Whether the government likes it or not, the Special Needs debate is full of a familar nastiness

It's already happened to immigrants, people on benefits and disabled adults: amid a cloud of prejudice and "overdiagnosis" talk, SEND children and their families seem to be next

Illustration: Rosa Harris

One former politician in particular haunts what I write about Special Educational Needs.

George Osborne - “We’re all this together”, remember? - left front-line politics a decade ago, and hasn’t returned. He’s currently the Chair of the British Museum, and having seemingly made a large post-Westminster wad at a couple of finance firms, has a lucrative new job at the tech giant Open AI. But in terms of his legacy, he remains a strangely overlooked figure, despite his significance: he is, after all, the man who oversaw the endless social and economic tragedies of austerity, and thereby played a huge role in the pinched, dysfunctional country we now live in – a place full of simmering resentment, loathing of the political class, and the constant sense that too many things are dysfunctional and broken.

As I’ve said before, the crisis in provision for children and young people with SEND presents vivid proof of something that became clear after Osborne had left the Treasury: the fact that cuts – in this case, to councils, children’s centres, real-terms school spending, and so much more – usually turn out to be very expensive. So, when I heard that he was about to talk to Bridget Phillipson on the Political Currency podcast (he hosts it alongside Ed Balls), I felt compelled to listen.

The two-person chat Osborne and Phillipson had is here. By and large, the conversation is tepid and uneventful. He adopts the polite, analytical, seen-it-all tone of the former politician; she apparently doesn’t see the point of much partisan combat. They respectfully – and somewhat awkwardly – disagree about the two-child benefit limit and what happened to Sure Start, and that’s pretty much that. But their brief exchange about the SEND system is different. Even if it sounds rather anodyne, it gets into something we should all be thinking about: the politics of “overdiagnosis”, and how the inevitable noise and controversy that will be sparked by Phillipson’s plans for drastic change to the Special Needs system are going to play out, any time now.

Constant opportunities for the politics of divide and rule

While he was Chancellor, as well as spending cuts, Osborne had a particularly grim political specialism: a habit of cynically pitting one part of the public against another, usually on the basis that people on so-called “welfare” were a very handy focus of suspicion and cynicism among voters who weren’t.

Here lay constant opportunities for the politics of divide-and-rule, enthusiastically endorsed by the red-top press. You may, for example, remember the infamous passage in the speech Osborne gave to Conservative conference in 2012, replete with the fingers-down-a-blackboard sound of someone from a very privileged background holding forth about life at the sharp end: “Where is the fairness, we ask, for the shift-worker, leaving home in the dark hours of the early morning, who looks up at the closed blinds of their next door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits?”

The shorthand for this stuff was “strivers vs. skivers”. Now, Osborne thinks that current levels of benefits spending – and the end of the two-child limit on child benefit - are reviving something similar. At one point, he mentions the Motability aspect of disability benefits, and “the person in the street who’s got a brand new car” being resented by their neighbours. What’s striking, though, is how he quickly applies the same kind of thinking to SEND provision and how much money is spent on it, as follows…

“We’re better at diagnosing children’s mental health problems,” he tells Phillipson: he’s seemingly referring to autism, ADHD etc. And he goes on:

“Parents who previously just sort of took what they were told are now more assertive about what they want for their children. Who doesn’t want additional help in the classroom for their child? You know, school transport can be a nightmare, particularly for people who have mental health problems – so minicabs are provided. But if you take a step outside all this, it’s gone a little bit crazy with all of this additional spending. It’s sort of uncapped. And… I think other parents at a school will say, ‘Well has my child not got the one-to-one tuition? Why am I having to somehow get my child to school when the minicab is turning up with this other [child]?’”

There is an reasy answer to this: most of them actually won’t, because they understand that some kids have Special Needs and others don’t. But this point soon leads him on to an issue he really wants to talk about: alleged overdiagnosis, and how he thinks it might cause hostility and bad feeling about people seen as getting their kids unfair advantages. “Wes Streeting actually said publicly [that] there may be overdiagnosing,” he says. “I think he was talking more broadly about mental health issues, [but] there are obviously clear incentives… This is not to blame the parent: they want the best for their child, to try and get their child with a statement [i.e an EHCP], right?

Phillipson evidently understands what he’s driving at. “The trouble is that because of the way in which the system has been set up,” she says, “the money goes to schools in that way rather than directly to schools to accommodate a wider range of need.”

