Alex Chalk
Main Page: Alex Chalk (Conservative - Cheltenham)Department Debates - View all Alex Chalk's debates with the Department for Education
(5 years, 9 months ago)
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Julian Sturdy
The hon. Lady makes a good point. Members will mention different examples of constituency cases in the debate, which shows that this is a wide issue. However, I completely accept the point that it is about not just diagnosis but the next steps. I will come on to that, and I will put a few questions to the Minister. I hope that she will be able to respond to them accordingly.
Alex Chalk (Cheltenham) (Con)
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for leading this incredibly important debate. Does he agree that mainstream schools must be supported as much as possible to educate SEN children in that setting? If they cannot and they exclude children, that in turn puts huge pressure on special schools, which cannot then cope, increasing the risk of exclusion into incredibly expensive independent provision, which drains the budget.
Julian Sturdy
I entirely agree. There is also a wider issue: it is important for children to be taught together with their peers—I want to come on to this, and the study I mentioned talks about it—because of the potential stigmatisation of being taken out of mainstream education and the consequences that can have for all the students. I completely accept the importance of that.
Julian Sturdy
Absolutely—that is a very important point. I will touch on some of the Select Committee’s findings, but I entirely agree.
Alex Chalk
My hon. Friend the Member for Mansfield (Ben Bradley) makes a really important point about the extent of the budget. Do we as a community not have to recognise that needs are much higher than they were even 20 years ago? The special schools in my constituency—whether it is Belmont, Bettridge or Ridge—increasingly deal with medical issues that impact some of these children’s ability to learn, yet those medical needs have to be funded from the education budget. That simply adds to the strain on that budget.
Julian Sturdy
That is a good point and I am glad I took the intervention, to which I hope the Minister will respond. I did not want the debate to turn into one about child adolescent mental health services referrals but I am sure all Members have experienced frustration over the referral time lag. I have raised questions in the House and it is immensely frustrating—and part of the reason is that it is a cross-departmental matter, between education and health. However, as my hon. Friend pointed out, a lot of the money comes from the schools budget.
Alex Chalk
I am really disappointed by the hon. Gentleman’s speech, because normally he makes such helpful contributions and this one is not that. The fact is that we now spend, as a nation, £50 billion a year on debt interest, which is more than the £43 billion schools budget, and that is in no small part because of the historic failings of the Labour Government.