Education
After disability benefits, is Labour really about to target the educational rights of special needs children? | John Harris
What will Keir Starmer and his colleagues learn from the disaster of their attempt to cut benefits? Most speculation so far has been focused on the prime minister’s prospects, and other ministerial careers. But there are soon going to be more big decisions to make, which will have massive consequences for people’s lives.
One policy area in particular is about to return the political conversation to the subject that defined last week’s fiasco: disability. Once again, Labour MPs from all wings of the party are feeling anxious and restless. Campaign groups and charities – not to mention the huge numbers of people who will be directly affected – fear the worst. With the wounds from the welfare bill fiasco still raw, there is a grim sense of a possible reprisal of the same story.
And this is why. The education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, wants to reform England’s system of provision for children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities, or Send. Long years of Conservative failure – not least, reforms introduced a decade ago that were lamentably underfunded, and an exodus of children from mainstream to specialist schools – have resulted in ballooning costs amid disappointing outcomes. The councils that administer everything are crying out for help. The Treasury, meanwhile, surveys the mess and demands action.
A new education white paper will be published in the autumn. Phillipson says the government needs to “think very differently”. She wants to reverse a trend that took root in the Tory years and prioritise the inclusion of Send kids in mainstream schools. There is talk of somehow “making sure that all teachers are teachers of special educational needs [sic]”. A new neurodivergence task and finish group that will “work alongside the department to drive inclusive education” has been created; £740m of capital funding is being spent on “adapting classrooms to be more accessible and for creating specialist facilities”.
On the face of it, these moves are very welcome. But self-evidently, it will take much more – and a lot of time – to meaningfully turn things around. One of the big teaching unions has already said that without a commensurate increase in day-to-day schools spending, the plans could put “extreme pressure” on teachers. And there is an even bigger tension at the heart of the government’s plans.
Since Labour won the election, rising noise has been coming from Whitehall and beyond about drastically restricting the legal rights to dedicated provision that underpin the education of hundreds of thousands of children and young people. Those rights are enforced by the official Send tribunal, and embodied in education, health and care plans (EHCPs), which set out children’s needs and the provision they entail in a legally binding document. Contrary to what you read in certain news outlets, they are not any kind of “golden ticket”: parents and carers used to unreturned phone calls and long waits still frequently have to fight their local councils for the help their plans set out. But – and as a special needs parent, I speak from experience – they usually allow stressed-out families to just about sleep at night.
For about 40 years, such rights have been a cornerstone of the Send system. But their future is now uncertain: councils, in particular, are frantically lobbying ministers to get parents and their pesky rights out of the way. Late last year, a government source quoted in the Financial Times held out the prospect of “thousands fewer pupils” having access to rights-based provision. Despite the fact that EHCPs are most sorely needed in mainstream schools, a senior adviser to the Department for Education recently said that a consideration of whether EHCPs should no longer apply to children in exactly those settings is “the conversation we’re in the middle of”. There are whispers about families who currently have EHCPs being allowed to keep them, while in the future, kids with similar needs would be waved away, something that threatens a stereotypical two-tier model, another element with worrying echoes of the benefits disaster.
As a result, parents and carers – and many teachers – are terrified. Whenever ministers are asked about what is going to happen next, they tend to come out with the response: “no decision has been made”. On Sunday, the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg challenged Phillipson on whether she is about to “get rid” of EHCPs, which was met with vague words about improved support in schools, familiar claims that the current system is too “adversarial”, and no specific answer. This, needless to say, is not exactly allaying people’s fears.
Just under 483,000 children and young people in English schools now have an EHCP, up 11% on the previous year’s figure. Their numbers have risen partly because ad hoc, informal special needs provision in schools has become so unreliable that the only way of having any chance of securing what a child needs is to apply for one. Official data shows that the majority of applications for EHCPs are initiated by schools and colleges, often as a last-ditch move. In short, many children desperately need them. Without the support such plans are meant to guarantee, even more pupils would either exit mainstream into specialist provision that is often eye-wateringly expensive, or end up joining the increasing numbers of kids who are not in formal education at all.
For the foreseeable future, because even an optimist would have to agree that improvements promised by the government will take years to really kick in, all that will remain the case. So the safest and most humane option would be to leave children’s legal entitlements in place, and start to improve Send provision as Phillipson wants, on the basis that boosted ad hoc help will naturally bring down EHCP numbers and costs. Instead, her most vivid move could be an awful rights grab, which would surely heighten the impression that this Labour party has an ingrained problem with issues around disability.
