And so it is that the public consultation into the government’s SEND (special educational needs and disabilities) reforms closes next week, and that’s what I’m focusing on today – although I’ll also touch on the potential implications of the leadership ructions for these reforms at the end.

We didn’t mean to go to hell

The key thing about the current SEND crisis is that it started with good intentions.

In 2014 the coalition government passed the Children and Families Act. It increased the upper age at which children and young people could receive statutory SEND support from 19 years old to 25, and formalised support in pre-school.

This was the era of David Cameron, George Osborne, Eric Pickles and Iain Duncan Smith, of vicious benefit cuts and savage raids on local government funding, of Nick Clegg Says I’m Sorry (The Autotune Remix). Amid all that, here was the government doing something that was, in the most basic meaning of the word, “good”.

But they didn’t put enough money in. For once, that wasn’t the austerity reflex at work – they just didn’t realise how much they’d need, because they hadn’t done their homework. The National Audit Office reported in 2019 that the Department for Education (DfE) “did not fully assess the likely financial consequences of the 2014 reforms”.

The DfE “expected that the benefits and savings would significantly outweigh the costs of moving to the new system”, the NAO said. The DfE assumed that greater cooperation between different agencies and more engagement with parents would save money. It expected fewer challenges to council decisions about SEND supports under the new system, with more of these settled through mediation.

Instead, the number of SEND tribunal cases rocketed by 80% between 2014/15 and 2017/18. Funding for high needs education rose by 7.2% in real terms in that time – but the number of children with education, health and care plans (EHCPs, which set out legally mandated SEND support) rose by 10%, meaning that high need funding per pupil actually fell.

The rest you already know – council overspends on their SEND budgets exploded, special schools filled up and developed long waiting lists, and children with high needs were left without support, and sometimes without any schooling at all.

Which brings us to 2026.

Labour’s proposed SEND reforms promise more funding to support SEND children in mainstream schools, a more streamlined process to meet all but the severest needs, more training for mainstream school staff to cater to SEND children, £3.7bn in capital funding to adapt the mainstream school estate to meet SEND needs, and a new Experts at Hand service to make SEND-oriented specialist professionals, such as educational psychologists, available to mainstream schools.

As a result, more SEND children will be able to be taught in inclusive mainstream schools, with special school provision for those who need it, while the adversarial nature of the current system – which frequently sees parents dropping out of paid work to fight full-time legal and bureaucratic battles to wring droplets of support from underfunded and bottlenecked institutions – will be consigned to history.

All good intentions, right?

Hurry up and get to the “but”

But there’s a problem – and if your memory stretches as far back as the start of this post, it’s a familiar one. The government isn’t putting enough money in to make this work.

Take the Inclusive Mainstream Fund (or IMF – insert your bailout jokes here). This new funding stream is meant to enable mainstream schools to support more SEND children without the need for special school provision. The IMF is often written up in shorthand as a way to fund extra teaching assistants, but the DfE sees its role much more broadly – it recommends seven “themes of activity” for schools to spend the money on, including early intervention, attendance and behaviour practices, data collection and peer review, and provision beyond the classroom.

The IMF is worth £1.6bn. That’s a lot of money – except that’s over three years, and covers every mainstream state school in England. The first annual tranche for 5-16-year-olds will be worth £400m in 2026/27.

What does that £400m amount to when spread across so many schools? In late March the DfE published an IMF “calculator” – an Excel spreadsheet you can download and enter a school’s registration number to find out any school’s provisional IMF allocation for 2026/27. But they’re not going to publish a full list until the allocations have been finalised, apparently sometime this month.

So I decided to take the registration number of each school and enter it into the spreadsheet calculator, before noting down its provisional IMF allocation for 2026/27.

I did that 19,857 times.

It took about 20 hours of solid, plus probably another 15-20 hours cleaning and checking the data and merging it with DfE spreadsheets showing school demographic and financial data.

