Oral Answers to Questions
Jen Craft Excerpts(2 weeks, 3 days ago)
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Catherine McKinnell
My hon. Friend is right to raise the priority of ensuring that children with special educational needs and disabilities are accommodated in mainstream schools with their friends whenever possible. We are ensuring that training is available from the earliest possible stage so that those in the workforce can teach children with SEND, and that educational psychology services are there to help schools to make any changes that are necessary. We want to work in partnership with the sector to secure the best outcomes for every child.
Jen Craft (Thurrock) (Lab)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Stephen Morgan)
Ensuring that parents have access to affordable and high-quality childcare is a priority for this Government. We will focus on greater opportunities for every family to access early education, and on greater opportunities for children to thrive and develop. As an initial step, we have announced the bidding round for the first 300 school-based nurseries from next September.
Jen Craft
Many early years providers struggle to meet the needs of children with SEND. Lack of funds, lack of training and lack of specialist staff often mean that those that do provide a good or excellent service quickly become over-subscribed. What steps is the Department taking to reassure parents and carers of children with SEND that those children will have access to the childcare or early years provision in their areas that meets their needs?
Stephen Morgan
We are helping members of the workforce to develop the skills and confidence that will enable them to work effectively with children with SEND, and reviewing early years funding arrangements to ensure that they meet the needs of those children. I should be happy to meet my hon. Friend or visit her constituency to understand the issues that her local providers are facing.
SEND Provision: East of England
Jen Craft Excerpts(1 month, 2 weeks ago)
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Jen Craft (Thurrock) (Lab)
I thank the hon. Member for Lowestoft (Jess Asato) for securing this important debate.
The SEND system is in chaos. It is broken. I am the parent of a disabled child and I have seen first hand the damage and chaos wrought by 14 years of chronic underfunding, understaffing, and a lack of political will to understand the level of need, coupled with the stigmatisation of parents of SEND children when we fight for the educations our children deserve. How do we fix the system? How do we go back to getting what our children need? I believe that an education system that works for SEND children is one that works for all our children. Educational need and disability should not be seen as parallel to the education system; they should be absolutely central to it. If we get it right for our children, we get it right for every child. Secondly, a SEND system built around the lived experience of parents and carers, which comes at it from the perspective of a parent or a carer, has absolute success built in. I do not see my child’s journey through education in stages; I do not see early years, primary school, secondary school, further education and beyond as separate. My child’s journey is a lifelong one. Similarly, I do not look at the services that she requires in silos, nor do any parents of an SEND child.
To fix the system, we need to come at it from the basis of considering what the child needs from the moment that they enter the education system, whether that is in a pre-school setting or nursery setting, through to the moment that they leave the system. How have we created a successful individual who can go into the world and achieve their full potential?
At the moment, so many parents find themselves at a complete loss and in desperation because of the chaos of the system. They have to be all things to their child and they never get a chance to just be mum or dad. They have to be a speech and language therapist, an advocate, a physiotherapist and an educational psychologist arguing for an education, health and care support plan that is often absolutely impossible to obtain.
Our system needs an awful lot of work. We need to begin this journey and consider how we can properly deliver for children not just in our region—the east of England—or in our individual constituencies, but across the country.
Jack Abbott (Ipswich) (Lab/Co-op)
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Lowestoft (Jess Asato) for securing this important debate on a subject close to my heart.
Although the SEND crisis is a national issue, the devastating testimony from colleagues from across our region shows that hundreds if not thousands of families in Suffolk have been failed by this deep-rooted, unrelenting issue. The failure is not only structural but cultural, and it is not new. I have campaigned alongside families and campaign groups for many years and have battled to get them the support they need. There is nothing as heartbreaking as a parent breaking down in tears as they beg for help for their young child, exhausted and broken by a system that works against them, rather than for them.
In Suffolk, we have seen the same cycle over and again. There have been multiple versions of the damning Ofsted/CQC report. I say gently to the hon. Member for West Suffolk (Nick Timothy) that it was not the first report, but the third in less than a decade. Warm words and hollow promises of change and improvement follow, yet little change ever comes. The lived experiences of families across our county have not improved, and in many cases have worsened.
