SEND Provision: Local Authorities

Liam Conlon Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd March 2026 Commons Chamber

[Georgia Gould]

It is really important to say to families that we are expanding their support and their rights. There will be new legal duties on schools to develop these new layers of support, which will mean that support is available earlier.

[Liam Conlon (Beckenham and Penge) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Member for Dorking and Horley (Chris Coghlan) for securing this debate. It is so important that the lived experiences of parents are valued by local authorities and other services, and too often they are not. In 2023, two of my constituents, Jo and Chris, tragically lost their son Leo to suicide. Leo was a bright, intelligent, inquisitive child. He was also neurodivergent and struggled with his diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder. He is featured in the Times article that the hon. Member mentioned. The coroner’s report into his death found that he had been failed by multiple agencies over a sustained period. The hon. Member kindly reached out to Jo and Chris to learn more about what happened to Leo and the lessons that could be learned, and I am really grateful to him for doing so. Will the Minister agree to meet me, so that we can ensure the voices of parents like Jo and Chris are given the weight that they deserve?

[Georgia Gould]

I thank my hon. Friend for sharing that tragic story. Of course I would be willing to meet him to discuss it further. These are stories of failure, and we need to do better for these families and change things. We need a system in which every school is set up to support children with special educational needs and disabilities. We are making it mandatory for every teacher to be trained to support children with special educational needs and disabilities, investing directly in schools to provide that support and setting out new national standards and new accountability for schools.

The hon. Member for Dorking and Horley made a really important point about families still being able to apply for specialist support. Any individual who feels that their child is not getting the support they need through the targeted or targeted-plus offer will be able to have a needs assessment. If they are unhappy with the needs assessment, they will be able to go to the tribunal to challenge that decision, so there will be individual redress in the system.

But it cannot just be for individual families to hold the system to account, because that is the system we have at the moment, with families having to take on legal battles, and for those who do not have the resource, it is not possible to do that. We in the Department for Education and Ofsted have to hold institutions to account. We are really clear that we will provide more support for councils—we are supporting them with 90% of their deficits—but with that support comes much stronger accountability.