Reducing SEND provision is part of a wider fight against the disabled and the young

~ punkacademic ~

Labour’s long-awaited announcement of ‘reforms’ to special educational needs and disability (SEND) provision in schools landed with the typical misrepresentation of facts beloved of British capitalism’s HR department. For Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson, ‘effective’ SEND provision would be the watchword moving forwards, and an additional £4bn would be committed by government to supporting local authorities.

In the government’s story, the current situation is a nightmare for children and parents, support takes too long too arrive and often only after a battle, and this is what the government is seeking to sort out.

The first part is true, the second part isn’t. The proposed reduction in access to Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) means a reduction in statutory rights, end of story. This is about the government’s spending cuts, and placing the onus on schools which are under-resourced as it stands will have predictable outcomes, and deliberately so.

The number of pupils with declared SEND needs has risen sharply over the past 15 years. Since 2014, according to the government’s own figures, the number of pupils in schools with EHCPs, which impose a statutory duty on local authorities to offer support, has doubled.

Including pupils with EHCPs and those without, the total proportion of pupils in England receiving SEN support is now a fifth of the school population. This means 1.7 million young people in England alone.

With EHCPs requiring local authorities to act by law, and the rate of new EHCPs not slowing down (the number granted rose by over 11% last year), councils across the country face the prospect of insolvency, brought about by the costs of SEN provision and adult social care.

So cost is a key factor motivating the government’s agenda here. And as with the ongoing review into Personal Independence Payment (PIP), means reforms to SEND cannot be separated from successive governments’ wider war against disabled people. In the LinkedIn dialect that Labour politicians speak, both are framed as noble endeavours that seek to give people hope, when in fact they are causing huge levels of anxiety to vulnerable people and their families.

The other motivation is to throw some bones in the culture war. In her speech to introduce the reforms, Phillipson quoted a phrase first deployed by George W. Bush, “the soft bigotry of low expectations”, a convenient go-to for politicians ever since (especially Michael Gove) to dodge responsibility for the challenges facing children, young people, and their families.

In Phillipson’s framing, it is some nebulous system to which she is exterior that has low expectations of pupils and ‘fails’ them. Gove for his part used the phrase ‘the Blob’ to travesty educationalists, a rhetorical trope borrowed straight from the US culture war politics of the 1990s.

The fight against SEND provision is also part of a wider fight against the young, slandered as a ‘snowflake generation’. In this context the framing is ‘over-diagnosis’; that neuro-divergence and mental illnesses in particular are ‘over-diagnosed’, a view ostensibly shared by both Farage and Wes Streeting in 2025 (until Streeting hastily backtracked following a backlash).

All this is culture-war mood music has a very dangerous history.

Over a century ago, Kropotkin opposed his theory of mutual aid as a factor of evolution to the right-wing social Darwinists, who championed ‘the survival of the fittest’ as the ‘natural law’ of economics and everyday life. The same trends later turned towards eugenics and the horrors of Nazism. Capitalism’s framing of disabled bodies as unproductive led to their being stripped of their human dignity through selective breeding, sterilisation, and extermination.

Eugenics was a value-system that had a grip not only on the right but on the parliamentary left and even some anarchists, until it was fulfilled in all its horror by Nazism. But it has never left our politics. It underpins ableism, and during the pandemic it underpinned the thinking that led to so many disabled people dying, even if their deaths were often not counted. Under the Trump regime eugenics is a watchword of the Make America Healthy Again movement associated with RFK Jr.

The fascist iteration of right-wing politics that increasingly passes for the ‘mainstream’ hates disabled people viscerally. That these views have resonance speaks to the presence of everyday ableism in our culture. What is needed instead is a fundamental reassertion of human dignity, and the refusal to reduce individuals to cost centres in cells on an Excel spreadsheet.

As anarchists, we know that fighting alone without mutual aid is a thankless and futile task. And despite Phillipson’s characterisations of parents fighting solitary battles for SEND support, the truth is that mutual aid has been at the fore of these struggles and disabled folks’ struggles more widely.

But this is a reminder to us that it is not enough to fight reactively against one set of cuts or another. We must win this battle socially and politically in all spaces – and not leave it to lawfare in a courtroom.