I’ve written a lengthy piece on my findings for Schools Week, but to summarise:

· primary schools are set to receive £13,485 on average, with secondary schools in line for an average allocation of £47,531

· 1,399 small primary schools stand to get less than £6,000

· 331 secondary schools are set to receive less than £24,400, which is roughly the cost of an entry-level full-time teaching assistant

These IMF allocations amount to 1.6% of primary schools’ average spending on teaching staff in 2024/25 – and just 1.1% for secondary schools. They amount to 0.6% to 0.7% of their total annual income that year. In terms of overall school budgets, it’s peanuts.

None of the headteachers I spoke to for the article felt their allocation would be anything like enough to meet the IMF’s stated goals. They all welcomed any new funding, but they all saw this as effectively chipping in a bit of money – one head told me it would do no more than enable his school to just about set a balanced budget. Another said that his school’s £7,700 amounted to around a day and a half of additional support staffing – a role that would be hard to fill in his rural school.

It’s not just the IMF. There are concerns over whether school staff actually have time to train adequately to support SEND children – and whether training providers have time either. The £3.7bn capital investment is bigger, but some badly stretched councils fear they’re being shortchanged, and there are also concerns that schools will simply create rooms in which to dump SEND children when they get overwhelmed. Nor is it clear that there are enough specialist professionals to populate the Experts at Hand service.

Trust us, bro

All of this is happening at the same time that the government tries to water down the rights of parents within the system. The government’s plans will raise the bar on qualifying for an EHCP – indeed, the DfE’s modelling suggests one in eight children with EHCPs will end up transitioning to “individual support plans” (ISPs) for those whose needs do not meet the newly raised EHCP threshold.

Those ISPs won’t be legally enforceable like EHCPs are – or at least, are supposed to be. SEND legal charity IPSEA has warned that “a school having a legal duty to produce an ISP is not the same thing as a child having a legal right to receive specified provision or to challenge the contents of an ISP”. Tribunals will no longer be able to name a particular school or college that a young person must be allowed to attend, which is currently a key legal recourse for parents wanting specialist provision.

The government’s line is that this doesn’t matter – its reforms will improve inclusion in mainstream schools so legal recourse isn’t needed so much anymore, and in any case, isn’t the point to take the conflict out of the system? We want to hold hands, right? Don’t you want to hold hands?

But there’s a contradiction here, and SEND parents know it. If the government’s reforms work as planned – if mainstream schools are well-resourced and genuinely inclusive, and ISPs meet most SEND children’s needs – then the need for EHCPs and special schools will naturally decline, conflict will dissipate, so there’ll be no cause for restricting parents’ legal rights.

But if the reforms don’t work out – because, for example, they’re underfunded like they were last time – then taking away that legal recourse is removing an essential safety net for SEND children, tattered though it doubtless is.

As IPSEA chief executive Madeleine Cassidy told a SEND protest in London last weekend: “If it’s this hard when we have rights, what will it be like when we don’t?”

Why remove the safety net? I think primarily it’s about cost – but not in the sense of spending cuts. The government, after all, is increasing spending on SEND, just as the last government did.

But what the government is also doing is taking those heaving SEND deficits off the books of local authorities – who are the big winners from the SEND reforms. Responsibilities will shift downwards to schools via ISPs, and upwards to central government via the costs of EHCP-funded support.

Until now, big overspends on SEND budgets have been borne by councils. In future, they would be borne by central government. And by restricting parents’ legal rights, I believe the government is looking to make SEND costs more predictable – a bigger funding pot, but also a more controlled one.

Looking at the state of government finances and borrowing costs, I get where they’re coming from. But it’s SEND children and their parents who are being made to carry the risk of the government’s SEND reforms failing.

If those reforms work, the “costs” of maintaining legal recourse would be minimal. If those costs are meaningful, it’s because the reforms haven’t worked, and removing those rights will have a disastrous effect on SEND children.

So which is it, Bridget?

