Bradstow School Closed — Now Kent and Wandsworth Are Fighting Over £4.58m in SEND Fees

Bradstow School in Broadstairs educated and cared for children with some of the most complex special educational needs and disabilities. Kent County Council didn’t merely know about the school: KCC itself placed and funded Kent children there, historically accounting for about 40% of its pupils. Now the children have gone, the school has closed and its site is heading towards disposal — but Wandsworth and Kent are left fighting in court over a bill for £4,576,578.43.

Bradstow closed for good on 31 December 2025.

What disappeared that day wasn’t an ordinary school. Bradstow was a community special school for children and young people aged five to 19, with specialist provision for autism and severe learning difficulties, alongside residential care. Ofsted described its pupils in 2023 as all having “deeply complex special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND)”. The Government’s school register records its SEN provision as Autistic Spectrum Disorder and Severe Learning Difficulty. Whatever else is argued about Bradstow’s finances, these were children requiring exceptionally specialist education and support.

And some of those children were there because Kent County Council placed them there.

KCC put that beyond doubt itself in December 2024. Answering a question at County Council, it said Bradstow had historically taken children from across the country placed by their home authorities and added: “This has included some Kent children placed by Kent County Council.” At that point there were 11 Kent children funded by KCC at Bradstow. Four were expected to leave when they reached 18 by July 2025; Kent said it was searching for suitably matched education and care provision, preferably closer to home, for the remaining seven. Wandsworth’s own January 2025 assessment gives an even higher snapshot a little earlier: 13 of the 32 children at Bradstow in the October 2024 census were from Kent.

That matters because it gets to the heart of what the present court case is — and isn’t — about.

Wandsworth isn’t suing Kent because it says KCC somehow became responsible for a school it didn’t use. Nor does Kent dispute that it commissioned placements. The fight is over the money attached to those placements: what was agreed, what additional provision was required, whether particular fee increases had been accepted, whether some invoices were wrong and, ultimately, how much KCC is legally obliged to pay. Those questions are allegations and issues in live legal proceedings; they aren’t findings of fact by a judge.

How Wandsworth ended up owning a school in Kent

The arrangement was peculiar from the outset. Bradstow sits in Broadstairs, yet its local authority was the London Borough of Wandsworth. That dates back to the abolition of the Inner London Education Authority: the 1990 property transfer order expressly transferred Bradstow School, Dumpton Park Drive, Broadstairs to Wandsworth. So for more than three decades a London council maintained a specialist school on the Kent coast while Kent and numerous other authorities bought placements there for their own children.

Kent became a particularly important customer.

Wandsworth’s final closure report says that historically approximately 40% of Bradstow pupils had been placed by KCC. The relationship was significant enough that Wandsworth and Kent spent roughly three years discussing whether the school itself could transfer to Kent. Those negotiations eventually came to nothing: Kent decided in October 2024 not to take it over. By then the financial relationship between the authorities had already become deeply strained.

Then the school itself changed shape.

Bradstow once had capacity for 62 placements: 40 on a 38-week basis, 16 on a 52-week basis and six day-only places. From September 2024 the 52-week provision was stopped and the residential operation reduced to five smaller 38-week homes. Wandsworth says that decision followed “significant safeguarding concerns” involving medication management and the leadership response to allegations made by children. Ofsted had found parts of the residential provision inadequate. Importantly, that doesn’t mean Bradstow’s education was failing: at the May 2024 school inspection its quality of education, behaviour and attitudes, personal development and sixth form were all judged Outstanding, although leadership and management led to an overall Requires Improvement judgement. Wandsworth later reported that the remaining registered children’s home had improved to Good.

The distinction is important. A row about care provision, a row about school finances and a row about unpaid invoices aren’t the same thing, even though all three eventually collided at Bradstow.

From 32 pupils to 12

The numbers then fell with remarkable speed. There were 32 pupils in January 2025. At the start of the 2025/26 academic year there were just 12: two from Kent, two from Medway, two from Newham, two from Havering and one each from Wandsworth, Richmond, Hillingdon and Barking and Dagenham. Wandsworth’s report says that after talks about transferring Bradstow to KCC ended and Kent became aware Wandsworth intended to begin the statutory closure process, “Kent started to move children from the provision.”

So KCC’s recorded presence had dropped from 11 children in December 2024 to two by the beginning of the following school year. Four of those original 11 were already expected to leave because they were turning 18, so it would be wrong to attribute the entire reduction to Kent moving children. Nevertheless, the overall collapse in numbers was substantial, and for a highly specialised institution with large fixed staffing, property and care costs, losing pupils meant losing fee income much faster than many costs could disappear.

Here’s where the finances become rather more complicated than the simple claim that Bradstow was just haemorrhaging money.

Wandsworth’s October 2025 Cabinet report said the school “has not made an operational surplus for over 4 years” and forecast another £670,000 loss between September and December 2025, taking its accumulated deficit to about £1 million. It also said Wandsworth was supporting Bradstow’s cash flow with almost £6 million, without which the school wouldn’t have been able to pay staff. Yet when that claim about four years without an operational surplus was challenged at Wandsworth’s scrutiny committee on 17 November, an officer acknowledged that in 2024/25 Bradstow had actually produced an in-year surplus of about £600,000. The reason it still finished in deficit was that it had begun with more than £1.1 million of accumulated deficit; the £600,000 improvement reduced that legacy hole to roughly £590,000 rather than eliminating it.

