SEND Provision: Hertfordshire and Central Bedfordshire

Wednesday 4th September 2024 Westminster Hall

16:00

[Dr Rupa Huq (in the Chair)]

As this is a 30-minute debate, I will call Alistair Strathern to move the motion, then I will call the Minister to respond. People can intervene on Alistair; that is the format for these debates.

[Alistair Strathern (Hitchin) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered SEND provision in Hertfordshire and Central Bedfordshire.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship today, Dr Huq. While I regret not being able to secure more time to discuss this important topic, I am very glad to see the keen interest across the House evidenced in the room today. I am particularly grateful to see many more Labour colleagues in this room than might have had quite such a geographical interest in the debate prior to the election.

I would like to start by welcoming the Minister to her new role. In my admittedly rather short time as an MP before the election, her energy, wisdom and reassuring positivity was a real source of comfort for me in what can be a pretty mystifying place to navigate. I have no doubt that young people across the country will be better off for her ability to bring exactly that same warmth and drive to her new role. As a former teacher and children’s lead, I am under no illusion of the scale of some of the challenges she will inherit. I am sure she will agree that fixing special educational needs and disability provision and the broken national system we have inherited is right up there with the biggest of them.

It is a near universally accepted truth that SEND provision across our country is simply not working. Indeed, the system had become so broken that, by the time of the election, the Conservatives’ own Education Secretary had to admit that they were presiding over a system that had become, “lose, lose, lose”. Vulnerable young people right across the country looking for the support they need to thrive at school are the ones who are losing.

[Andrew Lewin (Welwyn Hatfield) (Lab)]

When discussing SEND provision with families in Hertfordshire, the phrases that most often resonate with me are people describing their experience as a fight or a battle. This is a consistent pattern. Parents spend months or even years pushing the system to get the support and care their children deserve, at huge personal and financial cost to their families. The fight can take many forms: securing an education, health and care plan in the first place, finding an appropriate school, or even fighting for recognition from the council that their child has additional needs at all. There is much that must change. It is of paramount importance that we reform the system so it is no longer characterised by defensiveness, but becomes one of empathy and support. I hope my hon. Friend agrees.

[Alistair Strathern]

I could not agree more, because the sad reality is that Hertfordshire—a county we share—and Central Bedfordshire, which my constituency straddles, are far from exceptions to the national challenges we currently face. Both Central Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire face real challenges in SEND provision, which is letting down schools, families and, crucially, the young people the system is meant to wrap around. Rather than providing support at the earliest possible moment of need, all too often it is pitting them as adversaries against the very stakeholders that are meant to support them.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I commend the hon. Gentleman on securing the debate. He is right that every constituency in this place is affected by the issue. Does he agree that without more trained staff, facilities and enhanced funding, it will not simply be SEND children who struggle, but everyone in that classroom? Does he agree that resources to meet the need in a long-term funding stream need to be delivered for all, because they are all affected?

[Alistair Strathern]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for bringing his keen interest to Hertfordshire and Central Bedfordshire today. He is renowned for that forensic insight across the House. He is, of course, quite right. When one young person in the classroom is let down, whatever their needs, the whole class is losing out. Putting that right is a fundamental challenge for our new Minister and new Government.

The Ofsted reports received by authorities in 2019 and 2022 across my constituency painted a damning picture of local provision and the challenges families were facing. It is important to acknowledge that since the reports were published, there have been some welcome steps forward. Increases in staff capacity were needed and are welcome. Moves to boost specialist school capacity, however delayed, have to be welcomed. The model that Hertfordshire is moving towards—a model of making SEND everyone’s business to ensure a breadth of ambition for those who look after young people with additional needs right across the partnership—is a novel and noteworthy approach. I am sure it is one that will be of interest to the Minister.

[Daisy Cooper (St Albans) (LD)]

I thank the hon. Member for securing the debate and for starting it so well. He is right to say that there has been recent progress in the delivery of SEND in Hertfordshire, but much of that has started only since the most recent damning Ofsted report. Back in 2021, I invited the then Conservative leader of Hertfordshire county council to attend a ministerial meeting with me to discuss the funding formula and he declined. In 2023, the Conservative group refused to invest an extra £1 million in SEND services at Hertfordshire county council, as the Lib Dems had proposed, and only backtracked after that Ofsted report. This year, the Conservative education portfolio holder apparently decided to join the f40 campaign, but only after I had written suggesting they do so. I am pleased to see that there has been some progress, but does the hon. Member agree that Hertfordshire children have been really let down, not only by the Conservatives in Government but by the Conservatives in county hall?

