LONDON — Keir Starmer is still reeling from a humiliating backlash to his welfare reforms. But there’s hardly time to catch a breath.
Fresh from a House of Commons climb down over social security changes, the British prime minister’s government is now straining to head off the next big fight: how to reform support for young people with learning difficulties and disabilities.
There’s agreement on one thing at least.
Special educational needs provision, as it’s known, is a disaster. Costs are soaring, and parents are pitted against each other in a battle for poorly directed resources.
Now ministers are plotting a shake-up to the system aimed at helping more children receive support in mainstream schools rather than costly private alternatives. Campaigners — and some backbench Labour members of parliament — fear penny-pinching could undermine the entire agenda.
With the welfare embarrassment fresh in their minds, MPs and government officials are at pains to avoid Labour walking into another political bear trap.
Learning the lessons
A government drive to stop Britain’s welfare budget spiraling lay behind last week’s ill-fated welfare reforms. Critics charge that the government focused too narrowly on tightening eligibility for disabled people rather than trying to tackle root causes.
Disabled communities, and the backbench MPs who represent them, felt shut out of the reforming process. In the aftermath of the welfare bill’s filleting in the face of a major Labour rebellion, Starmer acknowledged he and his team “didn’t engage in the way that we should have done.”
That’s a message Whitehall officials now say they are taking on board when it comes to Special Educational Needs and Disabilities.
Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson wants to ensure her reforms don’t rile the parents of the around 1.9 million young people in England identified as having special educational needs. A white paper setting out the proposed reforms is due for publication in the fall, with legislation expected to follow.
Phillipson is not averse to picking a fight when required. She relished in adding tax to elite private school fees upon taking office, despite well-funded opposition.
But with SEND reform, the education secretary has tried to adopt a consultative process with backbench MPs. That’s included encouraging them to hold consultations in their constituencies, in a bid to ensure parents are on board when the changes come.
Labour backbenchers invested in the process agree the approach ministers are taking is a smart one — at least it is now, as several of them granted anonymity to speak frankly put it. They point to a marked improvement since the benefits debacle.
Whitehall officials say their own engagement on the SEND shake-up — a manifesto commitment — has been long-standing. And they point to the number of critics of the welfare cuts who they have on side as proof.
One official conceded that there are “lessons to be learned” from the recent failings.
‘You feel like you constantly need to fight’
One reason SEND reform is so fraught is that parents with experience of fighting for the crucial education, health and care plans that guarantee a level of support for their kids are already highly politicized. They have fought the system before — and they know the law inside out.
Letters from worried activists concerned the shake-up will mean a loss of provision for some children have already started. Dozens of special needs and disability charities signed a letter in Sunday’s Guardian raising the alarm about any changes to EHCPs. Officials deny existing EHCPs will be withdrawn.
Many in the new intake of MPs who arrived with Starmer’s landslide victory last year are young parents familiar with the struggles to get adequate support for their own children.
Jen Craft, the Labour MP for Thurrock, in Essex, was one of those welfare critics. She also has a primary school-aged daughter with Down syndrome, hearing loss “and she is a pickle,” as Craft endearingly put it.
“We’ve had services cut, we’ve been run to the bone and as a parent you’re in a system where you feel like you constantly need to fight,” she told POLITICO.
“You don’t want to have to be this whole speech and language therapist … as well as a sort of gladiator warrior going into battle to get every day … they just want to be mum — and if we do this right and we do this well that’s what we could achieve,” she said.
“We could take that stress and anxiety right down a notch, take the adversarialness out of the SEND system and it will ultimately work so much better for everyone.”
But she added: “We need to do this without adding further stress and anxiety to a population who’s already very worried and stressed and anxious already.”
Beyond cost-cutting
Accounts of how the current SEND system is not working are everywhere. One cash-strapped council is spending £62 million sending kids to the nearest suitable school; others are paying £100,000 per pupil to send them to independent special schools. An expert review warned the system is becoming “unsustainable” due to the “rocketing” number of children with EHCPs.
The Whitehall official quoted above argued that Phillipson understands first and foremost that reform must not be seen as a mere cost-saving measure. Indeed, June’s spending review allocated an extra £760 million to help smooth changes. But there are hazards too in the reallocation of support if parents think their children could be losing out.
For all the risk for Labour, there could also be huge reward in getting these reforms right. Some also see a potential vulnerability for Nigel Farage and his right-wing populist Reform UK party, which is hammering Labour in the polls.
Farage was widely criticized by both campaigners and charities earlier this year for claiming Britain is “massively over diagnosing” children with special educational needs. Some Labour MPs see this as one of the small number of areas where the veteran Brexit campaigner is out of step with the British public.
Around 11 percent of children and young people are identified as having special educational needs — so voters are likely to know the struggles in finding support, either first hand or through their friends and relatives.
The issue has caused friction in Farage’s own party too. Andrea Jenkyns, a former Conservative MP who was elected as mayor of Greater Lincolnshire for Reform in the party’s local elections success in May, publicly disputed Farage on the subject.
Jenkyns, who has spoken about both herself and her young son having ADHD, put on record the challenges she faced in pulling her child out of mainstream education into a private school to get him the support he needs.
Peter Swallow, a former teacher who’s now a Labour MP, makes clear why the conditions are there for poorly handled changes to go down terribly with parents.
“Parents have had to fight tooth and nail to get the support they need for their kids,” he said.
“It is really important for us we make it clear to parents that we want to get more support for young people and not less and secondly they shouldn’t have to fight for it. That’s the change we need to make and are working to deliver.
“Their backs have been up against the wall for so long I completely understand why they’re anxious about this and that’s exactly why we’ve got to get this right.”
A spokesperson for Starmer told reporters Monday it would be “totally inaccurate to suggest children, families and schools might experience any loss of funding or support” because of the ongoing review.
Languishing in the polls a year since his landslide victory, the British prime minister knows his administration can ill afford to botch another attempt to reform the crumbling state. Voters and MPs will be there to hold him to task if the government again lurches toward cost-cutting without a believable vision for reform.
The post Keir Starmer battles to prevent another domestic calamity appeared first on Politico.