A new campaign titled Save Our Children’s Rights was launched over the weekend with a letter in the Guardian signed by leading figures from charities and lobby groups, including Disability Rights UK, the National Autistic Society and Mencap – as well as such high-profile Send parents as the broadcasters Christine McGuinness and Carrie Grant, along with the TV naturalist and neurodiversity campaigner Chris Packham (full disclosure: I am helping out, and I was one of the signatories). For the second time in less than six months, are these really the kind of people ministers want to argue with on Good Morning Britain, 5 Live and BBC Breakfast?
As I watched the benefits fiasco unfolding, knowing that the special needs story would soon explode, it brought one big thought to mind. Labour needs to stop sowing fear and dread among people whose lives are already full of those things. Instead of picking on vulnerable parts of the population who already view the future with deep anxiety, they should maybe go after much more powerful interests, who might be compelled into helping the government with its financial woes. Instead, fear is swirling around parts of society that are already unable to cope. Labour governments are meant to make people feel less scared, not more. If there is going to be yet another “reset”, this is where it should be focused.
There is one point that may yet bring clarity to the government’s thinking. Governing politicians habitually pretend they will win future elections. But there is now every chance that Reform UK might end up in power, possibly in partnership with whatever remains of the Conservatives. Judging by his recent pronouncements, Nigel Farage has very questionable views about special needs and disabilities. There is strong evidence that the same is true of Kemi Badenoch. The current fashion on the political right for nonsense about savagely cutting back the state would have deep implications for Send families. If Labour takes away so many children’s basic educational rights, it may well end up leaving them at the mercy of politicians who will then vandalise their lives. “No decision has been made,” say ministers. It is time they took the only morally and politically right one, and fast.
Education
The Trump administration pushed out a university president – its latest bid to close the American mind | Robert Reich
Under pressure from the Trump administration, the University of Virginia’s president of nearly seven years, James Ryan, stepped down on Friday, declaring that while he was committed to the university and inclined to fight, he could not in good conscience push back just to save his job.
The Department of Justice demanded that Ryan resign in order to resolve an investigation into whether UVA had sufficiently complied with Donald Trump’s orders banning diversity, equity and inclusion.
UVA dissolved its DEI office in March, though Trump’s lackeys claim the university didn’t go far enough in rooting out DEI.
This is the first time the Trump regime has pushed for the resignation of a university official. It’s unlikely to be the last.
On Monday, the Trump regime said Harvard University had violated federal civil rights law over the treatment of Jewish students on campus.
On Tuesday, the regime released $175m in previously frozen federal funding to the University of Pennsylvania, after the school agreed to bar transgender athletes from women’s teams and delete the swimmer Lia Thomas’s records.
Let’s be clear: DEI, antisemitism, and transgender athletes are not the real reasons for these attacks on higher education. They’re excuses to give the Trump regime power over America’s colleges and universities.
Why do Trump and his lackeys want this power?
They’re following Hungarian president Viktor Orbán’s playbook for creating an “illiberal democracy” – an authoritarian state masquerading as a democracy. The playbook goes like this:
First, take over military and intelligence operations by purging career officers and substituting ones personally loyal to you. Check.
Next, intimidate legislators by warning that if they don’t bend to your wishes, you’ll run loyalists against them. (Make sure they also worry about what your violent supporters could do to them and their families.) Check.
Next, subdue the courts by ignoring or threatening to ignore court rulings you disagree with. Check in process.
Then focus on independent sources of information. Sue media that publish critical stories and block their access to news conferences and interviews. Check.
Then go after the universities.
Crapping on higher education is also good politics, as demonstrated by the congresswoman Elise Stefanik (Harvard 2006) who browbeat the presidents of Harvard, University of Pennsylvania and MIT over their responses to student protests against Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, leading to several of them being fired.
It’s good politics, because many of the 60% of adult Americans who lack college degrees are stuck in lousy jobs. Many resent the college-educated, who lord it over them economically and culturally.
But behind this cultural populism lies a deeper anti-intellectual, anti-Enlightenment ideology closer to fascism than authoritarianism.
