King’s Speech

Lord Jamieson Excerpts

Friday 19th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jamieson (Con)]

I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Malvern, on her new role as a Minister and her excellent maiden speech. I also come from a family of teachers, although I managed to escape and become an engineer. I also congratulate my noble friend Lady Monckton of Dallington Forest for her excellent maiden speech. I need to declare that I am a councillor in Central Bedfordshire.

Yesterday, we debated planning and place, which is a key role for local government. This Government have said that their priority is growth. However, the pressures of children and adult social care are overwhelming local government and removing the bandwidth and resources for it to develop great places to live and work. This will also be one of the key long-term contributors to addressing social care, with short-term pressures overriding what is best in the long term.

I welcome the earlier comments from the noble Lord, Lord Addington, which pre-empted some of my comments on SEND—the major topic of my speech. The current SEND system is not fit for purpose: it is hugely expensive yet delivers poor outcomes. While the 2014 educational reforms were largely positive for mainstream education, they appear to have had unintended negative consequences for SEND.

Since 2014, we have seen a more than doubling of children with EHC plans to over half a million. Costs have increased at an even faster rate, yet there has been no discernible improvement in outcomes. If anything, they have got worse, with the achievement of level 2 of pupils with SEND declining faster than the average and with no improvement in employment outcomes.

We have moved to an exclusive rather than inclusive system, with more pupils attending specialist schools—often some distance from where they live—increasing numbers of specialist placements and more home education with bespoke packages. Schools find themselves lacking resources and specialist support for SEND pupils, hence are incentivised to seek an EHC plan to get more resources or offload high-resource pupils. Parents seeking support for their child find that this is not available and can be achieved only through an EHC plan. Local authorities have the responsibility but neither the resources nor the levers to support SEND pupils, leading to rationing. There is a lack of capacity in mental health support. We lack educational psychiatrists, speech and language therapists to deliver what is needed. We have a legal framework that encourages an adversarial and legally based approach, rather than one focused on children and collaboration. In short, we have a system with perverse incentives that is leading to a vicious circle.

Things can be done differently, as happens in a few parts of the country where the current system has not yet broken down. There are many examples in Europe. We need a system where inclusion is the norm for the majority of parents; where schools do not need an EHC plan to get the support that they need; where local authorities have not just the responsibility but the resources and the levers to deliver; and where there is a clear understanding from all parties on what support to expect and what will be delivered. We need a system that does not require resorting to a legal process and has a clear focus on delivering outcomes. This will not be easy, not because it is technically and financially difficult but because there has been a complete breakdown in trust in the system. Everyone is seeking to protect what they have because they do not trust the system. This mould needs to be broken, on a cross-party basis.

I welcome the proposals in the gracious Speech to require all schools to co-operate with local authorities on school admissions, SEND inclusion and pupil planning. I welcome that there will be specialist mental health support in all schools. However, this is not enough. I urge the new Government to move forward with the proposals in the previous Government’s SEND review. I also urge the new Government to engage seriously with local government. The Local Government Association and the County Councils Network are shortly to publish a report on SEND and have written to the Secretary of State for Education with a number of very sensible recommendations. Those should be taken up because, without change, we will fail children and bankrupt councils.