Andy Burnham Will Say He’s Sorry (The Autotune Remix)

Which brings us to the Labour leadership.

A leadership election throws things into flux. It would bring an opportunity for SEND campaigners to try and drive the candidates to break with the government on this issue – to commit to restoring those legal rights, for example, or to seek more funding for some of the key plans of the reform package.

That matters, because that’s the most obvious window in which the government could be made to change tack. If a new prime minister decides to stick with the plans and brings them to a parliamentary vote, the chances of a significant Labour rebellion against a leader and prime minister they’ve only just elected are extremely low.

And that would leave us facing the risk of going through the motions of yet another SEND crisis, culminating a decade from now with more reports and more regrets and more reforms.

I found a Commons speech by the Labour MP for Cambridge about problems in the SEND system. They spoke of “inadequate levels of resources from central government”, of teachers being overwhelmed by unaddressed SEND needs in the classroom to the detriment of other children without special needs.

They described the “consensus” that greeted the previous reforms, with SEND children taught “in mainstream schools through individual attention, learning support assistance and specialist teaching” and reduced use of special schools – but said “the inadequate level of resources is the primary reason for the problems that we are experiencing in special needs education”.

They warned of the impact of capping spending on education; and of “the increasing number of children in our society who have emotional and behavioural problems”. And they said that it had not been the "intention” of the existing laws “to create a situation in which parents and schools compete with each other to get their children” specialist, legally enforceable support “to secure the resources that they need”.

That Labour MP for Cambridge was not Daniel Zeichner, the Labour MP for Cambridge in 2026. It was Anne Campbell, the Labour MP for Cambridge on 3rd July 1992. The existing law she was referring to was not the 2014 Act, but the Education Act of 1981.

Let’s not go round again.

This newsletter will be quite England-focused, but I will on occasion look towards the rest of the UK, and in time I also want to draw on how other countries approach social affairs and public services.

I will publish either weekly or twice-weekly – not sure yet, I might alternate – and it’s free for the time being. Depending on how things go, I may make it paywalled down the line, though I’d always look to keep benefits-related content free-to-read in some form.

With the introductions out of the way, I’ll crack on. Today I’m mostly looking at homelessness, via an ABBA pun so weak I have to specify that it’s an ABBA pun…

Cooper blooper (rights are gonna die here)

Government figures published last week show a big spike in homelessness caused by people having to leave Home Office accommodation.

The rise coincides with the Home Office deciding to cut how long newly accepted refugees are given to find somewhere to live before booting them out of “asylum hotels” and the like. You don’t say.

It works like this. Asylum seekers who can’t fund their own accommodation are housed by the Home Office while their asylum applications go through the system. This is usually in contracted hotels or in privately managed flats and housing.

Once the Home Office has decided someone’s asylum claim, the applicant has to leave their accommodation within a set time. If their claim has been refused, they are generally barred from getting formal homelessness support from local government.

But even if they are accepted as a refugee, they are effectively welcomed to this country with a scramble to find new accommodation – which may include approaching their local council for formal help to prevent homelessness (if they are threatened with homelessness) or relieve homelessness (if they are already homeless).

Here are the figures showing how many people were granted either a “prevention” duty or a “relief” duty by their local council each quarter, where the recorded reason was “required to leave accommodation provided by Home Office as asylum support”:

The main driver of these figures is arguably fluctuations in the number of people granted asylum – you can see how the two relate in this chart from a recent Refugee Council report, published before the most recent homelessness data:

But it won’t shock you to discover that some of those shifts in numbers also coincide with changes in Home Office policy.

In the past, successful asylum applicants were given 28 days to move out of Home Office accommodation – a timeframe that was widely seen as too short to enable them to find affordable housing.

