SEND Provision and Funding

Matt Hancock Excerpts

Thursday 11th January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock (West Suffolk) (Ind)]

It is striking that there is such strong cross-party support for the motion moved by my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Sir David Davis). I congratulate him, and agree with every word of his speech. The Minister is a very smart man. I am sure that he will welcome the cross-party pressure, because he cares a lot about this subject, and it will help him in his battles within the Department and with the Treasury for the much-needed increase in funding in this area.

Suffolk is also a member of the f40. We are underfunded, even compared with Norfolk, which I can tell the House makes us in Suffolk feel particularly bad. Some 27% of the local funding formula is still based on 2017-18 spending, and because that was low in Suffolk, it is a drag anchor. While that drag anchor remains, it is explicit in the formula that the funding is unfair between different counties. That needs to be fixed so that counties such as Suffolk get fair funding. Despite the very tight funding, Suffolk County Council works incredibly hard. There are some excellent examples of best practice—for instance, at St Mary’s in Mildenhall, Exning Primary School and others that I have visited—but they all suffer terribly from the very tight funding.

In addition to the points that have been made already across the parties, I want to put a slightly uncomfortable truth on the table. Having served in the Department, and elsewhere in Government, I think I know a bit about what is going on. The challenge is that when EHCPs were introduced in 2014, they improved the system by making statementing more consistent across the country, but that did not resolve the fact that ultimately the budget is limited. I want the budget to be bigger, but however big it is, it will always be limited, so it is also about how the budget is allocated.

Thus far, we have had a discussion about how the budget is allocated between different counties and regions, led—he was rather humble about it—by my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr Walker), who was not only part of f40, but is f40 and has led f40. We have also discussed who individually gets a diagnosis, and therefore who gets an EHCP. Here there is a bigger social injustice that needs to be named and then dealt with: the silent scandal of access to diagnosis. I come at the issue from the point of view of dyslexia. I am dyslexic and it is the area that I am most expert in; until recently, I was vice-president of the British Dyslexia Association.

A study in November by the London School of Economics found that 15% of children with specific learning difficulties are in the most affluent decile and 6% are in the least affluent. That cannot reflect reality. It is simply not true that 15% of those in the most affluent decile have specific learning difficulties, and only 6% in the most deprived. The truth is—this is just a fact of life—that in the most affluent decile are parents who can pay the £600 for diagnosis outside the state system, and more parents who are articulate and able to fight, and go to their MP and to the council to make their case, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Rossendale and Darwen (Sir Jake Berry) does for his child. That means that there is an unjust allocation of diagnosis within the system, with relatively too much diagnosis among those in the upper echelons of the demographic scale, and relatively too little for those who are less well off. That is unfair. Ultimately, that is an affront to universal education.

I believe in universal education because it underpins universal equality of opportunity in this country. However, what leads to the disparity we see in the data of who gets a diagnosis is if we say, “You can have universal education, but if your child has a special need, you can pay £600 to get them identified, which will make it more likely they will get the EHCP, and therefore much more state money following them. If you don’t have the £600, or the wherewithal to find one of the many brilliant charities like Evelyn’s that helps you get it, you will not get that extra money and therefore the extra support”. That is harder to fix than just asking for extra money because it implies that, in one part of the income distribution, too many people are getting a diagnosis. That is the uncomfortable truth. The fact is that there is not enough diagnosis, early identification and funding, but, crucially, there is also an inequality in the diagnoses that lead to the EHCPs.

I founded a charity—the Accessible Learning Foundation —to try to champion that need for early identification and support. That is how much I care about the issue. I know the Minister cares about it as well, and I hope that he will address the point about the distribution of access and who gets identified, as well as the overall level of funding, because both need to be fixed.