There really isn’t much new under the sun (Special educational needs bill in England hits record £10bn a year, 24 October). As a senior local authority education officer in the 1990s, I worked with schools on what was then a problem of the costs of statements of special education needs (the forerunner of education, health and care plans) spiralling out of control.
The problem, then as now, is that a funding system that links additional resources to specific needs of individual children rapidly runs into overdrive if the basic funding for all children is not covering the great majority of needs, special or otherwise. The number of statements was rising at a rate that seemed exponential, promising a situation where all children would be funded through statements and basic funding would become irrelevant.
