Not educated at all on this, but my guess is the underlying challenge is the refusal to 'decay' or 'slide backward' in national standards.
Once you've put a standard in place, no one will willingly 'walk it back' on any aspect.
This creates unrealistic and expensive constraints for everyone. The net result is high expense and the 'semblance' of quality that does nothing to adapt to the constraints and meet local needs. The expectation that everyone is 'treated the same' does nothing to help.
30% of children with genetic disorders are born to Pakistanis, who make up only 4% of births, due to their proclivity for first cousins marriage. I suspect there are a lot of little things like this that filter through mechanisms like spiralling special needs educational costs to a pervading “we’re completely broke” feeling.
I was also intuitively shocked at the effect size as well when I first saw it, but on reflection I think it makes sense rationally. The effect is directly and principally caused by an activity the population engages in a lot, it’s like if you had a population that loved smoking, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear they had an 8 times increase in incidence of lung cancer. I attribute my surprise to the ideology I was brought up in - everyone is the same, it’s impolite and low status to notice group differences, the whole liberalism shtick.
Isn't your call to arms, that tax reform has to be paired with major public sector reform, an example of your "escalators"? It reminds me of how everytime major spending reform of the NHS is paired with a "reform" that at best makes no difference or makes things worse.
I don’t think you can meaningfully separate the two though. At some point if I got to a board of investors and ask for more cash, I need to come with a credible business plan for how I’m going to spend that cash, otherwise why would they contribute?
Speaking as a chartered accountant and economist there are many tax reforms we can make that aren't just asks for more cash (if you want to find out more, have a look at Dan Niedle's work). Many of these could easily be designed to be revenue neutral (if that's a real sticking point). The problem we have is that governments pair these tax changes with political issues. This means they make multiple little changes to the tax code that means, year after year, it gets more complex, bloated and creates bad incentives. These have a real cost to the economy
"If anything is done on taxes, it has to be coupled with serious, once-in-a-generation reforms that stop the state from simply bleeding out the extra cash, and visibly improve the fabric of people’s lives. That means things like a total rethink of local government funding, a massive expansion of house building, ripping up procurement processes, far more radical reforms of planning, and an integrated strategy for social care."
There’s been a lot of debate and noise around the broken SEND system - both from parents and from councils.
Root causes - councils have responsibility to fund ‘suitable education’ but no ability to directly commission schools.
Academies are also outside of LA control - although the LA does have some power to direct academies to take SEND pupils, many of them run policies that mean they, sadly, cannot meet need.
On top of that, EHCP budgets are not ring-fenced, and in my experience the LA never demands evidence from mainstream schools they are delivering the support detailed in the EHCP, but will accept their word when they say they ‘cannot meet need’.
(In the schools defence, this is often because the budget they are assigned is insufficient to deliver neccesary support)
The SEND review under the last government and the strategy of the current one both acknowledge that children who could be supported in mainstream education are being pushed out.
At which point, it will almost certainly be to a specialist school with travel costs attached.
I don’t know the actual costs for ours, but I believe it’s around 80k a year, and the educational outcomes aren’t even that great. (Lack of subject specialist teaching and low ambition)
But what we are seeing is the therapeutic support that CAHMs and school failed to provide. In mainstream, complex psychological support of SEND pupils is left to teaching assistants.
The noises from the government about more inclusion are good, but not if it’s a case of having Special Need children physically in mainstream without holding anyone accountable for improving outcomes.
The current system is incredibly opaque on this. You can see progress by gender and ethnicity, yet it’s perfectly acceptable for a child to leave primary with excellent SAT scores and regress in secondary.
In our case, attendance was good on paper, but in reality they were barely in the classroom, so largely being ‘taught’ by teaching assistants. And with no disrespect, TAs are not teachers - don’t have the same subject knowledge, teaching skills or responsibility. They are mostly lovely hard-working people, but there is plenty of research suggesting they are negative towards learning - beyond the simple correlation that children with additional needs spend more time with TAs.
The last point would be Covid - it has made all these problems worse, and Sunak refused the catch-up funding, so now we have a SEND system that was already failing, drowning.
And picking up the pieces is an exploitative private sector.
