From leadership research to district action: Local authority variation in school-recorded special educational needs and disability provision in Year 1 among children born in England, 2003–13

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Evidence and transfer

Education-related source: verify which participants, institutions and outcomes were actually studied before district adoption. Source publication type: research-article. License and identity checks do not establish study quality or causality.

Original authors’ abstract, reproduced under the source license:

Abstract Evidence of disparities in special educational needs and disability (SEND) provision at local authority (LA) level in England is needed to guide policies for equitable provision. We described LA-level variation in recorded SEND provision using linked health-education records. We used linked hospital-primary school records (ECHILD – Education and Child Health Insights from Linked Data) to create a cohort of 3 729 265 children born in England between 2003/04-2012/13. LA of pupil’s residential address and SEND provision [SEND support or Educational Health and Care Plan (EHCP)] were defined at Year 1 (5/6 years old). We compared single-level and multilevel logistic models, adjusting for individual-level sociodemographic, health indicators, and school governance, and stratifying by gestational age. In further multilevel models, we added LA characteristics. After accounting for individual-level characteristics, there was between 2.0% (SEND support compared with no SEND provision) and 5.8% (EHCPs compared with SEND support) residual unexplained variation between LAs across gestational age groups. Adding LA-level income deprivation reduced the between-LA variance for EHCPs by 14%–24% across gestational age groups; less so for other LA characteristics. Under 6% of the differences in school-recorded SEND provision in Year 1 between 2009/10 and 2018/19 was associated with the LA context. We need to carefully disentangle structural factors at the school and individual level to understand inequities in recorded SEND provision.

Study methods

We used the ‘Education and Child Health Insights from Linked Data’ (ECHILD) dataset [9]. ECHILD is a whole population-based cohort of children and young people in England, linking their administrative educational data (National Pupil Database [NPD]) to hospital (Hospital Episode Statistics [HES]) and social care records. We further linked opensource school characteristic data published by the Department for Education and geographical boundary data published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) to ECHILD [10–13]. Dataset details and linkage are provided in Supplementary Table S1.

Limitations

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A 90-day district inquiry

Days 1–15 · Appraise. Read the source methods, recruitment, comparator, outcomes and limitations. Record how the study setting differs from your district and which claim the design can support.
Days 16–30 · Design. Choose one school improvement question with teachers. Protect a short shared planning cycle, agree an instructional change and use a common rubric for examining student work. Agree participation, privacy protections, baseline and stopping rules before starting.
Days 31–60 · Observe. Collect the pre-agreed measures, keep a log of implementation changes and invite confidential voluntary feedback. Preserve existing support for staff and learners.
Days 61–90 · Decide. Review implementation fidelity, teacher time and independently scored student work against a recorded baseline. Examine access differences and competing explanations before attributing changes to leadership. Make a dated decision to stop, revise or extend the inquiry.

Board decision brief

Present the local problem, source setting, evidence limits, intervention, responsible owner, total cost, measured changes and uncertainty. Separate staff perceptions, implementation measures and student learning outcomes.

Attribution and reuse

Kate M Lewis; Vincent G Nguyen; Ruth Gilbert; Bianca De Stavola; Lorraine Dearden; Ayana Cant; Johnny Downs; Laura Gimeno; William Farr; Tamsin Ford; Katie Harron; Matthew Lilliman; Stuart Logan; Jacob Matthews; Jugnoo Rahi; Jennifer Saxton; Isaac Winterburn We thank Ruth Blackburn; Milagros Ruiz; Matthew Jay; Antony Stone; Farzan Ramzan. Local authority variation in school-recorded special educational needs and disability provision in Year 1 among children born in England, 2003–13. The European Journal of Public Health (2026-03-01). https://doi.org/10.1093/eurpub/ckaf116

Prepared 2026-11-07. Source authorship and DOI are preserved. The abstract and source passages are attributed extracts; this editorial guide is offered under the same CC BY 4.0 license.