JD Vance (Yale Law 2013) has called university professors “the enemy” and suggested using Orbán’s method for ending “leftwing domination” of universities. Vance laid it all out on CBS’s Face the Nation on 19 May 2024:
Universities are controlled by leftwing foundations. They’re not controlled by the American taxpayer and yet the American taxpayer is sending hundreds of billions of dollars to these universities every single year.
I’m not endorsing every single thing that Viktor Orbán has ever done [but] I do think that he’s made some smart decisions there that we could learn from.
His way has to be the model for us: not to eliminate universities, but to give them a choice between survival or taking a much less biased approach to teaching. [The government should be] aggressively reforming institutions … in a way to where they’re much more open to conservative ideas.”
Yet what, exactly, constitutes a “conservative idea?” That dictatorship is preferable to democracy? That white Christian nationalism is better than tolerance and openness? That social Darwinism is superior to human decency?
The claim that higher education must be more open to such “conservative ideas” is dangerous drivel.
So what’s the real, underlying reason for the Trump regime’s attack on education?
Not incidentally, that attack extends to grade school. Trump’s education department announced on Tuesday it’s withholding $6.8bn in funding for schools, and Trump has promised to dismantle the department.
Why? Because the greatest obstacle to dictatorship is an educated populace. Ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny.
That’s why enslavers prohibited enslaved people from learning to read. Fascists burn books. Tyrants close universities.
In their quest to destroy democracy, Trump, Vance and their cronies are intent on shutting the American mind.
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Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
Education
Minister won’t rule out support cuts for children with EHCPs amid Send overhaul – UK politics live – UK politics live | Politics
Minister won’t rule out support cuts for children with EHCPs amid Send overhaul
Good morning. Less than a week after the government had to abandon the main pillar of its welfare reform plans 90 minutes before a vote it was otherwise likely to lose, the government is now facing another revolt over plans to scale back support available to disabled people. But this row affects children, not adults – specifically pupils with special educational needs who have education, health and care plans (EHCPs) that guarantee them extra help in schools.
As Richard Adams and Kiran Stacey report, although the plans have not been announced yet, campaigners are alarmed by reports that access to EHCPs is set to be restricted.
The Times has splashed on the same issue.
The Times quotes an unnamed senior Labour MP saying: “If they thought taking money away from disabled adults was bad, watch what happens when they try the same with disabled kids.”
Stephen Morgan, the early education minister, was giving interviews this morning. He was supposed to be talking about the government’s Giving Every Child the Best Start in Life strategy being announced today, but instead he mostly took questions on EHCPs.
On Times Radio, asked if he could guarantee that every child who currently has an EHCP would continue to keep the same provisions, Morgan would not confirm that. Instead he replied:
We absolutely want to make sure that we deliver better support for vulnerable children and their parents and we’re committed to absolutely getting that right. So it’s a real priority for us.
When it was put to him that he was not saying yes, he replied:
Well of course we want to make sure that every child gets the support that they need. That’s why we’re doing the wider reform and we’re publishing the white paper later this year.
Here is the agenda for the day.
Morning: Nigel Farage attends a meeting of Kent county council where his party, Reform UK, is in power.
11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
11.30am: Keir Starmer and other leaders attend a memorial service at St Paul’s Cathedral in London to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the 7/7 attacks.
2.30pm: Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, takes questions in the Commons.
If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line when comments are open (normally between 10am and 3pm at the moment), or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.
If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn.bsky.social. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X, but individual Guardian journalists are there, I still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary.
I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.
Key events
Unison and Usdaw join other unions in urging Labour to consider introducing wealth tax
As Peter Walker reports, Neil Kinnock, the former Labour leader, said the government should consider a wealth tax, in an interview with Sky News.
Today the Daily Telegraph has splashed on the proposal.
In their story, Ben Riley-Smith, Dominic Penna and Hannah Boland quote five trade unions also supporting a wealth tax.
Some of them them are leftwing unions long associated with calls for wealth taxes. Unite told the paper it had “led the campaign for a wealth tax inside and outside the Labour party”. Steve Wright, general secretary of the FBU, told the paper that “introducing a wealth tax to fund public services, a generous welfare state, and workers’ pay must be a priority in the second year of a Labour government. And Matt Wrack, the former FBU general secretary who is now acting general secretary of Nasuwt, called for an “immediate introduction of a wealth tax”, which he said had “very significant public support”.
