SEND Provision

Mary Robinson Excerpts

Thursday 14th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Mr Walker]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for her intervention and for her campaigning to secure those vitally needed places in south Worcestershire, which I hope will benefit my constituents as well as hers. I want to more places delivered for autistic students in Worcestershire as swiftly as possible. That is being done through a combination of the provision that she has rightly championed and campaigned for, a new base in my constituency in a mainstream school—which the county council is commissioning—and the provision recently created for an AP, or alternate provision, school in the north of the county. There is some welcome progress there, but as I will touch on later, I do not feel that it is quite enough to meet need.

Back on that £2.6 billion, I have some concerns about the progress of that much needed capital investment. Careful examination of the supplementary estimates for the Department reveals a £300 million transfer from the capital to the revenue budget. I ask for reassurance that none of that has come out of the £2.6 billion originally targeted for investment in SEND. If any has, will the Minister tell us how much? Can he provide figures for how many places have been commissioned in each of the three categories set out in the 2021 spending review and how many more are in the pipeline?

From long experience and from my work on the Select Committee, I know that the DFE has routinely underspent its allocated capital, but at a time when the need for SEND placements is so high and we have the urgent challenge of RAAC—reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete—affecting many mainstream and specialist schools, I hope that the Department is protecting the precious investment that Ministers, including me and my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester (Will Quince), fought so hard to secure.

[Mary Robinson (Cheadle) (Con)]

I am grateful for my hon. Friend securing this debate and for his work on the subject. In Cheadle, we are welcoming a new £70 million SEND provision being opened at the end of this year, in September; 133 places will be provided there. Teachers and headteachers I have talked to are telling me that in their establishments and schools, they want more resource-based provision, which might involve capital investment. Going along with that as well, we have the problems mentioned earlier in securing the education, health and care plan. Does my hon. Friend agree that all those issues need to be addressed if we are to get the right future for our children?

[Mr Walker]

Yes, is the short answer. My hon. Friend sums up some of the challenges neatly.

I come to some of the recommendations of the Select Committee before touching in a little more detail on the local picture in my part of the world. During my time as Chair and under my predecessor, now the Minister for Skills, the Education Committee has held a number of sessions on SEND and the implementation of the 2014 reforms. In 2019, before my time, the Committee concluded that the reforms of 2014 “were the right ones” in principle, but that implementation had “been badly hampered”, notably by administration and funding, which at that time it called “wholly inadequate”.

The Committee also called for a more rigorous framework for local authorities; a direct line of appeal for parents and schools to the Department for Education; powers for the local government and social care ombudsman to investigate school complaints; and development of more employment and training opportunities post 16 for people with SEND. The Government pointed to their Green Paper and towards the Command Paper that was finally published two years later in response, but only the first and last of those recommendations have been fully addressed.

More recently, under the chairmanship of my right hon. Friend who is now the Minister for Skills, and his predecessor, the Committee held sessions and published correspondence in which SEND funding, and delays in processing it, have repeatedly been raised. I am grateful for correspondence in which Ministers have unequivocally confirmed that there is no push from the Government to ration or limit EHCP numbers, but I note that in his letter of October last year, the Minister on the Front Bench stated that

“in-year funding delays occur due to insufficient planning from local authorities”.

Will he update the House on what steps he is taking to address that and to ensure that every local authority has the resource and support it needs to plan properly in this space?

The vast majority of local authorities have high-needs deficits, which have been growing rather than shrinking in recent years. I have no doubt that my hon. Friend will talk about the valuable work that the Department supports through the safety valve and “Delivering Better Value” programmes, but the fact that those programmes are constantly growing, as is the cumulative deficit of local authorities, surely makes the case for more funding. At some stage, we have to acknowledge that producing ever more help to manage the level of deficits is not a sustainable solution, and that investment is required to clear or remove them. The high needs deficits are now compounded by the fact that the same local authorities have rapidly growing deficits in children’s social care and transport, limiting their potential to cross-subsidise.

The Government promised to introduce in their SEND and AP improvement plan a new national framework of banding and price tariffs for high needs funding, and more details were to follow later in 2023. I am not aware that that has been published, but my local specialist schools tell me that, although the total level of high needs funding has seen much-needed increases, and underlying per pupil funding has risen in real terms, the banding for specific conditions has not had an inflationary increase for over a decade. Given the rising costs of employing teaching assistants to support complex needs, surely that needs to be reviewed.

At every level of education, my Committee has made recommendations about SEND and encouraged the Department to do more to support SEND children and our families. In our childcare report, we recommended that the Government amend the early years foundation stage framework to ensure that more staff involved in a child’s care receive mandatory training in identifying and manging types of SEND. The Government rejected that proposal but stated that newly revised criteria for level 3 early years educator qualifications, alongside level 2 criteria, now include standalone criteria on SEND identification and practice. They also made welcome announcements about support for early years special educational needs co-ordinators, and partially accepted our recommendation to expand family hubs—although, to be clear, I believe that they can and should go further.

Absence rates are significantly higher for pupils with SEND. In our report on persistent absence, the Committee recommended that the Government prioritise resources for early identification of need, inclusion and assessment in mainstream schools to ensure that they can adequately support pupils with SEND. We recommended making attendance in specialist schools a key metric of success, recognising both the support that having children in such settings provides families and the developmental benefits to the child. The Committee also recommended that the Government ensure that pupils with SEND are placed in alternative provision only for a limited time and as a way of addressing issues affecting their attendance in mainstream schools. The DFE should discourage its use as a way of managing behaviour.

The Department for Education said in its response that it is working with 32 local authorities and testing approaches in schools to improving early identification of SEND-related conditions. Additionally, it is piloting early language support for every child, jointly funded by NHS England, to have speech and language professionals based in early years primary schools to spot early delays in development and take swift appropriate action. Pilots are great, but we need that support everywhere in the country.

For our recent report on Ofsted’s work with schools, we heard that lack of expertise among inspectors was seen by specialist schools as a particular problem. The report recommended that Ofsted ensure that the lead inspector always has expertise relevant to the type of school, and that a majority of members of larger teams have the relevant expertise. We recommended that factors, such as the number of students from disadvantaged groups and those with SEND, should be clearly described and visible in the final Ofsted report. We hope that that will be reiterated both to the new chief inspector, through his “Big Listen” consultation, which was launched last week, and to the Government.

Evidence to our careers inquiry suggested that pupils with SEND were not receiving adequate careers advice and guidance, and highlighted that they face additional barriers and need extra support to access the same level of careers education and opportunities as their peers. The Committee recommended that the Department set out the steps that it intends to take to ensure that all SENCOs are fully trained and working with career leaders or with a school or college.

The Committee has welcomed the increased focus on supported internships and apprenticeships targeted at SEND pupils, but as we highlighted in our post-16 qualifications report, too many SEND pupils are being held back by the focus on GCSE grade 4 for English and maths as a gateway to progression. We have also agreed in principle to look into the Government’s changes to disabled students’ allowance to ensure that the consolidation of that system does not lead to a reduction in opportunities for SEND students to progress into and sustain higher education. That matters because we know that pupils with special educational needs are a rising proportion of the school population. Their life chances matter just as much a everyone else’s, and their parents’ ability to work, support them and live a full life depends on their receiving the right support through childhood, in school and into early adulthood.