SEND Provision

Munira Wilson Excerpts

Thursday 14th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[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.

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[Munira Wilson (Twickenham) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for West Suffolk (Matt Hancock). I agreed with an awful lot of what he said, particularly his point about early diagnosis and not being afraid to attach a label to things, because that equips parents and teachers to support a child appropriately. Even if that does not necessarily mean additional funding is needed, it is about making sure that we all have the right tools in our armoury to support a child.

I congratulate the new hon. Member for Wellingborough (Gen Kitchen) on her maiden speech, and I look forward to seeing her around—I hope for many more months and years to come.

I also congratulate the Chair of the Education Committee, the hon. Member for Worcester (Mr Walker), on securing this important debate. I was very happy to sponsor his application for it, given the desperation and exasperation felt by so many parents of children with special educational needs and disabilities up and down the country. As he said, we heard from Members from both sides of the House in January in a well-attended debate secured by the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Sir David Davis). They told harrowing stories that they learned of from their constituency casework, and in some cases from personal family experiences. Sadly, his plea for more immediate support in the Budget fell on deaf ears, although the longer-term commitment to build a few more special schools was welcome, and I will say a little more about that later. The insufficient funding for SEND has a visceral impact on vulnerable children and their families, but it is also one of the most pressing financial issues facing local authorities around the country, many of which are on the brink of bankruptcy. I shall focus my remarks on that issue, rather than repeating points that I made in the debate in January.

Since March 2021, the Department for Education has made safety-valve agreements with the 34 local authorities with the highest dedicated schools grant deficits, and a further five are in the pipeline. The Department is working with an additional 55 local authorities through its “delivering better value in SEND” programme, so we are not far off having 100 local authorities already engaged with the DFE because they are struggling with funding for SEND. That number will continue to rise because, as has repeatedly been said in the House, the available SEND funding simply does not match the need. Ultimately, many of these programmes are sticking-plaster solutions that will not address the longer-term underlying challenge, because local authorities are already predicting and modelling significant deficits in years to come, beyond the lifespan of some of these agreements.

It is worrying that so many local authorities are already involved in these mechanisms, but more worrying still is the number of local authorities using the statutory override. Introduced in 2020, the override allows local authorities to exclude any deficits in their dedicated schools grant spending from their main revenue budgets. In effect, it allows local authority to proceed with an imbalanced budget without requiring a section 114 notice. That provision had been due to expire in March 2023 but has been extended for a further three years and will end in March 2026, yet there seems little prospect of local authorities being able to manage these deficits down in such a short space of time without a great deal more Government support.

Are we just waiting for a deluge of section 114 notices when the statutory override expires? The Select Committee on Levelling Up, Housing and Communities certainly seems to think so. In its recent “Financial distress in local authorities” report, it concluded:

“The Government’s use of the statutory override and one-off ‘safety valve’ funding are temporary measures and do not address the underlying mismatch between demand, costs, and annual Dedicated Schools Grant funding”.

It added:

“the sector faces a cliff-edge of section 114 notices.”

There is no information on what will happen when the statutory override concludes. A cynic might suggest that this Conservative Government, who are clearly on their last legs, are happy to kick this thorny issue into the long grass for the next Administration to grapple with. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s answer to this problem, which is already keeping many council leaders awake at night, even if he hopes that this will be somebody else’s problem.

As for those local authorities that are in safety-valve agreements, are the Government keeping their side of the bargain? I have spoken before about the lack of SEND school places and the costs that can lead to; for example, children may be placed in private equity-backed schools that charge exorbitant fees and rip off taxpayers, and there is also the additional cost of transporting SEND children outside the local area. It behoves the Government to set up new SEND schools and create new places, and although the Government have promised 15 special schools in their Budget, as we have heard, their track record on delivery is poor. As the Chair of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for Worcester, pointed out, it is an open question whether the funding announced will allow the promise to be met.

We are told that we can expect these schools to open in three to four years. Frankly, I will believe it when I see it, because just last week it was reported that building work on 33 new special schools that will particularly help children with autism was seriously delayed, despite the expectation that they would be up and running by 2026. The response from the Department for Education was that it never set that target date. Councils are trying to take matters into their own hands, but the Government approved fewer than half of the 85 applications from councils to open SEND free schools in 2022.

