Asked by: Sharon Hodgson (Labour - Washington and Sunderland West)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, with reference to the SEND and Alternative Provision Improvement Plan, published on 2 March 2023, whether her Department plans to confirm the status of pre-existing legislation in areas where National Standards are to be trialled.
Answered by Claire Coutinho - Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero
The new National Standards will build on the comprehensive legal framework relevant to children and young people with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) by clarifying what good evidence-based provision looks like, who is responsible for securing it and from what budgets.
Through the SEND and Alternative Provision Green Paper, the department has identified how important it is that National Standards are evidence-based and that children, young people and their families are able to feed into the development process. We are setting up a steering group of cross sector representatives, that will include parent-carer representatives, to oversee the development of standards. We will test the National Standards in the context of our £70 million Change Programme to ensure they are iterated and set up for success.
The development of the National Standards may require updates to both the legislation on SEND and to the SEND Code of Practice. The department will publish the National Standards in full for consultation.
Asked by: Sharon Hodgson (Labour - Washington and Sunderland West)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, for what reason her Department found that (a) national standards were required to underpin SEND provision and (b) that existing legislation including (i) the Equality Act 2010, (ii) the Children and Families’ Act 2014 and (iii) the SEND Code of Practice were not fit for purpose.
Answered by Claire Coutinho - Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero
The Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) and Alternative Provision Green Paper highlighted that early identification of needs and provision of support does not happen consistently across the system, despite the best efforts of the workforce. The inconsistency means that parents, carers and providers do not know what to reasonably expect from their local settings, resulting in low confidence in the ability of mainstream settings to effectively meet the needs of children and young people with SEND.
National Standards will set out clear expectations for the types of support that should be ordinarily available in mainstream schools, who is responsible for securing it and from which budgets. This will give families and providers clarity and confidence in the support that is ordinarily available, reducing reliance on Education, Health and Care (EHC) plans to access support.
The department has a comprehensive legal framework relating to support for children and young people with SEND. At the heart is the Children and Families Act 2014, the related statutory guidance and the Equality Act 2010. The guidance can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/send-code-of-practice-0-to-25.
We will build on this foundation through the introduction of National Standards to help guarantee a more consistent level of support for those with SEND, no matter where in England they live.
The department is setting up a steering group of cross sector representatives, that will include parent-carer representatives, to oversee the development of standards. We will also test the National Standards in the context of our £70 million Change Programme, to ensure they are iterated and set up for success. The development of National Standards may require some updates to SEND legislation and the SEND Code of Practice. We will publish the National Standards in full for consultation.
Asked by: Sharon Hodgson (Labour - Washington and Sunderland West)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps her Department plans to take to ensure that mainstream education settings (a) support learners with SEND and (b) spend adequate amounts of funding on students with SEND.
Answered by Claire Coutinho - Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero
In the Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) and Alternative Provision (AP) Improvement Plan, the department has set out the mission for more children and young people with SEND to have their needs met effectively in mainstream settings, reducing reliance on education, health and care plans to access support.
The department will improve mainstream education through setting standards for early and accurate identification of need, and timely access to support to meet those needs. The standards will include clarifying the types of support that should be ordinarily available in mainstream settings, who is responsible for securing the support and from what budgets.
Head teachers working directly with children and young people in schools and colleges are best placed to make decisions on how much to spend on the additional support their pupils and students need. To help mainstream schools in making those decisions, local authorities are required to identify for each school in their area an amount as a notional budget, within their overall budget allocation, for the costs of support for their pupils with special educational needs, up to £6,000 per pupil per annum.
Asked by: Sharon Hodgson (Labour - Washington and Sunderland West)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, if her Department will take steps to ensure schools and local authorities receive adequate funding for delivering outcomes for children and young people with SEND.
Answered by Claire Coutinho - Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero
The department is committed to ensuring that children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) receive the support they need to realise their potential.
Overall schools’ funding increased by £4 billion in 2022/23 compared to the previous year and will rise by a further £3.5 billion in 2023/24. The total high needs funding for 2023/24 amounts to £10.1 billion, an increase of over 50% since 2019/20, supporting children and young people with complex SEND. Every local authority in England will see a minimum per-head increase of 9.8% in their total high needs allocations in 2023/24 compared to 2022/23.
