England's Education Spending: £122 Billion, a Decade of Cuts, and a SEND Crisis Bankrupting Councils

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The Headline Number Misleads

The UK spent £122 billion on public education in 2024–25, measured in today's prices. That sounds like a lot. It is not as impressive as it looks.

In real terms, that figure is 10% — or £14 billion — lower than it was in 2010–11, according to the IFS Annual Report on Education Spending in England 2025–26. Education's share of national income has fallen from around 5.6% of GDP in 2010–11 to 4.1% in 2023–24. That is back to levels last seen in the late 1990s — despite decades of rising participation at every stage of education.

The biggest driver of the long-run fall is higher education: successive governments shifted the cost of university from the taxpayer to graduates. Strip out that structural change and school spending tells a different, more complicated story — one of cuts, partial recovery, and a hidden crisis consuming everything the recovery produced.

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School Spending: The Recovery That Wasn't

Between 2009–10 and 2019–20, school spending per pupil in England fell by 9% in real terms. Secondary schools were hit harder than primaries. The 2019 and 2021 Spending Reviews reversed some of that: between 2019–20 and 2024–25, school spending per pupil grew by 11% in real terms, enough to take it back to 2010 levels, according to the IFS.

The 2025 Spending Review confirmed £4.7 billion more for schools by 2028–29, per the DfE Education Hub. Per-pupil funding is projected to reach £8,800 by 2028–29 in 2025/26 prices — a 7.7% real-terms increase on its current level — according to the Institute for Government's Performance Tracker 2025.

That headline, too, deceives. Half of the increase in school funding between 2019 and 2024 was absorbed by the growing costs of special educational needs provision, the IFS found. Strip out high-needs funding and mainstream school spending per pupil grew by just 5% in real terms over that five-year period — not 11%. And school costs over the same period rose faster than funding. The IFS projects that in 2025–26, school costs will grow by approximately 3.6% while mainstream school funding per pupil grows by around 2.8% in cash terms — meaning schools face an effective real-terms squeeze even as cash numbers increase.

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The SEND Crisis: Costs With No Ceiling in Sight

The system of support for children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) is, in the IFS's own word, "broken." It is also the dominant financial pressure across English education.

The number of pupils with an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP) — the legal document that entitles a child to specific, tailored support — more than doubled between 2016 and 2025, rising from 236,800 to 482,600, according to the Institute for Government. Nationally, EHCPs rose from 240,183 in 2015 to 575,973 in 2024, according to County Councils Network research. In the last year alone, EHCP numbers rose 11.1%.

High-needs spending — the budget that funds SEND provision — has almost doubled over the past decade. It stood at around £7.8 billion in 2015–16 and reached £11.8 billion in 2023–24. The IFS projects it will exceed £18 billion by 2028–29, leaving a £6 billion gap between expected spending and available funding. Bloomberg reported in October 2025 that the cost will reach £21 billion by 2029, with the IFS calling it "financially unsustainable."

Specialist school placements are a core driver. Placing a child with an EHCP in a non-special school costs an average of £58,000 per pupil — seven times the cost of a mainstream placement, per CCN data. Fees for independent special schools have nearly doubled in real terms between 2018–19 and 2024–25, now averaging over £60,000 per year and totalling over £2 billion nationally, according to the IFS. Two thirds of state special schools are now operating over capacity, according to the Institute for Government.

There is a structural incentive problem embedded in the system. Mainstream schools can only access top-up funding when a pupil's additional support costs exceed £6,000. That threshold was set in 2014 and has never been uprated for inflation. In practice, schools often need an EHCP to access any top-up at all — creating an institutional incentive to seek EHCPs for children whose needs might previously have been met without one.

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Councils on the Brink

Local authorities are legally required to fund SEND provision. The costs have outrun their allocations by billions. Since 2020, councils have been permitted to use an accounting device — the "statutory override" — to exclude these deficits from their budget books. The override was due to expire in March 2026.

Without it, the consequences were stark. By February 2026, eight in 10 English councils warned they would become insolvent if required to cover SEND deficits accumulated in recent years. The County Councils Network estimated that 18 county and unitary councils would be insolvent overnight if the override ended without intervention, with a further six by 2027. The OBR projected cumulative council SEND deficits could reach £14 billion by 2027–28.

