Student Loans
Chris Coghlan Excerpts(1 day, 5 hours ago)
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Dr Evans
Exactly. It was not in the manifesto, and the Prime Minister made a promise. He made a promise when he stood to be Labour leader, and it was not there. Worse still, what did he do in his first Budget? He increased student fees from £9,250 to £9,535. And last year, he froze the thresholds. That is important, because he promised one thing and then changed his promise.
When it comes to student loans, we have heard a lot of tittle-tattle on both sides of the House, but all parties—including the Liberal Democrats, wherever they happen to be—have a responsibility. In 1998, it was Tony Blair who brought forward tuition fees. He then increased them in 2004. Then there was an increase in the coalition years, which the Liberal Democrats stood on an election manifesto not to do. And here we are now, having just been over what the Labour Government said they were going to do and now have done.
Does it really matter? Yes, there was an issue hidden in the plan 2 student loan, but it has come to fruition because of what we have seen across the globe. I do not think anyone was raising those concerns back then, but the Government have to deal with things that come up. That is what we are looking for today. That is what students outside this place will be listening for. Two years in, what is the solution? At the end of the day, it is the middle earners who are being squeezed. It is unfair, because no matter how hard they work, their debt is going up. Principally, regardless of our political position, I think we all agree that is unfair.
The question is how we solve it. When the Chancellor was asked that question, she said:
“So, yes, we want to fix it. Yes, we want to make improvements. But is it front of the queue? No, it’s not... Politics is about priorities. I’m not denying there is a problem. I’m not blind to that, but what I do say is there has to be some patience.”
Tell that to the hon. Member for Kettering (Rosie Wrighting) or the people from Hinckley and Bosworth whose debt, no matter what they do or how hard they earn, is going up.
Chris Coghlan (Dorking and Horley) (LD)
A constituent of mine, who aspires to be a GP, like the hon. Member, left university £44,000 in debt. She is actually paying more in interest than on her loan repayments. Does the hon. Member agree that the system deters graduates from following the very careers that we so desperately need them to follow in this country?
Dr Evans
The hon. Member is absolutely right. I expect his constituent will be shocked to hear that this is not a priority for the Government. It is unfair, which is why the Opposition at least tried to put up a solution. I was expecting the Government to turn around and say why it does not work, and perhaps offer us something different. That is what the public and his constituent want to hear, and certainly what mine do.
The Chancellor went on to say:
“If you say to me, ‘you shouldn’t have done child poverty and you should have reformed the student loan system,’ I just strongly disagree with that.”
Actually, that is very honest. I give her credit for that, but look at the wider context and what that means for younger people. As we have heard, unemployment in the UK is at its highest since 2021, and since 2015 for those aged 16 to 24. UK youth unemployment, for the first time ever, is above the European average. Let that sink in. As I said to my right hon. Friend the Member for Sevenoaks (Laura Trott), 257,000 people left the UK last year when it was expected to be 77,000, and three quarters of them were under the age of 35. Those people will not be recorded among the number of young people who are not in employment, education or training because NEET numbers are not calculated to include such cases. So not only do we have youth employment going up, but herds of young people are moving elsewhere. That is a tragedy for our economy and for those young people, because they are having to look elsewhere to find work, the lifestyle they want and their place in the world. To me, that is really sad.
What is the Government’s solution? They have already increased taxes on businesses, introduced more red tape and seen youth unemployment go up, and they have said to businesses, “Do you know what we are going to do? We are going to give you £3,000 to rehire the person who lost their job.” They have created a hole and they are now trying to fill it themselves, but they are only filling it halfway.
The Conservatives have set out a solution in the document that we have brought forward. Agreed, it does not fully cover the entire student loan system, and I agree with my hon. Friends that the whole approach needs to be carefully looked at, but at least the Conservatives are offering solutions and have time to develop them. The Government are having meetings and talking, but I see no solutions, and that is a shame.
