ALN FUNDING: ‘Absolutely damning’, Swansea leader rounds on Plaid over the £44m schools never saw

Swansea Council will formally demand the city’s share of the £322m Wales received on the back of England’s special needs funding, after councillors overwhelmingly approved the cross-party motion tabled by the cabinet and opposition group leaders.

Council leader Rob Stewart told the meeting that had the money been passed on for its intended purpose, Swansea’s schools would have received £44m this year.

Custom under devolution, he said, is that money clearly provided for a specific purpose is generally passed on for that purpose, but the £322m Barnett consequential went into the Welsh Government’s general budget instead.

The offer on the table before the government’s budget fell in July was £50m a year for three years, he told councillors, £150m across Wales that would have meant £11m for Swansea’s schools.

Stewart said the government now had the chance to work with other parties on a supplementary budget, but his verdict on its record so far was blunt: sending “the message to the most vulnerable learners across Wales that you don’t matter enough is absolutely damning”, he said.

Moving the motion, cabinet member for education Robert Smith said the number of children with additional learning needs was rising, their needs were growing more complex, and demand for specialist placements was increasing with them.

“I’m sorry that I have to move this resolution,” he said, stressing the money was not about topping up existing budgets but creating provision, employing staff and easing the workload on those already in post.

The scale behind the demand was set out when the motion was tabled: more than 6,600 primary pupils with additional learning needs, around 1,600 needing more than their school can normally provide, and more than 60 per cent of schools in parts of the city already in the red, pressure the council has answered so far with new specialist provision and Ysgol Calon Lân, the 350-place special school planned for Morriston.

Lib Dem councillor Peter Black, who chaired the then Assembly’s education committee between 2003 and 2007, said the ALN system his committee helped shape was the right one but had never been properly funded, piling financial and workload burdens onto schools, and that a minority government could not “play politics anymore with budgets”.

Mary Jones warned of the gap that opens every autumn term: a child arrives in September with additional needs, staff are employed to support them, and by Christmas the child has moved on without ever appearing in the January pupil census that drives funding.

Conservative group leader Lyndon Jones said the education scrutiny panel he sits on examines ALN in depth every year, that his letter to Smith after its last session acknowledged continuing and growing challenges, and that it was councillors’ “duty to ask, in fact demand” a share of the money.

Several councillors with family members working in ALN services declared interests and left the chamber before the debate began.

The demand now lands exactly where the Welsh Government said the answer would come: Cabinet Minister for Education Anna Brychan promised an update early in the autumn term after the £120m ALN package fell with July’s budget, and Swansea’s letter to the First Minister will be waiting when it arrives.

It was the second demand of Cardiff Bay in a single evening, passed shortly after councillors called for powers to block new vape shops on the city’s high streets.