Rethinking SEND: what if college SEND provision and local authorities had an amicable separation?

In this blog series, AoC and Natspec are exploring alternative approaches to SEND provision in FE colleges. The ideas discussed do not represent formal policies by either organisation.

The relationship between colleges and local authorities (LAs) is fraught with difficulties. LAs ‘commission’ and sometimes fund college places for students with education, health and care plans (EHCPs). Unfortunately, the planning of places is often one of the areas that is most difficult.

Very often, individual choices are not well informed by knowledge of the post-16 sector, nor by knowledge of the needs of the would-be student. This is partly because EHCPs are so often vague, out-of-date, or lacking in content about preparation for adulthood. Decisions are often made far too late, in defiance of the SEND Code of Practice, creating stress for students and those hoping to support them. Increasingly LAs are using the ‘duty to admit’ to enforce placements. And when negotiations begin about the high needs funding for these places, LAs often try to manage stretched budgets by driving down costs for some of the most hard-working employees in education: college learning support staff.

It's a dysfunctional relationship and many of the dysfunctionalities stem from the anomaly that colleges are a separate sector from schools, except when it comes to students with EHCPs.

Colleges are different in terms of their curricula, their programme funding, their admissions processes, and their support for students with a lower level of need. Yet college students with EHCPS are shoe-horned into a system designed for children in schools, a system in which decisions sit with local authorities. Colleges suffer the worst of both worlds: they cannot pay their staff as much as schools do, but they are subject to the same local authority decision-making.

So, a big part of the college SEND system is built on the obvious conflict of interest that LAs assess young people’s needs through the EHCP process, and then determine how much to pay for those needs to be met. It is not surprising that students, families and colleges all find the system to be adversarial.

Conversely local authorities find themselves in a position where the higher needs part of the SEND system is the only part of further education for which they are responsible; inevitably it is a sector about which they have less knowledge. So, has the time come for a separation of powers? Could we disaggregate assessment, funding and commissioning?

Some existing proposals

The SEND and alternative provision improvement plan was published by the previous government in 2023. It set out various intentions like increasing LAs’ powers to choose placements (through ‘advisory tailored lists’), requiring LAs to publish strategic plans, and creating ‘national bands and tariffs’ for the cost of student support.

The Labour manifesto did not say much about SEND, except that they intend to increase the powers of LAs to direct school admissions.

Then ISOS published a report in July, commissioned by the Local Government Association and County Councils Network. This suggested different reforms, like removing statutory accountabilities through EHCPs and SEND tribunals, and replacing them with a new national body to set ‘standards’ of practice.

These ideas have something in common: they would all increase the power of LAs even further. If the main problem in the SEND system is that mainstream schools aren’t inclusive enough, then it makes sense to give LAs a stronger lever. But general further education (GFE) colleges are already highly inclusive, educating 89% of college students with EHCPs. This means that many young people progress from special schools to GFEs. In the absence of state-maintained special colleges, the remaining 11% with the most complex needs are educated in around 130 specialist colleges which play an essential role working alongside GFE colleges.

So in the FE sector a drive for greater inclusivity isn’t needed. The sector as a whole educates around one in seven holders of EHCPs in any one year, meaning that far more will eventually pass through college. Yet there is a danger that the distinctiveness of the sector will be ignored and that LAs might apply the same approach that they do with schools. We would then see increased misuse of the duty to admit, more young people being inappropriately placed, more placement breakdown, and greater conflict between LAs, young people, their families, and colleges.

A new architecture for high needs

So, if the reforms proposed by others risk making matters worse for the FE sector, what are the possible alternatives? Might it be possible to separate assessment, commissioning and funding for FE students, but without creating new institutions? Could the college SEND system work better if it was decoupled from the imperatives of school reform?

What if we removed high needs funding for college students from LA control and replaced it with two separate mechanisms?

A lot of high needs funding is currently claimed in order to pay for small class sizes and access to learning support. But these are basic, intrinsic requirements on entry level courses for young people with SEND, such as ‘skills for independence’ or ‘preparation for work’. Instead of inefficiently claiming identical costs for each student on a course, we could just include these costs in programme weightings. Is that really any different from building in the cost of maintaining a chemistry lab for A Level chemistry or stabling horses for an equine studies course?