SEND Provision: Local Authorities
Chris Coghlan Excerpts(2 weeks, 2 days ago)
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Chris Coghlan (Dorking and Horley) (LD)
I welcome many aspects of the special educational needs and disabilities White Paper, especially those on early intervention and increased funding. We know that most local authority SEND staff care deeply, and we are grateful for them for that, but local authority SEND provision is chronically underfunded and too often this has led to corner cutting, a culture of dishonesty and brutalisation. I fear that the Government have seriously underestimated the scale of harm. One mum wrote on my Facebook page:
“My daughter is self-harming and suicidal. EHCP behind by weeks. Discharged by CAMHS as educational setting is the main reason for mental health struggles and has to change before any work can be done. We are just left watching our children suffer. How is breaking the law by all these services allowed and not prosecuted?”
To this point, Mathew Purchase KC has said that the schools White Paper has
“a lot of good intentions, but which, on the face of it, are going to reduce the ability for children and families to enforce what they are legally entitled to.”
Last week I published, with The Times, 20 cases of avoidable SEND child suicide caused by failures by local authorities. All 20 of those children would have had their education, health and care plan rights removed under the Government’s plan, so would potentially have been even more vulnerable. Three of their mums have asked me to speak about their children.
Patricia Alban is here today. Her son Sammy was autistic. His local authority removed his EHCP. Despite 13 referrals by the police to the council, it refused to provide him with any of the support he needed. After a history of suicide attempts, Sammy died, aged 13, after falling from a harbour wall. His inquest concluded that he died from
“inadequate support from the local authority and mental health services.”
My constituent, Jen Bridges-Chalkley, started college in October 2021. She was 17 and had been diagnosed with autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Her local authority failed to update the college, through her EHCP, about her risk of suicide. One month later, she was dead. Her 81-page inquest report detailed continuous and prolonged failures by her local authority to provide the support she needed.
Eivie White was 13 when she killed herself, after years of denials and failures by her local authority to provide the support she needed for her autism. Her older sister found her body. She had to continue sleeping in the same bedroom in which Eivie had hanged herself because the local authority would not provide new housing. Six months later, Eivie’s best friend killed herself, aged 13.
Those are just three of over 200 testimonies I have received about avoidable SEND child suicide—it is an epidemic. It is our country’s duty to protect our most vulnerable citizens. How can the Government even consider cutting children’s rights?
Georgia Gould
I very often hear that exact story: too much support is locked behind a diagnosis that takes years, or behind a bureaucratic process. The reforms that we have set out move investment directly into schools and services that wrap around schools. We are introducing two new layers of support—targeted and targeted-plus—that will be available to children, without that battle for external validation. Teachers will be able to draw on that to support children in their classrooms. That is backed up by two new pieces of investment: £1.6 billion going directly into schools; and £1.8 billion into a new “experts at hand” service, to pay for speech and language therapists, occupational therapists, educational psychologists, specialist teachers and others who will support schools. Their support will be available for young people, including the one mentioned by my hon. Friend.
Chris Coghlan
I agree with what the Minister says, and it is good that all this provision is coming in, but I simply do not understand why, if she is so confident that these reforms will work, it is necessary to reduce children’s rights. I know that she is likely to say that the Government are not doing so, but it is the view of KCs—an authority I trust—that that is happening. In theory, if the reforms succeed, the demand to exercise those legal rights should naturally fall, because families should not need to use them, so whether or not those rights are there should be slightly irrelevant. However, if the reforms do not succeed, those rights gives families whose trust has collapsed the peace of mind that they can, in the worst cases, go to a tribunal and save their children’s lives.
Georgia Gould
It is really important to say to families that we are expanding their support and their rights. There will be new legal duties on schools to develop these new layers of support, which will mean that support is available earlier.