(With the local state SEND schools full, including those in neighbouring areas, our LA has no option other than paying for whatever they can get)
The solution is obviously more accountability between education providers and the LA, so that there are sufficient places that meet local needs - with some ability to scale up and down types of provision.
What we will probably get is yet more cheap quick fixes - and then problems for the DWP later on, as these pupils become under-qualified adults.
There is also a reluctance to consider that some children will only thrive in a small classroom environment (under 10 pupils) while also receiving high quality subject specialist teaching - because wouldn’t all children? As Badenoch would have it, why should autistic children get advantages other children don’t get - especially if there is only a 21% chance of employment, it’s just a waste of resources.
(And even when they are in that small class environment, we throw together the chair-throwing kids and the anxious ones)
But if you cannot manage demand, how does "The solution is obviously more accountability between education providers and the LA, so that there are sufficient places that meet local needs - with some ability to scale up and down types of provision" work?
You may not be able to manage demand, but you can predict it - LAs are mostly able to respond to rising and falling birth rates, as there is lead time before children hit reception, and even longer before secondary. Similarly with trends in special needs - Covid aside.
At the peak of the recent baby boom our local primary had a four-form entry, which is back down to three now - so part of scaling is maintaining spare physical capacity in schools, as it’s easier to recruit or lose staff than building new schools.
In terms of accountability - I think it’s about making sure the academies are more accountable for providing and actually delivering SEND provision. At the moment, it’s too easy for them to go exclude or push for a managed move - there is a large dropout rate in Y7 and Y8 that should really be challenged.
It is too easy to make it ‘somebody else’s problem’ and in that scenario, they will
But is there a meaningful link between birth rates and SEN need? I agree that LAs can predict the number of school places they need, but the amount of specialist provision (either in specialist schools or more mainstream settings) is much harder. This is especially so as, a) SEN tends to make its own demand and b) the numbers of SEN seem to be rocketing so either i) vast numbers of children we going undiagnosed in the past or ii) there are a number of people swinging the lead a bit.
In practice LAs cannot budget for SEN provision because they can have no idea what they are budgeting for.
Merely saying academies should be accountable does not necessarily solve the problem. Accountable to whom in what way?
For starters - they should be held accountable by LAs for actually delivering the support agreed in an EHCP - my experience is the LA side has never raised questions around failure to deliver provisions listed in Section F, even as the school says the situation is deteriorating.
The quid-pro-quo to this would be the LA having to ensure the funding covers the provisions, and that the provision genuinely can be delivered - every provision should be budgeted, and then evidence that it’s been spent on delivering the provision. But equally, no more cases of LAs using their override to put schools in impossible positions.
The current model of assigning bands which go into a pot of money to the school, from which the costs of individual support are then drawn down without much oversight doesn’t work.
Secondly, in the relationship of academies to the local area. When every school can pursue its own policies, you can end up with provision desserts - pupils that no academy wants to take on.
When a placement breaks down, there should be a post-mortem review held on file by both school and LA, with the knowledge that will feed into the next Ofsted report.
Thirdly - some equivalent to Progress 8 measures. It’s ludicrous you can have pupils in the top decile in primary SATs leaving at 16 with entry level qualifications or low grade GCSEs without this raising alarm bells.
This is more of a problem in the specialist sector, as in mainstream SEN pupils still count against progress 8 measures - for now.
(I understand that as part of Labour’s plan to get SEN pupils out of ‘expensive specialist schools’ and into mainstream, they intend to allow schools to discount those pupils from the academic results. I wonder what the consequences will be?)
"The EPI report [5] did find that summer-born children were over-represented with SEND, that is, an over-representation of children who were at the younger end of their age cohort and therefore slightly less mature. Moreover, the relative age effect appeared to be mediated through lower Early Years Foundation Stage Profile attainment for younger children. This finding suggests that assessors of the EYFSP fail to take into account the development that occurs in children over a 12 month-time span."
This would seem to imply that once the assessment has been made, the funding is (notionally) attached, but remains with the child until they leave that school - and might carry over into the next, rather than being re-assessed. Don't know what actually happens.
