EDUCATION chiefs have ruled out providing a special needs unit in Wellington ‘for the foreseeable future’.

Somerset Council has been looking for mainstream school sites which can host a SEND unit, for pupils with special educational needs and disabilities.

It wants to allow more SEND pupils to receive education closer to their homes, thereby reducing the council’s transport costs.

But education places head Phil Curd said many secondary schools such as Court Fields, in Wellington, were already full with mainstream pupils.

Mr Curd said having more SEND units at secondary level was crucial to the authority’s education places strategy, which projects how many new school places will be needed over the coming decade and sets out how they will be funded.

He said: “We are already having conversations with schools in advance of falling pupil numbers just to line things up.

“In areas down the M5 corridor, we are not likely to have any real latent capacity in our secondary schools, ever.”

Somerset education portfolio holder Cllr Heather Shearer said: “Education place planning is really quite a challenging thing, it always is.

“We still have the lowest birth rate in 20 years, but we are also seeing pressures where people are coming into our area and bringing children with them.

“We have a very volatile situation at the moment which we have to keep tracking.

“I often joke that we have probably got the right number of places for all of our children, but they are not always in the right locations.

“It is not as simple as saying ‘oh, that school is empty over there, we will stick a new special school in there’, but we are looking at every opportunity to leverage space.”

The strategy, last comprehensively reviewed in 2019, includes a ‘local first’ policy for children wherever possible to be educated within their local community.