Late Intervention and special educational needs

The Early Intervention Foundation has published a report assessing the costs of Late Intervention for children and young people.

Late and Early Intervention

Late Intervention is the compliance with emergency and statutory duties to support children and young people who are in crisis. For example, placing a child in the care of a local authority when they have reached crisis.

Early intervention is the proactive delivery of services to children and young people who are at risk of requiring the Late Intervention actions. It is acting in sufficient time to ensure that the emergency and statutory requirements do not ‘bite’.

The report ultimately concludes that the current reactive approach is costing £7 billion. National budgets towards being proactive extend to £200 million – around 3% of the reactive costs.

Special Educational Needs

There is no specific assessment of the impact on special educational needs. However, there are assessments of services which deliver services which are dominated by special educational needs.

The following figures reveal how children with special educational needs are requiring Late Intervention:

• £474 million is spent on Youth Justice. Special educational needs are almost twice as common within the prison population as within the national population.
• £450 million is spent on Pupil Referral Units.
• £5.1 billion is spent on support for Looked After Children. Special educational needs are 16x more common among the Looked After population than in the national population.
• £4 billion is spent on benefits for 16-24 year olds who are not in education, employment or training. Earnings are recorded to increase by 10% for each year of additional training that a person undertakes. Children with special educational needs, but not supported with a Statement have the worst ‘outcomes’ in terms of remaining in education, training or employment post-16.

Conclusion

The results show that £10 billion is being spent on Late Intervention which is likely to be heavily dominated by young people with special educational needs.

This suggests that the special educational needs provision that was made available for those young people failed to either address their underlying difficulties and/or to ensure that they were adequately prepared for adult life.

The special educational needs reforms have promised an overhaul of the way that special educational needs provision is delivered. The Department for Education has hailed the reforms as a cultural change putting the young person and the family at the centre of the process. If these promises are honoured by local authorities, perhaps the Late Intervention costs will decline.

I remain sceptical. I have written about the difficulties with the special educational needs reforms and accountability for delivery of special educational needs provision and reforms. Unless cultural change is really adopted, and local authorities understand their obligations, Late Intervention costs will never come down.