Education: Special Educational Needs

Lord Touhig Excerpts

Monday 25th June 2012 Lords Chamber

Asked By

[Lord Touhig]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they will take to ensure that young people with special educational needs are appropriately supported to enter further education, higher education, training, apprenticeships and employment.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools (Lord Hill of Oareford)]

My Lords, Support and Aspiration: A New Approach to Special Educational Needs and Disability—Progress and Next Steps sets out our aspirations to help young people in England with special educational needs to make a successful transition to adulthood. The new education, health and care plans will require services to work together to agree a plan which reflects the young person’s needs and their future ambitions covering education, health, employment and independence. We have also developed supported internships as a way of providing meaningful work opportunities for young people, which we will be trialling from September.

[Lord Touhig]

I thank the Minister for that Answer. Is he aware that Work Choice, the scheme intended to help the disabled into employment, has had very little success in helping people with autism to find a job, while the Work Programme itself seems to find great difficulty in placing anyone with autism in employment at all? Given that the noble Lord, Lord Freud, has said that the Government will double the number of people with autism in employment from 15% to 30%, will the Minister tell the House when the Government will publish a programme to achieve that?

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

My Lords, first, I very much agree with the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, about the importance of doing everything that we can to address the problem of how we help young people with autism into work. The previous Labour Government published a strategy on that in 2009, which the current Government are working with and trying to build on. As the noble Lord says, my noble friend Lord Freud is working in this area. He recently set up an employer round table, where guidance was published for employers to help them with recruiting young people with autism. That is clearly work that we have to carry on. I do not have an immediate and easy answer because, as the noble Lord knows better than I do, this is a long-rooted and difficult problem. But I can say that the Government are committed to doing what we can to work with a range of organisations to address the problem.