28th November 2025 • My Family Our Needs

On Thursday 26^th November 2025, Chancellor Rachel Reeves presented the Labour Government’s Autumn Budget. The Chancellor’s address laid out the Government’s fiscal plans for the year ahead, including proposals to fund SEND provision by central government and scrap the two-child benefit cap.

Centrally funded SEND provision

The Government announced it will take over full responsibility for SEND spending from local councils by 2028/29 following the warning from councils that SEND services faced ‘total collapse’.

The need for a potentially decisive overhaul also comes after the Office for Budget Responsibility said the annual costs of SEND spending in England would reach £6 billion a year by 2028.

The government has yet to reveal how it will pay for the accumulated council deficits and the ongoing extra spending, projected by the OBR to reach £14 billion by 2028, who described this as a ‘significant fiscal risk’.

If the projected £6 billion-a-year extra costs were to be fully funded through the Department for Education’s core schools budget, this would ‘imply a 4.9% real fall in mainstream schools spending per pupil’ from 2028-29, rather than a planned 0.5% increase, the OBR continued.

A Department for Education spokesperson said, ‘We are clear that any deficit will be absorbed within the overall government budget. These projects also do not account for the much needed SEND reforms this government will bring forward.’

Chancellor Amanda Hopgood, chair of the Local Government Association’s Children, Young People and Families Committee, said, ‘While it is positive government has committed to absorbing the costs of SEND spending from 2028/29 – and we look forward to clarity on how this will be funded – this does not address existing deficits, which are pushing many councils to the financial brink.

‘In the provisional Local government Finance Settlement, we urge the Government to write off these deficits – both the current accumulated deficits and any future deficits expected up to and including 2028/29 – and to fully fund all associated costs such as home school transport over this period, ahead of setting out wider, comprehensive reform of the SEND system in the Schools White Paper.’

SEND spending has been largely driven by a rise in demand for EHCPs, which have more than doubled to 639,000 in the past decade. This has forced councils to increasingly rely on expensive private special schools, some owned by private equity investors, to meet the surge in demand.

Asked if the decision would mean cuts to schools or SEND spending after 2028, Reeves said the imminent reforms were ‘not about money’ but about ‘creating a system that works for kids, their parents and for schools.’

She added ‘I believe wherever possible we should integrate children into mainstream schools. That’s not always possible but I would like to see it happening more’.

Natalie Perera, Chief Executive of Education Policy Institute, said that this future funding is in spite of there being a ‘clear and imminent need to address the rising costs of SEND provision’.

Perera added, ‘The Government needs to invest in long-term reform of the SEND system. This requires investment in the workplace and targeted funding for early identification and intervention’.

Matthew Hicks, the chair of the County Councils Network, said ‘the government must grasp this opportunity to build a SEND system that works for children and their families, and which pulls councils back from the financial cliff edge.’

Lifting the two-child benefit cap

Another change proposed was to remove the two-child limit on Universal Credit from April 2026. This is expected to reduce the number of children in poverty by 450,000 by 2029/30 and would result in ‘the biggest reduction in child poverty over a parliament since records began’, alongside other measures, Reeves claimed.

She said that since being introduced in 2017 by the then Conservative government, the benefit cap has ‘pushed hundreds of thousands of children into poverty’.

The two-child benefit cap meant that parents of children born after April 2017 who received Universal Credit or child tax credit could not claim payment for any third or subsequent child born after this date. Whilst the introduction was widely criticised by welfare campaigners, the removal of the benefit cap has been welcomed by children’s charities across the UK.

When addressing the House of Commons, the Chancellor said, ‘I came into politics believing that every child has equal worth and should have equal chance to achieve. Child poverty is the biggest barrier to equal opportunity. […] It is the kids, not parents, that have paid the price’.

Removing the cap will increase benefits for 560,000 families by an average of £5,310 annually and will cost the exchequer £3 billion by 2029/30 according to the Office of Budget Responsibility. This will reportedly be paid for by freezing tax thresholds and the introduction of a ‘mansion tax’ for high-value homes.

Lisa Doyle, head of policy and public affairs at Centrepoint, said, ‘This may be a small part of the Budget – but it will make a huge difference to these young people, most of whom only want to get on in life and have so far found their ambitions blocked by the benefits system’.

In other news, Children’s theatre charity, Embracing Arts, presents this year’s Christmas for Kids (C4K) productions.