Chris Coghlan
I have repeatedly raised with the DFE over the last year very serious misconduct by Surrey county council, including concealing for over 14 months the fact that it had the highest number of complaints in the country and reclassifying complaints as inquiries to reduce complaint volumes. As far as I am aware, no disciplinary action has been taken. This is not a party political point, because it is a Conservative county council, and I know that, off the record, some Conservative county councillors feel exactly the same way about their own administration.
I worked with the Department of Health and Social Care on reforming the Mental Capacity Act 2005, and I was very impressed by its willingness to acknowledge misconduct and the need for accountability and transparency in that case. To be frank, all I have seen from the Department for Education is a culture of protecting one’s own and of cover-ups. When will serious action be taken against local authorities that commit misconduct on SEND and systematic lawbreaking? The Secretary of State for Education said that local authorities will be held to account, but given what has happened with Surrey county council, how can we have any confidence that they actually will?
Georgia Gould
Following the letters that the hon. Member and others wrote to the Secretary of State, she instructed further intensive activity in Surrey, including a number of deep dives into the issues that were raised, which will report back shortly. There are SEND advisers going in, and there is very close monitoring of what is happening in Surrey and the progress being made, but I take the wider point that families have made to me and Members across the Chamber that there needs to be greater accountability for local authorities. We recognise the challenging circumstances that local authorities have been in, but more investment is going in, and with that investment has to come stronger monitoring, accountability and intervention when there is failure.
As is set out in the schools White Paper, we are strengthening what we are able to do in a number of areas. We are very clear that if there is repeated and long-term failure, we will take SEND from local authorities. Working with the Disabled Children’s Partnership, we are setting out new conditions under which local authorities will need to learn from tribunal judgments, publish action plans on the back of them and show much greater transparency and action.
Georgia Gould
As I set out, we have appointed a SEND adviser who is offering that challenge to Surrey county council. We will continue to monitor the situation very carefully and I await the outcomes of the deep dives. I will be meeting parents, along with the hon. Member for Dorking and Horley, to hear directly from them. I am committed to continuing to work with all the relevant MPs to ensure that children are getting the support that they need in Surrey. More generally, I am committed to ensuring that there is strong accountability and monitoring of performance, as well as putting in new investment and support.
I want to address the concern mentioned by the hon. Member for Dorking and Horley that some young people who had previously had support will no longer get that support under the new system. I refer colleagues to the draft annexes that set out the specialist provision packages. I hope that those annexes reassure them that, as well as looking at children who have physical disabilities and complex learning difficulties, two of the specialist provision packages focus on social and emotional needs, and the interface with mental health.
Chris Coghlan
I fully believe that the Minister’s heart is in the right place, but for me the test is what lawyers and KCs—not to big them up too much—are saying about the White Paper: specialist educational lawyers are clear that the White Paper is reducing children’s rights. I would love to support the White Paper, but our country desperately needs reforms in this area, as this debate has highlighted. If the Minister wants my support, she will have to satisfy KCs that there is no reduction in rights, and at the moment there is.
Georgia Gould
Attached to the schools White Paper and the SEND consultation document is our own analysis of children’s rights and all the areas where we are strengthening them. I want to be really clear that the intention of the reforms is to bring in more support earlier and to extend the rights that children have access to.
Chris Coghlan
The Minister is being very generous with her time, and I am being slightly cheeky.
I have a horrendous case involving a child in Dorking who is 12 years old. I saw the mother in September, a week after the child’s second suicide attempt. The child and adolescent mental health services wrote to the GP one week later, saying that their risk of suicide was low, but there have been more self-harm incidents since then. This child has autism, and last week the county council rejected them from getting an EHCP, so I am literally at my wits’ end about what to do on this case. First, if I were to write to the Minister about this particular case, I would be hugely grateful if she could intervene. Secondly, how would she envisage this child’s situation improving after the reforms?
