The other day I watched a group of children at one of our schools doing African dancing and drumming. They were completely absorbed — moving in ways they had never moved before, laughing, concentrating, pushing themselves physically. What struck me most was not the energy or the joy, though there was plenty of both. It was that the children singled out by their teacher beforehand as the most difficult — the ones with identified special educational needs, the ones who routinely disrupted lessons and resisted engagement — were indistinguishable from everyone else. For forty minutes, there was no SEN. There were just children, doing something together that mattered.

I have been thinking about that scene ever since reading a report published this month by the Centre for Social Justice.

A crisis hiding in plain sight

The numbers in the CSJ’s Change the Prescription: Update are extraordinary. The number of children with Education, Health and Care Plans — the legal documents entitling them to specialist support — has more than doubled since 2015/16, rising from 240,000 to over 480,000 in schools alone. Across all ages, there are now 638,745 EHCPs, up 80 per cent since 2019. More recent DfE figures, reported by Nicola Woolcock in The Times (22 June 2026), show that the rise has continued: six per cent of all children now have an EHCP, up from 5.3 per cent just a year ago, and in total nearly 1.9 million children are receiving some form of SEND support.

The cost has risen in lockstep. Combined spending on high-needs SEND and child disability benefits has doubled from £12.4 billion in 2015/16 to £24.1 billion in 2025/26 — roughly the same as the entire teacher wage bill in England. Transport alone for SEND children now costs almost £2 billion a year. The government has already had to provide a £5 billion bailout to prevent local authority bankruptcies. And despite all of this spending, outcomes have not improved. There remains a fifty percentage point attainment gap between pupils with and without identified SEN.

The Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson acknowledged this month that inclusion bases — the specialist units in mainstream schools designed to support children with complex needs — are frequently being misused as a dumping ground for disruptive children. “Having SEND,” she said, “is not the same as bad behaviour.”

She is right. But the question the CSJ report forces us to ask is more uncomfortable: how much of what we are calling SEND is actually something else?

The diagnosis question

The CSJ commissioned Savanta to poll 1,002 GPs — the frontline clinicians who see these children every day. The results are striking. Seventy-five per cent of GPs agree that the clinical boundaries for diagnosing autism or ADHD have expanded to include behaviours previously considered within the normal range. Sixty-six per cent say diagnoses are given out too easily, where behavioural interventions would be more appropriate. Fifty-seven per cent believe financial entitlements linked to diagnosis strongly influence parental requests for assessment.

This is not a comfortable finding. It does not mean that the children involved are not struggling — they clearly are. But it does suggest that the label being attached to their struggles, and the expensive statutory machinery that label triggers, may not always be the most effective response. The CSJ report is careful to make this distinction: the concern is not with children who have severe and complex needs, for whom EHCPs are a lifeline. It is with the vast expansion into milder, often transient, behavioural and developmental difficulties that could be addressed earlier and more effectively by other means.

One statistic captures the inequity of the current system with particular clarity. Children from the most disadvantaged neighbourhoods are more likely to be identified with SEND — but significantly less likely to receive an EHCP. Families with resources navigate the assessment and tribunal system more effectively. The tribunal numbers tell their own story: 25,000 cases in 2024/25, up from 7,000 in 2018/19. Councils lose ninety-nine per cent of them.

Among the schools Cotswold Arts Through Schools works with, one village school with modest levels of deprivation has 29% of its children with SEN support; a comparable neighbouring village has 9.8%. Meanwhile some schools serving considerably more affluent communities show figures of 7–12%. The relationship between poverty and SEN identification is not straightforward — but the ability to navigate the system clearly plays a part.

This, as the CSJ report notes, is not a system supporting the most vulnerable children. It is a system that has been captured by those best able to work it.

What Katharine Birbalsingh knows

Katharine Birbalsingh runs Michaela Community School in Brent — the non-selective state school that last year saw more than forty per cent of its pupils achieve five or more grade 9s at GCSE. Over a third of its children are eligible for free school meals. It is, by any measure, one of the most remarkable schools in England.