Summer-born children; I don't believe the monthly birth numbers are that volatile, but from memory November is consistently the peak. So, born June or July, then what's different between conception September/October, or the earlier stages of pregnancy in November, December, or January?
One possible oddity; that some element of the diagnosis is related to falling TFR/CCFR - there are more only children around, and that there is some socialisation or competition between siblings within the household that would mitigate SENs, reducing the diagnosis rate.
We could fix a lot of this by fixing the risk/reward incentives. Large high profile infrastructure programmes being a case in point. HS2 is basically risk-free; however much you overspend, or fail to deliver on time, doesn’t matter; it’ll all be underwritten by future taxpayers, who probably haven’t been born yet. In the meantime, the rewards are quite good; getting a regular income for delivering very little value, or making huge margins as a supplier.
The vast array of compliance and checking from regulatory and commissioning systems in government is extreme. It litters the public realm. The rub is knowing what to keep and what to remove. The danger is that all involved are invested in their little zone of control and the system can’t control it as the important parts are just a single voice in the melee. Look at CQC a system of regulation and oversight that is a total failure. A burden on the public finances and one with a serious duty that should already be held by the management of hospitals - patient safety. A function that is lost as cutting of direct care staff and clinical leadership is the way we pay for the growth in tick boxes and “efficiency “. Madness.
Yeah, I think the phrasing about ‘little zones of control’ is spot on. You end up with hundreds of these little groups with tunnel vision inspecting their piece of the puzzle to the nth degree, but none of them have any responsibility for making sure the puzzle actually gets completed (if possible).
Any analysis of the UK's tax/spending issues which doesn't include remigration as a solution is fundamentally unserious.
Not educated at all on this, but my guess is the underlying challenge is the refusal to 'decay' or 'slide backward' in national standards.
Once you've put a standard in place, no one will willingly 'walk it back' on any aspect.
This creates unrealistic and expensive constraints for everyone. The net result is high expense and the 'semblance' of quality that does nothing to adapt to the constraints and meet local needs. The expectation that everyone is 'treated the same' does nothing to help.
30% of children with genetic disorders are born to Pakistanis, who make up only 4% of births, due to their proclivity for first cousins marriage. I suspect there are a lot of little things like this that filter through mechanisms like spiralling special needs educational costs to a pervading “we’re completely broke” feeling.
Citation please? That's a wild statistic.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4567984/#:~:text=Autosomal%20recessive%20disorders%20are%20also,(Modell%20and%20Darr%202002).
Hopefully the deep link works, if not it’s the middle of the second paragraph of the introduction to this report: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4567984/
The whole report is pretty sober reading for proponents of mass immigration to be honest.
Wow, that's a dramatically larger effect than I would have imagined. Makes me even gladder I married someone from a different continent!
I was also intuitively shocked at the effect size as well when I first saw it, but on reflection I think it makes sense rationally. The effect is directly and principally caused by an activity the population engages in a lot, it’s like if you had a population that loved smoking, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear they had an 8 times increase in incidence of lung cancer. I attribute my surprise to the ideology I was brought up in - everyone is the same, it’s impolite and low status to notice group differences, the whole liberalism shtick.
Isn't your call to arms, that tax reform has to be paired with major public sector reform, an example of your "escalators"? It reminds me of how everytime major spending reform of the NHS is paired with a "reform" that at best makes no difference or makes things worse.
Food for thought.
I don’t think you can meaningfully separate the two though. At some point if I got to a board of investors and ask for more cash, I need to come with a credible business plan for how I’m going to spend that cash, otherwise why would they contribute?
Speaking as a chartered accountant and economist there are many tax reforms we can make that aren't just asks for more cash (if you want to find out more, have a look at Dan Niedle's work). Many of these could easily be designed to be revenue neutral (if that's a real sticking point). The problem we have is that governments pair these tax changes with political issues. This means they make multiple little changes to the tax code that means, year after year, it gets more complex, bloated and creates bad incentives. These have a real cost to the economy
"If anything is done on taxes, it has to be coupled with serious, once-in-a-generation reforms that stop the state from simply bleeding out the extra cash, and visibly improve the fabric of people’s lives. That means things like a total rethink of local government funding, a massive expansion of house building, ripping up procurement processes, far more radical reforms of planning, and an integrated strategy for social care."