Georgia Gould
That is a truly tragic case. Of course, I cannot comment without knowing the full circumstances, but I encourage the hon. Member to write to me. There are two ways that the reforms could improve the situation. First, rather than having to wait for years, that support will go in a lot earlier. As well as the particular support for children with special educational needs and disabilities, we are working to bring more mental health support into schools to support children and young people. I mentioned the specialist provision packages and the drafts there, because I often hear from parents whose children do not get as much attention in the system because they internalise their social and emotional needs. Children who externalise those needs are sometimes not well supported either, but where they are internalised, those children get missed. We focused on those children and their need for specialist provision. For those children who can be supported in the mainstream, we want to put that support in earlier, but we want to have pathways into specialist support for those who need them.
Education Funding: Distribution
Chris Coghlan Excerpts(1 month, 2 weeks ago)
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Pippa Heylings
I agree with the hon. Member. It is exactly why we need this debate at the national level. I recognise the work undertaken by the f40 fairer funding campaign, which has provided comparative historical data for the whole country, exposing the huge variations in funding allocations per pupil by local authority. Nowhere is that unfair disparity more clear than in my constituency. Cambridgeshire remains in the bottom quartile nationally for the dedicated schools grant and for high needs block funding per pupil. We rank 133rd out of 151 local authorities in 2025-26. That ranking has been the same for more than a decade, despite the unprecedented growth in Cambridgeshire. The consequences are stark.
If Cambridgeshire schools were funded to the same level as Lincolnshire—a shire county funded close to the national median—they would receive an additional £23.8 million every single year. That equates to roughly £118,000 a year for a typical primary school—think of that. Equally, if Cambridgeshire were funded to the same level as neighbouring Peterborough, schools would receive around £33 million more annually. That is the scale of the gap we are talking about, and it is impossible to justify. This chronic underfunding interacts directly with the crisis in special educational needs and disabilities provision.
Chris Coghlan (Dorking and Horley) (LD)
My hon. Friend is raising incredibly important points on the distribution of funding, but does she agree that the distribution of funding during life stage is also important? [Interruption.] According to the Early Intervention Foundation, the NHS is spending £3.7 billion a year on the cost of late intervention. In theory, the Government could spend an extra £3.7 billion on early intervention on SEND at no extra net cost to the Government.
Pippa Heylings
My hon. Friend makes a hugely important point, and we have just heard agreement from across the Chamber about the importance of both the geographic distribution of funding and to which age groups it is distributed.
The underfunding interacts directly with the crisis in special educational needs and disabilities provision. Funding has been historically low in our county, and it cannot meet the rising demand. While there has been a 72% increase in high needs block funding since 2017, the demand for education, health and care plans has risen by 91% in Cambridgeshire over that same period.
The Minister for School Standards (Georgia Gould)
I thank the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Pippa Heylings) for securing this debate on this important matter. I really appreciate her taking the time to meet me and lay out her concerns in person. We had a very constructive conversation. I echo her thanks to all the brilliant teachers and staff who work so hard in her constituency. I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Truro and Falmouth (Jayne Kirkham), who came to speak to me about similar issues, the work of the f40 group, and the need to support not just schools, but, more widely, the professionals who wrap around schools in communities around the country.
I want to start where the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire ended, which is with the stories of families. I have travelled around the country speaking to thousands of parents and young people, and sadly, the experience she set out is all too common: parents’ fight for support, the exhaustion of having to navigate different systems, and parents having to give up their jobs to make a full-time job of trying to get support for their children.
Chris Coghlan
On the point about the terrible fight that families face, the Minister will know that I wrote to the Education Committee to pass on the testimony of 653 families from across 114 local authorities about harmful, unethical or unlawful behaviour by local authorities on SEND. These testimonies have 195 references to suicide. One of them said:
“My child now has ptsd, has lost the full use of their arm, is covered in scars from failed suicide attempts”.
The Education Committee wrote to me saying that these testimonies corroborated its findings about the failures in local authority governance. Does the Minister agree that, on SEND, there can be no case for weakening EHCP children’s rights, and that families’ trust in local authority governance has collapsed?