This is a really significant thing to say, which says a lot about the thinking behind the imminent white paper. The Education Secretary seems to think that via Education, Health and Care Plans, too much money is dedicatedly spent on individual children (“Special needs - the clue’s in the name,” as my partner always says), and needs to be redirected into general SEND budgets. This is the philosophy behind the creation of “specialist facilities” in mainstream schools that will seemingly cater to lots of kids at once: it obviously satisfies a crude kind of collectivism, but what it could mean in practice – children with wildly different needs, perhaps, crammed into clunky, multi-age provision – is a mounting source of concern to many parents and professionals.

There is, however, one crumb of comfort in the Osborne/Phillipson chat. Last October, she responded to a Reform UK council leader’s endorsement of Nigel Farage’s views about supposedly “massive” overdiagnosis of “general behavioural disabilities”, by labelling what he said “reckless”, “frankly shameful”, “damaging” and “shocking”. Her response to Osborne venturing a polite version of the same point is more measured: “I think the question about ‘Are we overdiagnosing?’ risks slightly missing the point,” she says. “Which is, if a teacher or member of school staff is picking up that a child needs support, whether that is a diagnosable condition or otherwise, we need to be better at meeting needs earlier.”

This, rather than visions of crafty parents making specious claims about their kids and getting luxurious help, is an actual issue. And Phillipson, in fairness, has been scrupulous in avoiding any impression of sympathy with the “overdiagnosis” brigade. Apart from anything else, it would be politically crazy to go anywhere near stuff like that: though people like me still have grave doubts about what it is about to announce, the government’s messaging about its SEND reforms is all about listening to parents and families, rather than impugning their motives. How could it be otherwise?

But when it comes to the politics of special needs and the rising sense that neurodivergence and disability are at the heart of a new culture war, that isn’t the whole story. Whatever the government says and whichever toxic talking-points it strives to steer clear of, its changes to the SEND system are still going to kick up a huge cloud of “overdiagnosis” innuendo, misinformation and base prejudice, and it is not going to be pretty.

Thanks partly to what Osborne and his ilk did to our politics, questioning other people’s needs and constantly alleging cheating and bad faith is now close to being a national sport. The “overdiagnosis” craze fits it perfectly, and if the government proceeds with its strongly-rumoured plans to cut down eligibility for EHCPs and the rights that go with them, a lot of the people who end up cheering it on are going to be reading from exactly that script.

For that reason, even if you are doing so with good intentions, this might be the worst time imaginable to be starting a debate about changing provision for SEND kids and their families and its place in the law. Osborne and his ilk, I suppose, would argue that once spending is reined in, the resentments they talk about (and actively encourage) will die down, and all will be well again. I don’t buy that at all, because there is a much greater danger – of the very act of scaling-down rights and provision while the media fills up with nastiness and prejudice further embedding horrible attitudes to disability and difference, to the point that they might become immovable. That has already happened to immigrants, people on benefits and disabled adults: is anyone surprised that SEND children and their families might be next?

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Insisting that what seems to be “need” is really nothing of the kind

“Overdiagnosis” is already built into the conversation about changing the SEND system, partly because of how the politics of Special Needs is dealt with in certain sections of the media. For publications on the right of politics, the idea has an obvious appeal: whatever the facts, the ‘O’ word allows them to discount such factors as the legacy of the austerity they enthusiastically supported, a childhood mental health crisis, the consequences of the pandemic and the constant increase in our understanding of human psychology, and blame the Special Needs crisis on a kind of decadent, mollycoddling playing of the system that must be swiftly dealt with. This is of course, really just a rewrite of the same outlets’ script on poverty and “welfare”: you downplay the complex realities, and insist that what seems to be “need” is really nothing of the kind.

These, for example, are the choicest bits of a recent piece by The Spectator’’s Ross Clark:

Children are routinely being made out to be disabled in some way – either because their schools want more money or because their sharp-elbowed parents want them to have some advantage. I am no stranger to special needs education. My daughter, who is now an adult, attended special schools. But I can tell a racket when I see it – and this is one… SEND is mushrooming because too many people have a vested interest in it.

Another perfect example is a recent editorial in the Times – which, among its other points, said this:

“An under-explained catalyst of the rising expenditure is a recent sharp increase in diagnoses of milder psychological conditions, causing many children to be needlessly removed from mainstream education….It is reasonable to ask whether this sharp rise in EHCPs reveals a relaxation of diagnostic standards rather than an increase in underlying need. More troubling still is the extent to which EHCPs have become the linchpin of a system riddled with inefficiencies and perverse incentives.”