But in December 2024, the Labour government doubled the move-on period to 56 days in what was initially a six-month pilot. Homelessness cases went into decline as refugees were given longer to find new homes. The Refugee Council report noted that asylum homelessness cases started shifting towards “prevention” duties rather than “relief” duties – indicating the additional time allowed to councils to intervene before people actually became homeless:

This pilot was then extended to the end of 2025 – but amid government panic over protests outside “asylum hotels”, the Home Office abruptly brought back the 28-day limit for all single adults from 1^st September last year (exceptional cases were exempted: pregnant women, over-65s, disabled people).

It was one of Yvette Cooper’s last acts as Home Secretary. And as you can see in the first chart, the most recent figures – from the final three months of 2025 – show a resurgence in homelessness cases, particularly relief duty (orange) rather than prevention duty (blue):

As the Refugee Council’s Jon Featonby flagged, nearly 6,000 households in three months (assuming no double-counting between prevention and relief cases) were given homelessness support by councils after being cut off from Home Office support – a 36% rise in one quarter.

In short, the thing that everyone said would happen, has happened.

So what now? The most recent data doesn’t cover this year’s Home Office decision to settle on a 42-day time limit – which, you may notice, happens to be slap bang in the middle of 28 days and 56 days. Uh-huh. The Refugee Council report noted there was “no clear explanation” why a 42-day limit was chosen.

I suspect the Home Office is trying to split the difference between its aim of clearing out and shutting “asylum hotels” as soon as possible, and not triggering a full-blown homelessness crisis for councils to pick up. Aside from the political toxicity of asylum seeker housing, it’s national government that funds it, whereas a lot of the cost of homelessness support falls on councils – but on the flip side, Labour governments tend to listen to urban councils more than the Tories did. Plus, intensive lobbying by refugee organisations will have had an effect.

So what we’re left with is the government muddling through, leaving a problem that perhaps won’t hit full-blown crisis levels with the 42-day limit, but will fester and do significant avoidable harm with no real resolution. Just for once.

But other than that, how was the play?

As it happens, those homelessness statistics did provide better news – not much better, but marginally better. In some cases, microscopically better. New homelessness cases appear to be on a very gradual downward trend from the high heights of early 2024:

Homeless households are now likelier to find long(ish)-term housing than they were in 2023 and 2024. Meanwhile, the number of households in temporary accommodation fell – minutely – at the end of 2025 for the first time since 2022. The number of families with children in TA continued to rise, but children in bed and breakfasts are falling sharply:

A tragic DWP case

(CN: suicide)

Finally, I want to highlight a terrible suicide case that’s been reported at an inquest by ChronicleLive and has been circulated widely online.

Andrew Halliday, from Northumberland, “died less than a week after telling DWP call-handlers he was going to kill himself after a reduction in his Universal Credit”, ChronicleLive reported. He had struggled with his mental health for many years.

“Mr Halliday, from Bedlington, had been telling NHS professionals and DWP workers how a reduction in his January [2025] payment - he had been told he would receive just £37.50 - had left him fearing homelessness in the days leading to his death.”

Halliday had received back pay from a previous employer in October 2024, which he used to pay off debt. HMRC was notified of this payment in December, meaning it was then used to “taper” his January Universal Credit payment – the process by which, if a claimant’s income goes up, their means-tested benefit payment goes down.

A DWP report into his death said that he “called the Universal Credit phoneline again to query the January 2025 payment. He said he had no money remaining for rent or bills and he could not get support from the council and this was leaving him at risk of homelessness.” He told a DWP call handler: “Can I get any support or am I going to end up offing myself?”

A medical history report said the mental health “trigger on this occasion was a reduction in his Universal Credit and fear of homelessness”.

The ChronicleLive report seems to say the DWP investigation concluded it had handled Halliday’s Universal Credit deduction correctly. I’ll keep an eye out for any Prevention of Future Deaths report that emerges from this case.

Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org

This has run longer than I’d planned so I’ll leave it there until next week, when I should be looking at SEND, Green councils, and private rents. Let me know any feedback you have - or, indeed, if there’s things you think I should look into - and if you think anyone else might be interested in this newsletter, feel free to pass it on.