Asked by: Oliver Heald (Conservative - North East Hertfordshire)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps her Department is taking to support the King James Academy in Royston following recent flooding and the loss of its roof.
Answered by Damian Hinds
The department is working with The Diamond Learning Partnership Trust, the responsible body for the school, to return pupils to face-to-face education as soon as possible. The trust is considering using alternative teaching sites and whether to install temporary facilities on the existing site. A loss adjustor from the Risk Protection Arrangement scheme is carrying out a site assessment on 12 January 2024. The department will discuss next steps with the trust once the outcomes from the site assessment have been received.
Asked by: Oliver Heald (Conservative - North East Hertfordshire)
Question to the Department for Education:
What steps his Department is taking to increase the number of places on medical courses available to undergraduates.
Answered by Michelle Donelan
The government is committed to ensuring that the number and distribution of medical school places are in line with England’s workforce requirements and continues to monitor the effectiveness of current arrangements.
Applications for medicine and dentistry made by the June deadline increased by over 20,000 this year compared to last year for all domiciles. We have increased the medical and dentistry caps so that providers can take on more students and we have run a brokerage scheme to help move over 80 students at oversubscribed providers into unfilled places.
In addition, we are providing up to £10m in grant funding for providers to take on more students in high-cost subjects, such as medicine, dentistry, nursing and other lab-based courses.
Asked by: Oliver Heald (Conservative - North East Hertfordshire)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment she has made of the effect of the closure of Nascot Lawn Health Centre on the provision of short break facilities in Hertfordshire for disabled children with complex health needs; and if she will make a statement.
Answered by Robert Goodwill
The Government recognises the great value of short breaks, which provide a valuable range of opportunities for disabled children and their families, and that all possible steps should be taken to reduce the impact that services ending has on disabled children and their families. Since 2011, local authorities have been under a duty to provide a range of short breaks services and to publish a local short breaks services statement showing what services are available, and how they can be accessed.
We recognise the value of local authorities working with partners wherever possible to support and expand short breaks provision. Clinical commissioning groups have a responsibility under section 3 of the NHS Act 2006 to commission health services to meet the needs of their population, including those of the children and young people for whom they are responsible, to a reasonable extent. The Mandate on which NHS England operates also includes the expectation that the NHS will reduce the health gap between people with mental health problems, learning disabilities and autism and the population as a whole, and support them to live full, healthy and independent lives.
To support local authorities in meeting their duties, we made available £800 million in grants between April 2011 and March 2015, plus £80m of capital funding to support new projects. Responsibility for short breaks provision rests with local authorities, but the Department for Education has offered support and challenge to help make sure they meet their statutory requirements, have funded innovative grants that promote best practice for delivering services, and continue to consider how we can best support local authorities who are working to deliver sustainable short breaks provision.
The Government is able to oversee how much local authorities have planned to spend on short breaks provision through authorities’ annual section 251 returns. In Hertfordshire local authority spending on short breaks for disabled children increased between 2014/15 and 2015/16 (the latest figures available), from £5,563,492 to £6,105,010.
Asked by: Oliver Heald (Conservative - North East Hertfordshire)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether home educators are permitted under her Department's guidance to receive help from education authorities (a) through the SEN budget and (b) for looked after children, through the pupil premium; and what financial help is available to guardians who wish to home educate children with SEN.
Answered by Edward Timpson
Local authorities can use the high needs block of the Dedicated Schools Grant to fund provision for home-educated children, where it is appropriate to do so. Guidance is available from the Department of Education on funding provision for home-educated children.
As set out in the ‘Special educational needs and disability code of practice’[1], where local authorities and parents agree that home education is the right provision for a child or young person with an Education, Health and Care (EHC) plan, then the local authority must arrange the special educational provision set out in the plan.
In cases where the EHC plan gives the name of a school or type of school where the child will be educated and the parents decide to educate him or her at home, the local authority is not under a duty to make the special educational provision set out in the plan, provided it is satisfied that the arrangements made by the parents are suitable.
Where parents choose to home educate children who have special educational needs but do not have EHC plans, local authorities should work with parents and consider whether to provide support in the home to help the parents make suitable provision.
The presumption is that looked-after children should access full-time learning in an education setting that best meets their needs. In the exceptional circumstances where a decision is made to home educate a looked-after child it would be for a local authority’s Virtual School Head, who is responsible for promoting the educational achievement of looked-after children, to decide how pupil premium funding should be used to support the young person.
Where a child’s carer has a special guardianship order, that person would have full parental rights over the child and would therefore be entitled to whatever home education support the local authority would normally provide to a parent, as described above.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/elective-home-education.
Asked by: Oliver Heald (Conservative - North East Hertfordshire)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, if the Government will take steps to maintain the schools budget and per-pupil spending in Hertfordshire.
Answered by Sam Gyimah
At a time of difficult financial decisions for the country, we have made a conscious choice to prioritise spending on education. We will continue to protect the schools budget, and will ensure that the funding schools receive increases as pupil numbers increase. In 2015-16, we added £390million to the budgets of 69 local authorities considered to have been unfairly funded in previous years, including £11.3million of additional funding for Hertfordshire.