Festus Akinbusoye is a Westminster City Councillor, and Former Police and Crime Commissioner.
When I was Police and Crime Commissioner, the overrepresentation of children with undiagnosed or poorly supported special educational needs in our criminal justice system was one of the several concerning things I encountered in relation to young people.
Not because those children were innately dangerous; but because our institutions had failed them – repeatedly.
I raise this now because the government’s proposed reforms to Special Education Needs and Disability (SEND) provision risk making that failure more likely for significantly more children, with consequences that will be felt in police stations and courtrooms long after they have ceased to register in any school absence register.
The concern is not, to be clear, that children with special educational needs are more inclined toward offending. Rather, it is that in many cases, unmet need drives disengagement from school, and that chronic school absence can compound vulnerabilities – leading to eventual contact with the criminal justice system.
For example, a staggering eighty per cent of children cautioned or sentenced in the youth justice system have SEND or a diagnosed neurodivergent condition. That figure is a measure of systemic failure, not parental or personal failing, when you consider that just seventeen per cent of student population in England and Wales have SEND. This therefore demands that any proposal to change how the state supports these children be scrutinised with great care.
The Schools White Paper published in February proposes to do exactly that.
From 2030, Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs), the legally binding documents that currently guarantee named provision for children with complex needs – will be reserved only for the most severe cases. Children with additional needs, including those with autism diagnoses and ADHD, will instead receive Individual Support Plans (ISPs).
The government has sought to reassure families that ISPs will carry legal rights and that schools will be required to make reasonable adjustments. Those assurances deserve to be tested against what we know about how schools currently perform when obligations are clear and enforceable, let alone when they rest on a judgment about what is reasonable in a system the Public Accounts Committee has confirmed is not adequately funded for the transition ahead. Teaching Unions are already highlighting the lack of resources in schools to meet this new regime.
There is however, a genuine problem here that the government is right to acknowledge.
Cumulative SEND overspending will exceed five billion pounds by the end of this financial year. The number of children holding EHCPs has risen by roughly 140 per cent since 2015. The question is whether what is being proposed will actually improve the situation for children, or whether it will simply redistribute the cost of their unmet needs to other parts of the public sector.
The evidence suggests the latter is a serious risk. Department for Education figures for 2023 to 2024 show that 35.5 per cent of pupils with an EHCP were persistently absent from school, compared with 16.8 per cent of pupils with no identified special educational needs. The Education Policy Institute has confirmed that absence rates continue to rise for children with EHCPs even as this falls for other groups.
ADR UK research, tracking nearly five million pupils across two decades, found that those in the highest quintile for unauthorised absence faced a 27 per cent probability of acquiring a caution or conviction by the age of 18, against four per cent in the lowest quintile. The Centre for Social Justice calculates that persistently absent pupils are more than three times as likely to come into contact with the criminal justice system as those who attend consistently.
As PCC, I partnered with schools, caregivers, and youth intervention specialists to help persistently absent children back to school. Despite being a short run pilot project – it was clear to me that the investment in supporting families was worth it. A written submission was made to the House of Commons on the outcomes.
During this pilot, I went to schools to see for myself how this was working. I also met parents who had drained their savings to get the help their child needed. I will never forget meeting a man whose son and mine went to the same school. He had heard a media interview I gave concerning vulnerable young people with SEND being targeted by organised criminal gangs. He told me that after five years of battles with the authorities over provisions for his son’s special education needs – it took a toll on his marriage. One parent wanted to keep fighting. The other was beyond battered. Their relationship and family life suffered the consequence.
The fiscal case therefore for narrowing access to EHCPs does not survive honest contact with the numbers. Public spending does not disappear when a child loses their legal entitlement to named specialist provision. It is deferred, and when it arrives, it is considerably more expensive.
The National Audit Office unit cost of a young offender, uprated for inflation, exceeds eleven thousand pounds. Custodial sentences cost multiples of that annually, and the downstream costs across social care, mental health services and lost economic participation extend across many years and many departmental budgets. Home-to-school transport costs, which have risen by 106 per cent in real terms since 2015, are not covered by the new funding arrangements at all, a gap the PAC has described as a glaring unanswered question.
The government has identified a real problem and is attempting, in good faith, to address it. What I am not persuaded of is that restricting the legal entitlements of children who depend on them constitutes a solution rather than a postponement, and a costly one at that. The consequences of getting this wrong will not appear in the Department for Education’s accounts.
They will appear elsewhere; in systems that are already stretched, dealing with young people whose needs went unmet at precisely the moment when meeting them would have made the most difference
Festus Akinbusoye is a Westminster City Councillor, and Former Police and Crime Commissioner.
