The cost of not meeting our kids’ needs now
Kirsti Hadley, mum to a 13-year-old boy in Sussex, said she first asked for an EHCP assessment when her son was 7. She was told she wouldn’t get one for him, the teachers at his primary school understood his needs and did all they could to accommodate.
But then he went to high school, and at the “worst point”, he missed nearly two years of school. She’d asked for a reduced timetable and for the EHCP process to commence when he started highschool, but she felt ignored, as if her opinion as a parent didn’t matter.
“My requests were denied, and I was told the local authority wouldn’t even consider our EHCP application until they had seen a year in the new setting,” Kirsti, 52, tells The Lead.
A part-time timetable would only be agreed when they could see the full-time one was unmanageable.
“Fail first on every level,” she says. “It has been one of the worst times - the feeling of helplessness was so overwhelming and immense.”
Her son didn’t cope in high school. He constantly experienced panic attacks, anxiety, emotional dysregulation, and discrimination in his new school setting.
“Highschool is a well-known trigger for neurodivergent kids – they’re like lambs led to the slaughter,” Kirsti says. “All the support they received in their younger years disappears at a time when they need it most. They are teeny, tiny children in a massive school like a city with 16-year-olds pushing them around. It’s noisy, overwhelming and overstimulating, there is no pastoral care, and no nurturing environment.”
Still without an EHCP, which would identify additional support required so he could reach his “full potential”, Kirsti doesn’t understand why it has taken so long, but suspects it is a funding issue.
“We understand that local authorities are under financial strain, but historically, there has been no accountability or transparency when all we want is for our children to be learning, as is their legal right,” she concludes. “The cost of not meeting our kids' needs now will be so much greater in the long run.”
SEND system not delivering and unsustainable
In October, Labour announced a further £1bn for SEND, and in December, said it would allot a further £740m to increase the number of places for pupils with SEND. Despite these two announcements, and with SEND funding rising by 58 per cent over the past decade to £10.7bn in 2024-25, the National Audit Office has warned that England’s system is not delivering better outcomes for children, isn’t financially sustainable, and is in urgent need of reform.
Simply throwing more money at the problem clearly isn’t working.
There have been rapid rises in the number of children with EHCPs, with the main needs being autistic spectrum disorder, speech, language and communication needs (including ADHD), and social, emotional and mental health needs. These have fueled a nearly 140% increase in EHCPs between 2015 and 2024.
Though it’s true funding has risen significantly of late, spending has also been higher and risen at a faster rate due to both the amount and complexity of need.
The majority of funding for high needs (including children with EHCPs) comes from ring-fenced blocks of the Designated Schools Grant [DSG] allocated to local authorities.
“Much of the SEND funding we know about is being spent on highly specialist provision: special schools, including an increasingly expensive bill for private special schools, and making good on the massive shortfalls in therapy provision that the NHS has failed to commission,” says Tania Tirraoro, Founder of Special Needs Jungle, a not-for-profit social enterprise.
Money from the high needs block of the DSG has also gone to children with EHCPs in mainstream schools. The number of children with EHCPs in mainstream schools has sharply risen from 126,000 in 2017 to 252,000 in 2024, likely placing strain on the ability of mainstream schools to cater for pupils with high needs.
But there isn’t enough money allocated from the DSG to provide students with the mandatory support outlined in their EHCPs. Since 2015–16, per-EHCP funding has fallen by almost a third, amounting to a nearly £9,000 real-terms fall by 2023–24, according to an IFS report.
As local authorities have statutory obligation to provide the support set out in each EHCP, but funding has not matched the needs, many local authorities face huge deficits in their high needs budgets. These deficits have been kept off local authorities’ balance sheets under the “statutory override,” a short-term fix due to end in March 2026.
Ultimately, many local authorities may declare bankruptcy once the statutory override ends next year.
The increased demand for EHCPs has led to significant backlogs in assessments, and access has become more combative, as Kirsti is finding. But the problem goes even deeper, according to Tirraoro.
”The way decision makers operate this system in practice is a perverse mockery of the system,” she says. “Things have never been good, but things have ended up this way because the people in local government and health are able to ignore their legal duties, and because the people in central government, who are supposed to oversee them, were asleep at the wheel when 2014 reforms to this system were funded and implemented.”
Stephen Kingdom of the Disabled Children’s Partnership, tells The Lead there is “no doubt” that some of the money being spent could be spent better.
“Too much money is spent on bureaucracy and the fight to get support, like parents having to go to the Tribunal to get what they are legally entitled to,” he says.
He feels a sense of positivity that the SEND crisis is now “top of government and MPs in-trays” but also is frustrated that the new government hasn’t offered any concrete plans.
A white paper is expected in late spring to set out the government’s plan to offer a “complete recalibration” of the SEND system, but there are concerns of what the plan will propose.
“We are concerned Ministers are not engaging enough with parents, with children and young people, or with experts in the sector,” Kingdom concludes. “And, most of all, messages about the state of public finances make us worry that the focus will be on saving money rather than improving outcomes and that things could get even worse for children and families.”
Tirraoro agrees, saying that while Labour talk about the need for deep reform, “the people they listen to are almost entirely gatekeepers: local government, consultancies who work for local government, and a tight-knit group of gagged SEND charities with a lengthy track record of failure in this space.”
If nothing changes, Tirraoro worries “outcomes for kids will continue to be dire.”
“Kids will increasingly only get meaningful support – particularly mental health support – once they have been broken by school or life, and sometimes not even then,” she says. “Mainstream schools won't have the resources they need to support many kids with SEND.’
The Lead has contacted the Department for Education for their comment and has yet to receive a response. ■
About the authors:
Lauren Crosby Medlicott is a freelance journalist based in Wales reporting on social affairs stories highlighting injustices against sex workers, asylum seekers, migrants, children, and modern slavery survivors.
Sarah Woods is a freelance journalist specialising in education, housing and social injustice. She is also a fully qualified English teacher with inside knowledge of how the education system works. She reports on issues that highlight inequality within the topics she specialises in.
At The Lead we are committed to covering the issues that impact parents, families and children – and education is something we keep coming back to. Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff wrote a powerful piece on the lack of safety for Black girls in UK schools. Lauren Crosby Medlicott also penned a fascinating The Lead Untangles about why homeschooling is on the rise. Historian Paula Akan wrote about the curriculum and its failure to grapple with the history of Empire. Consider a paid subscription to help us cover more of the issues that matter to you, always with a focus on people, policy and place.