SEND Provision and Funding

Keir Mather Excerpts

Thursday 11th January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Keir Mather (Selby and Ainsty) (Lab)]

I congratulate and thank the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Sir David Davis), a constituency neighbour of mine, for securing this debate on such an important subject. He is quite right to point out that the resources available for children with additional needs in our part of Yorkshire are under immense strain, and I look forward to working with him on a cross-party basis to improve provision for those in our area who desperately need it. He painted a bleak picture of SEND provision nationally, with local authorities’ high-needs funding deficit predicted to reach £3.6 billion by March 2025. It is clear that we are failing in terms of both the quality and the quantity of provision across the country.

It is important that we think about the lives of the people I come across every day who are wrapped up in this failure: the child prevented from realising their full potential by a system that works against them; the parents trapped in a seemingly endless cycle of pushing disjointed agencies and authorities, often trapped in their homes with little respite; and finally the overworked and under-resourced service providers, who are forced to paper over the cracks of a broken system—a system that appears to be failing everyone in my local area who tries their best to engage with it in difficult circumstances. Those who operate our services are nobly trying to do more with less to meet the needs of a growing number of children with additional needs, but meeting this growth in demand is simply not possible without increased resources. Refusing to recognise the resource crisis in this sector is an unparalleled false economy, and insufficient emphasis on intervention at the early years foundation stage stores up huge cost pressures further down the line. That is evident in the nationwide data on this issue.

Across the country, the number of children with SEN who are either excluded or waiting for a school place has risen by 29% in the past three years. That is the consequence of not facing up to the challenge of proper funding and refusing to take the hard choices to do the right thing to provide sufficient support for these children and their families. The national figures are compounded by the particularities of the area I represent. In Selby and Ainsty, our rurality, as the right hon. Gentleman mentioned, our poor public transport infrastructure and the wealth inequality that we see across our constituency create challenges of provision that are harder to crack on a public policy level, but also make the experience of living without provision more isolating and overwhelming for the parents and children affected.

In the Selby district, SEND provision is not just in a rut; it is truly in freefall. As I said in my maiden speech, parents have to suffer through the uncertainty of sending their children to travel in taxis for hours a day to attend schools in Scarborough or Harrogate. Those children are often exhausted and stressed. Non-verbal autistic children are unable to communicate the sheer scale of the stress that such journeys create for them. Any reasonable person in my constituency can see that the situation cannot continue.

I am glad that the Department for Education has engaged constructively with me on this subject. I thank the Minister personally for his efforts to do so, but I would like to push a little further on a few specific points that I have raised previously. First, though I concede that the phase-in period for a Selby SEND school must be well managed, I press the DFE to make every effort possible to explore efforts for temporary accommodation uplifts in the intervening years before the school is opened and to ensure that these temporary places are extended to many local children as quickly as possible. I am sure that the Minister can understand the frustration of local parents, who have already been waiting half a decade for the school to open. In the first year, only 40 students will be accommodated, in the second year it will be 75, and the school will only reach its full complement the year after. That means that by the time it reaches full capacity, it will have been almost a decade since funding was first allocated by the DFE. Maintaining options for temporary accommodation throughout this process will be crucial.

I remain resolute in my conviction that every child in the Selby district, regardless of their needs, has the right to a world-class education in a well-funded British school. I will keep fighting to make that a reality, and I once again thank the Minister for his engagement and the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden for securing this crucial debate.