College high needs funding surveys

High needs funding in colleges survey 2025

This survey explored the scale of high needs payments to colleges, the ways in which they are spent, and how processes are followed, or not followed, by colleges and local authorities. High needs students form only part of the population of students with SEND. This survey report reveals how current high needs processes work in practice, with short term implications for how the current system should be managed and longer-term implications for the shape of a new system.

Headline findings:

• For colleges other than SEND specialist colleges, high needs funding formed a significant slice of college budgets (8.7% on average) making them financially vulnerable to local authorities’ commissioning behaviour.
• High needs budgets for individual colleges amounted to £3.58 million per college on average, showing the large scale of college high needs provision.
• Specialist provision for students with SEND was provided by 90% of colleges, and the average proportion of high needs students learning on such courses was just over a third (33.7%) in colleges that were not specialist SEND colleges.
• Despite this scale, only 37% of colleges said that their local authorities consistently engaged them in strategic planning.
• Only 21% of colleges said that local authorities consistently took account of the actual costs of the provision they commission from colleges.
• 67% of colleges reported that price negotiations were based on inaccurate, uninformative or out of date education, health and care plans (EHCPs), meaning that the students in question will arrive at college without the college having the right information to meet their needs.
• Late payment was revealed as an ongoing problem. Little more than a quarter (26%) of colleges said payments stuck to an agreed schedule whereas almost a third (32%) said that payments were delayed beyond the academic year in which support took place.
• On average, the proportion of high needs income spent on learning support assistants was 56.4%, with 47 colleges indicating that local authorities set the pay rates for staff.
• 71% of colleges said that, under the “duty to admit”, they had been directed to enrol students whose needs they had formally said they could not meet.
• 66% of colleges said they had instances where, after declining a student placement, local authorities rewrote students’ EHCPs, sometimes to remove behavioural or medical needs.
• Despite these problems, over four-fifths (81%) of colleges said their relationships with local authorities were collaborative and colleges gave many examples of college and local authority actions that fostered collaboration.

AoC high needs funding in college survey report 2026 AoC press release