Education, Health and Care Plans

Alison Bennett Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd January 2025 Westminster Hall

[Alison Bennett (Mid Sussex) (LD)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford (Marie Goldman) on securing this important debate. I will not repeat what colleagues have said about the impact on children, but will instead talk about the impact on teachers.

The current EHCP system is grossly unfair to teachers who are expected to cope. I recently visited the Gattons infant school in Burgess Hill. As an infant school, it has only three school years. Four-year-olds arrive there with clearly unmet needs, and they quite often leave the school before the EHCP has been processed by West Sussex county council. That is clearly unfair on those children, and it is clearly unfair on the children who do not have special educational needs or are not yet diagnosed. It is unfair to expect teachers to be able to cope with a classroom of 30 children, a significant number of whom have needs that are not being met. In conclusion, it is absolutely essential that is this is turned around with urgency, and I thank the Government for all that they are doing.

Sixth-form College Strikes: Sussex

Alison Bennett Excerpts

Monday 13th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Alison Bennett (Mid Sussex) (LD)]

In my constituency, our young people are fortunate to have several highly regarded sixth-form options, including three brilliant colleges just over the constituency boundary in Brighton, Hove and Horsham. Varndean is one of only a handful of state-funded colleges offering the prestigious international baccalaureate; students at BHASVIC—Brighton, Hove and Sussex sixth-form college—received over 50 offers to study at Oxford and Cambridge last year; and Collyer’s has the best results in west Sussex and is in the top 15 colleges nationally for value added.

Since late November, those three local colleges have been among 32 across England, including one in the Minister’s constituency, that have held seven strike days—four before Christmas and, to date, three in January. I secured this debate having already submitted written parliamentary questions, the answers to which further frustrated those caught up in the dispute. In my opinion, the Government have dropped the ball on fairly and adequately funding non-academised sixth-form colleges. I feel that teachers are being treated unfairly and that students in Mid Sussex and beyond are being badly failed as a result.

[Alison Hume (Scarborough and Whitby) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Member for raising this issue, which also affects Scarborough sixth-form college in my constituency. There are high levels of deprivation in parts of Scarborough, and the sixth-form college is a key route to higher education or employment opportunities for young people. Will she join me in praising the dedication and hard work of staff at sixth-form colleges not just in Scarborough, but across the country, who enable students to reach their full potential?

[Alison Bennett]

I agree that sixth-form college teachers do a huge amount of good, supporting students from a vast variety of backgrounds, including disadvantaged backgrounds.

This evening, I was pleased to meet in Parliament my constituent Amelie Lockhart, a year 13 student at Varndean, and Fleur Hemmings, a philosophy teacher at Varndean. Amelie told me that the strikes are limiting the time left for year 13 students to finish their subject content, and she and her friends are worrying about hitting their grades for university. Sam, a BHASVIC student from Haywards Heath, said:

“I’m worried about learning all the content for my A-levels at this crucial point in my life but I support the teachers in this strike.”

Similarly, a year 12 double maths student from BHASVIC told me that because they complete A-level maths in just one year, the strikes mean that he has already missed out on the teaching of several full topics of learning crucial to his exams in June. In addition, BTec students started exams last week just as three days of strikes took effect, and university applicants who need extra support—often students from more disadvantaged backgrounds or with special educational needs—have been impacted just before the end of January application deadline.

Lily from Haywards Heath, who studies at Collyer’s, says:

“These strikes disrupted my learning during mocks week. I didn’t have the proper class time to prepare for my exams. Of course I support the teachers. I think they should get the proper salary they deserve.”

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I commend the hon. Lady for securing the debate. I spoke to her beforehand to mention an example and support her position. There have been similar strikes in Northern Ireland, and teachers’ strikes are approaching. The main thing my constituents tell me is that students, who are already under enormous pressure during exam periods, must not be left struggling under undue duress and pressure. When it comes to sorting out these problems, does she agree that, although wage increases for teachers are important, the issues facing students must not be ignored?

[Alison Bennett]

I thank the hon. Member for his intervention and agree that the impact on students is at the centre of the debate.

Emma, a parent from Hurstpierpoint, has said to me that it is madness for the Government to think that they could agree a deal with one set of teachers and exclude another. Meanwhile, a BHASVIC parent told me that they support the teachers but are frustrated that their children, who were let down during covid by a Conservative Government, are now being let down by a Labour Government, too.

So it is that teachers such as Fleur decided to go on strike, with a heavy heart. They are mindful that students get just two short years at college to study and prepare for their futures and that every day counts. For our year 12 and year 13 students, this is just the latest round of disruption that their education has been subject to: they were in years 7 and 8 when the first covid lockdown was announced and did not get back into school for six months. That had a profound impact not just on their learning but on their social and emotional development, with soaring rates of mental ill health and school absenteeism still being widely reported five years later. Then, during 2022 and 2023, there were further rounds of strikes in those students’ schools.

