Children: Special Educational Needs

Lord Storey Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

I agree with the noble Lord that residential special education is extremely expensive. One of our current problems is that local authorities tend to send a lot of children out of area to expensive residential solutions. We are trying to deal with this by increasing the number of specialist free schools around the country; we announced a £50 million capital funding pot in May of last year, bringing the total to £265 million, and in March we announced sponsors for 14 new special schools. In the announcement in December, to which the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, referred, we also agreed to remove the cap on applications for new special and alternative provision free schools.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, the Minister will perhaps know that up to 2,000 young people on education, health and care plans have received no provision at all. Increasingly, parents are taking legal action against local authorities. Are we not in danger of replicating what is happening in the National Health Service, where litigation costs have become astronomical?

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

The noble Lord is right that we are concerned about tribunal costs—indeed, he has asked a Question on this subject that will be taken in a couple of weeks’ time, so we will be able to deal with it in more detail then. Last year, we introduced a new measure to see how many appeals were going to tribunals: it showed that, of all the decisions made in the year by local authorities, only 1.5% were appealed by parents, and a number of authorities are seeing zero or near zero appeals. So the challenge for us is to spread the good practice of those local authorities that have very low levels of appeal, to ensure that those which are less good are learning.