Georgia Gould
The stories the hon. Member has collected are unimaginably awful, and I commend him for listening to families and engaging with the Education Committee. We are taking its report very seriously; it is one of the documents informing our approach to reform. Conversations with families around the country are informing it, too. We have been clear that we need more support earlier. He talked about the critical nature of early intervention, and families have told us about that. We need greater partnership and earlier support, but families are also very clear that we need a system that protects their legal entitlement to additional support in education. What we have seen, and the stories we have heard today, show the failure to invest in early intervention.
The hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire talked about the urgent need to bring forward the reforms. We said that we were determined to bring them forward in the first part of this year, and we are working very hard on that. However, we want to ensure that the voices of parents, young people and teachers are at the heart of decision making, and we have taken the time to do the further engagement. The proposals that we will take forward are strengthened by that engagement, and by the contribution of families and Members across the House.
However, we have not been waiting to invest and to take action. We have already invested in Best Start in Life hubs, and in leads on special educational needs and disabilities. We have put £740 million into capital for specialist places. We have announced a further £3 billion of capital for this year, and we will set out how that is to be distributed across the country. Just recently, we announced a further £200 million in support for teacher training, and we will make it mandatory for teachers to have continuous professional development on special educational needs and disabilities.
Children with SEND: Assessments and Support
Chris Coghlan Excerpts(6 months ago)
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Chris Coghlan (Dorking and Horley) (LD)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Allin-Khan. In Dorking the other day, a mum called Jenny came to see me about her daughters, Isabelle and Sienna. They are severely learning disabled, epileptic, blind, non-verbal and tube fed. Isabelle and Sienna have difficult lives, but they thrive when they are together. Jenny had to take Surrey county council to tribunal four times to fight for their rights—not only to get their needs met, but simply to get them together in the same school. Although she ultimately won her fight, that cost Jenny her life savings and her marriage. I said to her that if she were my mum, I would be incredibly grateful. I hope she is proud of what she is doing, because she should be.
It is not only profoundly disabled children who are mistreated by local authorities. I have today published almost 500 family testimonies of unlawful, harmful and unethical behaviour on SEND by 92 local authorities across the entire country. I will continue to collect these testimonies and I will be taking this further. These local authorities are led by every major political party, including my own, so this is not a party political issue. Rather, it suggests that there is something systemically wrong with local authority governance in this country—a failure of accountability to locally elected councillors. My own local authority, Surrey, hid for over 14 months the fact that it had the highest level of complaints on SEND in the country.
We know that local authorities are financially overwhelmed on SEND, but too often their response to the suffering of children such as Isabelle and Sienna is to be desensitised and to breed a culture of denial and dishonesty—a brutalised system. If we reduce SEND rights and throw children away to local authorities we cannot trust, we throw away their lives. The answer is early intervention.
Dr Al Pinkerton (Surrey Heath) (LD)
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way, especially during such a powerful speech. He raises the issue of early intervention. I have seen this in my own constituency, where if people can catch special educational needs early enough, they can get the right packages of support in place. Does my hon. Friend recognise, as I do, that early intervention is critical to the future of our children and the next generation?
Chris Coghlan
I entirely agree, because by the age of three a child has 1,000 trillion brain connections, but that declines to 500 trillion by adolescence. That is why the earlier the intervention, the more effective the outcome and the lower the total cost. That is even before we consider the cost of a parent who has to leave work to look after a child unable to cope at school, or an adult who ends up in social services instead of a job.
The Government must resist the siren calls of local authorities to reduce SEND rights. There are too many people in despair right now, but if the Government focus on early intervention for our children, they can set out a path for hope.
