Bristol Send Failure Sees Private Equity Backed Schools Muscle In On Money

Bristol City Council has a historic failure of creating enough specialist places

A lack of specialist placements for children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (Send) has seen rising costs to non-maintained and profit driven education settings.

A historic failure to match the number of places for children and young people with Send has given private equity backed independent specialist schools an opportunity to profit from local authority failure.

Chair of Children and Young People Committee (CYPC), Councillor Christine Townsend said the rise in funding to such establishments is linked to the rise in the number of children and young people with Send supported by Education Health and Care Plans.

She said: ” The rise in funding for the use of independent specialist provision links to the rise in the number of children and young people supported by an Education Health and Care Plan (EHCP). In Bristol, children and young people supported by an EHCP has risen by 164 per cent since 2018, placing significant pressure on local specialist settings.”

In the March 2026 meeting of CYPC, papers showed the Bristol remained below the national average of Education Health Care Needs Assessments (EHCNA). It also showed that the number of EHCNA requests received by Bristol City Council was in fact a decrease of 08 per cent compared to the same period of time in 2024.

In March 2021, Councillor Townsend blamed “longstanding neglect and apathy” by former Mayor Marvin Rees for a lack of specialist settings rather than a rise in EHCPs.

Lib Dem Councillor for Hengrove and Whitchurch Park, Sarah Classick, raised questions concerning council spend around Send private providers from 2015 at Members Forum this week.

Townsend said that Bristol City Council has a major £53.13 million programme which will create 308 new specialist places as part of the SEND Education Capital Programme 2024 – 2030.

She said this would see “high quality provision across the city, helping pupils learn closer to home, reducing the need for long journeys or placements outside of Bristol, to meet our statutory duties.”

The payments to non-maintained and private equity backed independent specialists since the academic year 2015/16 was disclosed as follows:

2015/16 £7,815,006
2016/17 £8,755,542
2017/18 £8,656,183
2018/19 £5,802,344
2019/20 £6,451,549
2020/21 £7,761,878
2021/22 £11,647,953
2022/23 £14,475,881
2023/24 £21,693,304
2024/25 £26,343,126
2025/26 £35,148,547

Councillor Christine Townsend said: “We welcome the government’s announcement that it will introduce new national price bands to end fee variation for the same provision, giving councils more power to challenge poor value placements along with changes to cost transparency to show exactly how public money is spent. We expect the detail on how this will be implemented in the future but this will go some way to support a reduction in spend, particularly on private equity backed independent special schools.”

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