Surging demand and shrinking budgets: there is no quick fix for a system that is on its knees

Despite council attempts to ration educational health and care plans, the number increased by 140% between 2014 and 2023

- Patrick Butler and Pamela Duncan

It was all meant to be so different. Announcing sweeping reforms of the special needs provision in England's schools a decade ago, the then children's minister, Edward Timpson, promised a simpler approach that would put the needs, rights and choices of families and children first. "For too long, families have found themselves battling against a complex and fragmented system. These reforms ensure support fits in with their needs and not the other way round," said Timpson.

Parents with experience of the special educational needs and disabilities (Send) system since then may smile ruefully. They have seen a system on its knees, locking frustrated families in lengthy and bitter battles with the authorities to get support for their children, its spiralling costs all but bankrupting scores of councils.

A Local Government Association report in July called it "an incoherent system that inadvertently perpetuates tension, creates adversity and sets everyone up to fail". The education commentator Sam Freedman described fixing the Send system as "the biggest single problem" facing Labour's education ministers.