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Adrian Ramsay
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Adrian Ramsay (Waveney Valley) (Green)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Mark. I thank my neighbour, the hon. Member for Lowestoft (Jess Asato), for securing this important debate.
Like other Members from around our region, my experience is that special educational needs are one of the biggest issues affecting my constituents. One constituent who came to my surgery recently told me that her young child, who does have an education, health and care plan, has been at home all year after leaving nursery, because there were no places available in a non-mainstream school. She said the system was hard to navigate, with little support given to families.
Another constituent has found that her child must wait two years for an ADHD assessment—two years from the beginning to the end of their GCSE courses; two crucial years in that child’s life. Other constituents have been in touch about the difficulty of getting a place in a specialist school. Even an educational psychologist who works in this area every day and is used to navigating the relevant systems told me she has had a long struggle to get her child a placement in a suitable school and was only offered a placement after her previous MP got involved. The school is a long way from her rural village and her child has to make a long journey each way. In rural areas, long travel distances and the pressure on school transport budgets compound the topics we are discussing.
What would help? We need a focus on faster initial diagnoses and then faster decisions on EHCPs. We need more specialist school places, clearly; better access to mental health and other support provision, whether that is for speech and language delay or ADHD; and more resource for special educational needs co-ordinators, who often have huge numbers of students to support. They need the time to be able to provide that pastoral and wellbeing support. There needs to be a streamlining of the current system, to make it easier and faster for parents and others to navigate. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response on this crucial topic.