Local authorities trying to meet the requirements of their safety-valve agreements will be significantly hindered if the new SEND places promised by the Government are not forthcoming. The day-to-day impact that the delays will have on mainstream schools must not be underestimated. I hold a termly call with all the chairs of school governing bodies in my constituency. My discussions with those governors and with local headteachers regularly feature SEND, as I am sure the Minister can imagine, and in particular the massive impact on staff, other pupils and school budgets of ensuring that children with high needs who are waiting for an EHCP or desperately searching for a special school place are adequately supported. One local school told me of teaching assistants being bitten, and quitting as a result. When that happens, it exacerbates the workforce challenges that many of our schools face. The school was concerned about how to keep other pupils safe, and was spending a large amount of money trying to support a child who clearly should not have been in a mainstream school. The mainstream school cannot claw that money back once the child finally gets an EHCP and a special school place.

These delays are exacerbated by a desperate shortage of educational psychologists and speech and language therapists. I agree with the comments about making sure that we have those people in place to support the early identification that has been talked about; these professionals are integral to the system. We must address the chronic shortage of speech and language therapists and educational psychologists if we are to provide any sort of timely assessment. Scandalously, one school in my constituency said that it had the budget that it wanted to spend on speech and language therapy, but it had to hand the money back because it could not find anyone to deliver the support, and it was a “use it or lose it at the end of the financial year” budget.

I come to the final issue that I want to raise. I heard about this just last week from a Shropshire councillor, and it strikes me as a real anomaly, and waste in the system that Ministers could easily address without spending more money. I was told that a statement of special need issued in one nation of the UK cannot be passported to another. If a child with an EHCP in England moves across the border to Wales, that EHCP is not recognised, and vice versa, and the parents have to join a waiting list and start the process again from scratch. The situation is the same in Scotland. That will also have an impact on children coming into England. They are being reassessed for EHCPs, as the statements they received in Scotland or Wales are not recognised. At a time when resources are being stretched to breaking point, this lack of passporting is surely nonsense. The help and support that a child requires in one nation of the UK is surely the same in the next. I hope the Minister will take this issue away and seek to resolve it. As always seems to be the case with SEND, it is the children and their families who suffer the most. They wait forever to get the help and support that they need, and families often have to fight hard for their child’s rights.

I am afraid that the Government are letting down children with special educational needs and disability. I hope that even if Ministers choose to ignore those on the Opposition Benches, they will listen to Back Benchers from their party, given that so many Conservative Members chose to sign a letter to the Chancellor asking for more SEND funding. We all know the statistics, and know that there has been a huge increase in the number of children with special educational needs. I recognise that presents enormous challenges for national and local government, but although those statistics are important, we must never forget that behind every statistic is a child who is directly affected—a child who, like every other, deserves the very best start in life, because every child, no matter their background or needs, can achieve great things.

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[David Johnston]

My hon. Friend makes some important points. The honest truth is that I just do not think the Labour party thought it through. I think they thought it was ideology that would please a particular wing of the party, but they did not think through the fact that it would hammer families with a child in a special school, trying to get their needs met, with an additional 20%. We will see what those families think about that policy.

[Munira Wilson]

I thank the Minister for giving way, because I actually support quite a lot of what he is saying on this issue. Just in the last couple of weeks, I have come across two or three families that have children with lower levels of additional needs that do not warrant an EHCP who have gone into state mainstream schools and really struggled. Those families told me that they scrimped and saved to get their child better support in a mainstream, but smaller and more nurturing, private school. In one case, a mother had inherited a little bit of money from a parent that she was then able to invest. She said to me that so many children will not have that opportunity. We should not penalise parents who want to make that choice to support their children with special needs. That is why the Liberal Democrats will also oppose putting VAT on private school fees.

[David Johnston]

It is not often I say this, but I entirely agree with the hon. Lady, and I hope we can work together. The Labour party believes in the myth that everyone who puts their children into these schools is wealthy and can afford the 20% increase, but, as the hon. Lady says, often people are just trying to get the right support for their children. Whether they can secure an EHCP is not within their control—all sorts of factors are involved—and it is completely unacceptable to hammer those families with another 20% on the cost of trying to meet their children’s needs.