Right across the sector, we all know - and all see - the significant increase in the numbers of young people presenting with additional needs and support.

For some trusts, this has gone up by as much as 40 or 50 per cent since the arrival of Covid. With most children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) taught in mainstream schools - as they should be - this is putting increasing pressure on schools.

This is not just due to the rise in numbers, but also the broad range of needs with which children present. They can be related to disability or cognitive development, from adverse childhood experiences, and include deprivation, neglect and attachment, anxiety and social or emotional traumas.

Schools have been trained and encouraged to identify these needs earlier, which of course is a good thing. However, this is exposing the lack of system capacity to follow up any initial assessment of need. We are forced to stand by frustrated and desperately looking for ways to move children’s cases forward, while the assessment process - which opens the door to provide the support these young people need - is on its knees.

SEND challenges

And so, as someone who also trained as a psychologist before starting my teaching career, the news this week that the Department for Education has found an additional £21 million to train 400 more educational psychologists from 2024 was welcome news.

At least at first glance.

Dig deeper and you realise that even with this boost, not enough educational psychologists will be trained each year.

This isn’t about a lack of appetite for the role: there are far more applicants to the doctorate course than there are funding places available. Only 17 per cent of applicants actually get onto the programme, according to the latest data from the Association of Educational Psychologists.

This lack of a pipeline is then matched with a serious retention issue. Like many other public sector workers, pay is driving the small number of educational psychologists that we do have into private sector work. An experienced educational psychologist can earn more than three times the salary in the private sector than if they work for a local authority.

As a large trust, we had been able to fill the “gap in service” by appointing our own education psychologist, but when this individual recently left us and we went out to advertise - three times - for a replacement, we had no applicants as we simply cannot compete with the terms available in the private sector. We will now have to join the queue and rely solely on the local authority provision.

Delayed help

And a final issue is time: in 2006, the level of training to become an educational psychologist increased from a one-year master’s degree to a three-year doctorate.

While the higher degree of training and expertise is welcome, the time in getting trainees to the front line creates another hiatus in the system, while the demand increases all the more.

The time is well overdue to review roles in the SEND Code of Practice and look again at who is best placed to advocate for children.

If - and it’s a big if - we agree it is the local authority, then this has to be resourced properly, both in terms of money and expertise, so that they can discharge this responsibility in a timely and thoughtful way.

And as part of this, there absolutely has to be more weight given to the assessments made by Sendcos in schools to help accelerate the time between diagnosis of need and access to professional services.

‘Tip of the iceberg’

The issues around educational psychology capacity in the system are just the tip of the iceberg.

There are even greater challenges around accessing services that educational psychologists rely on - including Camhs, speech and language therapists, and other therapeutic interventions.

As such, while £21 million is, of course, a welcome boost to these long-neglected areas, it is a drop in the ocean when it comes to the suffering that is being caused by SEND support having been inadequately funded and resourced for such a sustained time.

We owe our children so much more.

Tom Campbell is the interim chief executive at E-ACT