SENLOSS: The effects of losing special educational needs support at educational transitions in England

Many children with special educational needs (SEN) rely on support provided by their school without having a legally binding Education, Health and Care Plan. This support can change or stop, including when children move between stages of education. However, there is currently no nationwide evidence showing how often children lose support at these points or what happens to their learning, attendance and health afterwards.

This project will investigate how often special educational needs support is lost during key transitions, particularly when children move from primary to secondary school and from Reception to Year 1. It will identify which children are most likely to lose support and examine what happens afterwards, providing evidence that could help government, councils and schools better protect children at greatest risk.

This project aims to explore the following research questions:

1. How often do children lose SEN support when they move between stages of school, and which children, schools and areas are most affected?
2. What effect does losing support have on children’s learning, engagement with school and health?
3. How do these effects differ according to children’s type of need and other characteristics, and which groups are most affected when support is lost?

The methodology used in this study:

• The project will follow children who were receiving school-based SEN support before moving to a new stage of school. It will focus particularly on the move from Year 6 to Year 7, as children start secondary school, as well as the earlier transition from Reception to Year 1. Using ECHILD, the research will compare children whose support continued with those whose support stopped.
• Children who lose support may already differ from children who keep it, so the project will use several statistical approaches to make the comparisons as fair as possible:
  • Machine learning (a method called gradient boosting) will identify which characteristics of children, schools and local areas are most strongly linked to losing support.
  • Target trial emulation will be used, which uses existing records to imitate the fair comparison you would get from a randomised trial.
  • An event study will follow the same children in the years before and after they lose support, comparing how their outcomes change with how outcomes change for similar children who kept it. This is known as a ‘difference-in-differences comparison’: each child is measured against their own earlier record as well as against other children, which cancels out pre-existing differences between the two groups.
  • A causal forest searches across many characteristics at once to find groups of children most affected by losing support. 

Findings will be expressed in practical terms, such as differences in exam results, additional days of school missed and additional use of health services. This will help policymakers assess the potential consequences of withdrawing support alongside the resources required to provide it.

Angelina is a Senior Research Officer at the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER), University of Essex.