Alarm bells ringing for special educational needs provision
Inigo Gordon, Sheffield
The grim reaper of private profiteering has arrived to collect the latest soul of Britain’s crippled public services.
After over a decade of austerity and school marketisation, local authorities are being held to ransom by private equity firms for the supply of Special Educational Needs and Disability (SEND) services.
These private companies have tied a real financial ball and chain to local councils with outrageously expensive contracts – SEND overspending has risen rapidly from £200 million in 2020-21 to £2.5 billion today.
Under this pressure, councils have been asked to submit spending plans to the government on how they will keep these costs under control. In other words, they’ve been told it’s time to put the working class back on the chopping board and prepare for cuts.
Spiralling costs
So how did we get here?
The number of students requiring SEND provisions has more than doubled over the past decade to almost a fifth of the school population.
This increase has been blamed on everything and anything to let the system itself off the hook, from parents being too greedy and kids being too soft. All the while the real driver of the crisis we see today remains ignored: cuts to council funding, cuts to public services, and cuts to mainstream schooling.
With overstretched budgets and overworked teachers, mainstream schools are increasingly unable to integrate supporting SEND needs into their classrooms. Meanwhile social service waiting lists for just putting together plans of support for children stretch from four months to years.
For the private profiteers waiting in the wings, this crisis offers a gold rush of funnelling local authority funds directly into their pockets.
Since 2016, for example, there has been almost a 70 percent rise in disabled pupils in independent (i.e. private) schools – despite the total independent school population rising less than two percent in that time.
With state schools unable to accommodate their needs, there is little alternative for SEND pupils.
But as it stands, councils are obliged to cover any costs of SEND education – and the price difference between state and private provision is shocking. In 2023, Kent County Council was forced to pay out £350,000 to private companies for just one year of education for a single child.
To make matters worse, there is no evidence of a better education actually being received by SEND students in these schools than in state schools.
Footing the bill
Over the last decade, therefore, total spending on SEND has risen 58 percent to £10.7 billion
This has all been very lucrative business for the private sector; they are not stepping up from a sense of charity! The Witherslack group – owned by the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund and one of Britain’s biggest providers of specialist education – saw its revenue rise by 130 percent between 2019 and 2023.
And councils have now warned of another brewing disaster within the web of crises that is plaguing SEND provision: transport costs.
Cuts to public transport, in particular the closure of less popular bus routes, mean local authorities are now having to fork out thousands of pounds on taxis and minibus hire to help SEND students get to school.
These companies know that the councils contracting them to provide this service are desperate, with no other choice – and they take advantage accordingly. Most recently, one taxi firm was caught trying to rake in up to £85,000 by fraudulently submitting ‘irregular’ invoices to its local council.
Kick out the profiteers
So what solutions are being given?
Labour’s current plan is to continue kicking the can down the road. Starmer has recently pledged £4 billion to cover the accrued debts, but even this insufficient bailout comes with a caveat: rather than fix SEND services, they are tailing Reform UK’s argument that accessing specialised help must be made harder.
So in conclusion: a bailout to keep paying the profiteers to bleed us dry.
The Green Party’s pledge is little better – simply cover the £5 billion shortfall, along with upping the funding a whole range of services to bolster the crumbling SEND system.
The Green’s opposition to cuts is welcome, but we should note that their policies amount to a temporary fix. The root problem remains: education in Britain today is underfunded and whole parts are being picked apart by capitalist vultures.
As long as this fundamental system remains, those who need the most support to reach their full potential will continue to fall through the cracks.
To fight back against this, all essential infrastructure that has been gutted by these profiteers must be nationalised through expropriation to rid our schools of these leeches once and for all.
Wes Streeting, how much is a student’s life worth?
Theo Salisbury, Norwich, and Joe Corps, Canterbury
Two students have died in Kent after the largest outbreak of Meningitis B in decades.
Meningitis is a rare disease which causes swelling of the spine and brain lining, developing into sepsis if untreated. Symptoms can be easily mistaken for flu or a hangover, making it easy to miss – and deadly. It can kill within hours, and leaves one in five survivors with lifelong disabilities.
Young people aren’t widely vaccinated for Men B, despite being an at-risk group. Those who want protection have to fork out £200 for a full course privately.