As Arianne from Haywards Heath, who is a BHASVIC student, said this week:

“The most frustrating thing is the loss of routine. The strikes have made it hard to integrate back into college after Christmas. We can’t get as much support from teachers for coursework, which might affect our grades. It feels very disengaging. None the less, I still support the teacher strikes and understand that if change is going to happen you have got to do something disruptive.”

[Lisa Smart (Hazel Grove) (LD)]

On Friday, I was at Marple college, where a number of young learners talked to me about the really important elements of quality teaching and how they help, just as my hon. Friend laid out. She has mentioned a number of her constituents who have made exactly the same point.

I have also been contacted by Danny Pearson, the principal of Aquinas college, who knew that my hon. Friend had secured the debate. I want to share one sentence of his. He said:

“We really should be putting students and their education first and it seems a great shame that we cannot avert these strikes and get sixth form teachers back where they belong, in front of our students.”

Does my hon. Friend agree with me and Danny that the Government should do more to get brilliant teachers back in front of their students, where they belong?

[Alison Bennett]

I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention. I absolutely agree that more needs to be done, and with urgency.

Why would sixth-form teachers take this step and cause more disruption to their students? I think that these strikes have come about because of sheer frustration at an illogical pay offer that effectively creates a two-tier sixth-form system. In July, the Government accepted the recommendation of the School Teachers’ Review Body to increase the pay of teachers in schools by 5.5%, and £1.2 billion of funding was provided for that pay award, but the Government excluded teachers at non-academised sixth-form colleges, yet they do exactly the same job as those in academised sixth-form colleges and at maintained schools.

So far, the Government have provided two explanations for that illogical decision. First, in response to my parliamentary question, they said:

“The government is not responsible for setting or making recommendations about teacher pay in further education…colleges, including sixth form colleges.”

One college principal I have talked to described that explanation as

“inaccurate at best, deceptive at worst”.

In fact, the Government have made a choice. They could have chosen to provide more funding to colleges to help fund pay awards, but they did not. There is precedent for making that choice: in 2023, the then Conservative Education Secretary chose to provide more money for all colleges through the 16 to 19 funding formula. This choice is costing some students valuable teaching time, while others—in some cases at schools just down the road—are having no such trouble.

The Government’s second explanation is that they are facing a “very challenging fiscal context”. They were able to find £1.2 billion for the initial pay award but said they could not provide the extra £19 million needed to end the strikes. That relatively small amount would ensure pay parity for teachers everywhere in the country and, in doing so, stop students from needlessly missing out on vital days of education. As the 2023 funding settlement proves, it is absolutely possible to extend support to all sixth-form colleges and there is no legal or technical reason to prevent it. It is a choice in the gift of the Government.

To add insult to injury, sixth-form colleges are already facing significant funding inequalities. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, Government spending on students in those colleges is 26% lower than it is for students in secondary schools, and unlike schools and academies they cannot reclaim VAT, costing them around £350,000 per year on average.

There are also the longer-term implications of the widening pay gap. The IFS has estimated that as a result of last year’s 5.5% pay award for schoolteachers and the 2.5% increase for college teachers, the pay gap in this academic year will be the highest on record—£7,000, or 18%. My constituent Jo, a senior sixth-form college teacher and a mentor for early-career teachers, told me that one of her mentees has already had to leave Brighton and return to Newcastle as he could not afford to live in the south-east, and another of her current mentees is finding it difficult to survive on his teaching salary. She said that the erosion of teachers’ pay over the past decade, together with the high cost of living in this part of the country, means that Sussex is losing very good teachers. In her words, that is a direct threat to current and future students.

The Government must take urgent action to ensure that teachers in sixth-form colleges receive the 5.5% pay award, backdated from 1 September 2024. That is essential if we want to ensure that students’ education is not further disrupted. As we have heard, there is a clear and compelling case for providing funding to sixth-form colleges. The Government must change course. They appear to have belatedly realised that they made the wrong choice and have recently offered a staggered pay rise, with the 5.5% pay award applying from 1 April. However, that would still leave a pay discrepancy of £2,000 for no logical reason, other than—I presume—not being seen to backtrack completely from their ridiculous initial decision.

The Government must prioritise the education of students from Sussex and across the country, and must ensure that sixth-form colleges can continue to recruit and retain excellent teaching staff. Varndean, BHASVIC and Collyer’s are currently offering some of the very best opportunities within the state sector to our country’s 16 to 18-year-olds, but that is at risk if the Labour Government do not urgently address the inequality they are exacerbating in the sector.