[Alistair Strathern]

I could not agree more. The way in which families and, crucially, young people in Hertfordshire have been let down typifies a challenge facing local authorities right across the country: in the context of a nationally failing system, how do we make sure our local leaders remain ambitious for our young people and do not become incredibly complacent about performance that cannot be justified? We saw that in Hertfordshire and, heartbreakingly, we see it today in other parts of the UK.

It is clear that even with the early signs of improvement there are significant challenges to address. Local statistics, including those published today by ITV Anglia, lay bare some of the shocking challenges that families and young people are still facing. It is evident that far too many young people are waiting far too long for an assessment, for the support that follows that and, shamefully, even for the school places that are most appropriate for their needs. Alongside that, far too many families are having to battle an appeals system just to secure confirmation of the support their young persons are clearly in need of and clearly entitled to.

[Blake Stephenson (Mid Bedfordshire) (Con)]

I declare an interest as a Central Bedfordshire councillor, which puts me in a somewhat awkward position. I thank the hon. Member for securing the debate. As my predecessor in Mid Bedfordshire, he knows all too well the challenges across the constituency, and I thank him for his work on the matter.

It is important for all the parents and grandparents in our constituencies that children with special needs get the right support, and I absolutely want to deliver that for the people of Mid Bedfordshire. I know there have been failures in the past; we need to move forward and find solutions. I want to do that in a cross-party way and I hope I can work with the hon. Gentleman, who is my neighbour, and with the Minister to do that. I think that is the right way to go. This has been too partisan for too long and some cross-party working would be valuable. The hon. Member has my support.

[Alistair Strathern]

I thank the hon. Member for that intervention and for his commitment to working alongside everyone in the Chamber, whether in Central Bedfordshire or in Hertfordshire, to make sure our local authorities deliver the improvements in their gift and to make sure we support the new Government in finally getting a grip on the problems we have inherited.

I challenge anyone faced with the statistics we have been seeing over the past few months not to run the full gauntlet of emotions, all the way from despair to anger. For me, hearing the personal stories of the young people affected by the challenges has truly broken my heart.

[David Taylor (Hemel Hempstead) (Lab)]

Many of us have heard countless stories of families feeling dire frustration. For this debate alone I received more than 25 stories, each more harrowing than the one before. I will pull out a good example of a woman called Jane who has two children, both with SEND needs. One of them needs one-on-one support to catch up in English and maths, but the local authority has refused that. The consequence is that her son is now 14 years old and has not had an academic education for six years. Does my hon. Friend agree that this is an all-too-regular example of the challenges we are facing?

[Alistair Strathern]

I absolutely agree and I thank my hon. Friend for rightly drawing attention to our collective shame for the shocking way in which that young person has been let down. My office has been blown away by the number of young people and their families who got in touch after our call for evidence ahead of this debate to share their own personal testimonies about the struggles they have been facing and the way those struggles have impacted their lives.

As my hon. Friend alluded to, many children across my constituency have had a chaotic and uncertain time waiting for school places. Some of them—like James, who got in touch with my office—have been out of school for years while they wait for a place. Others, like Mary, had secured a place only to find in the last week of the summer holidays that it had been withdrawn. Just imagine how a child must feel to be out of school, week after week, month after month, and year after year. Just imagine how a young person must feel to be so excited about going to a school that has finally been allocated to them, because it is right for them, only to find out the week before they were due to go there that they did not want them. That shames us all.

We have also heard from parents such as Sophie, who have been driven to despair by a system that they feel all too often forces them to fight every step of the way just to secure the very basics of support that their young person needs. Often, they have to sink thousands of pounds that they can barely afford into private diagnosis, representation and support after completely losing faith that local provision will be able to meet their needs.

We have also heard devastating stories from young people who have been pushed to the brink by the lack of appropriate support, including stories of those young people whose mental health has spiralled to the point that many of them felt they could no longer be in day-to-day education. Devastatingly and particularly heartbreakingly, we heard from the parents of Alice who, after feeling isolated and alienated by the delays in getting the right support in place at school, felt that she had no option available other than to attempt to take her own life. What more damning indictment of our failure could there be?

I know that not one person in this room will consider any of these stories acceptable, and I want to reassure every young person and their family experiencing the sharp end of the failing system in my constituency that my office and I never will. It is truly impossible to do justice to all of the stories—there are over 100 in total —that I have received in the time that we have available to us today, but I want each and every one who has reached out and each and every one who is struggling at the moment to be assured that I will carry with me the pain and the urgency of their testimony every day as I champion the changes that we need to see locally and here in Parliament. To those elsewhere—whether in Central Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire or elsewhere; I am looking around the room—I can say that they will not be short of advocates either.