Several hon. Members rose—
SEND Provision: London Borough of Barking and Dagenham
Chris Coghlan Excerpts(8 months, 1 week ago)
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Margaret Mullane
The hon. Gentleman makes some very good points. The Minister was discussing that issue this afternoon and tomorrow my hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Nesil Caliskan) will have a debate on that very point.
Alongside that, the growing pressures in the health system and the shortages of educational psychologists, speech and language therapists and occupational therapists all serve to make the issue worse. As it currently stands, there is very little likelihood that the EHC teams will be able to meet the demand in Barking and Dagenham.
Chris Coghlan (Dorking and Horley) (LD)
I hear the heartbreaking stories from Barking and Dagenham about the huge demand for SEND provision and the difficulty in meeting it. In Surrey, we have similarly heartbreaking cases of children with autism who cannot move out of mainstream school because the capacity is not there. As a result, one of my constituents is getting bullied terribly and the council has refused to fund his place in a specialist school. But that story is not unique in Surrey or in Barking and Dagenham. Despite that, the county council leader, Tim Oliver, claimed that the vast majority of SEND families in Surrey are happy with their support. That is despite the council suppressing a survey of 1,000 parents for six months—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)
Order. The hon. Gentleman’s intervention is far too long. As the Adjournment started before 10 o’clock, he will of course be free to make a speech.
Chris Coghlan (Dorking and Horley) (LD)
I was moved by the speech just made by the hon. Member for Dagenham and Rainham (Margaret Mullane) and heartened to hear about the effectiveness of SEND provision in Barking and Dagenham. It is so important that we have effective examples of that in the country—particularly at the moment, when the Government are considering their national SEND provision. It was encouraging for me to hear that. From my experience in my constituency, a vital part of what we have to do is tackling the culture of dishonesty that certainly exists in my local authority—I do not know about elsewhere. That culture is a key barrier to effectively addressing SEND provision.
The issue could not be more serious. Constituents of mine—suicidal children with autism—are repeatedly denied the support that is their right. Desperate parents come to me, their MP, trying to beg the council to do its duty. The level of dishonesty is hard to exaggerate. Surrey has the highest level of complaints to tribunals in the country. It covered that up for over 14 months from its own internal council scrutiny committees. The county council leader then denied that in a formal written response to the Liberal Democrat Members of Parliament in Surrey. The council’s next trick, as reported by ITV, was to reclassify complaints as “inquiries”, to try to manipulate its complaints volumes. It then denied that there was a problem at all and said that the problem was, in fact, that Surrey parents are “too articulate”. Most recently, the county council leader said in the annual general meeting that “the vast majority” of Surrey SEND parents have a good experience of SEND. That was despite them suppressing for six months a survey of 1,000 SEND parents in which only 16% said that they trusted the county council on SEND and only 21% said that they trusted case officers to act in the best interests of their child.
It is a matter of extreme concern for me that the Government are putting so much faith in local authorities on SEND reform when, certainly in my case, they are so manifestly dishonest. I am particularly worried about Surrey, because the county council leader is chairman of the County Councils Network and so has major influence over SEND reform across the country. I am also worried about the fact that local authorities are saying that the way to solve the SEND crisis is to water down parents’ right to apply for an EHCP. There are many things wrong with the SEND system, but that is the one thing parents do have confidence in. It may take far too long to get an EHCP, but at least they have their legal rights and can go to tribunal.
I desperately hope that the Government are not going to water down their commitments and that they will respond to the call of my hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Dr Pinkerton) for an investigation into Surrey county council. Only then will my constituents be able to get the justice that they deserve and the opportunities that they desperately need.
The Minister for School Standards (Catherine McKinnell)
Congratulations to my hon. Friend the Member for Dagenham and Rainham (Margaret Mullane) on securing this debate on an incredibly important subject. I know that she and other hon. Members in the Chamber have an interest in supporting families in their constituencies in navigating the special educational needs system; hon. Members have conveyed compellingly just how complex it can be. In her powerful speech, my hon. Friend made clear her interest in the subject, and her passion for the improvements that need to be made.
