SEND Provision

Debate between Clive Betts and Richard Burgon

Thursday 5th September 2024 Westminster Hall

[Mr Clive Betts (in the Chair)]

Order. Please can Members leave quietly?

[Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Ind)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered SEND provision.

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Betts. I am delighted to have secured this debate and to see such a packed Westminster Hall. I start by thanking all the parents and campaigners who have rightly put this issue high on the agenda, all the organisations that have provided briefings for MPs, and of course all the MPs here in a packed Westminster Hall.

Nearly 50 MPs have applied to speak today; I cannot recall anything like that for many other Westminster Hall debates. I hope that the Government and all those with a say over the parliamentary agenda take note and ensure time for a much longer debate on this vital issue very soon. This is an essential debate. The crisis in SEND provision is one of the biggest messes left by the previous Government—one that the new Labour Government will have to start to clear up quickly, as SEND needs are likely only to increase. That will require a radically different approach from the one currently failing so many children.

We cannot have this debate today without acknowledging how the crisis was deepened by an austerity agenda that tore up much of the social fabric that once would have offered pupils and their families much of the support needed. That dangerous idea has hollowed out councils’ budgets and severely restricted the services that they can provide. It has caused long-term harm to the NHS, including huge waiting lists for assessments and massive backlogs in mental health services. It has placed unbearable pressure on schools, which are asked to do more and more with fewer and fewer staff and resources. It has caused key public workers to leave due to stress, simply impossible workloads and low pay, further weakening services.

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[Mr Clive Betts (in the Chair)]

Order. A lot of people are down to speak, so please keep interventions brief.

[Richard Burgon]

My hon. Friend makes his point well and passionately. He is correct; that is what parents and people who work in our schools have been saying to me.

I will highlight some of the most appalling statistics. More than half of SEND pupils have been forced to take time out of school due to a lack of proper provision, and some children are missing years of schooling. Two in three special schools are at or over capacity; there are 4,000 more pupils on roll than the reported capacity. There are eye-watering delays for children to get their education, health and care assessments and plans, and fewer than half of the plans are issued within the 20-week legal limit.

Nearly a third of parents whose children have special needs have had to resort to the legal system to get them the support they need, and many have spent thousands of pounds to do so. Seven out of eight teachers and 99% of school leaders say that SEND resources are insufficient to meet the needs of our children, according to National Education Union and National Association of Head Teachers staff surveys. Councils face huge SEND deficits, which now stand at £3.2 billion but are expected to reach £5 billion by 2026. The core £10,000 sum that special needs schools receive on a per-pupil basis has been frozen since 2013, despite spiralling inflation. That cost them hundreds of millions of pounds last year alone. I could go on and on, but that alone is a damning indictment of the system.

Child neglect is defined as:

“the persistent failure to meet a child’s basic physical and/or psychological needs, likely to result in the serious impairment of the child’s health or development.”

That is what this failure is, and we should be deeply angry that children are being neglected in such a way.

The SEND crisis is part of the wider crisis in education. There are too few teaching assistants, too few educational psychologists, too few special school places, and Sure Starts have been closed. All that and more means that schools are unable to provide the support that children need. It means that effective early interventions are not possible; that can deepen children’s needs with the result that they require more costly support. When schools face such difficulties, talk of bringing more children into mainstream schools, rather than specialist provision, is just empty rhetoric. All that is exacerbated by national curriculum changes, a much more rigid, prescriptive focus to learning and a greater emphasis on performance measures that simply do not provide the flexibility needed for genuinely inclusive education. We cannot solve this crisis by looking at the SEND system in isolation; we have to consider the wider education system as a whole.

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[Richard Burgon]

My hon. Friend makes that point very well on behalf of his constituents in the Wirral, and I completely agree. What a trauma! It is trauma piled upon trauma, as parents are forced through this adversarial system, with all they are going through, struggling to get the best for their children—and the best is what our children need and deserve.

I suspect that the blame game of unfairly calling parents “pushy” was all part of a strategy by some in the last Government to blame the system breakdown on too much demand for special education provision and to claim that that demand must somehow be suppressed rather than met. I fear that those who promoted that view could even have been looking to water down the legal entitlements of children with education, health and care plans. Our new Government need to ensure—as I am sure they will—that that demonising of parents is challenged.

To conclude, the dire picture I have painted today is not inevitable; the system can be fixed and children can get the education they need and deserve. That requires improvements in SEND training for teachers, and special educational needs co-ordinators having time to focus on doing their job. It requires many more support staff in school, which means proper pay. It requires changes to the curriculum and to the way in which our education is so focused on tests and league tables, which means that there is pressure to off-roll SEND pupils. It requires genuine early intervention, including the restoration of Sure Start. It requires the scrapping of the safety valve scheme and the writing-off of local authority debts. And, of course, it requires cash. I note that the f40 group believes that the high needs block alone requires an additional £4.6 billion a year just to prevent the crisis from getting worse.

I know that many hon. Members want to speak today. I am delighted that the new Education Secretary has recognised that there is a crisis in SEND provision, because the first step in solving a crisis is to recognise that there is one. I hope that this exercise—going into this debate, continuing through this debate and following this debate—can be part of getting a grip and turning the page on a situation in which so many children are not getting the support and education they deserve in order to fulfil their potential for a happy life, which is something all our children deserve.

[Mr Clive Betts (in the Chair)]

Obviously, a lot of Members want to get in. We have 40 minutes, so I am going to impose a time limit of three minutes. Please do not take more than one intervention, because that lengthens the time. Interventions should be to the point; they should not be speeches. If you make an intervention, you will not get called to speak as well. Off we go: I call Dr Neil Shastri-Hurst.