Special Educational Needs and Disabilities: Specialist Workforce

Helen Hayes Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd March 2023 Westminster Hall

[Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Sharma. I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea West (Geraint Davies) for securing this important debate on the specialist workforce for children with special educational needs and disabilities. I pay tribute to all the all-party parliamentary groups that work in that area for their important contribution in gathering evidence and raising concerns. I am grateful to every hon. Member who has spoken today.

We have heard a remarkable consensus this morning on the dire situation that faces many families with a child with SEND, on the rapid growth in need, and on the urgency of the need for more support. My right hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) highlighted the link between unmet need and mental health referrals, school exclusions and school non-attendance. He rightly highlighted concerns about the significant unmet need and the trauma experienced by children and their families who live in initial accommodation for asylum seekers across the country.

The hon. Member for Hastings and Rye (Sally-Ann Hart) pointed to the impact of the pandemic in worsening speech and language delay. I recognise that issue from my constituency, but it is being raised by primary schools across the country. She also highlighted the important innovative technique of auditory verbal, which, as other hon. Members said, can be delivered at low cost and used by parents and non-specialists, as well as specialist support staff in schools.

The hon. Member for Worcester (Mr Walker), the Chair of the Education Committee, spoke about the importance of intervention in the early years. My hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) emphasised the significant impact of long delay on families’ ability to access support, and the vital work of teaching assistants, who often go unrecognised and under-rewarded. We also heard from many other colleagues, and there is wide consensus on the subject.

There are 1.5 million children with SEND in the UK. The number of children on an education, health and care plan is up by 50% since 2016. Those with SEND are overrepresented among pupils eligible for free school meals, black pupils and looked-after children. The support for many children with SEND is insufficient. Parents often have to battle for a diagnosis, then they battle again for support, often multiple times at each stage of their child’s education.

I pay tribute to everyone who works with children with SEND: speech and language therapists, SENDCOs, specialist teaching assistants, educational psychologists, specialist teachers of the deaf and of visually impaired people, and many others. It takes dedication and commitment to train as a specialist, who often act as the gateway to the whole of a child’s education. The work of SEND specialists is vital, but it often goes unseen and unrecognised.

Research from the Disabled Children’s Partnership is damning. In response to a recent survey, seven out of 10 parents said that their disabled child’s health had deteriorated because of lack of support. Only one in three disabled children have the correct level of support from their education setting. Only one in seven families have the correct level of support from social care, only one in five have the correct level of support from health services, and only one in five felt that they received the support needed for their child to fulfil their potential.

That overall context disguises a huge diversity of need. SEND needs include autism, ADHD, speech and language delay, vision impairment, hearing loss, foetal alcohol syndrome, cerebral palsy and Down’s syndrome. That means that detailed workforce planning is required. There must be staff working in mainstream education and health settings who can identify and diagnose additional needs as soon as they are evident, available support in every school for children with needs that occur commonly, and specialist support available to draw down for low-prevalence conditions when they occur.

Securing a specialist workforce matters. For mainstream settings to be truly inclusive, teachers must have knowledge of and access to a broad range of specialist skills. Recently, I visited a secondary school and met the brilliant team who support children with special educational needs. Their care and commitment to every single child was inspiring, but they spoke about how hard it is to obtain a diagnosis for children whose needs had not been fully identified earlier in their education because of a shortage of educational psychologists.

Specialist support is vital to keep children in school. Children with additional needs are over-represented in the data on school exclusions and in alternative provision. Ensuring the right support is available can help to avoid exclusions, but for 13 years the Government have failed to plan for the SEND workforce. The number of specialist teachers of the deaf has declined by 19% since 2011, and there are more than 67,000 children on the waiting list for speech and language therapy. There are simply not enough therapists to meet the need. There is a national shortage of educational psychologists, with 70% of local authorities having to rely on agency staff.

Behind those sobering figures are children—children whose needs are not being met, who are unable to access education, whose mental health is declining because they are not properly understood at school, and who are simply disengaging from education. Alongside each child are parents and families—parents who spend hours each week fighting for support, who are being called at work to pick up their child from school, who are suffering the distress of knowing their child is unhappy and not fulfilling their potential, and who, like the parents I met in my constituency recently, feel that they need to give up work so as to educate their children at home.

The shortage of professionals and the lack of support result in unacceptably poor outcomes for children with SEND. The Government recently published their response to the SEND and alternative provision Green Paper. The Opposition welcome the fact that the Minister has listened to Labour’s call for a focus on the early years. Identifying children’s needs early is vital, and the evidence is clear, but the Government have not said how they will build SEND diagnosis and support into an early-years sector that is fragmented and diverse, and within which nurseries in particular take widely varying approaches to inclusivity.

Families who have a child with SEND find it hardest of all to find suitable childcare, but allocating more money to a broken childcare system without reform, as the Government have announced this week, will not deliver a step change in the availability of SEND support, particularly as 5,000 childcare providers have closed since 2021.

The SEND and alternative provision improvement plan has the aim of reducing the number of EHCPs through improving support in mainstream schools, but the Government have not set out a clear plan to achieve it. There is no overall workforce plan. Meanwhile, the Government are expanding the number of special schools, which are needed, but there is weak data on which types of school are needed, and where, and no detailed plan to improve the inclusivity of mainstream schools.

A fundamental weakness of the Government’s approach is that it is characterised by pilots, rather than a national roll-out, and progress is set to be far too slow. Much of the plan will not come into effect until 2025 or 2026, leaving families to continue to struggle in the meantime, and more children going through the whole of their education journey without the support they need.

Children with SEND and their families need a workforce plan to deliver the support they need, wherever they live in the country. A Labour Government would work with professionals and families to deliver a SEND system that works for every child.