England: 20% of students have special needs; "autism still most commonly identified need"

June 16, 2025,  Special Needs Jungle: 19.5% pupils with SEND, but don’t believe the hype: Most are still educated in mainstream schools 

Last last week, the Department for Education (DfE) published its annual statistics on special educational needs in England. . . .

What’s in this data?

These figures come from a census the DfE ask schools to complete annually; it’s a snapshot of the third week in January 2025. The census data is collected from state-funded nurseries, state-funded schools, hospital schools, mainstream independent schools, alternative provision, and non-maintained special schools.

But because it’s a school census, it leaves out large parts of the education population with special educational needs. The data doesn’t cover further education, home education, apprenticeships, or supported internships. It doesn’t cover specialist post-16 colleges, and there’s no real depth to the coverage of the independent school sector either.

On top of that, there are some health warnings to bear in mind too: The data includes a breakdown of different types of special educational needs and disability, and it’s done in a standard way. But the terminology used to classify SEND isn’t that helpful. Some of the categories of SEND the census uses are inadequate catch-alls. For example, you can’t use these numbers to work out the number of school pupils with ADHD, or Developmental Language Disorder.

This data is hoovered up from tens of thousands of individual schools, each with their own take on identifying and classifying SEN. Research from the Education Policy Institute convincingly shows how much inconsistency there is in SEN identification at school level—and that’s before anyone tries comparing SEN identification across state and independent school sectors. Eton, for example, has 27% of its pupils on its SEN register.

So what does the 2025 data tell us?

Basically, it’s more of the same: a larger number and proportion of school pupils have been identified with a special educational need than last year. The overall number and proportion of pupils who have statutory support through an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP) is also growing.

In January 2025, there were 9 million pupils recorded on the English school census in state schools, mainstream independent schools, and non-maintained special schools. Of those, roughly 1.8 million (19.6% of them) were reported to have a special educational need.

That’s higher than last year, but it’s not the highest ever. We saw similar numbers and percentages of pupils identified with SEN in the early 2010s.

In January 2025, 73% of these school pupils—roughly 1.3 million of them, or 14.2% of the total school population—were on SEN Support. These pupils are supported almost entirely through resources delegated down to individual mainstream schools and academy trusts.

The number of pupils on SEN Support has grown by 45,000 in a year (3.7%), and by roughly 220,000 in a decade.

The others – roughly 482,000 of them, or 5.3% of the total school population – have an EHCP. That’s a number that’s grown a lot: by 11% on last year, and effectively double the number of school pupils on statutory support a decade ago.

The types of SEN most commonly identified in state schools haven’t changed. Speech, language and communication is still the most commonly identified category of primary need. Autism is still the most commonly identified need for school pupils with an EHCP.

Overall, 64% of state school pupils with SEND were reported to be boys in January 2025.

For pupils with EHCPs, 71% were reported to be boys. That represents a tiny increase in the proportion of girls over the last few years. The boy-girl split was wider for autistic pupils and those with social, emotional and mental health listed as a primary need. What that tells us is unclear, particularly when identification of need is so inconsistent.

For all the headlines lately, the education of school pupils with SEND still overwhelmingly takes place in mainstream schools and in the state sector.

82% of school pupils with SEND are educated in mainstream, and

92% of school pupils with SEND are educated in the state sector.

Has VAT on independent schools caused an influx of SEND pupils to mainstream?

The new government added VAT to mainstream independent school fees at the start of 2025. There’s no obvious sign yet from the DfE data of an influx of pupils with SEN from the independent sector to the state sector, although this census was taken a few weeks after VAT kicked in, so it’s early days.

According to the DfE data, the number of pupils with SEN in mainstream independent schools was 3% higher in January 2025 than it was in January 2024. That’s also consistent with census data from the sector’s own body, the Independent Schools Council.

The SEND system created in 2014 looks like it’s being led unsteadily towards the glue factory. So, how have some of these numbers changed over the years? We can’t do the full decade, but we can do a reasonable comparison for state schools from January 2016 to January 2025. They show the number and incidence of pupils with SEN are clearly up since 2016, but in what ways?

Looking at the difference in number from 2016 to 2025, in terms of primary identified type of SEN:

There are roughly 250,000 more state school pupils on SEN Support in 2025 than there were in 2016.

The biggest single increase in the primary type of SEN for these pupils is social, emotional and mental health (SEMH), closely followed by speech, language and communication (SLCN), with a sizeable drop in the number of pupils on SEN Support identified with Moderate Learning Difficulty (MLD).

There are roughly 220,000 more state school pupils with EHCPs in 2025 than there were in 2016.

Almost 90% of this net EHCP increase is of pupils with one of three types of primary identified SEN: ASD, SEMH, or SLCN.

It’s probably no coincidence that some of the most common problems identified in Ofsted and CQC Area SEND inspections are weaknesses in local NHS assessment and treatment pathways for neurodivergence, mental health, and speech and language therapy. . . .

If you look at the proportion of pupils on SEN Support in 2025 from early years to year 11, and compare those numbers to 2016, then the percentage of the cohort on SEN Support is up – but the rise is pretty even across all ages …

…but try the same exercise for pupils with EHCPs, and the increase since 2016 is much more pronounced for pupils of primary school age than it is for pupils of secondary age.

Incidence of SUP Support by School Year Groups, 2025 vs 2016 Click to enlarge.

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Exploding SEND? Not so much…

When people say SEND has ‘exploded’ in recent years, it’s not that accurate. The number of pupils who have statutory support has grown quickly and steadily, particularly from 2019 onwards. But the overall number and proportion of pupils with SEND is lower than it was at the start of austerity.

The rise in the number of pupils with EHCPs has caused a mass outbreak of sweat patches on pinstriped skirts and suits in Whitehall, and small, unseemly bulges in the pressed chinos of the highly-paid advisers and consultants helping civil servants manage SEND demand.

If you’re reading this, it won’t have escaped your notice the government wants to reform the SEND system. There won’t be any official details until the autumn, although there’ll doubtless be a continual trickle of rumour. But most of the tight circle around the reform process appears to want EHCPs restricted further, or even gone entirely.

You might be able to do that if you have precision-guided, surgically sharp policy tools. But thanks to the wider SEND sector’s professional standards and accountability, these guys don’t have surgically sharp policy tools, precision-guided or otherwise. All they have are blunt, but easily weaponisable, wooden clubs. And for some reason, they don’t appear to realise that.

The vibe appears to be that if statutory support survives, then it’ll be limited to those with as-yet undefined “most complex needs”. In school terms, at least, that appears to mean calibrating policy to deliver something like a two-percentage-point drop in the proportion of school pupils getting statutory support to meet their additional needs.