What can the education reforms for children and young people with SEN/D learn from wider ideas about public service reform?

What can the education reforms for children and young people with SEN/D learn from wider ideas about public service reform?

by Professor Brahm Norwich

This blog is a call for a wider perspective on the issues we discuss in the SENPRF, drawing on the recent ideas of Sam Freedman. His advisory work in the DFE for Michael Gove more than a decade ago, might lead some to pass over his ideas as not being of any relevance. But Freedman wrote in a 2022 Substack piece:  (‘How to change your mind’) about his own changes of mind. I heard him talk recently about his current ideas on a Compass podcast and came to see how relevant his ideas could be.

In his 2024 best-selling book on ‘Failed state: why nothing is working and how to fix it’ he examines the unhealthy relationship between central and local government. He outlines the gradual growth in central control, the reduction in local authority decision-making powers and the increase in competitive bidding for small pots of ringfenced Whitehall money. His main argument is that there have not been sufficiently powerful intermediary bridges in England between the national and the local. Though not novel, even in the SEN/D field, the time for this argument may now have come. Freedman identifies an overpowerful centre prone to micromanagement, partly because of the weakening of local government since the 1980s based on quasi-market and neo-liberal ideas. Friedman’s position on schools seems to be that neither schools run mainly by local authorities nor academies and Multi-Academy Trusts overseen by  the Department for Education is optimal.

His book explains why centralisation in England underlies many of the current governance problems. This has got worse with authorities losing their control over housing, education and other services, with their funding not just cut but tightly constrained. All of this is while demand for services like social care and SEN/D have been rising, so leading to service cuts. Central funding, he argues, comes through bidding for small time-limited amounts that do not enable coordination or planning. So, Whitehall takes control across the country, while there is also more centralisation to No. 10 and the Treasury. What he calls a ‘loss of state capacity outside the centre has led to large scale out-sourcing and numerous failures –  a sense that nothing is working, as in his book’s sub-title.

In a more recent policy paper for Labour Together Sam Freedman outlines his ideas about how mayors and combined authorities (MCA) can help the new Government improve public services. He sees MCAs as able to complement the public services role of their constituent Local Authorities, while having the scale for the devolution of powers from central government. MCAs offer the opportunity for regional state capacity at a tier that has not been developed significantly in England. They were developed by George Osbourne during the Coalition Government as a way to enable regional economic growth. The responsibilities of current 11 MCAs, with two more awaiting approval, cover transport, skills and economic development. However, some like Greater Manchester, West Midlands and South Yorkshire, have also become more involved in public services, e.g. probation services, working with a NHS Trust.

Freedman’s argument is that expanding the MCA space has benefits because of the greater ease of joined-up service delivery being local than in Whitehall. He also contends that the public services / economy divide makes little practical sense, when economic productivity depends on a more skilled and educated workforce. Over-centralisation also means that central government cannot focus on high level policy when it is overseeing service delivery. However, Freedman realises that MCAs are fragile and require proper establishment, especially as some areas do not have a MCA. So he proposes that MCAs be built up over time, allowing for the shifting of powers from the centre.

So, he proposes several principles for how the Labour government could implement this in practice to establish a lasting public service reform agenda:

1. Unifying powers through mayors: seen in policing already, could also happen in other areas like health (in integrated care boards). Match regional structures used by central Government for service delivery to the MCAs, e.g. as in Manchester.
2. First refusal for delivery of new programmes: e.g. like tuition for school students or a pilot of a new scheme to help disabled people into work, These will not be contracted out to a for-profit company, but offered to mayors who would commission locally.
3. Devolved flexible funding: the budgets allocated to MCAs for economic development can have an added public service element.
4. Encourage MCA-level commissioning and expertise in public sector reform: MCAs could become centres of commissioning excellence, helping constituent local authorities to get better deals and develop state alternatives to private providers by pooling resources. For example, economies of scale for children’s homes
5. Treasury can combine the various pots of money into a single budget for mayors to have more autonomy over what to prioritise.

Freedman also examines other key questions about the mayoral role: standardisation, balance been central role requirement v. determining own priorities, all areas having a MCA and what fiscal power would mayors have?

There was a regional school commissioner system in school education, which has been replaced by Regional Directors as a department of the central DfE.  These 9 regional directors have a very wide range of responsibilities, from school under performance, decisions about free schools and multi-academy trusts, ensuring enough places in local areas, working with local partners, lead responses to Ofsted local area SEN/D inspections, appropriate safeguarding responses, admission arrangements etc. The roles and responsibilities of regional directors in relation to the DfE, Ofsted and other agencies is shown in this figure.

Were Freedman’s MCA principles applied to the current DfE regional system major changes would be required, for example, an improved match of the current education regional structure to the MCA boundaries. There would be devolved funding away from the DfE to the regional level, which would develop commissioning powers. MCAs  would receive a budget which the MCA would have some autonomy over what to prioritise. Though Regional directors have some SEN/D responsibilities, It is unclear how much of their work is taken up with these specific aspects. Nor is it clear how much of the DfE implementation of the SEN/D Improvement Plan (DfE, 2023) involves the Regional directors. The DfE Change Programme for SEN/D involves 9 regional Expert Partnerships to co-produce and test the proposed ’National Standards’ in refining the key reforms.

There was a regional structure for SEN developments in the previous Labour Government that did not survive a change of Government. But, it was not one linked to other regional development powers. The idea of a regional tier in the development of low incidence specialist SEND provision was also proposed by Professor Peter Mittler in the 1990s, that has links to Freedman’s ideas about the economies of scale of regional planning for care services.

Connecting education reforms for children and young people with SEN/D to wider ideas about public service reform adds another dimension to the last Government’s SEN/D Improvement Plans. It also goes beyond recent perspectives found in the LGA, CCN & ISOS report and the SENPRF’s National policy framework for SEND and inclusion, by raising questions about devolving powers to a regional tier that combines a role in boosting economic growth with public service developments. As Freedman suggests this could be a significant constitutional innovation to address the damage done through decades of centralisation and destruction of local government.