Sheffield SEND Strategic Needs Assessment

0.1 Release notes

24/5/24 - initial long-form draft for review & discussion
28/6/24 - first released version 30/4/25 - updated with data up to & including half term 4 of the 2024/25 school year

1 Introduction

This document is an assessment of Special Educational Needs (SEN) in Sheffield children. There follows an analysis of volumes of pupils with different levels of need and different specific needs; how this is changing over time; comparisons with other authorities; the demographic makeup of children with SEN; geographical distributions and differences in prevalence; links to economic deprivation; school attendance, attainment and exclusion; and the types of support offered within the city.

The data used comes from the Sheffield School Census; Capita One attendance and exclusion records; and published government data.

Important

This report remains in draft, and the figures here are subject to revision & change

2 Summary of key points

• Around 1 in 5 pupils in Sheffield has some level of SEN, and almost 1 in 20 have an EHC plan in place
• This figure is growing over time, with a particular increase seen since the COVID-19 pandemic
• Among core cities, Sheffield has around the average level of children with an EHC plan, but above average prevalence of children with SEN support
• The most prevalent specific needs are also the fastest growing, these are:
  • Speech, language & communication needs (SLCN)
  • Social, emotional & mental health needs (SEMH)
  • Autism
  • Moderate learning difficulty
• Children who have an EHC plan are more likely to be male, and peak in Y7
• The majority of children with SLCN are boys in the early primary years, and as these children age the cohort is likely to grow significantly
• There is increased prevalence among certain ethnic groups
• There is a strong apparent link to economic deprivation
• Children with SEN have lower rates of school attendance, particularly in secondary phase
• Children with SEN support experience a bigger drop off in attendance between years 6 and 7
• All SEN levels see a steeper decline during secondary school that children without SEN
• Attendance rates are worsening over time for children with SEN support

3 Overall volumes

Special Educational Needs pupils in Sheffield - Spring 2025
data from School Census & Capita One attendance records; counts rounded to nearest 10
	all pupils		primary		secondary
	count	%	count	%	count	%
No SEN	61500	81.4%	31330	81.2%	24640	79.4%
SEN Support	10880	14.4%	5870	15.2%	4650	15.0%
EHCP	3160	4.2%	1380	3.6%	1730	5.6%

As of the half term period ending 2025-03-28 there were 13649 pupils between years 1 and 11 with SEN support or an EHC plan in place. This is 19.6% of all pupils. Of these, 89% are in mainstream provision.

3.1 Growth over time

The numbers of pupils with SEN support and with EHC plans have been growing year on year, with a significant rise in the years following the COVID pandemic.

Caution

At the time of writing levels of both categories seem to have reduced on the previous year. This may reflect data availability, or delays to assessments rather than true prevalence

4 Types of school provision

4.1 Mainstream and special

Of primary age pupils with an EHC Plan, around 30% are placed in special schools. In secondary this figure is 48.5%.

Pupils with an EHC plan in Sheffield, by provision type
count of pupils on roll in Spring 2025; data from School Census & Capita One attendance records
	mainstream		special
	count	%	count	%
Primary	893	66.7%	446	33.3%
Secondary	771	48.3%	825	51.7%

4.2 Elective Home Education (EHE) and Education Other than at Setting (EOTAS)

Elective Home Education & Education Other Than Setting Data

The EHE & EOTAS data is from a separate source to the pupil counts for mainstream & special above. There is potentially some overlap & figures here are provisional

Pupils educated other than in mainstream or special
count of pupils registered as EOTAS or EHE on 1/4/2024; data from Capita One & school census
	Education other than setting	Elective Home Education
EHCP
Primary	3	16
Secondary	21	29
SEN Support
Primary	-	51
Secondary	-	104

The numbers of electively home educated children continue to grow dramatically - though noteably not for those with an EHC plan.

Volumes of children with an EHC plan who are educated other than at setting also continue to rise dramatically:

4.3 Alternative Provision

Pupils with special educational needs in alternative provision
count of pupils registered to Sheffield Inclusion Centre on 1/4/2025; data from Capita One & school census
	Sheffield Inclusion Centre
SEN Support
Primary	6
Secondary	126
EHCP
Primary	6
Secondary	29

5 Benchmarking

Taking published DfE data to compare Sheffield to the other core cities, and Sheffield’s statistical neighbours.

Caution

Since we are looking at published DfE data here, the figures here may not align with other areas of this report that use local data.

Sheffield has slightly more EHCP and SEN support pupils than the core cities average.

Sheffield also has slightly more children with an EHC plan than our statistical neighbours.

