SEND Provision

Matt Hancock Excerpts

Thursday 14th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Mr Walker]

The hon. Gentleman is right: that is definitely part of the challenge. I will try to come back to that later in my speech. The briefing that the Local Government Association has provided for the debate is very helpful in drawing attention to that. In the previous Backbench Business debate, Members from both sides of the House highlighted the need for earlier identification of need, and all the different organisations across local authorities, health and education that need resource and support to deliver that.

[Matt Hancock (West Suffolk) (Ind)]

The need for early identification is incredibly strong. There has been some progress towards it, and I congratulate the Minister for the strides that he has been able to make, but we cannot have a genuinely universal education system unless we have universal early identification of special needs, so will my hon. Friend welcome the fact that I have secured the opportunity to reintroduce my Dyslexia Screening and Teacher Training Bill, as a ten-minute rule Bill, on 23 April?

[Mr Walker]

I congratulate my right hon. Friend on securing that opportunity, and for all the progress that he has made in drawing attention to the needs of dyslexic children and identifying those needs early. He is right that we need to look at how we better support universal identification of need at an earlier stage. He will recognise that some conditions only show themselves over time, so it is important that there are the right interventions at every level to identify those needs and ensure they are properly met.

When we debate children missing school, as we often have in recent years, we often find it difficult to tell which are doing so because of unmet need. The work of the Children’s Commissioner, among many others, has highlighted that that is a major cause. When we debate rising levels of home education without the benefit of a much-needed statutory register, which the Government have now pledged to support, we find it impossible to tell how many of the rising number of cases are genuinely elective. My hon. Friend the Member for Meon Valley (Mrs Drummond) is sponsor of a Bill that seeks to address the issue, and I hope the whole House will support its Second Reading tomorrow. I welcome the fact that Opposition Front Benchers have already done so and I believe that the Government have as well.

Both those factors, as highlighted in the Education Committee’s report on persistent absence, point to the need for urgent action on SEND. The Government’s own Command Paper is also clear on that point. In fact, in preparing for this debate, I was struck by recent comments made by the Secretary of State at the Association of School and College Leaders conference:

“The massive demand, of more and more children diagnosed or even not diagnosed but have special educational needs, that’s something that I don’t think we’ve got the right system in place. If you look at special education needs, we haven’t built enough special educational needs places or schools. We have councils under pressure because families can’t get the right support that they need”—

a succinct summary of the nature of the challenge, which colleagues across the House will recognise all too well.

In that context, we need to consider the departmental estimates of the Department for Education, the £57.8 billion rising to £58.5 billion for the core schools budget, and the £82 billion rising to more than £100 billion overall in the supplementary estimate, as well as the £6.3 billion capital budget. Although it would be easy for a Government Member to point to those big numbers and trumpet what are without doubt record sums in cash terms for revenue funding, they do not tell the whole story.

The excellent House of Commons Library briefing prepared for this debate confirms both cash and real-terms growth in spending on high needs since 2015, as well as a faster trajectory of increasing need as identified by education, health and care plans. Within those numbers, it is to the credit of Ministers in this Government that the amount spent on high-needs funding has doubled in the past 10 years and has increased by more than 60% since 2019. That shows some recognition of the importance of investing in this space.

But it is also clear, as we debated on the F40—Campaign for Fairer Funding in Education—motion a few weeks ago, that revenue funding has not been sufficient to meet demand. Over the same period, the growth of EHCPs alone has more than doubled. The level of need demonstrated not only by the number rising from 240,000 nine years ago to more than 500,000 today, but by the complexity of conditions and the demand for specialist places to support highly complex pupils, has grown even faster. I am told that 180 children per day are being identified as having special educational needs.

For every child with an EHCP, as the hon. Member for Chesterfield (Mr Perkins) pointed out, many more are awaiting assessment or have their needs already met in public or independent schools without the need for an EHCP. Nevertheless, those children also need support. I do not intend to rehearse all the arguments for the early identification of support need, but that is a vital part of the argument.

Also to the credit of Ministers is the greater recognition in recent years of the need for more capital investment in SEND places. Even in the most recent Budget, the main capital commitment for school-age education was a further £105 million for 15 SEN free schools, delivering up to 2,000 specialist places across the country. I welcome that, but I observe that the calculation that just over £100 million can deliver 15 whole new special schools seems a challenging one. That gives a cost of £52,000 per place, compared with more than £86,666 per place in the calculations that the Government made only three years ago—before the impact of three years of high inflation for building costs.