As I highlighted in my maiden speech, five years ago, after yet another damning report on SEND provision in Suffolk—the one before last—our local newspaper, the East Anglian Daily Times, carried a hauntingly memorable front page with the faces of children and families across Suffolk who have been badly let down by a failed system, accompanied by the headline, “We must be heard”. That simple plea has gone unanswered time and again.
I could give many examples to highlight the crisis in SEND provision in Suffolk, but in the short time I have I want to focus on school exclusions. It was absolutely right that the new Secretary of State for Education, Bridget Phillipson, has made driving up school attendance a priority—if a child is not in school, they cannot learn—but too often our education system fails to meet the needs of many children with SEND, and in the worst cases they are removed entirely.
Over the summer, the Department for Education released the latest school exclusion figures from English schools for school year 2022-23. Once again, they showed an increasingly familiar, and therefore increasingly alarming, trend across the east of England, in particular Suffolk. In our county this year, children with special educational needs received all but one of the primary school permanent exclusions.
Jen Craft (Thurrock) (Lab)
I want to reflect what my hon. Friend has said on the amount of school exclusions for SEND pupils, and to state that parents often feel pressured into off-rolling their children—that is, into removing them from the education system—so as not to have what is known as a permanent exclusion on their record. In fact, a permanent record does not exist, and never has in this country; it is a work of fiction. However, a number of parents feel that they have no option other than to remove their children from the education system so that they do not face further penalties for having absent children when they should be at school.
Jack Abbott
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The statistics I am reading just scratch the surface. We know there are many more families who have had to make the difficult decision to homeschool their children not out of choice, but out of necessity, because they feel they have no other option.
To finish my point, in state-funded primary schools in Suffolk, fixed-term exclusions were 30 times more likely to go to a child with SEND and an EHCP than to a child without. I should add that our county’s fixed-term exclusions are, once again, some of the highest in the country—an unwanted and shameful record of inaction and indifference. Across all age groups in Suffolk, permanent exclusions are more than six times as likely, and fixed-term exclusions more than five times as likely, to go to a child with SEND.
While I am encouraged by the intentions of the new Government with respect to SEND provision, I join Members present, along with so many others, in reiterating that the challenge is enormous and must not be underestimated. Like families across Ipswich, I know there is no overnight fix for years of failure. What those families expect is a clear, credible plan with measurable defined goals for SEND provision, and not the half-baked, half-hearted SEND review that was finally dished up after much delay by the previous Government.
SEND Provision
Jen Craft Excerpts(2 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Westminster Hall is an alternative Chamber for MPs to hold debates, named after the adjoining Westminster Hall.
Each debate is chaired by an MP from the Panel of Chairs, rather than the Speaker or Deputy Speaker. A Government Minister will give the final speech, and no votes may be called on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
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.
Jen Craft (Thurrock) (Lab)
My hon. Friend mentions the staffing crisis in the SEND system, but I want to note that there is also a crisis in recruitment and training for teachers of the deaf. From my experience, I know that is a key role for a number of deaf children, particularly in my constituency. There is a real crisis in back-filling those positions and recruiting across councils, particularly at a unitary level. The need for teachers of the deaf is not reflected in those coming through the system, which often results in children not having the resource and help they need to succeed in school.
Richard Burgon
My hon. Friend is exactly correct, and I am delighted that she has put on record the contribution of teachers of the deaf and the situation in terms of their recruitment.
The current situation is working for no one; not for children, not for parents, not for teachers, not for children without SEN and not for local authorities. The last Government’s approach pitted parents against local authorities, and they failed to take responsibility. That has created a completely adversarial system, with ever more cases going to tribunal—there were 14,000 cases last year alone, up fourfold since 2014. Parents win in 98% of cases, but it is exhausting and often traumatic for them, as well as a complete waste of money.
Even then, the right support often does not follow. At times, that is due to local authorities being cut to the bone and their lack of effective mechanisms to hold schools to account, especially since academisation. Of course, that is only the tip of the iceberg, as so many parents simply do not have the time, energy or money to undertake legal action. The Government have a duty to end that blame game by addressing the root causes of the crisis: the failed policies that got us here.
As I draw to a close, I want to make a point about increasing attempts to shift the blame to parents, with stories blaming so-called pushy parents, a former Minister accusing parents of abusing the SEND tribunal scheme, and other powerful people calling for parents to make fewer demands.