Staffordshire’s education lead for Education and SEND has welcomed a campaign by the f40 group for increased and fairer education funding and sweeping reforms to solve the crisis in SEND.
With demand for SEND support currently outstripping funding, local authorities in England are estimated to have a cumulative SEND deficit of £6 billion by April 2026, which will continue to grow unless substantial changes are made.
As we await the publication of the Schools White Paper, the County Council and f40 are calling for a commitment from Government to meet the cost of current and future SEND deficits to ensure councils are financially sustainable – until such point that the system is reformed and there is alignment between SEND policy and the funding required to deliver it.
Janet Higgins, Staffordshire County Council’s Cabinet Member for Education and SEND said:
I am proud to support f40 and their campaign, and I am passionate that every child, no matter what their circumstances, should have access to the support and resources they need to reach their full potential.
We are investing in SEND with a focus on early intervention, additional specialist places and specialist provision resource hubs across the county, but with demand increasing and rapidly outstripping supply, the current system is unsustainable and in need of fundamental reform.
For too long Staffordshire has been penalised by an outdated and unfair funding model. This is not good enough and our children deserve better. I want to see a new funding model which fairly distributes education funding to ensure that every school has enough funding to operate well.”
The f40 group, which campaigns on behalf of 43 local authorities across the country for fairer and increased education funding, including Staffordshire County Council, is hoping for a whole re-set of the education sector.
The campaign calls on the Government to ensure the reforms are powerful enough to solve the crisis and are backed by sufficient funding to enable schools to implement them.
Chair of f40, Councillor Alex Dale, said:
We welcome Government’s commitment to tackle the crisis in SEND and hope they take this opportunity to really get to the root causes of the issues and make brave, lasting changes that benefit every child and school.
However, the reforms must be backed by funding, or schools and the reforms themselves will be set up to fail.
Whilst Government is focusing on education, it’s the perfect time to also improve the National Funding Formula to ensure money for schools is distributed more fairly. Currently, some schools receive more than £5,000 less per pupil than others, and only a third of the SEND funding that others get. That is fundamentally wrong. No child should be worth less than another.”
For more information about f40, and to view funding graphs that show the disparity in education funding across all local authorities in England, please visit https://www.f40.org.uk/