--- Later in debate ---

[Matt Hancock (West Suffolk) (Ind)]

I begin by congratulating the new hon. Member for Wellingborough (Gen Kitchen) on an eloquent speech and on her “Visit Wellingborough” campaign. That campaign is just embryonic right now; I know that she was encouraging some in the House to join it a couple of months ago, but sadly, I could not do so. No doubt it will continue.

I note that before entering the House, the hon. Lady was an ardent fundraiser for many charities, including Sarcoma UK, a children’s hospice, a children’s health charity and the Salvation Army. I am delighted that she is taking such an early interest in special educational needs, a subject that is very close to my heart. I have just launched a charity, the Accessible Learning Foundation, to champion early identification of neurodivergent conditions. Maybe in the short time we will overlap in this House, she can teach me something about charity fundraising. I say “short time”, of course, because I am leaving, not just because—[Laughter.] I will leave that hanging. It was an excellent maiden speech: it was powerful, strong and clear, and did not go on nearly as long as the speech by the Chair of the Select Committee. By acting in that way, she will win many friends right across the House, and I congratulate her.

This is an important debate, because it is vital that we have stronger provision for special educational needs. I acknowledge and appreciate the work that the Minister has done on this issue and the progress that the Government have made. The Chair of the Select Committee was right to say that some of the promise of the 2014 Act that is the cornerstone of the legislative framework has been delivered on, but certainly not all of it. My particular focus is on the need for early identification. The argument is this: if we can identify special educational needs and neurodiverse conditions early, we can get the support in early, which is better value for the taxpayer as well as self-evidently better for the individuals concerned.

In particular, I want to take on and defeat the argument that identifying conditions leads to labelling, which some say makes the problem worse for an individual. That is not true—it is an antediluvian attitude that needs to be abolished from our policy approach. Having more information and data about each child is better for those children and their teachers. For instance, early identification of dyslexia by assessing the gap between a child’s phonic ability—already assessed in the early year 1 phonics test—and their oral linguistic ability is now easily doable using technology and artificial intelligence, which can automatically assess oral capability in a way that simply was not possible even a couple of years ago. Knowing about that gap can help a teacher support a dyslexic child in a way that can mitigate the challenges that dyslexia brings and give them the skills to deal with those challenges, so that they can benefit from all the rest of their education. That is not just in English—in reading and writing—but in all other subjects, which are of course built on reading and writing, especially those such as history that require significant amounts of language.

The argument that these conditions are somehow not scientifically valid and we should not identify them early has been put to me by officials in the Department, and most recently in The Times newspaper by the otherwise absolutely brilliant Matthew Parris, whom I love. He argued that he did not think attention deficit hyperactivity disorder existed, for instance. Those arguments are simply wrong, and should be destined for the dustbin of history. I urge the Minister to set out the further progress that has been made on early identification. The pilots are good and some schools are doing great work, but what we need in a universal education service is universal early identification of neurodivergent conditions, and the support that comes with that.

I welcome the fact that the Minister recently said that there is no rationing of education, health and care plans. That is important because some people worry that, because EHCPs are expensive to deliver, there is somehow an attempt to limit who gets them. The challenge, however, is that they are not fairly and evenly available. Because some parents can afford to pay for a formal diagnostics test for dyslexia, there is a social inequality in who gets access. Hence we need universal screening—not necessarily universal formal diagnosis, which is a more expensive process, but universal screening—so that we know who is more likely to be neurodivergent, and then the plans can be more properly and more fairly targeted. There are now proven, cost-effective early years interventions that we know work. They do not take up much time, and the time they do take up is more than well spent in being able to target better support. They are available online, and this needs to become a universal standard across primary schools in England.

One of the reasons why this subject is so important is what happens when things go wrong. We heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Ipswich (Tom Hunt) that we need to support neurodivergent children because of their ability to succeed. We know, for instance, that about half of successful entrepreneurs are dyslexic. We know that there are skills that dyslexic people tend to have in more abundance than straight-line thinkers, such as creativity, and we can understand why, because if someone has had to spend their whole childhood working out how to get around the fact that they are dyslexic, that will develop those parts of the brain that enhance creativity.

