Disabled Children: Support Services

Baroness Bull Excerpts

Thursday 23rd June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I think I mentioned our starting point in response to the original Question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, which is that part of our challenge is building up trust with parents who have children with a disability. We believe that by having much clearer bandings around provision, so that we reduce some of the regional inconsistencies in the system, and by requiring mediation as part of this, we will reduce confrontation. That is absolutely our intention, but we do not have a closed mind on this. We have held more than 153 consultation events and they are growing all the time. We are very keen to hear from parents on what they think will work.

[Baroness Bull (CB)]

My Lords, the Disabled Children’s Partnership, to which many noble Lords have referred, points out that the Green Paper does not answer what may be the biggest question for many families: how will councils, schools, the health service and others be held to account if they do not meet their legal duties to provide appropriate support for disabled children and their families?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The noble Baroness is right, and she will be aware that just over 50% of councils inspected by Ofsted got written statements of action, which means they have significant weaknesses in their arrangements for children with special educational needs and disabilities. Obviously, we are planning to improve the system, but we are also planning to improve accountability through new inclusion dashboards for 0 to 25 year-old provision. We hope that that will give us a timely picture of performance that can be used to create a self-improving system.