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Last year, a group of ten settings from Kent wrote to Nursery World about SEND funding. In a letter which was also sent to the Government and the County Council, Canterbury Early Years United Collaboration said, ‘We are all dedicated practitioners and managers striving to provide the best for all children within our diverse settings, yet we are experiencing insurmountable difficulties in meeting the needs of the very young.’
The went on to explain, ‘Children aged two, who are not entitled to government funding, are not entitled to any support at all. Once the children are three, and are entitled to 15 hours of funded childcare, we can then apply for financial support. We must have two terms of evidence to support our claim, which means settings are already struggling before the insufficient funding is allocated. The most a setting can be allocated works out at approximately £4.50 an hour. The living wage is £7.83 per hour. We would like to know where the additional £3.33 is supposed to come from.’
Their plea is one of many. Rising numbers of SEND children, budget cuts combined with ambitious reforms bringing in Education Health and Care (EHC) plans, plus increasing pressures on social services, have created a perfect storm. Current SEND funding levels are ‘completely inadequate’, according to the Commons Education Select Committee in its report in July 2019. ‘There is simply not enough money in the system to provide for the scale of demand,’ it said, estimating that local authorities were expected to face a funding shortfall in excess of £1 billion by 2021.
The lack of money means there are fewer places for SEND children in the PVI sector than in schools – an average of three children with SEND per setting, compared with four at school-based nurseries, according to Government data. For Coram Family and Childcare, giving evidence for a London Assembly report on Education last year, ‘The lack of capacity within the PVI sector may […] be due to a lack of support from local authority early years’ service, particularly through qualified SENCOs, ‘driven in part by local authority funding pressures.’
Last month's spending review had a fillip in the form of an extra one-year allocation of £700 million for SEND as part of a three-year plan to boost school funding by £7.1 billion by 2022-23. This follows an announcement of a further £350 million for SEND – which consisted of £250 million over two years to be distributed to local authorities on top of their existing high-needs budget and £100 million for more specialist places.
Recent analysis by the Education Policy Institute says if the additional cash is held flat in real terms, ‘it will mean that by 2022-23 the overall high needs budget will be some £600 million short of what is required’.
With the early years having a funding gap of its own - currently at £660 million, according to latest estimates from Ceeda - and only £66 million extra from the spending review to adjust these rates for inflation, it does not look like there will be much extra support coming from dedicated early years funding.
Funding
Details of where the £700 million will be distributed from have not yet been released, but the ‘working assumption’, according to Adam Boddison, chief executive of Nasen, ‘is that it will go into the high needs block’ of the dedicated schools grant. This funding ‘block’ is for children (including the under-sixes) with an EHC plan or for support with severe and complex needs.
Most of the high needs block is spent on places for older children (who may or may not have an EHC plan documenting their needs) – providing top-up funding for support in mainstream schools, and places in special schools. However, around 4 per cent of children with an EHC plan are under five (14,094 of the 353,995 EHC plans in England), according to the January census. If all the high needs block were spent on funding EHC plans, Nasen estimates this would work out at an extra £184,000 per local authority, or £2,000 extra per early-years-aged child per year.
However, this is likely to be an overestimate as high needs funding isn't just spent on children with EHC plans, and children under six don't need to have an EHC plan in place to qualify for high needs funding. There could be significant numbers of these as there can be delays with getting EHC plans, especially for the youngest children.
Th ere are also other sources of support for birth to five-year-olds receiving the funded entitlements – an inclusion fund and disability access fund for three- and four-year-olds also in receipt of child disability living allowance. Because of this, high needs money that is spent on the early years is, according to the EPI's Jo Hutchinson, ‘likely to mainly feed local authority services as the early years national funding formula provides for this separately. Some children under five will benefit from the additional funding but not via mainstream early years providers – unless local authorities choose to give them extra funding at their discretion. This could mean only those with more severe needs get a share of the increase in many cases.’
The picture is further complicated by the fact that some councils spend more on early years SEND than others. For example, in Westminster, an additional £40,000 is allocated to each nursery school in the borough through this budget. In Islington, high needs cash has previously gone on providing places in Children's Centres for children with severe and complex needs, top-up funding for under-threes, and area SENCOs, among other things. As previous spending patterns are taken into account when allocating the funding, councils that have spent a relatively large proportion on early years SEND in the past would get more high needs funding now, contributing to geographical inequality, says the EPI.
Future
The crisis in SEND funding is getting harder to ignore. Last month the National Audit Office warned that the needs of children with SEND are not being met. Meanwhile, the Government has been challenged in the courts over its decision-making over SEND funding. Three families brought a case to the High Court saying that the Government has failed to increase funding for high needs in line with rising demand. A ruling is expected this autumn.
In September, the Government announced a major review of the support available for children with SEND, including looking at the ‘postcode lottery’ of support and joined-up working across health, care and education services. A previous review was carried out in 2010 by Ofsted – which identified inconsistency between areas as a key problem.
The case for directing SEND money to the early years is clear. Dr Boddison says, ‘Th ere is an argument to be made for weighting additional funding towards the early years because early identification of needs means that appropriate provision can be put in place sooner.
‘The challenge of early identification is spotting the difference between normal variation in childhood development and a genuine SEN. Increasingly, early years settings are investing in SENCOs and other qualified professionals so that they can provide an inclusive offer, but sustainable funding is needed for this to have a long-term impact.’
