(Wales) Over 40,000 kids have SPED needs; $334M spent on support

July 12, 2026, 'Support for children with additional learning needs is our red line' - LabourList

Next week the new Plaid Cymru Government will face its first big vote – their supplementary budget. Plaid Cymru, who were elected in May for the first time ever, have made their first set of spending proposals. Why, then, did their initial spending plans allocate not a single penny to additional learning needs?

In England, it’s called special educational needs and disabilities, or SEND for short. In Wales, it’s called additional learning needs, or ALN, and over 40,000 children in school in Wales experience it. 

As a council leader myself, with responsibility over ALN provision in schools, the scale and complexity of needs is only increasing. This issue is not going away. The struggle to give these pupils the support they deserve is one of the things that keeps me up at night as a council leader.

In Torfaen, where I live and work as a council leader, we’ve made funding for schools our top priority over the past term. But despite everything we’re doing, I still too often see the lack of opportunity that robs children of the chance to realise their full potential. 

So I was pleased that, underpinned by that core Labour value of fairness, the UK Labour Government designated extra funding to expand the support and opportunities afforded to all children. 

In Wales, we had a proud record under the previous Welsh Labour Government – we ensured that every single child in primary school had a free hot meal every lunchtime in termtime. Breakfast clubs, now being rolled out in England under Labour, have been running in Wales for almost twenty years. And the Welsh Labour Government spent hundreds of millions of pounds to support children with ALN, including £250 million [$334M] spent on building new facilities and improving existing ones. . . .