Where is this government heading, and who is now in charge? Keir Starmer looks even weaker than he did a week ago, uncoupled from the aides who wrote his scripts and picked his fights, and only still in his job because the cabinet and parliamentary Labour party stared into a chaotic immediate future and decided not to pounce – for now. The high-stakes Gorton and Denton byelection arrives in less than two weeks’ time. Policy-wise, meanwhile, we are about to finally be presented with a set of plans that have been fitfully gestating for over a year, and causing a quiet chorus of jangling Labour nerves.
That sound is now getting louder. Any day now, the government will publish the education white paper containing its plans for sweeping reform of England’s provision for children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities, or Send. Amid rising fears about current and future costs, that document will shine light not just on the government’s thinking about the system it wants to change, but even bigger questions about Labour’s views on disability and human difference, and the relationship between families and the state. And if the proposals misfire, this most fragile of administrations will find itself back in the nightmarish place it ended up in when Labour MPs refused to pass its cuts to disability benefits – only this time, the resulting chaos could consume it.
Education secretary Bridget Phillipson and her colleagues want to maximise the numbers of Send kids taught at mainstream schools, driven by a staunch belief in the ideal of “inclusion”, and the slightly less idealistic imperative to cut spending on comparatively expensive special school places, and hack down the transport bills resulting from getting thousands of kids to scarce placements miles away from where they live. Over 10 years, £3.7bn will be spent on buildings and facilities in mainstream secondary schools that will seemingly contain “inclusion bases”, where kids with the relevant needs will be given extra help.
But the government says it wants its new Send model to go much further. It is about to implement what it calls “the most ambitious and comprehensive Send training offer ever seen by the English schools system”, which will apparently ensure that “every teacher receives training to support pupils”, in both these new facilities and standard-issue classrooms. So how much has been found for this great leap forward? Here we encounter a gap between lofty ambition and the likely reality that is one of this government’s specialities. The answer? Just £200m – which must cover not just England’s almost 470,000 teachers, but support staff, people who work in further education colleges, early-years workers and more. Even on the most generous estimates, that works out at no more than a couple of hundred pounds per head.
There has been no talk at all so far about improving the chronically miserly pay and lowly esteem of teaching assistants, despite the fact that existing Send support in mainstream schools – let alone the kind of hugely ramped-up provision the government wants to create – depends on them. I have also heard precious little about the dire shortage of the speech and occupational therapists who will be needed for the kind of great transformation the government seems to want; nor anything at all about what will happen to post-18 provision. Current Send support can go up to the age of 25, but observing the current conversation, you would think everything starts and ends with schools.
And so to a huge anxiety among parents – and many MPs – that will not go away. Some 638,000 children and young people in England have education, health and care plans (ECHPs), those documents that set out needs and support as a matter of legally enforceable rights, and whose numbers have hugely increased largely because of the decline of ad hoc, everyday Send help. For many parents, they form one precious pillar of accountability: the other is the official Send tribunal, to which they can appeal against a council’s refusal to assess their child for an EHCP, or suggested provision that they feel is either lacking or inappropriate. On this score, ministers and their advisers have spent the last year refusing to deny that EHCPs might be on their way out for most families, but also declining to say what they are planning: even now, when asked about any of this, they tend to emit the kind of nervous waffle that fills parents with dread.
Worse still, the informational vacuum this leaves has been filled by another one of the government’s grimmest habits: near-constant anonymous briefings, often greeted with the maddening Department for Education mantra: “We do not comment on speculation.” One high-up source has said the government may “cut the tribunal off at the knees”: there have been whispers about taking refusals to assess children out of its reach, and further restricting appeals to whether other council decisions have followed the right processes, rather than their actual content. On this evidence, with the caveat that change is likely to be gradually phased in, the plan will not be to restore the Send system to stability by ensuring councils can meet their responsibilities, but by drastically reducing the number of parents they have to deal with: a classic bureaucrats’ fix, which has nothing to do with outcomes for children.
In some Westminster circles, such ideas are justified by attacking and guilt-tripping a familiar folk devil: the pushy, sharp-elbowed parent, who supposedly enjoys unfair Send privileges (in truth, fighting for help is a grinding trial, whatever your alleged advantages). Almost certainly, that notion is one key reason why the government seems to be set on limiting legal rights, perhaps encouraged by recent research showing that wealthy areas in England have recently seen bigger increases in Send spending than their poorer counterparts. In this reading, accountability and legal entitlements are mostly a bourgeois sham. It’s telling, though, that people fond of such arguments never make the case for making systems of accountability more open and accessible: the prevailing idea, which often thinly conceals a drive to cut provision, is that because pursuing your rights tends to be less impossible for one layer of society than another, the only egalitarian solution is to ensure no one has any rights at all.
All told, the government’s underlying vision seems to be of a great rebalancing, away from personalised support towards the kind of top-down system in which families basically get what they’re given. A report last week from Sky News held out exactly this prospect: ministers, it said, “ultimately want to restrict the number of children with specific per-pupil funding packages, and to curb the number of parents who end up taking their case to tribunal”.
What that might say about the Starmer government’s basic instincts is both fascinating and depressing. In the midst of all its chaos, this sometimes looks like an old Labour administration, in the worst possible way. It has no modern versions of that tradition’s good stuff: massed council-house building, or the creation of the NHS. But what remains is a familiar and very old-fashioned mistrust of redress, choice and accountability, a tendency to side with officials and penpushers, and an apparent belief we should all be grateful for whatever favours the state can give us. At a moment when Labour is being regularly warned of the dangers of retreating into an ideological comfort zone, that would be quite some safe space in which to take refuge. It would also test a lot of people’s faith in a party they hitherto believed was on their side: in all likelihood, to breaking point.
