North Yorkshire Council is "under enormous pressure" as it faces higher than average demand for children who need special educational needs support. 

The council's executive member for children and families, Cllr Janet Sanderson, said the authority is doing all it can to deliver the best possible service in the face of inadequate funding and spiralling demands for education and healthcare.

However, Cllr Alyson Baker, authority's young people's champion, questioned whether the council was being “proactive rather than reactive” to the continuing increase in the volume of children with the plans.

An officer’s report revealed that at the end of March, the council was funding 4,877 education and healthcare plans, with the most common need being for autism, representing a nine per cent rise on the previous year.

There has been a steady increase in plans nationally since the government introduced a special educational needs and disability code of practice in 2014. North Yorkshire has had to absorb a rate far higher than both national and regional increases.

Between 2020 and 2023, the volume of plans funded in North Yorkshire rose by 43%, ten percent higher than the national rate.

Officers have warned there has been “a dip in timeliness” in recent months, partly due to a considerable backlog in gathering information for decisions on plan assessments alongside a shortage of educational psychologists available in North Yorkshire.

Earlier this year, Levelling Up Secretary Michael Gove announced £600m worth of extra funding to help councils meet demand for adult and children’s social care, saying he hoped the extra money would “reduce pressures on other areas of children’s services.”

He said the funding was in addition to the £1bn extra previously announced to “enable councils to continue to provide crucial social care services for their local communities, particularly for children”.

Neverthless, the authority’s chidren and young people’s service director Stuart Carlton said the service had been thoroughly reviewed and new ideas brought forward, but it was facing “a struggle” due to a lack of national funding.

He said: 

Cllr Sanderson added the high demand, a lack of provision and being comparatively poorly funded was putting the service “under enormous pressure”.

She said the service was awaiting the findings of an Ofsted inspection to consider whether the measures the council was implementing were suitable.