For SEN support, Sheffield is higher than all our statistical neighbours.

6 Primary Specific Needs

The most common specific needs are Speech, Language and Communication needs, Social Emotional and Mental health, and Autism.

Note

This chart looks significantly different to the previous year, see the time series chart below to see the changes in more detail.

A primary specific need is recorded in the school census data for pupils with SEN support or an EHCP. Here we look at volumes over time, and for clarity, we have divided these into two plots. The first shows the larger groups (pupil count >= 1000). There has been substantial growth in the prevalence of three specific needs: Speech, Language and Communication Needs; Social, Emotional & Mental Health; and Autism.

Heading into 2025, SLCN has continued to grow dramatically, while the autism and SEMH categories have reduced.

This second plot shows the smaller groups (pupil count < 1000), these smaller groups are mostly static in prevalence, except a noteable reducting in severe learning difficulties Note that 2020 has been removed from these plots due to COVID shutdowns affecting the data.

7 Age & gender

Age & gender profiles show a significant gender bias towards males in the SEN cohorts. There is a particular peak in EHCP rates for boys in Y7. SEN support volumes are higher in Primary Provision.

8 Ethnicity

8.1 Time series of ethnicity

This time series displays the count of children requiring SEN support or an EHC plan for broad ethnic groups, and shows some differences in rates of growth and decline.

Pupils in Sheffield, by ethnicity description and SEN level
count of pupils on roll in 2024/25; data from School Census & Capita One attendance records
	EHCP		SEN Support		No SEN		Total
	count	% of row	count	% of row	count	% of row
all pupils	3414	4.7%	11500	15.7%	58267	79.6%	73181
White British	2062	5.0%	7120	17.3%	32056	77.7%	41238
Black African and White/Black African	267	4.3%	653	10.5%	5308	85.2%	6228
Pakistani	232	4.2%	773	14.0%	4518	81.8%	5523
Any Other Ethnic Group	118	3.8%	401	12.7%	2627	83.5%	3146
Any Other White Background	105	3.8%	344	12.4%	2315	83.8%	2764
White/Black Caribbean	136	6.9%	437	22.2%	1399	70.9%	1972
Other Asian Background	77	4.1%	202	10.8%	1586	85.0%	1865
Gypsy, Roma and Traveller of Irish Heritage	56	3.3%	527	31.1%	1113	65.6%	1696
White/Asian	77	4.6%	221	13.2%	1381	82.3%	1679
Any Other Mixed	63	3.9%	268	16.5%	1298	79.7%	1629
not known	81	5.6%	166	11.5%	1196	82.9%	1443
Indian	26	2.0%	61	4.8%	1191	93.2%	1278
Bangladeshi	30	3.6%	113	13.6%	687	82.8%	830
Any Other Black Background	37	4.8%	90	11.6%	646	83.6%	773
Chinese	18	2.8%	39	6.0%	590	91.2%	647
Black Caribbean	24	6.5%	71	19.3%	272	74.1%	367
Irish	5	4.9%	14	13.6%	84	81.6%	103

9 Mapping

The following maps show the prevalence, per 100 or 1000 pupils of the following SEND characteristics: EHCP; SEN support; Speech, language & Communication needs; Social, Emotional & Mental Health needs; Autism; physical disabilities; learning difficulties; visual impairment; hearing impairment and multi-sensory impairment.

The maps show how these prevalence rates vary across the wards of the city. Note that this is based on ward of residence rather than school attended. Rates have been calculated for pupils on roll during the 2024/25 academic year and for all pupils in years 1 to 11. In a change to previous versions of this report, the maps on specific needs now include those with secondary specific needs as well as primary needs - though the impact of this change is small.

Education, Health & Care Plans

Sen Support

Speech, Language & Communication Needs

Social, Emotional & Mental Health Needs

Autism

Physical disabilities

Learning Difficulties

Note

The map below shows the prevalence of all learning difficulties listed in the school census data: moderate, specific, severe, and profound & multiple.

Visual Impairment

Hearing impairment

Multi-sensory impairment

10 Deprivation

Measures of deprivation correlate strongly with the prevalence of special educational needs, more so for SEN support, and less so for pupils with an EHCP.

Caution

The apparent prevalences seen here probably result from differences in the true prevalences of SEN in the population, but may also reflect differences in engagement with the system, recording or policy. It is difficult to quantify the relative contributions of these factors from the data, though discussion of these issues with teachers, SEN workers and others on the front line may provide insight.

