Solving the SEND crisis: what can schools and colleges learn from the latest House of Commons Education Committee report?

On 18 September 2025 – after nine months of inquiry, 890 pieces of written evidence and seven oral hearing sessions – the House of Commons Education Committee released its report into the Special Educational Needs and Disability (SEND) system in England, entitled “Solving the SEND Crisis”. 

The report describes a SEND system at breaking point, with gaps in provision and extreme pressure on stakeholders across the board. 

It sets out a range of recommendations designed to address the most egregious issues and improve outcomes for everyone.  

We examine the Committee’s findings, its proposed solutions, and what this could mean for schools and colleges in England. 

A system in crisis

The report begins by setting some important context; since the current SEND system was introduced with the Children and Families Act in 2014, the number of children and young people in England with identified SEN has increased from 1.3 million to 1.7 million (a 30% increase). Of those learners, 1.2 million receive SEN support and 0.5 million have an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP).

But, as the report states, “behind these numbers are families navigating a system that too often feels adversarial, fragmented and under-resourced”. The inquiry heard from “exhausted parents fighting for basic support, teachers stretched beyond capacity and committed professionals working within services buckling under pressure. Their voices were clear and consistent: the current system is not working”.

The problems

The report identifies problems with the current system and its delivery, including: 

Poor inclusion of SEN pupils in mainstream education

There is a clear emphasis throughout the report on improving inclusivity for SEND children and young people in mainstream schools and colleges. This seems consistent with central government’s rhetoric thus far, and the general push towards improving mainstream schools’ ability to accommodate learners with SEND.

However, the report describes how the current mainstream education system is “not designed with inclusion in mind” and can't cope with the current level of need. There is a lack of standardisation, clarity and consistent understanding when it comes to both ordinarily available provision (i.e. support that should be available in mainstream schools for any pupil) and SEN support (i.e. additional support in place for pupils with identified SEN that does not require an EHCP), leading more parents pushed to consider EHCPs and specialist placements for their children.

Lack of trained professionals equipped to manage the level of demand

There are a few different aspects to this including:  

• The well-acknowledged lack of sufficient skilled professionals (including Educational Psychologists, Speech and Language Therapists and other health professionals) to meet the current level of demand, which impacts on timescales at almost every stage of the process; and 
• The lack of training, resources and support for workers across education, health and local authorities to respond effectively and compassionately to the needs to SEND learners and their families. 

The report says that professionals need to have strong technical understanding (e.g. an understanding of child development and SEND law) as well as effective mediation skills, and stressed that responsibility for supporting and educating SEND pupils must be shared across all staff – including teachers, TAs and leadership – rather than falling exclusively to a school’s SENCO.

Insufficient funding

It is no secret that the SEND system is chronically underfunded. 

Schools have a notional budget of £6,000 per pupil, and this hasn't changed since 2009. In real terms, the amount of funding available mainstream schools to meet the needs of their SEN pupils has been reduced by a third over the last 16 years. 

These funding challenges are, inevitably, not confined to local authority and school balance sheets. In practice, stretched resources mean that services have no choice but to focus on addressing urgent crises, rather than taking preventative steps to support SEND learners and their families. Not only does this deliver worse outcomes, the report notes that operating reactively (rather than proactively) in this way inevitably increases costs overall, exacerbating the problem further. 

It also leads to a “postcode lottery” of inconsistent service delivery between different local authorities, with funding models ignoring factors like local demographics, levels of deprivation, historical funding patterns etc.

Lack of communication between services

EHCPs were introduced to bring together professionals in education, health and social care to deliver a holistic, comprehensive package of support for children and young people with SEND. In reality “coordination between services responsible for assessing and delivering SEND support remains limited, with many operating in silos. This fragmentation leads to inefficiencies and delays”.

The report stresses the need for Education and Health services to work more closely and coherently together. Whilst there are success stories – such as programmes like PINS (Partnerships for Inclusion of Neurodiversity in Schools) – there are many stories of schools being apprehensive about accepting children with complex medical needs, because they are worried about being liable for providing health tasks. 

The report also notes a particularly surprising lack of overlap between SEND and Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS), despite there being obvious links.

The benefits of collaborative working between statutory services are clear. However, the system’s current approach to children with SEND falls short of the “blended partnership” envisaged when the 2014 reforms were put in place, and poor communication between departments means some children are left to “fall through the cracks”. 

Broken trust between parents, local authorities and other stakeholders

For those of us familiar with the SEND system in England, it comes as no surprise that, having considered the evidence presented to it, the Committee found that trust and confidence between parents, local authorities, schools and other stakeholders has been “eroded” by failures to deliver provision, by a lack of transparency in decision making, and by a seeming lack of accountability or consequences when unlawful decisions are made. 