In an interview with Alice Thomson in The Times (16 June 2026), Birbalsingh was asked about the soaring SEND referral numbers. Her answer was characteristically direct: “The phone is the biggest issue. It is breaking their brains.” She does not accept that the explosion in SEND numbers reflects a genuine explosion in neurodevelopmental need. What she sees, in a school that keeps children structured, purposeful, off screens, and genuinely engaged, is far fewer of the behaviours that elsewhere generate referrals.

She is also candid about what her funding does not allow. “Private schools have about £35,000 a year per pupil,” she says. “I have £7,000 a year, so financially my hands are tied.” She wishes she had a sports hall and playing fields. She runs choir and art and debating clubs despite the constraints, because she understands what they do for children. “Sport would very much feed into our ethos of teamwork.” One of the best state headteachers in England is telling us, clearly, that the arts and sport matter — and that she cannot afford enough of them.

What the Children’s Laureate is hearing

Frank Cottrell-Boyce, the outgoing Children’s Laureate, has spent two years touring schools, young offenders’ institutes, and hospitals across the country. His conclusion, shared with Alice Thomson in The Times (20 June 2026), is bleak: “Children have become much more anxious. They don’t read easily any more, or act, or want to play music. The number of teachers who say, ‘I can’t get them to sing any more’ — it’s heartbreaking.”

He describes children who now cling to their schools, fearing the holidays. “Suddenly it’s like, ‘I don’t want the holidays, I’ll be lonely stuck in my room.’” A generation that has lost the habit of making things, playing in streets, joining clubs, and occupying itself without a screen. A generation arriving at secondary school without the resources — creative, social, emotional — to navigate adult life.

This is not a coincidence. It is the predictable consequence of stripping the arts, music, and drama from primary schools over the course of a decade, and filling the resulting vacuum with screens.

What we know works

One of the patterns we observe consistently across the seventy state primary schools where CATS works is that schools which create an arts-rich environment are the ones where attendance improves, engagement rises, and attainment follows. The children who are written off as difficult — the ones flagged as SEN, the ones who resist conventional classroom learning — are frequently the children who come most alive in an arts workshop.

The African drumming session I watched at the beginning of this piece was not an anomaly. It is what happens, reliably, when children are given something purposeful to do with their bodies and their imaginations. The child who cannot sit still in a maths lesson can hold a complex rhythm for forty minutes. The child who will not make eye contact with a teacher will make a mask, perform in it, and take it home. The child who disrupts every lesson will spend an entire afternoon building a sculpture from materials that cost almost nothing.

We know this because we are doing it — in seventy schools, with over twelve thousand children, at a cost of £26 to £40 per child per year. For comparison, the government’s Every Child Can programme offers £14.85 per child across five activity categories, for all ages, over the course of an entire parliament.

The Centre for Social Justice’s Recommendation 5 calls for a national enrichment entitlement — sport, arts, volunteering, outdoor education — for every pupil. We would go further: arts provision in primary schools should be ring-fenced, properly funded, and understood not as enrichment, but as early intervention. Because that is what it is.

The lottery paradox

There is a final absurdity worth naming. National Lottery funding — and much other public grant funding — cannot be used for activities in schools, on the grounds that education is a statutory responsibility of the state. The state, having accepted that responsibility, then fails to discharge it. Lottery funding cannot fill the gap because the rules say the state should. The state does not fill the gap because the money has run out. Children are left in an arts-poor environment. The SEN bill rockets. The Treasury complains.

One of our local authorities understands its responsibilities broadly and provides genuine support for arts and culture in its schools. Another does not, on the grounds that education falls outside its remit. The children on either side of that boundary receive a different childhood. That is not a policy. It is a postcode lottery — and not the kind that generates the funding to fix it.

The government has acknowledged — through its SEND White Paper, its £5 billion bailout of local authorities, Bridget Phillipson’s guidance on inclusion bases, and the Every Child Can announcement — that something has gone seriously wrong with childhood in this country. It has not yet connected the dots. Arts in primary schools is not a luxury for the few children lucky enough to live in the right area or attend the right school. It is the most cost-effective early intervention available. We are doing it for £26 to £40 a child. The alternative — the diagnosis, the EHCP, the tribunal, the independent special school placement — costs the taxpayer an average of £61,500 a year.

The lesson is there to be learned. We know it; the government is just refusing to learn it.