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‘Potentially catastrophic’: Suffolk County Council’s SEND funding gap grows larger as demand balloons




The funding gap for SEND provision continues to grow larger as demand for services balloons.

During yesterday's Schools Forum meeting, Suffolk County Council's forecasted High Needs Block (HNB) spending was revealed to be just under £113m against its budget of £88m.

The HNB is a proportion of the Government's Dedicated Schools Grant (DSG) which supports the delivery of Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) services for students under the age of 25.

Revelations concerning the funding gap came out at yesterday’s Schools Forum meeting
Revelations concerning the funding gap came out at yesterday’s Schools Forum meeting

This £24.6m overspend against its HNB budget is an increase from the £23.3m overspend announced during the financial report on November 7.

Robert Lenko, a governor at Thurston Community College said: "The funding gap for high needs is exponential, and potentially catastrophic."

During the meeting, it was also revealed that the council had been receiving a record number of funding requests.

In Suffolk, funding applications are made through a banding system (A-H), which represents increasing amounts of money spent per pupil depending on their need.

For this year's Autumn term, the council has seen a ballooning of requests at nearly 1600 — 1126 being requests for new bands, and 436 representing requests for a band increase.

This increase in demand, Mr Lenko says, has been made exponentially worse due to the impacts the covid pandemic had on younger people and their development.

He said: "Youngsters have suffered so much post-Covid, missing out on school, that their mental health and education have been affected.

"The year sevens who are coming into school are almost two or three years behind where they used to be.

"They've lost a couple of years of their education at the most critical time in their development, and that's really hard to catch up on."

A big part of the problem, the group heard yesterday, is the lack of funding coming from the Government itself.

In 2017, when the National Funding Formula (NFF) for schools and high needs came into effect, the council had kept its spending close to its allocated budget, making the value it operated the funding baseline for the years that followed.

This meant the council would be allocated less funding than some of its neighbours such as Norfolk and Essex.

However, Steven Wright, who is part of the Campaign for Change (Suffolk SEND) group, said the council's current position comes as a result of decisions which have 'broke the system and made it unworkable'.

Mr Wright added: "Undoubtedly lack of funding is a major factor but this is a problem of their own making."

With the council having to find ways to deal with the increase in demand and expanding budget gap, several measures were discussed, including further focus on preventative measures and continued Government lobbying.

The group also briefly discussed the option of potentially having to decrease the funding given to each of the bands should the problem get unmanageable, effectively cutting the amount of money schools can get for SEND provision per pupil.

Mr Lenko said: "If it were to happen, it would just add more pain to the impending catastrophe — it's the sort of result we all dread.

"We would fight tooth and nail to stop it, it's the worst-case scenario."

A spokesperson confirmed the council was not considering any changes to band funding at present.