Don't like these odds...
I’m totally baffled these over escalating statutory local government costs seem to evade any wide scale national debate 🤔
There’s been a lot of debate and noise around the broken SEND system - both from parents and from councils.
Root causes - councils have responsibility to fund ‘suitable education’ but no ability to directly commission schools.
Academies are also outside of LA control - although the LA does have some power to direct academies to take SEND pupils, many of them run policies that mean they, sadly, cannot meet need.
On top of that, EHCP budgets are not ring-fenced, and in my experience the LA never demands evidence from mainstream schools they are delivering the support detailed in the EHCP, but will accept their word when they say they ‘cannot meet need’.
(In the schools defence, this is often because the budget they are assigned is insufficient to deliver neccesary support)
The SEND review under the last government and the strategy of the current one both acknowledge that children who could be supported in mainstream education are being pushed out.
At which point, it will almost certainly be to a specialist school with travel costs attached.
I don’t know the actual costs for ours, but I believe it’s around 80k a year, and the educational outcomes aren’t even that great. (Lack of subject specialist teaching and low ambition)
But what we are seeing is the therapeutic support that CAHMs and school failed to provide. In mainstream, complex psychological support of SEND pupils is left to teaching assistants.
The noises from the government about more inclusion are good, but not if it’s a case of having Special Need children physically in mainstream without holding anyone accountable for improving outcomes.
The current system is incredibly opaque on this. You can see progress by gender and ethnicity, yet it’s perfectly acceptable for a child to leave primary with excellent SAT scores and regress in secondary.
In our case, attendance was good on paper, but in reality they were barely in the classroom, so largely being ‘taught’ by teaching assistants. And with no disrespect, TAs are not teachers - don’t have the same subject knowledge, teaching skills or responsibility. They are mostly lovely hard-working people, but there is plenty of research suggesting they are negative towards learning - beyond the simple correlation that children with additional needs spend more time with TAs.
The last point would be Covid - it has made all these problems worse, and Sunak refused the catch-up funding, so now we have a SEND system that was already failing, drowning.
And picking up the pieces is an exploitative private sector.
(With the local state SEND schools full, including those in neighbouring areas, our LA has no option other than paying for whatever they can get)
The solution is obviously more accountability between education providers and the LA, so that there are sufficient places that meet local needs - with some ability to scale up and down types of provision.
What we will probably get is yet more cheap quick fixes - and then problems for the DWP later on, as these pupils become under-qualified adults.
There is also a reluctance to consider that some children will only thrive in a small classroom environment (under 10 pupils) while also receiving high quality subject specialist teaching - because wouldn’t all children? As Badenoch would have it, why should autistic children get advantages other children don’t get - especially if there is only a 21% chance of employment, it’s just a waste of resources.
(And even when they are in that small class environment, we throw together the chair-throwing kids and the anxious ones)
But if you cannot manage demand, how does "The solution is obviously more accountability between education providers and the LA, so that there are sufficient places that meet local needs - with some ability to scale up and down types of provision" work?
You may not be able to manage demand, but you can predict it - LAs are mostly able to respond to rising and falling birth rates, as there is lead time before children hit reception, and even longer before secondary. Similarly with trends in special needs - Covid aside.
At the peak of the recent baby boom our local primary had a four-form entry, which is back down to three now - so part of scaling is maintaining spare physical capacity in schools, as it’s easier to recruit or lose staff than building new schools.
In terms of accountability - I think it’s about making sure the academies are more accountable for providing and actually delivering SEND provision. At the moment, it’s too easy for them to go exclude or push for a managed move - there is a large dropout rate in Y7 and Y8 that should really be challenged.
It is too easy to make it ‘somebody else’s problem’ and in that scenario, they will
But is there a meaningful link between birth rates and SEN need? I agree that LAs can predict the number of school places they need, but the amount of specialist provision (either in specialist schools or more mainstream settings) is much harder. This is especially so as, a) SEN tends to make its own demand and b) the numbers of SEN seem to be rocketing so either i) vast numbers of children we going undiagnosed in the past or ii) there are a number of people swinging the lead a bit.