Both things can therefore be true: Bradstow remained in accumulated deficit, but it had also generated a substantial in-year surplus during 2024/25.

That distinction isn’t bookkeeping trivia. It changes how a reader should understand the argument over whether Bradstow was inherently unviable. The school and its supporters could point to a year in which its underlying position improved sharply; Wandsworth could point to the remaining deficit, collapsing roll and forecast deterioration once pupil numbers had fallen. At the same scrutiny meeting an officer cautioned that there were “lots of variables” and said the final December position would differ from an earlier £965,000 forecast because pupil numbers, staffing and other costs were moving.

Then there was the other £4.9m

Separate from Bradstow’s operating position sat the disputed bills.

By October 2025 Wandsworth recorded £5.3 million of aged debt owed to Bradstow by other councils and expected that figure to rise to about £6.5 million once the autumn term was invoiced. Of the £5.3 million, Wandsworth categorised £4.9 million as sums councils were refusing to pay: around £4.6 million attributed to Kent and about £300,000 to Surrey. It calculated that KCC represented 87% of Bradstow’s debt. Crucially, Wandsworth kept that disputed £4.9 million outside Bradstow’s operational deficit because, it said, including it could “predetermine or jeopardise any outcome from the court proceedings”. In other words, even Wandsworth’s own accounting treatment recognised that these weren’t simply settled debts waiting for a cheque; liability was contested.

Wandsworth nevertheless made a sweeping allegation of its own: it said Kent hadn’t paid current placement fees in full for more than two years and had paid no fees at all since September 2024. KCC’s position is quite different. Kent said publicly in November 2025 that it hadn’t refused to pay fees “properly due”, but had identified disputed increases and charges that hadn’t previously been agreed.

That disagreement has now become a commercial court claim for £4,576,578.43.

According to the pleadings reported in March 2026, Wandsworth says the sum covers unpaid invoices dating from late 2023 and argues that Kent had “not put forward any substantial ground for disputing payment of the sum referred to”. Kent’s Defence says otherwise. Its lawyers contend that some invoices included “additional or enhanced special educational provision that was never specified nor required by the relevant education health and care plan” and was “neither discussed nor agreed with the defendant”. Kent also says there were errors in 15 invoices worth £284,270.79 and disputes uplifts beyond rates it says were originally agreed. When those pleadings were reported on 27 March 2026, no court date had yet been set.

There is an awkward detail in Wandsworth’s own paperwork which shows why that argument may matter. After discussing recovery of the money with the Department for Education, Wandsworth recorded the DfE’s position that councils were the commissioners and “need to agree the charges”, particularly where inflationary uplifts or price changes for existing placements were involved. If councils couldn’t resolve such disputes between themselves, Wandsworth said, legal action would be needed.

That doesn’t prove Kent’s Defence. It does explain the battlefield.

A school caught in a vicious circle

Bradstow’s shrinking roll presented another problem. Wandsworth acknowledged that other councils had approached the school about new placements and admitted that taking those children would have improved its finances. But by then closure was hanging over Bradstow, and Wandsworth decided admitting new children could be unfair because they might then face another disruptive move only months later. The logic is understandable from a safeguarding point of view, but financially it created a trap: Bradstow needed more pupils to increase its income, while the uncertainty over whether it would survive prevented it taking some of the pupils who could have brought that income.

There was an attempted escape route.

Bradstow’s governors pursued academisation, and Wandsworth supported a restructuring estimated to save about £816,000 a year, involving a 7.2 full-time-equivalent reduction and altered working arrangements following the move to 38-week provision. Cygnus Academy Trust became the governors’ preferred partner, but Wandsworth was told on 29 July 2025 that the Department for Education couldn’t approve that application. The Bridge Academy Trust was subsequently explored as another possible route, but by October Wandsworth said it still hadn’t been told that an application would be approved or that an academy order would be issued. With the debt dispute continuing, pupil numbers falling and the accumulated deficit forecast to worsen, Cabinet approved closure on 3 November 2025.

Two months later, Bradstow was gone.

By January 2026 Kent told its Children, Young People and Education Cabinet Committee that it had secured “suitable alternative placements for all pupils previously attending Bradstow School”. KCC also gave its own carefully worded account of the failed relationship, saying it had spent several years working with Wandsworth to secure a safe and supportive environment for Kent pupils “at an acceptable cost”, but that the authorities had been unable to reach agreement “for a range of reasons”.

The buildings haven’t escaped the consequences either. In July 2026 Wandsworth declared the Bradstow land and buildings surplus as part of its spending review and said it intended to dispose of the freehold for the best consideration reasonably obtainable, subject to the necessary consents. The council says the empty site now incurs security, maintenance and holding costs while delivering no services to Wandsworth residents.

The school, then, has reached its ending. The financial story hasn’t.

Whatever the court ultimately decides about particular invoices, uplifts and additional support, one central fact shouldn’t get lost beneath £4.58 million of legal argument: KCC chose Bradstow as a placement for Kent children with profound and complex SEND, and KCC funded those placements. The dispute isn’t about whether Kent children were there. It’s about exactly what Kent agreed should be provided for them, what Wandsworth was entitled to charge for it, and how much of a multimillion-pound bill Kent must now pay.

The Shepway Vox Team

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