I reassure hon. Members that improving the SEND system is a priority for the Government. We want all children to feel that they belong in a mainstream setting, if that is the best place for them to have their needs met. We want them to receive the right support, succeed in their education, and lead happy, healthy and productive adult lives. We know that is possible. We have seen it in innovative examples across the country, including when the Secretary of State visited Becontree primary school in Dagenham in December. It was heartening to hear my hon. Friend’s account of the practice in Barking and Dagenham, but much more needs to be done to improve the system for children and their families, and to ensure consistent good practice in every part of the country.
I am grateful to the hon. Member for Dorking and Horley (Chris Coghlan) and my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford South (Jas Athwal) for their contributions. It is clear that there is much shared interest in this issue, and their contributions were an important part of this timely debate. Every child, regardless of their needs, deserves the opportunity to achieve, thrive and succeed. We are absolutely clear that the system is too difficult for parents, carers and young people to navigate, and it is simply not delivering the outcomes that we want.
Chris Coghlan
In the 2023-24 academic year, more than 1,800 SEND children in Surrey were out of school for more than a third of the time. What steps is the Minister taking to ensure that promised schools are delivered? I think in particular of the Betchwood Vale academy SEND school in my constituency.
Catherine McKinnell
I know the hon. Gentleman cares passionately about this issue, and he is clearly keen to see the expansion of provision. As he knows, we are investing in the capital estate in the round, and supporting mainstream schools to expand. We have already given local authorities the funding, and we hope that they are working with their local schools to increase capacity. Obviously, the building of any additional schools is considered in the light of that, because we need to ensure that the right provision is available for the children who need it. We are giving close consideration to that, and are working closely with local authorities, whose duty it is to make sure that they have the places to meet those needs.
We have announced that the details of our longer-term approach to SEND reform will be set out in the schools White Paper in the autumn. We are not wasting any time on this. We are already working to ensure that children and young people get the support they need; we are building a robust evidence base about what works to drive inclusive education, and we are creating the expert advisory group for inclusion, led by Tom Rees. We are introducing new regional improvement for standards and excellence—RISE—advisers, who will work with mainstream schools to ensure that they become more inclusive.
We are extending PINS—partnerships for inclusion of neurodiversity in schools—to a further cohort of mainstream primary schools, so that we build teacher and staff capacity to identify, and better meet, the needs of neurodivergent children in mainstream school settings. We are prioritising early intervention and inclusive provision in mainstream settings, because early intervention prevents unmet needs from escalating, and is the best way to support all children and young people to achieve their goals alongside their peers. We are committed to working with the sector and our partners to ensure that our approach is fully planned, and developed in partnership with families, stakeholders and the entire sector, which needs to deliver these reforms.
The number of education, health and care plans has increased each year since their introduction in 2014, with over 630,000 children and young people having an EHCP as of January 2025. Over time, flaws and lack of capacity in the system to meet lower-level need have put additional strain on specialist services. That has had a really detrimental impact on the experience of accessing support through the EHCP process, and has contributed to pushing up costs and creating an increasingly unsustainable system. The latest data shows that in 2024, just over 46% of new EHCPs were issued within the 20-week timeframe. The Government want to ensure that EHC need assessments are progressed promptly, and that plans are issued quickly to provide children and young people with the support that they need to achieve positive outcomes.
Independently commissioned insights published last year showed that extensive improvements to the system using early intervention and better resourcing of mainstream schools could have a significant impact, with more children and young people having their needs met without an EHCP, and in a mainstream setting, rather than in a specialist placement. We have listened to parents, local authority colleagues and partners right across education, health and social care. We are considering really carefully how to improve the EHCP process for families, and are reflecting on what practices could or should be made consistent nationally.
