SEND Provision: East of England

Debate between Jen Craft and Jack Abbott

Tuesday 8th October 2024 Westminster Hall

[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.