Northern Lights: Disabled children and young people are not the cause of SEND deficits
Sheffield’s disabled children and young people’s community is bracing itself for what many already know is coming: disruption, loss, and deep harm arising from the government’s soon-to-be-released SEND “reforms”.
No one working at the sharp end of disability, education, or family support is fooled by the language now being deployed. What is being presented as “improvement”, as the “upholding of inclusion” and “children’s rights”, is in truth a programme of retrenchment and rationing, dressed up as reform.
If the intent were genuinely to fix what is broken, the reforms would not be anchored to one overriding objective: preventing local authorities from carrying SEND budget deficits. Instead, the proposals point towards offloading responsibility onto mainstream schools through bolt-on provision, weakening statutory protections, and ultimately withdrawing Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) from tens of thousands of disabled children.
That is not needs-led reform. It is resource-led containment.
The government says it inherited a SEND system “on its knees”. In 2024, the National Audit Office warned that the system was financially unsustainable for councils and failing to deliver improved outcomes, despite a 58% increase in funding over the previous decade. These facts are now repeatedly cited to justify sweeping change.
What is consistently omitted is causation.
SEND did not become financially unstable because disabled children suddenly became more complex, nor because families are unreasonable. It became unstable because of chronic under-investment, workforce erosion, and crucially because some local authorities diverted SEND funding away from SEND year after year to plug wider budget gaps. That practice has been documented repeatedly. Yet responsibility is now being displaced onto families who were forced to fight for their children’s legal entitlements through tribunals, and onto disabled children themselves.
This inversion of blame is not just inaccurate. It is abusive.
Parents do not pursue tribunals because they enjoy conflict. Tribunal volumes hit record levels not because parents are litigious, but because the system was made obstructive by combatant local authorities.
At the same time, the government highlights pressure on mainstream schools and a shortage of specialist places and staff. These shortages did not appear overnight. They are the predictable result of years of policy drift, inadequate capital investment, and a failure to plan for rising need.
Now, ministers are proposing to “fix” this by focusing on earlier intervention and making mainstream schools more inclusive, laudable aims in principle, while refusing to rule out replacing EHCPs altogether. That single point should alarm anyone who understands SEND law. EHCPs are not bureaucratic excess; they are the mechanism that makes disabled children’s rights enforceable.
Strip them away, and “inclusion” becomes optional.
The government points to £3bn of capital funding to create 50,000 new specialist places, many within mainstream schools, alongside £200m for teacher SEND training. These figures sound impressive until placed in context. They do not undo years of under-investment. They do not address workforce retention, they do not alter the fact that many children’s needs cannot be met safely or appropriately in mainstream settings, no matter how well-intentioned the policy.
In Sheffield, families already face unacceptable journeys for suitable provision. Some children travel hours each day because no local specialist place exists. Others are placed in mainstream environments that actively harm their mental health, simply because nothing else is available.
There is still, a chronic insufficiency of SEND school placements.
What is now being proposed, reducing access to EHCPs, narrowing eligibility for specialist provision, and shifting responsibility onto schools without equivalent statutory safeguards, will deepen that harm.
None of this is new.
As early as 2016, organisations including Equalities and Human Rights UK and Sparkle Sheffield were told directly by senior SEND leaders within local authorities that this was a “done deal”. One head of SEND stated verbatim that “only the most vegetative children will get places in special schools, and will be the only ones who get an EHCP”. We were told this reflected discussions already taking place with central government, across political parties.
Ten years later, that plan is quietly being implemented.
To pretend this is a fresh response to crisis is disingenuous. It is the execution of a long-standing strategy to restrict entitlements by redefining need downward and recasting rights as unaffordable luxuries.
Disabled children and young people are not the cause of SEND deficits. Families are not the architects of system failure. Special schools are not the problem. The problem is political choice, and the refusal to fund disability properly while simultaneously blaming those most affected.
In Sheffield and across the country, families are not bracing for reform. They are bracing for loss. Loss of support. Loss of safety. Loss of futures painstakingly built against the odds.
If this is what “fixing” looks like, then we should have the honesty to call it what it is: austerity by another name, paid for by disabled children.