The crisis in funding for pupils with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) was laid bare this week: the National Audit Office reported that over the last decade, the budget for spending on SEND has risen 58 per cent to £10.7 billion, yet this has not led to better outcomes for the 1.9 million children and young people with SEND.

The report added that two-fifths of local authorities (LAs) in England risk going bankrupt by March 2026 - in part due to these costs.

A lack of specialist state provision is increasingly part of the problem: councils often now pay for pupils to attend independent settings as that is where the only spaces are available.

During the current academic year, councils in England plan to pay private schools £2.1 billion to fund support for pupils with SEND - a 15 per cent rise on last year, and a trebling of the £710 million spent in 2015.

This cost is likely to increase as more children receive education, health and care plans (EHCPs) - there has been a 140 per cent increase since January 2015, from 240,000 to 576,000 - and there continue to be too few places in specialist state provision.

So, what can be done?

A local solution

A possible solution is on show in West London, in the form of a partnership between a local authority and a multi-academy trust (MAT).

Freston Junction is a specialist resource provision (SRP) for key stage 3 and 4 young people with high-functioning autism and/or social, emotional and mental health needs.

Ormiston Academies Trust (OAT), a MAT with 42 schools across England, launched the SRP in Kensington in June this year because “there isn’t a provision locally to meet those needs”, according to Wasim Butt, director of alternative provision (AP) and special at OAT.

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Freston Junction, which has space for 12 secondary-age students, with nine currently on roll, sits downstairs in a newly refurbished space on the site of Ormiston Latimer Academy, an AP school. Its students come from within the borough.

Tom Rees, CEO of OAT, tells Tes that while “there are lots of trusts who run AP or special schools”, the set-up in London is unusual because the trust doesn’t have any mainstream schools in the borough.

A trust-council partnership

Freston Junction is also a partnership between OAT and the local authority, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC). A spokesperson says the council “provided £350,000 of one-off capital funding” to refurbish the school, as well as committing “to provide funding annually to cover the running costs and staff, equivalent to about £35,000 per place”.

They add that compared with “more expensive independent sector provision”, Freston Junction results “in savings of about £18,000 per place for the council’s schools budget”, which, if rolled out for every child requiring specialist provision, would be a major saving nationally.

So could the model - and similar models across the country involving trusts and LAs - scale up to make more of an impact on SEND budgets?

The capital cost of the new provision is not insignificant. Freston Junction lies just a stone’s throw away from Grenfell Tower in a Grade II-listed building. The school has two classrooms, each with a teacher and a teaching assistant. With a principal who oversees Freston Junction, that makes five dedicated staff.

All the children at the school have an EHCP, explains principal Grant Monaghan, and their needs “manifest themselves in behavioural issues. They dysregulate quickly”. So the delivery of the curriculum is all about being “flexible”.

Specialist design

The aim of the refurbishment was to make this 19th-century space feel like a “home from home”, says Butt. Special design attention was paid to suit students’ needs. “You want the lighting and the sound and the acoustic baffling to be really clever because the ceilings are quite high.”

Classes are not arranged strictly by age but by ability. Each classroom has adjustable desks and cushioned pod seating as well as chairs. There are also separate spaces for group work.

“We want them to be free to use the space however is most comfortable for them,” Butt says of the students, adding that teachers can also control lighting in the classroom - purple and green light creates a “calming, slightly lower arousal space” to help students focus.

The refurbished school also includes a gym area, an outside space with benches and space for ball games, and an art hut. Alongside their curriculum classes, the students benefit from sessions with an educational psychologist, art therapist and speech and language therapist, and have lessons to develop “self-esteem and resilience”, Monaghan says.

A flexible curriculum

The route into the provision, and what that provision offers, is more familiar and thus arguably more attainable than the design features.

RBKC commissions places for students at Freston Junction based on their EHCPs. Those who arrive at the SRP have been “identified really specifically for this provision”, Butt explains.

Monaghan adds: “We’ve got students at different stages on the engagement spectrum. Some have been out of school for several years.”

“Our aim here is: how can we be as inclusive as we possibly can?” he says, adding that the school “expects some children in five days a week”, while others are on hybrid models and adaptive timetables.