I close in the strongest terms, by urging the Minister and the Government to reconsider their approach; to find the small amount of money remaining to ensure that teachers are paid the same for the same job; and to finally put this cohort of students, whose education was most affected by covid disruption, at the centre of decisions made by Government that affect them.

SEND Provision: Autism and ADHD

Alison Bennett Excerpts

Thursday 12th December 2024 Commons Chamber

[Pippa Heylings]

I could not concur more. Over the past decade or more, we saw chronic under-investment from the Conservative Government, despite the needs having been recognised in statute, and that has left us in this pressure point situation. We are now seeing the results of that. I have also been told that this is a time bomb, because we will see the impacts in the future in the quality of life, in opportunities, in the NHS and in social services—in all services really—if we do not deal with this situation.

I have also been told about the situation for siblings. When a child is not given the support that they need in school, young carer siblings are often drawn out of their class and asked to be with their sibling during their lunch break or lessons. There is an impact on all those affected.

[Alison Bennett (Mid Sussex) (LD)]

On that point about young carers, does my hon. Friend agree that, at the moment, schools struggle to recognise how many young carers are on their rolls? Does she think that the Department for Education would be wise to look at better ways of measuring the number of young carers and giving schools the toolkits to identify them?

[Pippa Heylings]

I could not agree more with my hon. Friend. The Carers Trust has provided us with these stories and pointed out that we really need to collect this evidence. It would be easy to point the finger at local councils and say that this is their failure, but, as we have said, they are stretched to their limits by a chronic lack of funding. We have heard that f40, the cross-party local authority campaign group, has estimated that an additional £4.6 billion of annual SEND revenue is required to meet the current need, yet most of our county councils face a black hole in their budgets. One issue is the training and retention of educational psychologists, because they and council workers are overwhelmed. Turnover rates are high and burnout is common, which leads to an exacerbation of those waiting lists.

--- Later in debate ---

[Catherine McKinnell]

I absolutely recognise the challenge the hon. Gentleman has outlined, but it very much speaks to the point I was making, which is that we have published independently commissioned insights that suggest that if the education system as a whole was extensively improved, and if we had much better early intervention, which the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire rightly referred to, and better resourcing within mainstream schools, that could lead to tens of thousands more children and young people having their needs met without an education, health and care plan. Their needs would be met within a mainstream system and with their peers, without needing a specialist placement. Clearly, we need specialist places for children with the most complex needs, but to ensure we have those places, we need to improve inclusivity and expertise within mainstream schools, while ensuring that those special schools and places can cater to children with the most complex needs.

I come back to the hon. Lady’s point about transition points for young people and how important it is for the whole system to be reformed. It is not good enough to reform just part of it, and for that great work to then be undone when a child or young person moves on to a new educational setting that does not provide the right support and environment for them. My point is that this situation is huge and complex. There is not a magic wand, and there is no overnight quick fix, but we are determined to change it, and we cannot do it alone. We need to work in partnership to achieve this.

[Alison Bennett]

I thank the Minister for her response. So much could be said about special educational needs across the country and in my constituency of Mid Sussex. The Minister mentioned how we all as Members of this place are undoubtedly trying our best to help families navigate the special educational needs system. I am sorry to say that when families come to me and I ask, “How can I help you?”, they say, “We don’t think you can help us. We just want you to witness and listen to what we are saying,” because the system is so broken. I met the family of Annabel in Mid Sussex. She has been out of school for several years, has been sectioned and has had multiple suicide attempts because her autism was not being managed in the schooling system. Her family just wanted me to bear witness to them, and I am so sorry that there is not more that we as parliamentarians can do.

[Catherine McKinnell]

The hon. Lady has borne witness today to that family and young person facing that challenge. It is vital that we work together with parents, schools, councils, the health sector and expert staff, who we know go above and beyond to support children within education settings to achieve the changes that are clearly desperately needed.

The hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire specifically focused the debate on support for autistic children and young people and those with ADHD. She will know from the work she has undertaken that we are seeing significant increases in the numbers of children and young people identified as autistic or with ADHD, and that is something we share in common with other countries around the world. We know families are facing significant challenges and that support needs to be in place, as she outlined, to ensure that those children can thrive in school.

We absolutely recognise the long waiting times across the NHS for autism and ADHD assessments, and we are working to address them. As the hon. Lady identified, we need to ensure that mainstream schools and colleges can identify those needs and put support in place early, because the earlier a child gets the support and right environment in which to learn, the more chance that they will thrive and that some of the challenges they face will be mitigated.

Ensuring that we have knowledgeable professionals in our schools and colleges is a key part of this. All teachers are teachers of pupils with special educational needs and disabilities, but we need to make sure those teachers have the skills and support to help all pupils succeed. As such, we are implementing a range of teacher training reforms that begin with initial teacher training and continue through early career teaching to middle and senior leadership.