In February 2026, the government stepped in. The BBC reported that the government committed £5 billion to pay off 90% of historical SEND deficits accumulated by English councils. But the County Councils Network warned that clearing historic debt solves nothing without structural reform: absent systemic change, councils are on course to re-accrue SEND deficits at £4.4 billion per year by 2029. The government has committed to setting out plans in a SEND white paper in 2026.

The CCN's conclusion, based on a decade of data: councils have invested £30 billion more on SEND services over the past decade. Educational outcomes have not improved.

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Falling Pupils, Wrong-Way Planning

England's school system is also adjusting — slowly and badly — to demographic reality. A surge in births in the late 2000s pushed pupil numbers to a peak of 7 million in 2023–24. That cohort is now moving through and exiting. Pupil numbers fell for the first time since 2010–11 in 2024–25, dropping by 47,200 in a single year. The Institute for Government projects 412,200 fewer pupils by 2029–30 compared to 2023–24.

Primary schools are hit first. Numbers peaked at 3.8 million in 2018–19 and fell by 102,100 in the years since. DfE projections show primary enrolment falling by a further 164,400 by 2026–27. Almost one in eight primary school places was unfilled in 2023–24 — the highest proportion since records began in 2009–10, equating to 22,900 empty classrooms.

Against this backdrop, local authority areas plan to add 18,900 net new permanent primary places by 2026–27, according to DfE capacity data cited by the Institute for Government. Only 8% of areas are actively cutting capacity. The mismatch is not an accident; it reflects fragmented local governance, schools' financial incentive to preserve rolls, and the absence of any strategic mechanism to reduce places at national scale.

Since schools receive most of their funding on a per-pupil basis, empty classrooms directly erode budgets. The Institute for Government found that a 1 percentage point increase in unfilled primary places is associated with a 1.1 percentage point increase in the share of maintained primary schools running negative reserves.

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Rebuilding a Crumbling Estate

On capital: the Spending Review 2025 confirmed approximately £2.4 billion per year for the School Rebuilding Programme over the next four years, reaffirming the commitment to rebuild over 500 schools. The review also allocated £2.6 billion between 2026–27 and 2029–30 to fund mainstream school places, and maintenance funding is set to increase annually with inflation, reaching approximately £2.3 billion by 2029–30. The programme exists in part because the previous government allowed the proportion of schools with buildings in serious disrepair to grow unchecked, including ongoing issues with reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC).

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Outcomes: Above Average, Declining

Higher spending does not straightforwardly translate to better outcomes — and recent trends are downward. In PISA 2022, the UK scored above the OECD average in mathematics (489 vs 472), reading (494 vs 476), and science (500 vs 485). But 2022 results were down compared to 2018 in mathematics and reading. Science scores in 2022 confirmed a decade-long decline from the UK's 2012 peak.

Pandemic disruption is part of the explanation — but not a complete one. The Institute for Government found that educational inequalities across English schools grew at an alarming rate between 2020 and 2022, with gaps widening to their largest in a decade. Disadvantaged pupils and those with SEND faced the steepest setbacks.

On international comparisons of spending: the UK spent USD 14,262 per primary-to-secondary student in 2021, compared with the OECD average of USD 12,703, according to OECD Education at a Glance 2024. The UK is above the OECD average at primary and secondary level. The UK spends 6.2% of GDP on educational institutions (primary to tertiary, including R&D), against the OECD average of 4.9% — but this figure is inflated by unusually high tertiary spending and masks the relative underinvestment in early years, where UK spending per child is well below the OECD average.

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What the Numbers Actually Say

The narrative that education is well-funded does not survive contact with the data. Total spending is 10% lower in real terms than in 2010–11. Half of the recovery in school budgets since 2019 has been consumed by SEND costs. Councils were on the edge of mass insolvency over deficits they were legally required to incur but structurally unable to afford. Pupil numbers are falling, empty classrooms are multiplying, and local authorities are nonetheless adding school places.

The 2025 Spending Review adds money. The Institute for Government and IFS are consistent: without structural reform of the SEND system — how EHCPs are issued, who pays, what threshold triggers support, how mainstream schools are funded to be genuinely inclusive — the new money will be absorbed before it reaches a classroom.

The £122 billion headline is real. So is the 10% real-terms cut. So is the system in which billions more spending has produced no measurable improvement in outcomes for the children who need it most.

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