Children with learning disabilities in schools in England - 2025 update

I've been very bad at writing this blog for a couple of years now. I'm going to write blogposts a bit more often again, mainly just to do regular updates of statistics related to people with learning disabilities. There are unlikely to be hot takes or deep insights, and there will be graphs. 

This blogpost updates previous blogposts I've written about Department for Education annual statistics concerning children and young people identified within the English education system as children/young people with learning disabilities, recorded in an annual census of schools that takes place in January each year.

 In the Special Educational Needs (SEN) statistics there are a number of mutually exclusive categories of SEN, three of which concern children with learning disabilities – Moderate Learning Difficulties (MLD), Severe Learning Difficulties (SLD) and Profound & Multiple Learning Difficulties (PMLD). There are a number of other SEN categories recorded within these statistics (Specific Learning Difficulties; Speech, language and communication needs; Social, emotional and mental health; Autistic spectrum disorder; Visual impairment; Hearing impairment; Multisensory impairment; Physical disability).

Within the annual census, a child can be classified as having a ‘primary need’ in one of these categories, and optionally classified as having an additional, ‘secondary need’ in another category. Most importantly in terms of how children are supported, children may have a special educational need that has been judged to require specific support in the form of an Education, Health and Care (EHC) plan (previously an SEN Statement). Beyond that, DfE statistics now only report an additional much larger number of children at a level of ‘SEN support’, which has no requirements to specifically support a child.

This blogpost simply  goes through what some of these statistics say about the education of children and young people with learning disabilities, as identified within the education system. I would strongly recommend looking at Special Needs Jungle for brilliant, in-depth analysis and opinion about these and other statistics.

The first question is simply – how many children and young people with learning disabilities are recorded in DfE statistics?

The first graph below shows the number of children with a statement/EHC plan with a ‘primary SEN need’ of MLD, SLD and PMLD, from 2010 to 2025 (apologies for the acronyms).

The graph shows that in 2025, almost 76,000 children in England had a statement/EHC plan and were identified as children with learning disabilities. 

For children with MLD this was 34,755 children in 2025, with a large decrease of 31% from 2010 to 2018 but an increase of 23% from 2018 to 2025 - the number of children in 2025 is still less than the number of children in 2010. 

In 2025, there were 31,271 children with a statement/EHC plan and identified with a primary need of SLD, an increase in numbers of 24% from 2010 to 2021 but with numbers staying static from 2021 to 2025.

Finally, in 2025 there were 9,911 children with a statement/EHC plan and identified with a primary need of PMLD, an increase of 16% from 2010 to 2018 but with fluctuating numbers and a possible small decrease since.

 

The second graph below shows the number of children with a ‘primary SEN need’ of MLD, SLD and PMLD at the level of SEN Support, from 2015 to 2025 (the reporting of statistics changed in 2015).

The graph shows that in 2025, 173,000 children in England were identified as children with learning disabilities at the level of SEN Support. For children with MLD this was 170,228 children in 2025, with a 16% increase from 2015 to 2016 and a 30% decrease from 2016 through to 2025.

In 2025, there were 1,859 children with a primary need of SLD at the level of SEN Support, with numbers increasing by 5% from 2015 to 2016 and decreasing by 44% from 2016 to 2025. 

Finally, in 2025 there were 695 children at the level of SEN Support with a primary need of PMLD, with an 11% increase from 2015 to 2018 and a 31% decrease from 2018 to 2025.

How many children with learning disabilities are being educated in mainstream schools or special schools? The graph below shows the percentage of children with statements/EHCPs in mainstream vs special schools from 2010 to 2025.

The percentage of children with a primary need of MLD and a statement/EHC plan in mainstream school dipped from 51% in 2010 to 43% in 2017, with the percentage increasing again to 59% in 2025. 

For children with a statement/EHC plan and a primary need of SLD, the percentage of children in mainstream schools decreased from 17% in 2010 to 12% in 2018, and has stayed static from 2018 to 2025. 

For children with a statement/EHC plan and a primary need of PMLD, the percentage of children in mainstream school was around 14% from 2010 to 2016, 15% from 2017 to 2020, and 16% from 2021 to 2025.

For children identified at the level of SEN Support (I haven’t included a graph on this), in 2025 almost all the children with a primary need of MLD (99.8%) and the vast majority of children with a primary need of SLD (90.1%) or PMLD (87.8%) were in mainstream schools.

Although it’s not an ideal marker of the financial circumstances of families, eligibility for free school meals is collected within DfE statistics. 

The graph below shows the proportion of children with statements/EHCPs associated with MLD, SLD and PMLD and the proportion of children at the level of SEN Support eligible for free school meals, from 2015/16 to 2024/25. There are a number of trends in this graph:

1) There are big increases over time in the percentage of children eligible for free schools across all groups in the graph

2) A greater percentage of children with a statement/EHCP are eligible for free school meals compared to children with the same label at the level of SEN Support

3) Children with a label of MLD are most likely to be eligible for free school meals, followed by children with a label of SLD and then children with a label of PMLD.

In 2024/15, 51% of children with a label of MLD and a statement/EHCP were eligible for free school meals (47% for children with MLD at the level of SEN Support). 47% of children with a label of SLD and a statement/EHCP were eligible for free school meals (41% for children with SLD at the level of SEN Support). 40% of children with a label of PMLD and a statement/EHCP were eligible for free school meals (30% of children with PMLD at the level of SEN Support).

At what age are children with learning disabilities identified in schools? The graph below shows how many children for every 1,000 total children in school had a statement/EHCP at each age from age 5 to age 15 in 2025. 

For children with MLD, there were big increases in the number of children with a statement/EHCP through the later ages of primary school and into the early years of secondary school, with slight decreases beyond this point.

For children with SLD, there was a steady increase in the number of children with a statement/EHCP through the school years.

For children with PMLD, the highest numbers of children with a statement/EHCP were in the earlier years of primary school, with slight decreases beyond this point.

Finally (horror of horrors) I'd like to post the table below. This shows, for 2025, the proportion of children with labels of MLD, SLD and PMLD with a statement/EHCP, broken down by the ethnicity labels used in the pupil census. These are compared to the proportions for all children in schools. Lilac means that children from a particular ethnic group with labels of MLD, SLD or PMLD are more likely compared to the proportion of all children from that particular ethnic group in schools. Orange means that children from a particular ethnic group with labels of MLD, SLD or PMLD are less likely compared to the proportion of all children from that particular ethnic group in schools.

I'm not qualified to offer an interpretation of what these figures mean (getting an EHCP is one endpoint of a very long and complicated process, with all sorts of factors impinging on this). All I will say is that the picture is complicated, with very different patterns across MLD, SLD and PMLD for specific ethnic categories as used in the pupil census.

As I've said, I'm not in a position to offer a deep interpretation of these numbers, but I hope it is useful to see them set out like this. I'm not seeing a massive and sustained increase in the number of children with the labels of MLD, SLD and PMLD, certainly taking 2010 as the baseline. If anything, recent years suggest that the number of children with these labels being supported with an EHCP is flatlining. On the long view from 2010, there is also little change in the proportion of children with these labels in mainstream schools. 

However, poverty amongst children with these labels is sharply and consistently increasing year on year, and there are different patterns of EHCPs for children with MLD, SLD and PMLD across different ethnic groups.

What all of these statistics miss is children who are not in school, for any number of reasons. Without having some understanding of this, we only have a partial picture of children with learning disabilities in England.