“We personalise the timetables for each young person,” he says, and timetables are “reviewed regularly to make sure they are the best fit”.

Monaghan explains that the school day starts with a “communal breakfast” in the central hall, alongside “a low arousal task - sometimes a simple game, or a worksheet, or some reading”. This “slow build-up” makes students “more ready to go into their first lesson”.

He explains that Freston Junction’s aim is to encourage “children to make progress from their own starting point”, but there is a “non-negotiable” focus on English and maths - all students will sit GCSEs in these subjects at a minimum.

Preparing students for post-16

“The most important thing is that we support the young person to make a successful transition when they leave,” Monaghan adds.

Freston Junction is not designed to prepare students for re-entry into mainstream schools. “It’s better to try and better meet their needs and then try and secure some really good outcomes,” he says.

So “we’ve just employed a post-16 and CIAG [careers, information, advice and guidance] lead internally”, he says, to support students with the transition into work or further education. The CIAG lead will work at both Freston Junction at upstairs at Ormiston Latimer Academy, he adds - and it is this kind of sharing of resource that has made the opening possible.

That mix of environment and offer has meant students have already made progress, he adds. “Prior to the summer break, one young lady wouldn’t even open a window in her bedroom, never mind leave the house. She’s now coming in three or four days a week.”

So, could it scale?

Rees says that Freston Junction is “unique” because it is a “special provision within an AP”. Building on the expertise that already exists at the AP upstairs - rather than starting from scratch - has allowed OAT “to be quite creative”, he says.

He adds that while LAs often commission specialist provision places in out-of-borough schools, Freston Junction allows students to “go to school in their local community, growing up and being as close to their family and peers as possible”.

This benefit is social as well as financial - the council saves on long-distance travel costs, another huge part of the SEND budget crisis.

Future plans

Butt adds that Freston Junction “reduces the high-needs deficits across the country”, filling the “black hole” of “great local provision”.

But with just 12 places, it helps only a small number of students.

Butt explains that OAT plans to continue to “work deeper” in the “tri-borough” area - RBKC, Westminster, and Hammersmith and Fulham - where it also runs the APs Bridge Academy and Beachcroft Academy.

The trust also runs managed intervention centres (MICs), which exist as “satellites” of the three OAT APs, offering five-week intervention programmes for local children at risk of exclusion from their mainstream school, Butt explains. He adds that 70 per cent of children who attend an MIC are still in their mainstream school a year after intervention.

Butt says that further plans to be the “inclusion partner” of these LAs include the incorporation into OAT of the Queensmill Trust, a special school MAT with two academies and three satellite provisions in mainstream schools.

A spokesperson for RBKC says that following the opening of Freston Junction, “we have asked Ormiston to work with us to deliver equivalent primary provision from 2025”. They add that the “new site will be an expansion of the primary AP provision that is delivered from Beachcroft in Westminster”.

Elsewhere, OAT has built on its own model, launching two pilot MICs outside London in June this year - in Lowestoft in Suffolk and Stoke, where OAT has mainstream academies.

Butt says the scheme, which is part-funded by the Education Endowment Fund, is currently “a one-year pilot”, with “plans for year two”. He adds: “We want to replicate the success we’ve had [in London].”

A model for a nationwide solution

Rees believes Freston Junction has the potential to be a model for a nationwide solution to the crisis in SEND funding.

“We see an urgent need to create more high-quality and affordable special and alternative provision places,” he says. “We know other trusts are on this journey, too, and are pleased to be working in collaboration with colleagues from within the trust system and across LAs on what is a system challenge.”

Rees adds: “I can see why schools might not feel that they’ve got the expertise or the capacity to move into the alternative provision and specialist space, particularly when there’s such a stretch on schools at the moment.

“But I think, if we are to respond to the national shortfall in alternative provision and specialist places, there are some great trusts across the country with the capacity and the ability to do more of this in the future. I think incentivising trusts to do this would be a good thing.

“The SEND system has been characterised as ‘lose, lose, lose’. We think this is an example of where it can be ‘win, win, win’.”

Ellen Peirson-Hagger is senior writer at Tes

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