We all recognise that every day a child lacks the support they need to thrive at school is a day’s potential that will forever have been wasted. When that support is lacking, as the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) pointed out, everyone loses. Every time a parent has had to give up work to take on extra responsibilities because the state has fallen short on our promise to them is a moment when their career and indeed their whole family’s life has been forever narrowed by a systems failure. Every child who has given up hope that the system can ever work for them at all, and who has turned to despair or even worse, is a child we have all failed collectively to do right by.

I hope that colleagues here today will welcome Labour’s commitment to making sure that we finally put in place some of the actions needed to address this issue. There have already been early actions in this Parliament to bring consideration of SEND back alongside schools; we have announced potential reform of Ofsted to improve its approach to assessing inclusion, particularly around admissions; and we have ensured that we have an underlying commitment to a community-wide and reinvigorated approach to SEND. All of these actions suggest to me that we finally have a Government who understand the nature of the challenge we are dealing with.

However, as we move forward to tackle the system, I want to make sure that our approach shows that we have learned from some of the failings that are evident in the stories that we have heard locally. It is clear that our local systems were allowed to get to a truly dire place before action was prompted by Ofsted. As the hon. Member for St Albans (Daisy Cooper) pointed out, we have to do better. We have to make sure that our local partnerships are held accountable regarding the high ambitions we have for all of our young people regardless of the national context—that can never be an excuse for choosing to let people down day after day.

It is also clear in both the areas I have discussed that academisation has added to fragmentation locally and that we need to think through how we can resolve some of the challenges of creating a truly inclusive admissions system when the partnerships involved currently do not have the powers they need to compel all local stakeholders and all local schools to play their part. I am sure that there will be an important role for Ofsted to then hold schools accountable for delivering on their approach to inclusion.

In Central Bedfordshire, some of the challenges have been particularly exacerbated by the issues involved in the transition from a three-tier system to a two-tier system. This stalled transition has delayed the release of school capital sites, which are so important for us to be able to invest in localised specialist provision, meaning that sites that have been earmarked for much-needed special schools continue to be used in mainstream education for much longer than originally intended. I would welcome thoughts from the Department for Education about how it can potentially support Central Bedfordshire’s efforts to finally get this transition over the line.

More fundamentally, there is a big underlying question about how we can make sure that the funding formulas to allocate resource to match need right across our country, particularly in the two areas that I am talking about today, truly match the evidence of need that exists and address the challenges of doing so in a rural context. It is especially noteworthy that, in spite of all of the challenges we have been discussing, Hertfordshire still has one of the lowest high-needs block allocations in the country.

However, all the funding in the world would not make a difference without a trained workforce to deliver. Alongside thinking through how we best support local authorities and local partnerships to answer these questions, we need a workforce strategy to ensure that we are properly addressing the issues that we have been talking about. From educational psychologists to speech and language therapists, we just do not have the trained professionals to take on some of these vacancies currently.

In our patch, these challenges are exacerbated by the fact that our near-London context makes it even harder to recruit and retain for these specialties. Thinking through how we can make sure that we have a national workforce strategy, but with an eye to the specific challenges of outer London and near-London authorities, will be an important part of truly resolving the system for the young people we have been talking about.

Crucially, we must make sure that the heartbreaking stories of families and their children, and the painful misery of the appeals system, can finally be brought to an end. All too often, cases are appealed at great cost to everyone involved. Both Central Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire have spent eyewatering amounts fighting appeals only to concede and often lose. How can we possibly see this as a good use of anyone’s time and resource? We need to think through carefully how we can reform the system to ensure that incentives are there in the right place to address these at the earliest opportunity, and that mediation is used robustly, fully, in good faith and exhaustively to make sure that expensive appeals are only necessary as a last resort, rather than as the default, for managing demand in a broken system.

I know that this Government are very aware of the challenges they are inheriting. Along with so many others, SEND provision will fall to this new Government to put right. I want to thank the Minister in advance for the leadership I know she will show on this issue, and I want to thank colleagues across the House, too, for their attendance. Whatever party, whatever seat, I look forward to working with all of them to hold our local partnerships to account to deliver on what is within their gift, and to work with our new Minister nationally to deliver on Labour’s commitments to finally get on top of SEND provision.

