SEND and Alternative Provision

Debate between Lord Addington and Baroness Twycross

Thursday 9th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for the Statement. There is much to welcome in this long-awaited SEND improvement plan. Children and young people with special educational needs, as well as those with disabilities, all too often have to battle an unwelcoming and sometimes unsupportive world, including at school. Labour has some concerns, however, which I would be grateful if the Minister could address.

First, as your Lordships might be aware, the Children’s Commissioner has raised concerns that much of the substance of this plan, including the welcome new national standards, is not coming into effect until 2025 or even 2026. Children needing SEND assessments cannot put their lives on hold. Can the Minister reassure the House that this delay will not subject children, in the words of the Children’s Commissioner, to years of a vicious cycle of poor outcomes?

In particular, when will the initial teacher training review conclude? For the new area SEND inspection framework, we are told that timeliness will be assessed. What amount of time will be considered timely to have a SEND assessment initiated and completed? This involves pupils and parents who have spent their school lives waiting for appropriate assessments and subsequent placements, so time really is of the essence for this pupil group. The focus on additional skills in the workforce to improve SEND provision is welcome, as is the commitment to review the initial teacher training and early career frameworks. However, the timeline is not clear. Can the Minister advise this House when the review will be completed?

I note that Speech and Language UK is keen that the review of teacher training should also include how to support children with speech and language challenges, from early years and throughout school. Will this be included?

I would particularly like to highlight paragraph 75 of chapter 2 of the plan, which refers to data on inequalities

“in relation to certain characteristics such as place, gender and race”

and is the only paragraph that refers to gender or race. This is unduly light on detail, given that black children with special educational needs are increasingly likely to be permanently excluded from school for behaviour due to their condition, rather than malicious intent. Can the Minister assure the House of the Government’s commitment to addressing disproportionality?

Looked-after children also face particular issues in accessing SEND provision; this is referred to in the plan. As the Children’s Commissioner also highlighted, there are

“serious gaps in the Plan”.

She continued:

“Much of the Plan assumes that children will have familial support and does not consider how children in the care of the state will be represented and supported”.


References to looked-after children in this plan are limited. Can the Minister provide a timeline for when the work referred to in the plan to ensure that looked-after children get the best provision will be complete?

Finally, the plan sets out the aim of reducing the number of children with education, health and care plans. If this reduction is made through improving support in mainstream schools and getting better support in place early, it would be welcome. But the reduction must not be a means of reducing costs or making it even harder for children and young people to access support, and to access an education, health and care plan if required. How will the newly forming ICBs bring together health and education to support SEND children?

Parents, guardians, carers and, critically, children with special educational needs and disabilities are crying out for a more sustainable solution to the current patchwork of SEND provision. I had hoped this plan would be more ambitious in seeking to provide that. As yet, regrettably, I am still sceptical.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I should first declare my interests: I am president of the British Dyslexia Association and chairman of Microlink, which is an assisted tech company that works in the education sector. I also realised when preparing for this debate that I made my maiden speech almost 35 years ago on special educational needs.

When we look at the Statement, the most important bit is really where it says that:

“we know that the system has lost the confidence of parents and carers. We need to regain their trust by improving the support that is ordinarily available.”

That is the essence of it. We have a system that has got bogged down in legalese, buck-shifting and dodging. With the best of intentions, what was set up under the 2014 Act—I was involved in that, so I take a share of the blame—is not addressing need and is chasing itself around. The big beneficiaries of the education, health and care plans have been lawyers. The appeals procedure has become ridiculous, and I thank the Government for recognising that. There are also other structural changes.

A school is expected to have £6,000 to support a person going through. If you are planning a budget in a school, you actually have a disincentive to identify needs and get help and care through. That money could be far better spent on improving your staff structure to deal with the problems as they come through and on making sure the system can give support, particularly to those with commonly occurring conditions. Therefore, you would actually have something which means people do not go through the legal process of the plan, for the simple reason that a structure would be there to deal with it.

The best way to get high needs, if you have one of the commonly occurring conditions, is not to have them addressed for several years, so you are behind the curve, have not acquired the skills and have therefore got problems. It is also important to remember that, with the education system, you are only there for a fixed period of time. You are on a conveyor belt of acquiring skills to acquire more knowledge to pass exams. It should be more than that, but I am afraid that is the essence of it—and it has become more so of late.

I ask the Minister—I feel that she is a little bit like the poor infantry on this, but there we are, I am still going to shoot at her—if this is coming forward, how are we going to make sure that teachers are properly trained and have the support to intervene? We talk about better training here and about educational psychologists. An educational psychologist said to me in the all-party group on dyslexia, “We usually rely on people having failed for X number of years before we intervene.” Think about it: that is guaranteeing more failure. Are we going to get to something with better assessment and planning? There are tools in planning and screening tools available that can help with identification, but people need to train to be able to interpret results. Level 3 is not enough; they need to be at level 5 or level 7 to make these assessments. Are we going to passport this identification forward so that help can be accessed more quickly? That would be a huge change.

In the Commons, a great deal of attention was paid to special schools. I think 83 schools were promised—some now and some planned in future. Special schools, hopefully, should be for high-need pupils. They should not be for ordinary problems, or for people waiting to acquire high needs by failing. This was very common and many of the Government’s own supporters raised this. If you have got these special schools, how are you going to make sure people get the right one? Are you going to make sure that people can travel and that support—or indeed boarding arrangements—are there? Are you integrating them? How are you going to overcome certain education authorities or others saying, “No, we won’t send them there”—which is a very common thing in these processes when people are fighting forward. How will we start to address that? We need to know how the Government are going to use the private sector, which has been used in the past. These are questions which need to be answered.

I appreciate that the Government have started a process. I feel that there was enough information out there to have missed out some of this assessment, or perhaps to have got it done far more quickly. However, I have the Government to thank. They said we would be talking about this in September, but I have won a £5 bet because it is happening in March. We have got to get a little bit more speed and we know this. It has been a long time coming; many of these problems have already been established and everybody knows about them. I hope that the Minister can give us some guidance here, because we are not dealing with a new thing. We do not need to spend time looking at it. I hope the Government can go to the vast body of knowledge they have, give us a little bit more speed and tell us how they are going to meet these very well-established problems.