Some wards seem to have lower SEN levels than might be expected from their deprivation measures alone, and appear below the main groupings on these charts - most noteably Darnall, Burngreave and Firth Park. Other wards appear to have higher prevalence than expected from deprivation measures alone, appearing above the main groupings: e.g. Birley, Beighton, Park & Arbourthorne.

Note that due to it’s low population, city ward is often an outlier on plots such as these.

The relationship between deprivation and speech, language & communication needs is particularly strong.

…and less pronounced for social, emotional & mental health needs, with some signficant outliers, particularly Darnall.

For autism, any link to deprivation is weak:

11 Attendance

On average, school attendance is lower for children with SEN Support, and lower still for pupils with an EHC plan. These differences are greater in secondary schools than in primary, and the drop in attendance levels for SEN support children in secondary is particularly concerning.

Plotting attendance over time by sen level shows how the attendance gap between primary and secondary age children widened after the pandemic. We can also see the gap widen between children with & without SEN. By 2024 an attendance gap of almost 10% had opened up between secondary age children with no SEN and those on SEN support; children with an EHCP plan were attending almost 12% lower. The post pandemic period saw a drop in attendance for all children, but the group with the biggest reduction was children in secondary schools who require SEN Support.

Important

At the time of writing, the last year has seen encouraging recovery in attendance for all groups shown here. The biggest improvements for those groups most heavily affected - secondary school pupils on SEN support or with EHCP plans.

Plotting attendance by national curriculum year and SEN level produces three profiles of attendance. Here we see that the transition to secondary school has the most severe impact on attendance for children requiring SEN support. And while all children see a decline in average attendance through secondary, the decline is more severe for children requiring SEN support. Pupils with an EHC plan show a steady decline from NCY 3 onwards, and no discernable step down into secondary.

12 Attainment

Attainment data is available by SEN level and local authority from the DfE. Here we look at how attainment at Key Stage 2 (KS2) and Key Stage 4 (KS4) differs by SEN status, how Sheffield compares with the core cities, and how this is changing over time. There are many different measures of attainment in the published data, but here we focus on two: - At KS2, the % of pupils meeting expected standard in reading, writing and maths. - At KS4, the average attainment 8 score, which measures attainment across a pupil’s eight best subjects.

At both KS2 and KS4, children with SEN support have lower attainment than those no SEN, and children with EHC plans have lower attainment still.

Comparing with core cities, Sheffield shows similar performance at KS2 to the average for SEN support and children with no SEN, but benchmarks poorly for children with an EHC plan. It’s worth noting that there is large variation in the EHC plan attainment data here, that looks too great to be the result of local policy alone.

At KS4, Sheffield benchmarks around the average for children with an EHC plan, but poorly for those with SEN support.

For the years heavily affected by COVID, the DfE have not published the KS2 expected standard measure we used above, but the available data shows changes over time. Between 2019 and 2022 all children see a drop in attainment at KS2, and all see an improvement into 2023, but both SEN support and EHC plan children show a lesser drop to 2022 and a better recovery into 2023 than children with no SEN.

Finally on attainment, and at KS4 attainment peaking in 2021 and dropping slowly for all SEN groups.

13 Exclusions

Exclusion rates remain very low in primary schools, but rates are consistently higher for SEN support pupils. There has also been a recent rise in fixed period exclusions for primary aged children with an EHC plan.

Exclusion rates in Secondary are rising dramatically both for pupils with no SEN, and those with SEN support (where, just as in primary, rates have always been higher), though not for those with an EHC plan.

The above charts show the rates per 10,000 pupils, so for completion here we include a table of the underlying numbers for 2023/24:

Exclusion rates in Sheffield by SEN level and school phase
counts of exclusions and pupils on roll in 2023/24; data from School Census & Capita One attendance records
	primary			secondary
	exclusions	pupils on roll	exclusions per 10,000 pupils	exclusions	pupils on roll	exclusions per 10,000 pupils
No SEN
Fixed Period	535	32464	164.8	8474	25878	3274.6
Permanent	11	32464	3.4	111	25878	42.9
SEN Support
Fixed Period	471	6588	714.9	2549	4692	5432.7
Permanent	6	6588	9.1	33	4692	70.3
EHCP
Fixed Period	58	1359	426.8	56	1634	342.7
Permanent	2	1359	14.7	-	-	-

14 Distance to school

Children with SEN may travel further to access a special school, or a more suitable school. We calculated the straight line distance between home and school postcodes, in order to create the following distance profiles. Primary age children live closer to their school than secondary age children, with Over 40% of secondary age children with an EHC plan live over 5km from school.