Kent County Council Election 2025: Special Educational Needs and Disabilities

The issue of Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) has become a vexed issue in Kent.

Getting children into the right schools to meet their requirements is both difficult to achieve and it is also very costly to residents.

Making such provision work will fall to whichever party takes the reins at Kent County Council (KCC) after the elections on May 1.

KCC must provide the service by law and the cost of providing it has been affected in recent years by the increase in those in need of home-to-school transport and the number of education health care plans (EHCPs).

There are around 20,000 pupils in the county and the cost to the Kent tax-payer is more than £100m, although the government does contribute a significant amount more to the most in need, sometimes known as the high needs bloc.

Here we ask the five main parties fighting for seats at County Hall on May 1 how they would tackle one of the most important aspects of KCC’s service provision...

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1 January 2025

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