In contrast, some high needs funding is for ‘additional’ learning support that is not needed by the student’s peers on the same course. A student on a vocational course may need extra help because of their autism, while a student on specialist SEND course may have needs, for example for therapies, beyond what is ‘universal’ on that programme. This type of support is very individual. If it was not administered by LAs, who could do it instead?

At present adult skills funding, including adult learning support, is administered by combined authorities, where they exist. The forthcoming English Devolution Bill will expand this model to the rest of England. Is this an opportunity for high needs funding for college students to sit with the same bodies? This move would preserve the local character of current arrangements, for example tariffs that reflect local wages. But it would also separate LAs’ maintenance of EHCPs from the funding of the provision that EHCPs specify.

If LAs no longer controlled high needs funding, then what about their role in commissioning? In law LAs ‘must comply’ with students’ and families’ preferences unless, that is, the LA thinks their preference unsuitable. No other college students have their college chosen for them. Would the whole system fall apart if we simply allowed students to choose their own places? We might need an external body to act as a backstop when there are disputes about admissions, but that needn’t be the LA. Of course, students might appreciate advice when making choices, but Labour’s plan to restructure the National Careers Service could be a way to provide an independent transitions service a bit like the much-missed Connexions with its knowledgeable specialist advisers.

A strengthened careers service might also help students when they transition out of college. The new government’s Getting Britain Working plan intends to create a more effective employment support system. Students’ journeys through college should be seen as preparation for their destinations, not as an afterthought to their school days. Local authorities nominally have responsibility for strategic planning to ensure there are suitable FE places available for students with SEND; such planning is important for young people and colleges. But in practice LAs have struggled to find the capacity to exercise this function, a failing implicitly recognised by the planning requirements of the SEND and AP improvement plan.

If support funding was moved to combined authorities, would it make sense for sufficiency planning for all types of FE provider to move too? At present planning and commissioning is administered by 153 upper tier local authorities, which means that very many students cross boundaries to go to college, especially in urban areas. Devolution will create around 40 combined authorities, so these larger areas would create a better basis for planning of lower incidence needs like profound and multiple learning difficulties or visual impairment.

Relieving local authorities of this duty would also be an opportunity to bring consistency to the process of planning each following year’s place funding. This important function is currently made unnecessarily complex because some institutions work with LAs while others work with the Education and Skills Funding Agency, which will itself be assimilated into the Department for Education next March. The simplest process might be for place funding to be administered nationally for all, not just some, colleges.

Perhaps this architecture would create fresh problems. Would local authorities become even more disengaged from EHCP annual reviews? Would new anomalies arise for school post-16 provision? Or could such problems be more easily addressed once there were different relationships between agencies in the system?

What next?

These ideas are speculative. They are certainly not the policy positions of either of our organisations. But we know that the SEND system needs fundamental reform, so it makes sense to question its assumptions.

Young people do not stop having special educational needs or disabilities when they leave Year 11. But that does not mean that decisions about their funding or their choice of provision must continue to be made using the same mechanisms. The college sector has long called for LAs to develop greater expertise in making decisions about post-16 provision, yet as institutions they seem to have struggled to get to grips with FE and remain highly schools-focused. Perhaps they would be relieved to shrug off the responsibility for high needs funding for college students; maybe that would allow them to focus on improving the system for schools.

Colleges large and small play vital roles in their local communities and work with local authorities in lots of ways, but in terms of their relationship to the high needs block, perhaps it is time for an amicable separation.

David Holloway is the Senior Policy Manager – SEND at Association of Colleges, and Clare Howard OBE, is the Chief Executive at Natspec

You can simply fill out this form to share your views with us. We will be collating responses to each article and sharing a summary with readers. And if there is appetite for it, we plan to hold an online symposium to talk through any differences of opinion. If you would like to be alerted as articles in this series are published, please send your email address to Will.Marshall@natspec.org.uk.