This is a pretty mind-boggling argument, with no evidence offered for the claims it makes. Who, for example, are the children taken out of mainstream schools because of mere “milder psychological conditions”? Is the argument here about kids who aren’t in the classroom at all, or entirely imaginary pupils who are in specialist settings on false pretences? Does the person who wrote it even know? Or is this less about the practicalities of education policies than a way of looking at the world, and a basic mistrust of what we now call neurodiversity?

If you want to sample an even less polite version of this stuff, brace yourself, and have a look at the comment threads that follow SEND coverage in the same paper (though they’re behind a paywall). The one that followed a news report on December 31st about what the government has planned for the SEND system is as good an example as any: “SEND has turned into education welfarism over my 45 years in schooling, including 10 years signing off all ‘statements’ for 2 councils,” wrote one contributor. “Many, many millions of public resources [sic]. The most needy children are squeezed by parents, schools and SEN ‘advocates’ who pressurise and game this weak system.”

“About time too,” said another. “Too much money wasted on pushy parents who want everything for their ‘special’ children. It’s all a very sad indictment of our society where everyone wants to be a victim, have special needs and have someone else provide ‘special ‘ treatment.”

This shades into the basic views of SEND apparently shared by Nigel Farage, Richard Tice and their followers in Reform UK. Judging by an instantly-infamous pamphlet put out during her campaign to become the leader of the Conservative Party, the same is true of Kemi Badenoch. Worse still, some of the same buttons are apparently being pushed by people inside the government, with overwhelming echoes of very familiar arguments about benefits.

Three times now, I have read one particular bit of poisonous briefing, variously described as “concerns within government” and stuff that has been briefed by ministers. It centres on allegations that EHCPs are used to fund provision including skiing lessons, “falconry experiences” and “equine-facilitated learning, under which children with mental health problems are given the opportunity to ride horses”. No context or evidence has been offered here: my first thought was of the horse-riding my son used to do (at the suggestion of his NHS Occupational Therapist) to improve his core strength and stability. But who cares about that? The stories do their work: like tales of welfare malingers with huge TVs and flash cars, they sow mistrust and scepticism about something that may soon be destined for the chop.

Where does all this stuff sit with the general public? A few days ago, I got a fascinating email from the pollsters at More In Common, which had a chunk of findings about SEND and talk of the government’s plans for change:

Our latest research finds Britons strongly support the legal entitlement to provision of SEND support: 60 per cent believe support should remain a legal entitlement for all who need it, even if this requires significant government spending. Only 26 per cent think eligibility should be tightened. WIth the SEND reform white paper expected by mid-March, changes to the funding could carry significant political risk for the government as 72 per cent of their 2024 voter base believe that the spending should remain a legal requirement, despite the high price tag. Additionally, parents represent another group likely to be at the centre of this backlash, as they stand out in their strong support for the funding as an entitlement (7 in 10).

But there was also much more unsettling material:

However, this support sits alongside growing concern about overdiagnosis. More than one third of the British public believe children are being diagnosed with SEND when it does not accurately reflect their needs. This view is particularly prevalent among Reform UK (51 per cent) and Conservative (53 per cent) supporters

I did a bit of cigarette-packet maths on the second passage: on this evidence, belief in SEND “overdiagnosis” extends to just over 1 in 5 of the population. The same, perhaps, could be said of the qualities of being gullible, excessively judgemental, and, you know, basically not being very nice.

But a)Given that Keir Starmer and his colleagues are pretty hopeless at the art of explaining their policies by using stories and narratives, b)Because it will be hard to rebut suggestions of “overdiagnosis” in the midst of reforms partly about saving money and cutting back people’s rights; and c)Because casting doubt on people’s needs is now such an in-built part of our national conversation, I fear we will soon be hearing much more of this stuff, with at least some of it put around sotto voce by people within government. For those of us already used to battling misconceptions and prejudice, 2026 threatens to be a trial: a year spent not only dealing with a watershed change to the education system, but some of the most misplaced and nasty ideas this increasingly stroppy little island has to offer.

• You can order Maybe I’m Amazed, my memoir about my autistic son James, our battle through the SEND system and how music saved us, here