A Devon County Council agreement with the Department for Education which is intended to reduce its Special Educational Needs & Disabilities (SEND) spending deficit commits the council to £50 million of budget cuts, the sale of £13 million of publicly-owned assets and the use of £20 million of its financial reserves.
In return the Department for Education will contribute a total of £95 million over nine years to 2031-32, the length of time the deal will be in place.
The terms of the deal, which is being presented by the government as a “safety valve”, require the county council to break even on SEND spending within the next two years despite its persistent overspends.
These have produced a cumulative SEND spending deficit which currently stands at £163 million and is expected to exceed £200 million in less than two years.
The county council admits that the “transformation plans and proposals” are “high risk”. It is not clear what will happen if it fails to hold its gross SEND deficit, the cumulative overspend before the “safety valve” money comes into play, at £207 million every year from 2025-26 onwards.
Government funding for SEND provision comes from the High Needs Block element of the Dedicated Schools Grant, which pays for education services provided by the county council.
The Children and Families Act 2014 increased the age range of children and young people with SEND that councils had to support but the government did not increase High Needs Block funding to cover the additional costs the Act created.
In 2024-25 Devon County Council will receive £116.9 million High Needs Block funding but says this will leave it with £37 million less than it will need to deliver SEND provision next year.
It has been in a similar position for five years straight.
In 2019-20 it spent £20 million more than the government SEND funding it received. In 2020-21 this rose to £29 million, then £37.5 million in 2021-22 and nearly £39 million in 2022-23. It is expected to have fallen slightly to £37 million by the end of the current financial year.
Devon County Council was among the 90% of upper-tier authorities which overspent on SEND in 2019-20, by which time the national High Needs Block shortfall was already £643 million.
After initially compelling councils to finance their shortfalls by using funding intended for other purposes, the government allowed local authorities to ring-fence their SEND deficits, separating them from the rest of their budgets.
When deficits did not fall, the Department for Education created its “safety valve” programme, setting financial and performance targets for individual councils in return for providing additional funding.
Devon County Council’s agreement with the Department for Education requires that it makes progress in improving its SEND services provision following poor reports from Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission over several years, beginning in December 2018.
Among other failings, they said the county council had been too slow to implement the SEND reforms introduced by Children and Families Act four years earlier.
Children with special educational needs and disabilities and their parents staged protests at County Hall in February last year and again last month, saying Devon SEND services provision are still not fit for purpose.
Special educational needs and disabilities protesters at County Hall in February last year
Devon County Council will now have to update the Department of Education every three months against specific goals with aims that include improving early intervention practices to ensure it “meets the needs of children and young people with SEND across Devon”.
It says the Devon SEND transformation programme, which it set up in 2020, is key to delivery of the Department for Education deal.
It plans to increase SEND capacity in its school system, spending £18 million on extra special school places and £6 million on “resource bases” which provide support in mainstream schools.
It has also submitted a bid for £8.7 million of additional government funding, to which the council would add £1.5 million, to increase SEND capacity in further education settings.
The county council initially agreed not to publish its agreement with the Department for Education, excluding press and public from a cabinet meeting on 13 March to approve it in private.
Its children’s services scrutiny committee was then allowed to discuss the deal at its meeting on Monday, after the fact.
County council chief executive Donna Manson admitted that SEND spending had been allowed to escalate and said that the agreement was “about getting spending under control and put funding into resolving the deficit”, adding: “We are spending more money every day than we should be”.
Scrutiny committee councillors asked for a more detailed explanation of how the agreement would work in practice but Lois Samuel, Cabinet member for Children’s SEND Improvement Services, said that updates would be provided at future committee meetings.
Devon County Council joins 37 other local authorities that have so far agreed “safety valve” deals with the government.
