Special Educational Needs and Disabilities Funding

Alex Chalk Excerpts

Tuesday 12th February 2019 Westminster Hall

[Huw Merriman (Bexhill and Battle) (Con)]

I congratulate the right hon. Member for Twickenham (Sir Vince Cable) on securing this important debate. In my three minutes, I will touch on school funding, school choices and another area that I passionately support.

On school funding, I ask the Minister to focus particularly on recent changes to the allocations between school block, early years block and high needs block. Previously, it was a notional figure that could be switched across blocks, and now the limit is just 0.5%. I am concerned about the knock-on effect, as it creates a perverse incentive for mainstream schools to see children moved out of mainstream into specialist schools. Previously, they would have complained that they would be salami-sliced and would have to pay for that—now, they would not have to. I ask the Minister if it would be possible to see data on whether that is actually forcing more young people out of mainstream into specialist schools. Mainstream should be where we start. It is where these young people will return to after they have finished school, in their communities and workplace. Anything that creates an incentive away from that is a concern to me.

[Alex Chalk (Cheltenham) (Con)]

Balcarras School in my constituency takes a number of SEND children—more than 20—yet because of a quirk of the system that means it has to pay the first £6,000, it is disincentivised from doing the right thing. Does my hon. Friend agree that it would be helpful if the Government looked constructively at changing that funding arrangement?

[Huw Merriman]

I do indeed. My constituents living in east Sussex are less likely to be in a maintained mainstream school than children living in any other county around us, so I absolutely agree. The difficulty is that we have received a 3% real-terms cut to school funding in my constituency of Bexhill and Battle. We are at 4,334, whereas the figure is 5,157 in Birmingham, Edgbaston, and 5,123 in Nottingham North. I am afraid that my constituents are worse off living in my constituency. I have some fantastic primary schools that do an amazing job with young pupils with EHCPs, but in reality they are now reaching into a deficit. If it costs an extra £8,000 to £10,000 for those schools to educate those pupils, the incentive is moving away from their doing so.

On school choice, I absolutely support the belief that mainstream is best, but I am very concerned that my constituents are reporting that they almost have to fail in a mainstream in order to get to the school of their choice. As I think has been touched on, there is real difficulty in having a system in which the local authority is incentivised financially to put the child in a mainstream school, the mainstream school is incentivised financially to put them in a specialist school, and independent schools are incentivised to have the pupil in that particular setting. It is no wonder that we end up in a tribunal system as a result. Surely through reform we could have more independent assessment at the very outset, perhaps more informally, rather than waiting for a tribunal.

Finally, I am grateful to the Department for Education for accepting the recommendations of “Autism and education in England 2017”, the report of an inquiry that I co-chaired last year. We made some recommendations, and the Government have listened and announced that they will extend the autism strategy to young pupils in education. That is a great step forward—it is all about the training of staff. My last ask is whether it is possible for every new specialist school to be built within a mainstream perimeter, rather than having the apartheid system that we have at the moment.