We have a universal SEND services contract, which provides SEND-specific courses and professional development for school and college staff. Through that contract, the Autism Education Trust offers a range of training and support for staff on how to support autistic children and young people. The contract began in May 2022, and over 200,000 professionals have received training from the Autism Education Trust and training partners. On 1 September 2024, this Government introduced a new mandatory leadership-level national professional qualification for SENCOs. We are making the changes, but it will take time for them to work through.

Our partnerships for inclusion of neurodiversity in schools programme is also running in around 10% of schools, which is approximately 1,600 mainstream primary school settings. It is deploying specialists from both the health and education workforces and building better teaching and staff capacity to identify the needs of neurodivergent children. It provides opportunities to enhance support and improve outcomes for all children, taking a whole-school approach. It is a cross-Government programme backed by £13 million of investment, and it is a collaboration between the Department of Health and Social Care, the Department for Education and NHS England.

Additionally, we have just established a neurodivergence task and finish group, bringing together a group of experts from various backgrounds to help us understand how to improve inclusivity in mainstream schools in a way that works for neurodivergent children and young people. We know that listening to children and young people and their families and understanding their experiences is a really important part of this work. That group met for the first time this week, and I look forward to seeing their recommendations on the best way that we can support these children’s needs. This is happening alongside our expert advisory group on inclusion and the work being done by Dame Christine Lenehan, our new strategic adviser on SEND. We are looking at all of these issues strategically across Government, as we urgently need to turn this situation around.

I could go into the details of high needs funding, but I am very conscious of time. I appreciate the concerns that have been raised about the national funding formula. We prioritised speed over change this year—we needed to get the formula processed and out to schools and educational institutions—but we will obviously keep it under review to make sure the money is being spent in the most effective way to deliver the best outcomes for children. We have also allocated £740 million for high needs capital funding to support mainstream schools to adapt, if needed, to create more inclusive mainstream settings.

I thank the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire again for bringing this matter forward. Ensuring that effective support is in place for young people is absolutely a priority of this Government. We know the hardship that far too many families have faced, and my final word of thanks goes to all those working in the interests of our children in our health, education and care systems. We will deliver the best for our children and young people, and I am confident that together we can achieve that.

Question put and agreed to.

Oral Answers to Questions

Alison Bennett Excerpts

Monday 4th November 2024 Commons Chamber

[Bridget Phillipson]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for the work that she leads on behalf of this House on the Education Committee. Our child poverty taskforce is absolutely focused on this area. We will listen to and engage directly with families across the UK, including those who have children with SEND. As she identifies, child poverty blights the life chances of far too many, and that must change.

[Alison Bennett (Mid Sussex) (LD)]

Carers Trust estimates that two children in every classroom across the UK are young carers, yet 72% of schools say that they have no young carers on their roll. What steps is the Department taking to address that?

[Janet Daby]

We have recently required all schools to provide that data, so that we can find out where the young carers are and ensure that they gain the support that they need. Through the children’s framework, they can have an assessment alongside their parents. I am happy to speak further on this matter.

Special Educational Needs and Disabilities

Alison Bennett Excerpts

Thursday 24th October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Catherine McKinnell]

I thank my hon. Friend for his question. I reiterate that the Government have inherited a terrible legacy, not only on special educational needs and disabilities, but on our public spending and the state of our public services overall. The example he raises is good, as it highlights the importance of working across Government to resolve issues and help the families who need support. Whether that is done through the education system, which my Department is responsible for, or through the health service, we need to work collaboratively across Government to address the huge backlogs that far too many people face in getting the support that they need. I can assure him that that is a priority for us.

[Alison Bennett (Mid Sussex) (LD)]

In the past two weeks, I have met two families whose children are suicidal, one of whom is nine years old. The other one was committed to a secure unit for most of 2023. The cause of their suicidal thoughts was their educational needs not being met by the education system. Neither of those children have EHCPs. Conservative-controlled West Sussex county council is completing only 9.4% of EHCPs within 20 weeks. One block is the lack of educational psychologists. Does the Minister agree that increasing the supply of educational psychologists is essential?

[Catherine McKinnell]

I am so sorry to hear about the cases the hon. Lady raises. She highlights very well the huge challenge that we face in addressing needs—in ensuring that we have not only the inclusive mainstream education system that every child should feel they belong in, and that provides the education they need, but the mental health support that we know is sadly lacking. The waiting lists are too long for far too many children and families. We are prioritising investment to ensure mental health support and educational psychologists are available in schools, because we know how important it is to get the right support in place to help the families and individuals affected, and to enable schools to address these needs.