Asked by: Sharon Hodgson (Labour - Washington and Sunderland West)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether she has undertaken a recent review of the early years practitioner (level 2): qualifications criteria.
Answered by Claire Coutinho - Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero
The early years practitioner (level 2) qualifications criteria were updated in 2018, and came into effect on 1 September 2019. The updates to the criteria were consulted on and following feedback from the consultation, the title of early years practitioner (level 2) was introduced to recognise the skill and knowledge of level 2 members of staff.
As part of the recent review of the early years educator (level 3) qualifications criteria, the department has improved the alignment between the two criteria, to improve progression from level 2 to level 3.
Asked by: Sharon Hodgson (Labour - Washington and Sunderland West)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what her Department's reason was for the delay in finalising its SEND improvement plan in the context of the announcement of the SEND Review being made in 2019.
Answered by Claire Coutinho - Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero
The Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) and Alternative Provision (AP) Green Paper, published in March 2022, set out a bold and ambitious plan to equip children and young people with the skills they need to succeed in later life. The department received almost 6,000 responses to the consultation, 162 from children and young people, and held or attended 175 events during the 16-week consultation period.
We recognise that meaningful and significant change is required to deliver a SEND system that allows every child and young person to reach their potential, regardless of where they live or what their needs are. We know that the pandemic disproportionately impacted children and young people with SEND, exacerbating the challenges that already existed.
My right hon. Friend, the Secretary of State for Education and I wanted to take time to listen to children and parents, as well as those working in the system, in order to get our next steps right. We wanted to understand the extensive feedback received through consultation, before publishing our full response to the green paper in the SEND and AP Improvement Plan in March 2023.
The Improvement Plan outlines the department’s approach to building capacity to achieve the behaviours and culture required for the successful implementation of these policy reforms.
Asked by: Sharon Hodgson (Labour - Washington and Sunderland West)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, if he will make an assessment of the potential merits of amending the SEND and alternative provision improvement plan, published on 2 March 2023, to include a commitment to provide staff training in assistive technologies to all schools.
Answered by Claire Coutinho - Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero
High-quality teaching is central to ensuring that pupils with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) are given the best possible opportunity to achieve in their education. The SEND and Alternative Provision Improvement Plan outlines the department’s approach to building the capacity to achieve the behaviours and the culture required for the successful implementation of these policy reforms.
To support all teachers, the department is implementing a ‘golden thread’ of teacher training reforms which begins with initial teacher training and continues into early career teaching, through to middle and senior leadership. These reforms are designed to ensure teachers have the skills to support all pupils to succeed, including those with SEND.
The department is expanding training to increase school staff confidence in using assistive technology (AT). Following the promising results of the initial pilot, we are extending assistive technology training to a further 150 maintained schools. The extension, known as the ‘AT Test and Learn’ programme, will teach mainstream school staff how to use AT effectively, with a focus on the technology schools already have available or can easily obtain, such as text-to-speech tools.
The department wants to build on the learnings from last year’s pilot, where participants reported improved awareness, understanding and confidence in using AT and assessing its effectiveness. By running the AT Test and Learn training over 6 months and commissioning a comprehensive impact evaluation, we will gain a more thorough picture of how AT training can support wider SEND training.
Asked by: Sharon Hodgson (Labour - Washington and Sunderland West)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps her Department plans to take to ensure local authorities fulfil their obligations to (a) existing legislation and (b) proposed National Standards on the provision of support to children with special educational needs.
Answered by Claire Coutinho - Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero
There are existing statutory duties on local authorities, education providers and others to plan and deliver services for children and young people with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND), including those in the Children and Families Act 2014 and the Equality Act 2010. The department holds local areas to account for meeting these duties and the needs of children and young people with SEN and/or disabilities, including through Ofsted and Care Quality Commission (CQC) inspections, academy trust funding agreements and support and interventions in local areas.
In the SEND and Alternative Provision (AP) Improvement Plan, published 2 March 2023, the department committed to a range of strengthened accountability measures to ensure effective local delivery against existing legislation and the proposed new National Standards.
In terms of inspection, this includes the new Ofsted and CQC Area SEND inspections, launched in January 2023, and a greater focus on SEND in the Ofsted education inspection framework. The recently published, Academies Regulation and Commissioning Review provides clear descriptors for academy trust strength. This year we will also develop a holistic intervention approach for local areas, focused on improving outcomes for children and young people with SEND or in AP. This will be based on evidence and data, including that in new SEND AP inclusion dashboards and the implementation of local inclusion plans, as well as inspection outcomes.
