(UK) Oxon: Council forecast to have $204M "high needs funding deficit" by 2026

Nov 24, 2025, BBC News:  How can councils tackle the SEND funding gap?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c7404w39ledo.amp

A local authority is planning to support more children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) in mainstream schools, to reduce spiralling costs.

Oxfordshire County Council will expand its enhanced pathways provision into 40 state schools, providing a dedicate space and additional resource to support more young people with special needs, including non verbal children, in a mainstream setting.

Oxfordshire County Council is forecast to have a high needs funding deficit of £153 million [$204M] by next year.

The council says it needs to find new solutions to address the imbalance between government funding and local demand.

According to the County Council's Network, local authorities are forecast to have a yearly overspend of £4.4 billion [$5.9B] in special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) by 2029.

This is an amount, approved by the government and kept off the councils' books, giving authorities the flexibility to keep providing SEND services while discussions around reforming the system are ongoing.

But with no clarity about who will be responsible for paying off this debt, councils are concerned they'll face bankruptcy if they are held accountable.

Councillor Sean Gaul, Oxfordshire County Council's cabinet member for children's services, said, "we need government to come forward with a plan about how we're going to address the deficit. Allowing it to build up in an override account, without anybody being clear about who is going to cover this, is not an answer."

The council has been working on improving its SEND services following an Ofsted report In 2023 which found it was failing SEND families. But last week, after a monitoring inspection, the authority was judged to be taking "effective action" to improve its provision.

But costs for delivering the service have continued to rise.

The costs

On average, it costs councils around £10,000 [$13,000] each year to teach a child in a mainstream setting.

This number rises to £24,000 [$32,000] for children attending a state-funded special school.

But with demand for these places outstripping the number available, councils are increasingly placing children with SEND in private special schools, at a cost of £64,000 [$85,000] per child each year.

Councils also fund the transport to and from these more specialist settings, adding to the rising costs.

Mr Gaul says that reducing the council's reliance on private special schools, and the "enormous" costs involved, will allow more funding to go into mainstream schools.

The authority has also committed to providing an additional 240 state funded special school places, with the intention for 100 more, to reduce the number of children being taught in more expensive settings. . . .

"The government are really clear that they've invested more in special educational needs year on year, but it doesn't reflect the actual costs per pupil funding, so that gap has grown," he said. . . .