[Lewis Cocking (Broxbourne) (Con)]

I declare an interest as a Hertfordshire county councillor. It is an honour to speak under your chairmanship, Dr Huq. Hertfordshire receives the third-lowest high needs funding in the country. I know that the hon. Gentleman mentioned the need to increase that funding. Will he join with us cross-party to lobby the new Government to increase that funding? Hertfordshire deserves the right funding to deal with the SEND issues, which will help us to increase our workforce to deal with capacity issues in Hertfordshire. I want to place it on the record that this issue is very important to me. I have a brother and a sister who have special educational needs, so I have grown up in a family on the frontline and am pleased to speak in this debate. I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on getting time to discuss this very important issue.

[Alistair Strathern]

I thank the hon. Member for that intervention and for sharing that personal aspect of his story. In me, he will absolutely find an ally in ensuring that we get a funding formula that truly meets the needs of every authority, particularly our authorities. Many other hon. Members have pointed out some of the challenges of where the current formula is indexed, at a point where it was pretty clear that the local authority was not managing the full use of that budget to deploy and meet the very real needs that were already starting to build up underneath the surface.

I want finally to thank every young person, every parent and every teacher who is battling to do their absolute best across those two areas in a system that just is not set up to back them to succeed. A system that is letting down children with additional needs is a system that is letting down children full stop, and it simply should not be a system that any of us tolerate any longer.

16:18

[Kevin Bonavia (Stevenage) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin (Alistair Strathern) for securing this debate on such a vital issue for all our residents. For the last few weeks, I have been running an online campaign to encourage residents in my constituency to tell me their SEND provision stories. One constituent told me:

“Despite constant concerns raised and referrals, I was left undiagnosed, unmonitored and untreated for ASC1 and ADHD for over two decades. In retrospect, I can see that many of the difficult experiences I had throughout school could’ve been so different.”

A local councillor told me:

“My constituent has a 10-year-old son with significant cognitive delay. He was placed in a comprehensive school with no SEND support capacity whilst stuck on a 90 child waiting list for a place at a suitable SEN school.”

A mother told me:

“My son with special needs was excluded before we were able to complete his EHCP application, then sent to a school an hour and a half away as the nearest option with capacity to meet his needs. Unable to cope with the daily taxis, we were then refused funding for a transition into a new school. He has been left without formal education for 5 years. I’ve been unable to make any contact to get help for years.”

Those harrowing accounts tell a clear story: the diagnosis and EHCP process is hard to navigate and too slow. It is easy to see such cases as just another piece of complex casework, but they are much more than that. There is clearly a systemic problem in Hertfordshire, as the recent Ofsted and Care Quality Commission report found. Every case is about the future of a child who deserves an education, just as much as anyone else, and all children are impacted by a failure to provide SEND support to those who need it. I hope these remarks have underlined the importance of fixing the fundamental flaws in SEND services to secure a dignified future for all affected. We must do better.

I am hopeful that Hertfordshire county council can turn things around. I ask the Minister to consider a fairer funding settlement for our county, so as to help deliver the support our young people need.

15:21

[The Minister for School Standards (Catherine McKinnell)]

It is a pleasure to serve under you as Chair, Dr Huq. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin (Alistair Strathern) on securing this debate on an incredibly important subject. His excellent speech set out in great detail the challenges that far too many face in his local area. He is a champion for children and families in his constituency, and he shares this Government’s vision of breaking down the barriers to opportunity and ensuring all children receive the best start in life and the right support, so that they succeed in their education and lead happy, healthy and productive lives. I thank him for his kind words in opening. I assure him that improving the special educational needs and disabilities system across this country is a priority for this Government, and that includes improving services for children and young people with SEND in Central Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire.

More than 1.6 million children and young people in England have special educational needs. We know that for far too long, as hon. Members on both sides of the House have set out, they have been let down by a system that is not working. The former Secretary of State for Education said that the system was “lose, lose, lose”, and she was right: far too many families have been failed. Despite high needs funding for children and young people with complex special educational needs and disabilities rising to higher and higher levels, confidence in the SEND system is low, tribunal rates are increasing and there are increasingly long waits for support. Far too many children with special educational needs fall behind their peers, and they do not reach the fundamental expected level in reading, writing and maths. Just one in four pupils achieved the expected standard at the end of primary school. Families struggle to get their child the support they need and, more importantly, deserve. That really must change.