However, we should not just be Panglossian; there is a darker side to this. In our society, neurodivergent individuals have for far too long been let down, and we have a school-to-prison pipeline, much of which is due to the lack of early identification. For instance, statistics for 2016-17—I would be interested to know if the Minister has an update—show that children identified with special educational needs accounted for 46.7% of all permanent exclusions, despite making up under 15% of the school population, so almost half of those who are excluded from school are identified as having special educational needs.

[Munira Wilson (Twickenham) (LD)]

The right hon. Gentleman makes a powerful point about school exclusions. I should not have been shocked because the statistics are all out there for us to see, but last year when I visited Feltham young offender institution, just down the road from my constituency, I was told that the vast majority of young men in that institution have special educational needs and had been excluded from school. He is powerfully making the point that, if we do not invest early, we are storing up huge social and economic costs for ourselves.

[Matt Hancock]

That is absolutely right, and this issue unites colleagues from across the House. The Bill I will bring forward next month has cross-party support, and I urge the hon. Member to add her name to it. It has support from my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) all the way through to the right hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell), and it is not often that they sign the same piece of paper. If she will add her name to it, that would create a triangle of support across this House, which I would really welcome.

As the hon. Member said—in fact, she anticipated my very next point—the Ministry of Justice reports that 42% of incarcerated individuals had experienced exclusion from school, and we know that just over half of those in the male prison population have a primary school reading age. Addressing neurodiversity, identifying it early, ensuring there is the right support, and therefore reducing illiteracy and getting in support for the behavioural consequences of neurodivergent conditions will lead to fewer people in prison. It will also make sure that those who end up in prison, having been missed by the education system, get this support, and that will help to reduce reoffending. I am glad to say that the Lord Chancellor is on this and is making progress, and the Health Secretary made a huge amount of progress when she was prisons Minister, but there is much more to do.

Here is one concrete example of a new policy that I would propose, which I put to the Minister. The Ministry of Justice is currently rolling out digital profiles of prisoners, outlining their screening data and educational enrolments that are assessed on entry to prison, and ensuring that that data follows prisoners as they move from prison to prison. It is a very good initiative that was started under the previous Lord Chancellor and is being rolled out now. However, in the school system there is no automated data flow from primary to secondary school. Often, there are assessments early in secondary school, and that is good, but if there is screening data or an assessment of individual child need, there is no automated way for such data, with the richness of the data that can now be available, to be passed through to secondary school. Essentially, each child starts from a blank canvas, and it all has to be reassessed.

We need an accurate assessment of where a child is up to at the start of secondary school, but understanding their history as well would be valuable, so I ask the Minister to look at what the MOJ has done on data transfer—in its case, normally from initial prison to the longer-stay prison—for use in the transition from primary to secondary school.

[Mr Robin Walker]

It strikes me that my right hon. Friend’s suggestion about passporting information from primary has much wider applications. Something I have often observed in my work on the Education Committee is that there are problems when, for instance, primary schools build up a pupil’s ability in one language and then the pupil transfers to a secondary school that teaches a completely different one. Some form of passporting of data from primary to secondary through a pupil passport, not only for special educational needs but for learning, would be extremely useful in managing such transitions.

[Matt Hancock]

Yes, I am absolutely certain that this approach to data is more widely applicable. My focus is on this specific area, but there is now a richness of data on individual children that simply was not available 10 years ago or even five years ago, and I think that such passporting of data would be invaluable.

I agree with everything the Chair of the Select Committee said on the question of funding, so I will not repeat it. He has been the leader of the f40 campaign for many years. Suffolk is underfunded, as is Worcestershire, so I put in my plug, but I do not need to add any more details. The Minister knows them for sure.

I will close by saying that I appreciate the engagement the Minister has shown on this subject, and I look forward to meeting him in private in the next couple of weeks to continue this discussion. However, I would urge him to support early identification not just as a matter of social justice, not just as a matter of progress for each individual child and not just to ensure that each child can reach their potential, but, since this is an estimates day debate, because we will then spend taxpayers’ money on education more wisely and we will get better educational outcomes as a result.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

I would like to publicly congratulate Gen Kitchen on her fine maiden speech. Well done.