In addition, this year the department will review evidence of where statutory duties are met and not met across the SEND and AP system to inform our considerations of how we can better hold partners to account, should they fail to meet their statutory responsibilities.
Asked by: Sharon Hodgson (Labour - Washington and Sunderland West)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether the Government's commitment to ensure the ITT Core Content and Early Career Frameworks are up to date and fit for purpose includes an amendment to add specific reference to dyslexia to those frameworks.
Answered by Nick Gibb
The Department knows that quality teaching is the most important in-school factor in improving outcomes for all children, particularly those with additional needs. From September 2020, all new teachers have benefited from at least three years of evidence-based professional development and support, starting with Initial Teacher Training (ITT) based on the new ITT Core Content Framework (CCF), and followed by a new two-year induction underpinned by the Early Career Framework (ECF). These reforms support the Department’s ambition that all new teachers starting in the profession learn how to meet the needs of all pupils, including those with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND).
Both the CCF and ECF were based on the most up to date research into excellent teaching practice and have been independently reviewed by the Education Endowment Foundation.
All ITT courses and ECF-based training programmes are designed to support trainee and early career teachers to demonstrate that they meet the Teachers' Standards at the appropriate level. This includes the requirement in Standard 1, that teachers must set goals that stretch and challenge pupils of all backgrounds, abilities and dispositions, as well as Standard 5, that all teachers must have a clear understanding of the needs of all pupils, including those with special educational needs, and be able to adapt teaching to respond to those strengths and needs.
When launching the CCF and ECF, the Department committed to updating the frameworks as research progresses. The Department is reviewing and revising the ITT CCF and ECF into more closely combined frameworks which cover the first three years or more at the start of a teacher’s career and articulate what trainee and new teachers need to know and how to do it. The Department is building on what we have learned from the first few years of CCF implementation and ECF delivery and this will include identifying opportunities to improve how the frameworks can support new teachers to be more confident in meeting the needs of pupils with SEND, including those with dyslexia.
Asked by: Sharon Hodgson (Labour - Washington and Sunderland West)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent assessment she has made of the potential impact of food inflation on the ability of school meal caterers to deliver (a) hot, (b) freshly-prepared and (c) nutritionally-balanced meals.
Answered by Nick Gibb
The Department recognises the cost pressures that some schools and suppliers may be facing. The Department is holding regular meetings with other Government Departments and with food industry representatives, covering a variety of issues including public sector food supplies.
Following the 2022 Autumn Statement, schools will receive an additional £2 billion in each of the 2023/24 and 2024/25 academic years. The core schools’ budget, which covers schools’ day-to-day running costs, including schools’ energy bills and the costs of providing income-related free school meals (FSM), has risen from £49.8 billion in 2021/22 to £53.8 billion in 2022/23 and will continue to rise to £57.3 billion in 2023/24 and £58.8 billion in 2024/25. By 2024/25, funding per pupil will have risen to its highest ever level in real terms. These increases provide support to schools to deal with the impact of inflation on their budgets.
The Department is continuing to review funding to ensure that schools continue to be able to provide healthy and nutritious meals in schools. The funding for the FSM factor is increasing by 2.4% for 2023/24, in line with the latest available Gross Domestic Product deflator forecast when the National Funding Formula was published in July 2022.
Universal Infant Free School Meals (UIFSM) are funded through a direct grant to schools. In June 2022, the Government announced an increase to the per pupil meal rate in UIFSM to £2.41. This was backdated, recognising the cost pressures schools and some suppliers may be experiencing.
The standards for school food are set out in the requirements for school food regulations 2014 and are designed to ensure that schools provide children with healthy food and drink options, and to make sure that children get the energy and nutrition they need throughout the school day. Schools also have flexibility under the Standards to substitute food and regularly update and change menus. They may make changes if ingredients or meals are not readily available.
Schools are responsible for the provision of school meals and most contract with private sector caterers to manage this on their behalf. It is for schools and caterers to decide what is an appropriate portion and to balance the food served across the school week. Guidance to accompany the School Food Standards includes guidance on portion sizes and food groups.