SEND Provision and Funding

Laurence Robertson Excerpts

Thursday 11th January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Mr Laurence Robertson (Tewkesbury) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to take part in this very important debate, and I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Sir David Davis) on securing it.

I have two special needs schools in my constituency: Alderman Knight School—I should declare that my wife is a governor of it—and the Milestone School. They provide the most amazing care and education for children with special needs. Specifically, Milestone provides for children with far more complex needs, while Alderman Knight provides for those with a range of difficulties.

One of the problems we have in Gloucestershire, as has been said about other areas, is a lack of special school places. Estimates put that figure at about 330 places short across the county. The problem is that because they have been given places on appeal, 100 children have had special school places awarded to them, but no places have yet been found for them. That is a very big difficulty that both the schools I mentioned have raised with me.

Alderman Knight was built 10 years ago for 120 pupils, and there are now 235 pupils on its roll. That puts a big strain on the school itself, and it also means that class sizes have increased. The problem with that for special schools is that as the class sizes get bigger, they tend to lose what makes them special, which is something they are very concerned about.

Such schools are obviously very concerned about their budgets. As has been said, the formulas for calculating the cost of educating children in special schools is outdated and does not work, especially when children require a one-to-one situation. It simply does not enable the schools to provide that kind of care. The problem is that even if they could find extra teachers and even if they could recruit them, they could not actually afford to do so because of their budgets.

All this means that the schools are under great strain, but it also means that as places are not found for some pupils who should be educated in special needs schools, they end up in mainstream schools. It has always been the case that an awful lot of pupils with special needs are educated in mainstream schools, which have coped magnificently for very many years with many of those pupils, but some of those pupils should actually be in special schools, not mainstream schools, and such schools tend to struggle to provide the kind of care and education that their pupils need. They also have problems with funding, because the formula they depend on is outdated and not accurate, so they have a similar problem. We have a big and growing problem.

As mentioned by right hon. and hon. Members, we have a problem with the overall funding formula. Gloucestershire has traditionally been lower funded. I do not know why, and no Minister in any Government has ever been able to persuade me of the reasons for that or the need to continue with such a situation. I am aware that a few years ago, because of pressure from f40 and many of us in this Chamber, the formula was improved, but by no means has it been improved to the extent that it needs to be improved. I am not necessarily asking for more money from the Treasury; I am asking for the cake to be sliced up in a much fairer way and for the formula for calculating how much is needed to educate children with special needs to be reassessed and changed.

I think that each county or metropolitan area—however it is divided up—needs to carry out a full assessment of how many children have special needs and require places in special schools, and against that they need to assess how many places are available. If there is a shortfall, the Government must come forward with proposals for how that will be put right. We certainly need to assess how much it is costing mainstream schools to educate children with special needs and whether they are getting enough money. It is my submission that they are not, so we need to decide what we will to do about that.

I am not going to speak about EHCPs because that issue has been covered by several hon. Members. The only thing I would add is that it is not only the time it takes to get the plan that is the problem; the plan also needs to be reassessed as the child progresses through schools. Quite often, that takes far too long, so the child does not get the care they need and they do not then get the money following those new assessments.

There are lots of issues, but I only have a very short time, so I want to finish by paying tribute to the special schools not only in my constituency, but across Gloucestershire. We had something of a battle many years ago to save special school provision in Gloucestershire, and I am glad we did because such schools carry out the most fantastic work. However, we do need to reassess the situation, and we need to make sure that those schools can carry on serving what are very special children.

[Several hon. Members rose—]