Parents have felt frustrated for years, and there have been constant delays to the reform programme; we see time and again that there is a lack of trust in the system. This Government want to be honest with families. We are committed to improving inclusivity and expertise in mainstream schools, and ensuring that special schools can cater to those with the most complex needs. Fundamentally, we want to restore parents’ trust that their child will get the support they need to flourish. Effective early identification and intervention can reduce the impact that a special educational need or disability may have in the long term. That is why, in July, the Government announced that the funded support for the 11,100 schools registered for the Nuffield early language intervention programme will continue for the year 2024-25. We know that extra support with speech and language is so important to help young people find their voice.

But there are no quick fixes for these deep-rooted issues. After 14 years, I have barely seen a system as broken. It is in desperate need of reform, so it is important that we fix it. I welcome the comments from the hon. Members for Mid Bedfordshire (Blake Stephenson) and for Broxbourne (Lewis Cocking), who recognise that this is an inherited challenge; so many of us in this House want to see it addressed.

Let me be clear: we have started work already. Fixing our SEND system is a priority for the Department, but I have to be clear that it will take time and Government cannot do it alone. We will work with our essential and valued partners in the sector to ensure that our approach is fully planned and delivered. We will work together with parents, schools, councils and expert staff who, as my hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin rightly said, go above and beyond to support our children.

We are acting as quickly as we can to respond to the cost pressures in the SEND system because they are causing real financial problems in some local authorities, including in Hertfordshire and Central Bedfordshire. Before the parliamentary recess we announced a new core schools budget grant, which will provide special and alternative provision schools with over £140 million of extra funding in the 2024-25 financial year to help with the extra costs of the teachers’ pay award and the outcome of the negotiations for support staff. That is in addition to the high needs funding allocations for children and young people with complex special educational needs and disabilities.

Department for Education budgets have not yet been set for 2025-26. How much high needs funding is distributed to local authority schools and colleges next year will depend on the next stage of the Government spending review, due to be announced at the end of October. We are in listening mode to the challenges that are being set out today. That means that next year’s allocations of high needs funding have not been published to the normal timescales, but we are working across Government to announce next year’s allocations for Hertfordshire, Central Bedfordshire and other local authorities as soon as we possibly can.

We are acutely aware of the financial pressures that local authorities are facing, not just from supporting young people with complex needs, but from what we have inherited as a whole with the economic climate and the challenges around that. Resolving these problems will not be quick or easy, and it is important that we take the time to develop long-term solutions to ensure that we take a long-term approach to tackling these issues. I welcome the opportunity to hear Members’ thoughts on how we can do that together as we go forward. We need to ensure that we get better outcomes from our investment for young people. It is important that we have a fair education funding system that directs funding to where it is needed and can make the most impact. One aspect of that is the national funding formula and the way in which the high needs funding allocated to local authorities is used. We need to take time, if there are any changes to that formula, to ensure that we consider the impact and get it right.

As we know, Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission jointly inspect local area SEND provision. Those inspections enable the Department to intervene in areas of significant concern, and work with local authorities and professional advisers to address weaknesses. I am concerned that the SEND inspections in Central Bedfordshire in November 2019 and in Hertfordshire in July ’23 found significant concerns about the experiences and outcomes of children with special educational needs and disabilities. Ofsted and the CQC revisited Central Bedfordshire in July ’22, and found that three of the six initial areas of weakness had improved. Central Bedfordshire produced an accelerated progress plan to address the remaining areas of weakness, and the Department continues to monitor those areas. The issues raised in the inspection reports are serious. The Government need to be confident that the local area in Central Bedfordshire and the local area partnership in Hertfordshire are taking the right actions to secure rapid and sustainable improvement.

We work alongside NHS England advisers, we meet every six months with local leaders and representatives from schools and colleges, and we have a parent carer forum to review and challenge progress on the accelerated progress plan. In Hertfordshire, the local area appointed Dame Christine Lenehan to chair an independent board to bring about rapid improvement. DFE officials, an NHS England adviser and a SEND adviser meet monthly with local leaders and Dame Christine to scrutinise and challenge the improvement plan. It is so important that that work is undertaken.

I am conscious of time. I want to do justice to the excellent speech given by my hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin, but I fear I will not have time to address all the concerns that he raised; he went into quite some detail. I am keen to write to him with more details of the ongoing work in order to reassure him that many of the issues he raised are being tackled, and that the Department for Education is working to ensure that the improvement programmes are delivered. I thank him again for bringing this matter forward. We are all passionate about the SEND outcomes in his local area and right across the country. We recognise that the system needs to improve, we recognise the hardship that many families are facing, and we are determined that that will change. Like my hon. Friend, I thank everyone working in the SEND system to deliver better outcomes for all our children across the country.

Motion lapsed (Standing Order No. 10(6)).