In practice LAs cannot budget for SEN provision because they can have no idea what they are budgeting for.
Merely saying academies should be accountable does not necessarily solve the problem. Accountable to whom in what way?
Sorry, taken a while to get back on this as busy.
For starters - they should be held accountable by LAs for actually delivering the support agreed in an EHCP - my experience is the LA side has never raised questions around failure to deliver provisions listed in Section F, even as the school says the situation is deteriorating.
The quid-pro-quo to this would be the LA having to ensure the funding covers the provisions, and that the provision genuinely can be delivered - every provision should be budgeted, and then evidence that it’s been spent on delivering the provision. But equally, no more cases of LAs using their override to put schools in impossible positions.
The current model of assigning bands which go into a pot of money to the school, from which the costs of individual support are then drawn down without much oversight doesn’t work.
Secondly, in the relationship of academies to the local area. When every school can pursue its own policies, you can end up with provision desserts - pupils that no academy wants to take on.
When a placement breaks down, there should be a post-mortem review held on file by both school and LA, with the knowledge that will feed into the next Ofsted report.
Thirdly - some equivalent to Progress 8 measures. It’s ludicrous you can have pupils in the top decile in primary SATs leaving at 16 with entry level qualifications or low grade GCSEs without this raising alarm bells.
This is more of a problem in the specialist sector, as in mainstream SEN pupils still count against progress 8 measures - for now.
(I understand that as part of Labour’s plan to get SEN pupils out of ‘expensive specialist schools’ and into mainstream, they intend to allow schools to discount those pupils from the academic results. I wonder what the consequences will be?)
"But is there a meaningful link between birth rates and SEN need?"
Nobody seems to know what might be causing the rise in rates. Curiously; https://www.educationalneuroscience.org.uk/2022/04/01/why-has-there-been-a-rise-in-number-of-sen-children-especially-in-the-early-years/ - notes that the SENs rate is higher in the early years, and that;
"The EPI report [5] did find that summer-born children were over-represented with SEND, that is, an over-representation of children who were at the younger end of their age cohort and therefore slightly less mature. Moreover, the relative age effect appeared to be mediated through lower Early Years Foundation Stage Profile attainment for younger children. This finding suggests that assessors of the EYFSP fail to take into account the development that occurs in children over a 12 month-time span."
This would seem to imply that once the assessment has been made, the funding is (notionally) attached, but remains with the child until they leave that school - and might carry over into the next, rather than being re-assessed. Don't know what actually happens.
Summer-born children; I don't believe the monthly birth numbers are that volatile, but from memory November is consistently the peak. So, born June or July, then what's different between conception September/October, or the earlier stages of pregnancy in November, December, or January?
One possible oddity; that some element of the diagnosis is related to falling TFR/CCFR - there are more only children around, and that there is some socialisation or competition between siblings within the household that would mitigate SENs, reducing the diagnosis rate.
The purpose of a system is what it does
We could fix a lot of this by fixing the risk/reward incentives. Large high profile infrastructure programmes being a case in point. HS2 is basically risk-free; however much you overspend, or fail to deliver on time, doesn’t matter; it’ll all be underwritten by future taxpayers, who probably haven’t been born yet. In the meantime, the rewards are quite good; getting a regular income for delivering very little value, or making huge margins as a supplier.
Yes exactly this, it’s a hugely underrated point.
The vast array of compliance and checking from regulatory and commissioning systems in government is extreme. It litters the public realm. The rub is knowing what to keep and what to remove. The danger is that all involved are invested in their little zone of control and the system can’t control it as the important parts are just a single voice in the melee. Look at CQC a system of regulation and oversight that is a total failure. A burden on the public finances and one with a serious duty that should already be held by the management of hospitals - patient safety. A function that is lost as cutting of direct care staff and clinical leadership is the way we pay for the growth in tick boxes and “efficiency “. Madness.
Yeah, I think the phrasing about ‘little zones of control’ is spot on. You end up with hundreds of these little groups with tunnel vision inspecting their piece of the puzzle to the nth degree, but none of them have any responsibility for making sure the puzzle actually gets completed (if possible).
The Norway example on the podcast was a good one. We need to be more open-minded to learn how other countries have done things better.