What is a Safety Valve agreement?
Since 2021, the Department for Education (DfE) has been striking deals with local authorities that have large deficits in their high needs budgets...the ring-fenced fund used to pay for SEND support. The arrangement works like this: the DfE agrees to pay off a portion of the local authority’s debt. In return, the local authority agrees to reform its SEND provision and bring its spending under control.
By May 2024, 38 local authorities had signed Safety Valve agreements. A further 55 were in a related programme called Delivering Better Value in SEND (DBV). In December 2024, the government announced it would not enter any new agreements, though existing ones continue.
These deals are not secret. Plans are published on the government’s website. What is less widely understood is what those plans actually require local authorities to do.
What the agreements actually involve
IPSEA made Freedom of Information requests to all 34 local authorities with Safety Valve agreements in 2023. The information they received was described by the charity as deeply worrying.
Across the board, IPSEA found that financial sustainability was being pursued through:
• Setting targets for refusing EHC needs assessment requests (described in documents as “improving decision-making on awarding EHCPs”)
• Employing dedicated staff to identify EHCPs that could be ceased altogether
• Targets to increase the proportion of children with EHCPs educated in mainstream schools rather than specialist settings
• Framing parental requests for assessment as “inappropriate” where councils wanted to discourage applications
One Council document noted that the number of EHCP requests from parents and carers was declining, and that there was “further work to do to reduce the inappropriate referrals.” The council’s Safety Valve deal included a requirement to “appropriately manage the demand for EHCPs.”
IPSEA concluded that the agreements appeared to encourage local authorities to breach their statutory duties to children with SEND.
Is any of this lawful?
This is the critical question. The legal duties of local authorities toward children with SEND do not change because of a Safety Valve agreement. Section 36(8) of the Children and Families Act 2014 sets the legal test for whether an EHC needs assessment must take place. Section 42 places an absolute, non-delegable duty on the local authority to secure the provision set out in an EHCP.
A local authority cannot lawfully set a target to refuse a certain percentage of assessment requests, or employ staff specifically to remove EHCPs from children who still have the needs that warranted them. IPSEA’s chief executive was explicit: “Individual safety valve agreements are explicit about containing numbers of EHC needs assessments, EHC plans and placements in non-mainstream settings. It would not be lawful, for example, to refuse to assess a child for an EHC plan because of a numerical target.”
The DfE has stated it did not set EHCP reduction targets as part of these agreements. What the monitoring documents reveal, regardless of who designed them, is a system in which the pressure to reduce numbers is real and documented.
How to find out if your local authority has an agreement
Safety Valve plans are published on the government website under “Dedicated schools grant: very high deficit intervention.” You can search for your local authority by name. Plans set out what the authority has agreed to do, the financial targets it is working toward, and often the key performance indicators it is measuring.
If your local authority has a Safety Valve or Delivering Better Value agreement, reading the published plan will tell you what priorities are driving decisions in your area.
What this means if your child is being refused or has provision reduced
If your local authority has a Safety Valve agreement and has refused to assess your child, refused to issue an EHCP, or moved to cease an existing plan, the legal position is unchanged. The authority’s financial arrangements with the DfE are not a lawful reason to deny provision your child is entitled to.
You have the right to appeal refusals to the SEND Tribunal. The Tribunal applies the legal test in the Children and Families Act 2014, not the terms of any agreement between the local authority and central government.
If you suspect your child’s case is being shaped by financial targets rather than their assessed needs, document everything in writing, request reasons for decisions in writing, and seek legal advice.
The bottom line
Safety Valve agreements were created to address a real and serious problem: local authority SEND budgets are under enormous strain, and deficits in some areas run to hundreds of millions of pounds. The financial pressure is genuine.
The concern raised by IPSEA, Contact, and others is that the response to that pressure has, in a significant number of areas, slid from reforming systems into restricting children’s legal entitlements. Those are not the same thing, and only one of them is lawful.
If you live in a Safety Valve area, knowing that the agreement exists is the first step. Your child’s rights are not suspended because your local authority is in financial difficulty.