Contact calls for SEN Support to be placed on a stronger legal footing

What is SEN Support?

SEN Support refers to the help provided to children or young people with Special Educational Needs (SEN) using the existing resources that are already available to educational setting. Most children and young people with SEN don’t have an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP) and instead should be receiving SEN Support to meet their needs. However, this is currently not happing for every child who needs it.

SEN Support is part of the England SEND system and does not extend to other UK nations.

Findings from our SEN Support Survey

In February this year Contact joined forces with IPSEA and surveyed 2,000 families with children and young people who have SEN but do not have an EHCP to see how SEN Support is working for children, young people and their families.

The major finding was that there is not enough SEN support in schools leading many families to seek an EHCP to secure the support their child needs. As a result of mainstream schools being unable to meet a pupil’s needs through SEN support:

• 20% of schools had asked for an EHC Needs Assessment.
• 35% of parents had asked for an EHC Needs Assessment.

The survey also showed that as a result of pupils not getting any or enough SEN support, 60% of children experienced school avoidance, 47% were absent from school, 22% were put on part-time timetables and 14% were excluded.

Other key findings included:

• Just 9% of pupils were getting speech, language and communication support. This was the least commonly available provision, despite government research showing that speech and language is one of the highest areas of need.
• Over a third of respondents (35%) said that funding was the reason given by schools for not providing adequate SEN support.
• A fifth of children with special educational needs were not receiving any SEN support
• Only 8% of those surveyed said that SEN Support was meeting all of their child or young person’s needs

Current law around SEN Support

Unlike EHCPs, which are firmly grounded in law in the Children and Families Act 2014, SEN Support derives almost entirely from guidance. This means that schools have discretion in the delivery of SEN Support, resulting in varying and inconsistent levels of support for children and young people. It can, therefore, be all too easy for educational settings to reduce what they offer in SEN Support in times of financial and staffing pressures, and there is currently no effective way to hold schools to account when they do not provide the SEN Support they should. This was clearly shown in the results of our SEN support survey above and is why Contact is urgently calling for SEN Support to be put on a statutory footing.

Contact is calling for SEN Support to be put on a statutory footing.

Putting SEN Support on a statutory footing will mean that nurseries, schools and colleges will have legal duties to provide SEN Support.

Contact and IPSEA have worked together to draft a proposed amendment to the Children and Families Act 2014 so that educational settings will have a primary legal duty to:

• Identify a child or young person’s special educational needs and what special educational provision is required to meet those needs.

•  Issue a special educational needs (SEN) support record to the child or young person and deliver the provision in the record.

What Impact will this have?

If SEN support was put on a statutory footing

• Nurseries, schools and colleges would have to provide SEN Support and if they failed to do so they could be held accountable
•  The needs of more children and young people could be met in their local school, increasing inclusion.
• Fewer families would need to go through the legal process of obtaining an EHCP simply to get the right support for their child. 
• The pressure on the SEND Tribunal would reduce. With more children being properly supported without an EHCP, there would be fewer EHC Needs Assessment applications, fewer ’refusal to assess’ appeals and fewer plans being issued.

Download our report to read more about Contact and IPSEA’s Call for SEN Support to be put on a statutory footing.

SEN support & inclusive education

Download our report on parent experience of support in school

Download REPORT