SEND Provision: Local Authorities

Debate between Chris Coghlan and Georgia Gould

Tuesday 3rd March 2026 Commons Chamber

[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.

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[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.

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[Chris Coghlan]

Will the Minister give way?

[Georgia Gould]

I will give way one final time.

[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

Debate between Chris Coghlan and Georgia Gould

Wednesday 28th January 2026 Commons Chamber

[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.