Children and young people with SEND frequently require access to additional support from a broad, specialist workforce right across education, health and care. To support the demand, in partnership with NHS England, we are funding early language support for every child: ELSEC. This is trialling new ways of working to better identify and support children with speech, language and communication needs in their early years and at primary school. I have seen this in practice, and seen the difference it makes to not just the children who participate in the programme and clearly thrive as a result, but the teaching workforce, who grow in confidence and in their ability to untap and unlock children’s learning. It is having a great impact, and we are keen to see the results of the pilot, the roll-out, and the impact taking root in schools.
Continuing to ensure a pipeline of speech and language therapists is essential. That is why we have introduced a speech and language degree apprenticeship. It is in its third year of delivery, and it offers a really excellent alternative pathway to the traditional degree route into a successful career as a speech and language therapist. Of course, we need many more such therapists. It takes a vast workforce, from teachers to teaching assistants, and from early years educators to allied health professionals, to help children and young people thrive, and we are investing in each of those areas to improve outcomes and experiences across the country. I am aware of the ten-minute rule Bill sponsored by my hon. Friend the Member for Dagenham and Rainham, which is on this very issue, and is due to be presented in the House tomorrow.
High-quality teaching is central to ensuring that pupils with SEND are given the best possible opportunity to achieve in their education, so to support teachers, we are implementing high-quality teacher development. It begins with their initial teacher training, continues into their early teaching career, and carries on right through to middle and senior leadership. We want to offer professional development to all teachers, so that they have the skills to support all pupils to succeed, including those with SEND. The partnership for inclusion of neurodiversity in schools is also deploying health and education specialists in the workforce to upskill primary schools, so that they can support neurodivergent children. The support operates on a whole-school level and is not reliant on a diagnosis. That support is there for all children, depending on their needs.
Local authorities need support with their educational psychology services, and we are investing over £21 million to train 400 more educational psychologists. As these trainees complete their studies, they will be able to join the workforce and support local authority education services, including by contributing to statutory assessments. We know those assessments are a big challenge, and workforce shortages are a huge barrier to delivering our ambition for an inclusive mainstream education system.
Oral Answers to Questions
Chris Coghlan Excerpts(1 year, 1 month ago)
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Bridget Phillipson
Parents who choose to home educate their children are within their rights to do so. Those who provide a safe, loving environment and a good standard of education have nothing to be concerned about in the legislation. We are concerned about the growing number of children of whom we simply have no visibility. The Bill will ensure that where there are serious concerns about child protection and safeguarding, such as where a section 47 investigation is under way, the local authority must consent to home education. I am staggered that the hon. Gentleman finds those straightforward measures to keep children safe such an outrage. They are about protecting children.
Chris Coghlan (Dorking and Horley) (LD)
The Minister for School Standards (Catherine McKinnell)
Despite having to make tough decisions at the Budget to fix the foundations, key education priorities were protected. That is how we are able to provide a £1 billion high needs budget to help local authorities in schools support young people with SEND. As I said, we inherited a lose-lose-lose system, but we are determined to reform it and restore parents’ trust. The Secretary of State and I regularly meet Ministers from other Departments on special educational needs policies, to ensure that we take a whole of Government approach.
Chris Coghlan
Every headteacher in Dorking has told me that early intervention is vital for our special needs children. The London Business School told me that hiring people with special educational needs can be a source of competitive advantage for companies. Does the Minister agree that those principles could be the basis of a more financially sustainable and compassionate special educational needs system, and could avoid tragedies such as that of my constituent Jennifer Chalkley, who tragically lost her life aged 17 due to inadequate SEND provision?
Catherine McKinnell
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his thoughtful question. We absolutely recognise the role of early years education in identifying needs and providing timely support. We have launched the new SEND assessment resources and child development training, and are identifying and supporting communication needs through the early language support for every child programme, along with NHS England. We will continue to work across Government to ensure that children with SEND get the right support at the right time. I am very sorry to hear the tragic circumstances of the case the hon. Gentleman outlined.