If you listened only to the Department for Education, you’d never think there was a problem with money in schools.

Fairer funding sounds great, doesn’t it? Here in Gloucestershire, we could do with a bit of that, especially in our inner-city schools, which serve populations just as diverse and just as deprived as any you find in London.

And, when you see funding for SEND totalling £40,000,001, you’d think that we wouldn’t have much to worry about regarding some of our most vulnerable students. It’s loads of cash; wads, even. You can do an awful lot with that sort of money. Especially as the proportion of children requiring it is quite small. Everything will be OK.

Clearly, we teachers are making a fuss over nothing.

But I know something, which I am sure you all know, too, especially if you are one of those headteachers in charge of budgets and given to worrying in the early hours. The big sum of cash for SEND isn’t for schools.

What’s that, you say? Not for schools? No! I’m terribly sorry. Much like the £37.1 million in December 2014, the money earmarked “SEND” isn’t destined to pay for support in lessons, or resources, or to do any of those useful things that are directly to do with children. Instead, it is destined for the local authority to pay for the administrative costs of the 2014 SEND Code of Practice.

Now, I have nothing against local authorities. I quite like them. If it were up to me, I’d have a school buildings department and take the responsibility for drains and gutters away from headteachers, and one for energy bills and grass cutting, too. This would leave the teachers to concentrate on the teaching (and learning).

But - and it’s a big but - when you spend millions on setting up a new(ish) code of practice, when all this money could instead be invested in expertise, not in sending out faulty education, health and care plans (EHCPs) or on legal firms dedicated to putting parents off asking for help for their children, I kind of smell a rat.

And that’s before I get to how we pay for the rise in the number of profound and multiple learning disabilities (PMLD) and specific learning disability children (SLD) in special schools, the combined rise in the number of SLD and PMLD children in mainstream, a rise in expectation from parents, both in terms of entitlements and outcomes, and the requirement for FE colleges to magic provision into place for disabled young people up to age 25.

Somehow, I don’t think the money is going to come from the magical efficiencies of multiple-academy trusts, a reduction in colour photocopying and laminating and the joint purchase of paperclips.

We teachers worry about money; the government should, too.

Nancy Gedge is a consultant teacher for the Driver Youth Trust, which works with schools and teachers on SEND. She is the TES SEND specialist and author of Inclusion for Primary School Teachers