State-funded Schools: Special Educational Needs
Debate between Lord Clark of Windermere and Baroness Smith of Malvern(1 week, 5 days ago)
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Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
The noble Baroness makes an important point about the responsibility of all teachers to be able to identify special educational needs. All teachers are special educational needs teachers and that is why, although I cannot be completely clear on her point about dyscalculia, I can assure her that we are supporting improved teacher training throughout teachers’ careers, starting with changes to initial teacher training coming in from September 2025, and continuing through their careers from early career teachers into leadership roles. I will follow up the particular point the noble Baroness made in her question.
Lord Clark of Windermere (Lab)
As my noble friend the Minister knows, there are hundreds of thousands of children who simply do not go to school. How do we measure the limitations they are facing in the educational sphere?
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
My noble friend is right. It is important that we tackle absenteeism in the way that this Government have outlined and that I have talked about at this Dispatch Box on previous occasions, whether that is persistent absenteeism, where we see a higher proportion of students with special educational needs, or those who have been completely removed from schools and are no longer on school registers. It is also important that we introduce, as we intend to do through legislation, the registers for children who are not in school, so that we can ensure, first, that our schools are appropriately inclusive, so that parents do not feel the need to remove their children and children do not absent themselves from schools because of their inability to be able to learn, but also so that we can track children when they are not in school.