An affordable vaccination programme would require doses costing £3 each, but currently pharmaceutical companies charge the NHS £20 a dose. The deadly consequences of this have been borne out in Kent.
Wes Streeting was quick to praise the “Herculean efforts” to stop the spread. In reality, the response has been pathetic – not through the fault of NHS workers, but due to the incompetence and penny pinching of those at the top.
‘Trying to get the vaccine, they [111] constantly said no.’
University of Kent student Kai tells Sky’s @emmabirchley about being refused the vaccine at home, returning to campus to receive the jab, and his friends being hospitalised from meningitis. https://t.co/LyErktM8Jk pic.twitter.com/fzTReNgtgc
— Sky News (@SkyNews) March 21, 2026
Vaccinations were slow to start and were initially limited to those directly in contact with the infected. Even when the rollout was expanded, hundreds of students were turned away each day, due to understaffing.
Students were left queuing for hours or hiding in cramped uni halls – the very conditions that could spread the disease further!
Meningitis is not the only disease making a return. Many previously eradicated diseases, such as measles and polio, are rising across the West – with falling access to healthcare and vaccination rates.
Far from equipping health services for this, Streeting has put the NHS on the chopping block, cutting 11,000 jobs last year.
This situation has exposed the truth, clear as day: those in charge of Britain today care more about being ‘cost effective’ than the lives of the people they claim to serve. We should get rid of the lot of them!
Disability benefits are being slashed
Jodie Judge, Brixton
Starmer’s government has revealed its priorities starkly: introducing severe cuts to disability benefits, while pumping endless amounts of money into war.
Last year, it was announced that the government wanted to review Personal Independent Payments (PIP), a benefit for people with health conditions and disabilities. A similar benefit, ‘low capability for work-related activities’ (LCWRA), is also up for review.
Both these payments are meant to help people with disabilities navigate life more easily. Living with a disability is a lot more expensive than without: on average, people with disabilities will spend £1,000 more a month just on standard living costs.
The cuts being introduced next month mean future claimants of LCWRA will receive almost 50 percent less than they do now. All this comes in the midst of an ever-worsening cost of living crisis for which the Labour government has no solution.
The scale of the cuts they have brought in are criminal. If you apply for LCWRA before 6 April you will get £423.27 a month. After 6 April, it will be £217.26.
The government has decided that the cuts will only be put into action for new claimants, after pressure from back-bench MPs. However, this approach will really just foster division between disabled claimants – and by the DWP’s own estimates, it still means 84,000 will be worse off by 2030.
Instead of spending money to help disabled people live a fulfilling life, the government would rather use the budget to create weapons used in the war in Iran, the genocide in Gaza, and the war in Ukraine.
Not only are these wars not in the interest of the working class, they are also creating deep economic and environmental problems – which will only make life even more unlivable for people with disabilities.
Charity is no solution to homelessness
Alex Norris, Holloway
Recently, the homelessness charity Crisis ran a poster campaign featuring the tagline “We’ll end homelessness, one person at a time.” While this sounds admirable, it completely misrepresents the nature of Britain’s homelessness crisis.
In September 2025, a record 134,760 households in England were living in temporary accommodation, including 172,420 children. At the same time, an estimated 4,793 people were sleeping rough – another record high.
Charities have tried for decades to end homelessness, yet the figures are only increasing. Why?
At the end of the 1970s, 42 percent of Britons lived in secure council housing with affordable rents. Then, in 1980, Margaret Thatcher’s Right to Buy policy oversaw the mass transfer of publicly-owned property into private hands. Now, a measly 17 percent of people live in council homes, and over a million languish on waiting lists.
This is scandalous given that an estimated 34,000 properties in London alone are listed as ‘long-term vacant’, meaning they’ve been empty for over six months. Why would they need filling, in the eyes of the capitalist class? For them, these empty homes simply represent a safe investment that only ever increases in value.
Meanwhile, landlords buy up housing stock and use it to leech off the earnings of the working class – rents increase in line with the market and if people can’t afford them, there’s little they can do. With the sky-rocketing cost of living and a creaking benefits system, more and more people are therefore pushed into unstable housing – and homelessness.
Expropriating the billionaires, ending landlordism, seizing vacant properties, and building thousands more publicly owned homes – these are the only ways to solve Britain’s housing crisis. Far from fixing things ‘one person at a time’, we need revolution!