When I was Police and Crime Commissioner, the overrepresentation of children with undiagnosed or poorly supported special educational needs in our criminal justice system was one of the several concerning things I encountered in relation to young people.
Not because those children were innately dangerous; but because our institutions had failed them – repeatedly.
I raise this now because the government’s proposed reforms to Special Education Needs and Disability (SEND) provision risk making that failure more likely for significantly more children, with consequences that will be felt in police stations and courtrooms long after they have ceased to register in any school absence register.
The concern is not, to be clear, that children with special educational needs are more inclined toward offending. Rather, it is that in many cases, unmet need drives disengagement from school, and that chronic school absence can compound vulnerabilities – leading to eventual contact with the criminal justice system.
For example, a staggering eighty per cent of children cautioned or sentenced in the youth justice system have SEND or a diagnosed neurodivergent condition. That figure is a measure of systemic failure, not parental or personal failing, when you consider that just seventeen per cent of student population in England and Wales have SEND. This therefore demands that any proposal to change how the state supports these children be scrutinised with great care.
The Schools White Paper published in February proposes to do exactly that.
From 2030, Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs), the legally binding documents that currently guarantee named provision for children with complex needs – will be reserved only for the most severe cases. Children with additional needs, including those with autism diagnoses and ADHD, will instead receive Individual Support Plans (ISPs).
The government has sought to reassure families that ISPs will carry legal rights and that schools will be required to make reasonable adjustments. Those assurances deserve to be tested against what we know about how schools currently perform when obligations are clear and enforceable, let alone when they rest on a judgment about what is reasonable in a system the Public Accounts Committee has confirmed is not adequately funded for the transition ahead. Teaching Unions are already highlighting the lack of resources in schools to meet this new regime.
There is however, a genuine problem here that the government is right to acknowledge.
Cumulative SEND overspending will exceed five billion pounds by the end of this financial year. The number of children holding EHCPs has risen by roughly 140 per cent since 2015. The question is whether what is being proposed will actually improve the situation for children, or whether it will simply redistribute the cost of their unmet needs to other parts of the public sector.
The evidence suggests the latter is a serious risk. Department for Education figures for 2023 to 2024 show that 35.5 per cent of pupils with an EHCP were persistently absent from school, compared with 16.8 per cent of pupils with no identified special educational needs. The Education Policy Institute has confirmed that absence rates continue to rise for children with EHCPs even as this falls for other groups.
ADR UK research, tracking nearly five million pupils across two decades, found that those in the highest quintile for unauthorised absence faced a 27 per cent probability of acquiring a caution or conviction by the age of 18, against four per cent in the lowest quintile. The Centre for Social Justice calculates that persistently absent pupils are more than three times as likely to come into contact with the criminal justice system as those who attend consistently.
As PCC, I partnered with schools, caregivers, and youth intervention specialists to help persistently absent children back to school. Despite being a short run pilot project – it was clear to me that the investment in supporting families was worth it. A written submission was made to the House of Commons on the outcomes.
During this pilot, I went to schools to see for myself how this was working. I also met parents who had drained their savings to get the help their child needed. I will never forget meeting a man whose son and mine went to the same school. He had heard a media interview I gave concerning vulnerable young people with SEND being targeted by organised criminal gangs. He told me that after five years of battles with the authorities over provisions for his son’s special education needs – it took a toll on his marriage. One parent wanted to keep fighting. The other was beyond battered. Their relationship and family life suffered the consequence.
The fiscal case therefore for narrowing access to EHCPs does not survive honest contact with the numbers. Public spending does not disappear when a child loses their legal entitlement to named specialist provision. It is deferred, and when it arrives, it is considerably more expensive.
The National Audit Office unit cost of a young offender, uprated for inflation, exceeds eleven thousand pounds. Custodial sentences cost multiples of that annually, and the downstream costs across social care, mental health services and lost economic participation extend across many years and many departmental budgets. Home-to-school transport costs, which have risen by 106 per cent in real terms since 2015, are not covered by the new funding arrangements at all, a gap the PAC has described as a glaring unanswered question.
The government has identified a real problem and is attempting, in good faith, to address it. What I am not persuaded of is that restricting the legal entitlements of children who depend on them constitutes a solution rather than a postponement, and a costly one at that. The consequences of getting this wrong will not appear in the Department for Education’s accounts.
They will appear elsewhere; in systems that are already stretched, dealing with young people whose needs went unmet at precisely the moment when meeting them would have made the most difference