But two unions seen as less militant and more aligned with the Labour leadership (which is wary of ‘tax the rich’ rhetoric) have backed the idea. Christina McAnea, general secretary of Unison, told the Telegraph: “A wealth tax would be a much fairer way of raising revenue to invest in public services and grow the economy.”
And Paddy Lillis, the general secretary of Usdaw, said: “We know wealth in this country is with a small number of people. [A wealth tax] is one way of raising money quickly.”
Government plans to overhaul Send provision will be about ‘strengthening’ the system, minister says
Stephen Morgan, the early education minister, told LBC that the government proposals to overhaul special educational needs and disabilities (Send) provision would be about “strengthening” the system.
Asked if he could say parents of children with Send had nothing to fear from the plans, which are due to be announced in the autumn, Morgan replied:
Absolutely. What we want to do is make sure we’ve got a better system in place as a result of the reform that we’re doing that improves outcomes for children with additional needs.
But, asked if the plans would involve scrapping ECHPs, Morgan replied:
We’re looking at all things in the round. I’m not going to get into the mechanics today, but this is about strengthening support for the system.
Here is the letter to the Guardian, signed by dozens of special needs and disability charities and campaigners, that is covered in our splash story about opposition to proposals to restrict access to education, health and care plans (EHCPs). (See 9.34am.)
Here is John Harris’s column on the topic.
And here is an extract.
Since Labour won the election, rising noise has been coming from Whitehall and beyond about drastically restricting the legal rights to dedicated provision that underpin the education of hundreds of thousands of children and young people. Those rights are enforced by the official Send tribunal, and embodied in education, health and care plans (EHCPs), which set out children’s needs and the provision they entail in a legally binding document. Contrary to what you read in certain news outlets, they are not any kind of “golden ticket”: parents and carers used to unreturned phone calls and long waits still frequently have to fight their local councils for the help their plans set out. But – and as a special needs parent, I speak from experience – they usually allow stressed-out families to just about sleep at night.
For about 40 years, such rights have been a cornerstone of the Send system. But their future is now uncertain: councils, in particular, are frantically lobbying ministers to get parents and their pesky rights out of the way. Late last year, a government source quoted in the Financial Times held out the prospect of “thousands fewer pupils” having access to rights-based provision. Despite the fact that EHCPs are most sorely needed in mainstream schools, a senior adviser to the Department for Education recently said that a consideration of whether EHCPs should no longer apply to children in exactly those settings is “the conversation we’re in the middle of”. There are whispers about families who currently have EHCPs being allowed to keep them, while in the future, kids with similar needs would be waved away, something that threatens a stereotypical two-tier model, another element with worrying echoes of the benefits disaster.
Consumer confidence rising, survey suggests
The majority of UK households are feeling financially secure, with 70% of people confident enough to plan a summer holiday, according to a survey. PA Media reports:
The number of people feeling financially secure has risen this quarter by three percentage points to 58%, while confidence that the UK economy is improving has risen to 17% from one in 10 three months ago, the KPMG Consumer Pulse poll found.
The survey of 3,000 UK adults, taken in early June, found 50% feel able to spend freely, although 14% say they are still having to actively cut their discretionary spending to pay for essentials, and 3% of are incurring debt to do so …
Despite the quarterly improvement in economic confidence, half of people (51%) feel that the economy is still worsening – although this is down from 58% in the previous quarter.
Those saying that the economy is getting worse cite the cost of their groceries (79%), utilities (74%), and the general state of public services where they live (42%).
Linda Ellett, head of consumer, retail and leisure at KPMG UK, said: “Consumer confidence has rallied over the last quarter and only a fifth of consumers now feel insecure about their financial circumstance. Businesses will be hoping that this improvement brings about increased spending confidence during the summer months.
“But macroeconomic confidence still looms large, with half of consumers still to be convinced that the economy isn’t worsening.”
Minister won’t rule out support cuts for children with EHCPs amid Send overhaul
Good morning. Less than a week after the government had to abandon the main pillar of its welfare reform plans 90 minutes before a vote it was otherwise likely to lose, the government is now facing another revolt over plans to scale back support available to disabled people. But this row affects children, not adults – specifically pupils with special educational needs who have education, health and care plans (EHCPs) that guarantee them extra help in schools.
As Richard Adams and Kiran Stacey report, although the plans have not been announced yet, campaigners are alarmed by reports that access to EHCPs is set to be restricted.
The Times has splashed on the same issue.
