Last week the Department for Education (DfE) in England made a call for evidence about SEND funding. As many of you will know and have experienced, the SEN system in England was significantly reformed in 2014 with the introduction of the Children and Families Act but that wasn’t the only change to have a big impact on children and young people with SEND.

Eighteen months or so prior to that the government made significant changes to the way SEND was to be funded at the local level. The combination of the these two major reforms has had led to numerous accounts of serious issues for children with SEND with almost daily news stories of exclusions, head teachers saying they have no money for SEND and parents taking local authorities, and even the government, to court for matters relating to funding.

The consultation is open until 31 July and the online response form can be found here.

The DfE have also asked the Council for Disabled Children to organise a small number of workshops across the country, so that they can discuss the themes in the call for evidence in greater detail. If you would like to attend one of these events, you can register your interest at [email protected], giving your name, role, organisation and email address. They will send you information about the events as soon as it is available.

Bizarrely, the call for evidence doesn’t include special school funding or school/college transport. Families are telling us that problems with the latter continue to be a serious issue for some parents meaning that sometimes they have to reduce the hours that they work or even consider giving up work all together. In many cases, getting a child/young person with SEND to school or college and providing a meaningful educational and social experience needs all the pieces of the SEND funding jigsaw to work together: it would be great if the DfE could focus on all of the pieces and not just some of them.