The report notes that the current accountability mechanisms for schools and local authorities (e.g. Ofsted inspections of schools and SEND inspections of local authorities) fail to address and penalise exclusionary practices. If trust is to be rebuilt, accountability systems need to be reformed and strengthened so that “mainstream schools are held to account for delivering inclusive practice, and are well supported to do so…”. 

Proposed solutions

The report recommends a range of changes to address the issues it has identified and to improve the quality and consistency of SEND support in England. These include: 

1.  Implementing DfE set national standards and expectations for ordinarily available provision and SEN support, to give a consistent baseline and help education settings become more inclusive.
2. Introducing statutory requirements for adequate resourcing, access to specialist staff, appropriate equipment and an inclusive physical environment in all mainstream schools.
3. Embedding high-quality SEND training throughout teacher training (both initial training, CPD, and specific training for SENCOs and TAs). Examples given in the report to achieve this include:
   1. Increasing the number of Initial Teacher Training placements in specialist settings
   2. The introduction of mandatory SEND focussed CPD and a “a nationally recognised supplementary qualification in SEND that all existing teachers must complete within a defined timeframe”.
   3. DfE guidance on SENCO-to-pupil ratios (requiring larger schools to have more than one designated SENCO), and mandatory SEND-specific qualifications for all new headteachers (implemented within the next four years).
4. Increasing funding in the SEND system by:
   1. Index linking the notional budget (currently £6,000) to inflation and ring-fencing these funds so they can be spent on SEND support and provision only.
   2. Allocating more funds to early intervention and SEND childcare.
   3. Reviewing the National Funding Formula to ensure funding is allocated fairly and reflects the real level of need across the country.
   4. Partially writing off local authority SEND-related deficits.
5. Setting up a dedicated funding stream for post-16 SEND provision, to allow colleges to hire specialist staff, purchase the right resources, and make adjustments for their SEND students.
6. Mandating SEND training for Ofsted inspectors, with Ofsted using its new inspection framework to examine inclusion in schools more closely and consider outcomes like attendance and exclusion rates.
7. Making SEND a formal priority for NHS England, and improving joint commissioning and information sharing through the use of a “single unique identifier” (already proposed in The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill).
8. Appointing and national SEND health lead, and imposing statutory duties on ICBs to participate fully in SEND planning and delivery.
9. Extending the powers of the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman (LGSCO) to cover complaints about “the delivery of EHC plans, SEN support and other appropriate inclusive education for children with SEND in schools, multi-academy trusts and other education settings”.

What does that mean for schools and colleges? 

As anticipated, this report further demonstrates the government’s ongoing emphasis on integration of SEND pupils in mainstream education. The Committee believes that if mainstream schools can be more inclusive (and importantly, more consistently inclusive), there will be a significantly reduced need for EHCPs, which will help alleviate pressure on a system where supply is far outstripped by demand.

If the above recommendations are implemented, schools and colleges can expect to see some sizeable changes. Increased and reformed funding arrangements should alleviate some of the financial pressure facing local authorities (and by extension, schools and colleges) and the implementation of new national frameworks should help all schools understand what support and provision they are expected to be able to provide for their pupils as standard, i.e. without an EHCP in place. 

However, with these frameworks may come greater legal duties on schools and colleges. With the goal of inclusivity in mainstream education, the report recommends new statutory requirements for all mainstream schools to have “adequate resourcing, access to specialist staff, appropriate equipment and an inclusive physical environment”, a standard which, particularly for schools in older buildings, may require significant investment to achieve. What is not clear, though, is whether this statutory responsibility would sit with schools and colleges themselves, or with the local authority.

There will also be greater training responsibilities. Specialist settings may need to accommodate training teachers, there will a higher level of mandatory training for staff members, and larger settings may need to appoint multiple SENCOs to prevent such a high level of responsibility falling to a single staff member.

Schools and colleges can also expect more consistent input from health services to help equip schools to properly manage the health needs of their students, alongside a clearer, more consistent understanding of how responsibility for the management of health needs (and the management of health tasks) is delegated. 

What happens next?

These are recommendations. The report has been presented to the House of Commons and it is now up to the DfE to decide which recommendations (if any) will be put in place. We'll know more when the DfE publishes its SEND White Paper, due in Autumn 2025  which will set out specific government proposals for legislation to reform the SEND system.

This will be the beginning of a further process of consultation and discussion with interested groups (in this case, with parents, carers and schools) and often, proposals are subject to trial in pilot areas before they are adopted and ultimately rolled out nationwide. 

What this means is that although reforms are coming, implementation is going to take time, and schools and colleges should not expect to be facing sweeping changes overnight. 

The exception, in this case, is the changes to Ofsted’s inspection framework. This has already been confirmed, and a phased introduction is due to begin in November 2025. 

If your school or college is concerned about how this new inspection framework could impact your setting, or you would like advice on any of the proposed changes set out in the Education Committee’s report, our team of expert solicitors can help. 

Our newsletters

We publish monthly employment and education newsletters. If you'd like to be added to the mailing list, please let me know.