The Times quotes an unnamed senior Labour MP saying: “If they thought taking money away from disabled adults was bad, watch what happens when they try the same with disabled kids.”
Stephen Morgan, the early education minister, was giving interviews this morning. He was supposed to be talking about the government’s Giving Every Child the Best Start in Life strategy being announced today, but instead he mostly took questions on EHCPs.
On Times Radio, asked if he could guarantee that every child who currently has an EHCP would continue to keep the same provisions, Morgan would not confirm that. Instead he replied:
We absolutely want to make sure that we deliver better support for vulnerable children and their parents and we’re committed to absolutely getting that right. So it’s a real priority for us.
When it was put to him that he was not saying yes, he replied:
Well of course we want to make sure that every child gets the support that they need. That’s why we’re doing the wider reform and we’re publishing the white paper later this year.
Here is the agenda for the day.
Morning: Nigel Farage attends a meeting of Kent county council where his party, Reform UK, is in power.
11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
11.30am: Keir Starmer and other leaders attend a memorial service at St Paul’s Cathedral in London to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the 7/7 attacks.
2.30pm: Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, takes questions in the Commons.
If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line when comments are open (normally between 10am and 3pm at the moment), or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.
If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn.bsky.social. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X, but individual Guardian journalists are there, I still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary.
I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.
Key points:
In an era where workforce demands and the needs of high school learners are rapidly evolving, a new survey by Penn Foster Group sheds light on how teachers are reimagining education to better equip students for success.
Conducted at the start of the year, the survey of over 300 high school teachers underscores the growing need for educators to offer career-focused learning content and alternative high school pathways that equip students with workforce-ready skills in flexible ways beyond traditional schooling.
Teachers overwhelmingly reported a surge in interest among students to enter the workforce directly after graduation, with nearly 70 percent noting this trend had increased significantly in the past five years. This shift reflects a broader move toward practical, skills-based learning, as more than half of respondents (54 percent) shared plans to center their curricula around real-world skills. One teacher captured the essence of this approach, stating, “Students want to see how what they’re learning connects to their future. Showing them real-world applications keeps them engaged and motivated.”
By incorporating skills-based learning into their curricula, educators are equipping students with the tools necessary to transition seamlessly into the workforce after graduation–and online education is poised to play a pivotal role in this evolution. Nearly three-quarters of the teachers surveyed predict a rise in demand for online learning programs, with 70 percent agreeing that such programs are essential to workforce preparation. Educators pointed to flexibility and accessibility as key benefits, enabling students to balance education with other responsibilities while building critical skills for future careers.
The data in the survey also revealed that cost, faster completion times, and alignment with job opportunities are driving students toward nontraditional pathways. With 64 percent of educators expressing confidence in online learning as a viable alternative to traditional schooling, the shift toward digital and skills-based education is expected to continue accelerating, especially as high school learners are seeking more options for flexibility in their environment.
“As the educational landscape continues to evolve, it’s clear that traditional pathways are no longer enough to meet the diverse needs of today’s students,” said Andy Shean, Chief Learning Officer at Penn Foster Group. “This survey emphasizes the critical need for flexible, skills-based, and accessible learning options that prepare students for career success and keep them on track for graduation while supporting their overall well-being. By embracing innovative models such as online education, credit recovery, summer school, and blended learning, we can ensure that students not only graduate but thrive in an ever-changing world.”
Mental health remains a pressing issue, with 72 percent of teachers anticipating an increase in anxiety and stress among students in 2025. Teachers cited these challenges, along with social isolation and academic pressure as barriers to engagement and success. In response, many educators are implementing innovative strategies such as project-based learning, internships, and career exploration opportunities to meet students where they are and offer better support.
Online learning also serves as a lifeline for students who need additional support to stay on track for graduation. Penn Foster Group works with teachers and counselors who highlight the growing use of online courses for credit recovery, summer school, and blended learning models, allowing students in traditional schools to customize their education to meet their unique needs. These programs provide students with a second chance to earn missed credits, accelerate their progress, and engage with coursework in a way that accommodates personal schedules, extracurricular commitments, and other responsibilities.
As demand for alternative learning pathways rises, Penn Foster Group remains at the forefront of education innovation by focusing on practical skills and flexible, online program delivery. The latest data reinforces Penn Foster Group’s commitment to delivering forward-thinking education that empowers high school learners’ continued adaptability and success.
This press release originally appeared online.
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