GB News hosts Emily Carver and Tom Harwood have hit out at the "staggering" cost of support for special educational needs amid plans for Labour reform.Speaking on their show Good Afternoon Britain, Tom revealed that a councillor had disclosed that the cost of supporting one family in Britain amounts to "more than sending a child to Eton".FULL STORY HERE.
00:00Of course, looking at the terror threat as it stands today, reflecting on what that was 20 years ago,
00:05but also, as we were discussing, a huge rebellion for this government.
00:09It's easy to forget that this government has a massive majority in the House of Commons.
00:14It's behaving like it has no majority at all. Has it just lost control?
00:19It does look like that, doesn't it?
00:22And with these stories about scratching around for a wealth tax to try and plug this gap,
00:26well, maybe if you hadn't created this financial black hole, then we wouldn't be in the position where we're scrambling around for more and more things to tax.
00:34But that is the state of play. But this special needs, special needs help for pupils, it is quite staggering how many children now require this support.
00:42I mean, the amount that we spent on it in 2022 was £8 billion. The amount we're spending on it this year is £12 billion.
00:5250% increase.
00:53That is a 50% increase in the space of just a handful of years. And that's real money. That's a huge amount of money.
00:59I mean, what's going on in the system? Are people being misdiagnosed? Is the criteria set wrong?
01:04Tom, get this. Severe learning difficulties and physical disabilities make up just 4% of those who need these EHCPs, which is the Education, Health and Care Plan.
01:17So 96% of children who are on these special care plans don't have severe needs.
01:22No, so there's been a huge rise, as you might expect, in autism, which of course can be, it varies massively, speech, language and communication needs, social, emotional and mental health needs, which includes ADHD.
01:35So things like that. Now 639,000 children in England need this support.
01:4111% increase in the year to January.
01:44No wonder our councils are going bankrupt.
01:46Double what it was six years ago.
01:48And this is the thing, the government may well be right to want to reform this and think, you know, can we spend this money better?
01:53Because it's the councils that have to pick up the bill, isn't it?
01:55Absolutely. And then councils are going bankrupt left, right and centre and taxes are going up.
