SEND Provision

Toby Perkins Excerpts

Thursday 14th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Mr Robin Walker (Worcester) (Con)]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. I am grateful to colleagues on the Liaison Committee and the Backbench Business Committee for supporting my application for the debate and giving it the prominent position that it has today. I thank all those who supported the application. I note that it is an unusual subject that brings together the right hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell), my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Sir David Davis), and the hon. Members for Twickenham (Munira Wilson) and for Strangford (Jim Shannon). Not all of them can be here today, but I know that each has passionately supported the case for more and better targeted investment to support children with special needs. I warmly welcome the hon. Member for Wellingborough (Gen Kitchen) to the Chamber. It is greatly to her credit that she has chosen to make her maiden speech on this subject; I look forward to hearing it.

There have been many debates on the importance of special educational needs and disabilities in the House over the past few years, so this is not new ground, and I make no apology for that. There have been Green Papers, a Command Paper, and the excellent Backbench Business debate under the auspices of my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden, which was so well subscribed. It is no surprise to me that today’s debate is similarly well supported across the Chamber. I do not intend to repeat all the arguments from the previous debate, in which 30 Members spoke. I hope that the Minister will take them all as read in his response.

In my casework as MP for Worcester, and in the evidence that I have seen as Chair of the Education Committee, there is a consistent trend of schools at every phase and of every variety struggling to meet the rising level of SEND, of families struggling to get the needs of their children properly met and supported, and of children with SEN too often being home educated, not as a result of genuine elective home education but as a result of their parents feeling that there is no other way in which their needs can be supported. We have heard this at the Education Committee described as “non-elective home education”.

[Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)]

The hon. Member has secured a really important debate. One big problem that comes across strongly in Derbyshire is the lack of capacity within the local authority to do the assessment. Many schools are supporting parents and their special needs children, but are unable to get assessment for months or even years. How big an issue does he think that local authority resources are in all this?

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Walker]

My hon. Friend puts it perfectly, and I wholeheartedly agree with him.

The logic behind the Government’s welcome increase in investment in childcare, which I have strongly supported, applies just as much, if not more, when it comes to supporting children with SEND. If we get this right, there are benefits for the life chances of the individual and of the family who support them.

[Mr Perkins]

rose—

[Mr Walker]

I will not give way because I need to make progress.

I have lost count of the number of highly educated parents who have felt that they needed to give up work to support their children. An increase in the departmental estimate to support SEND children would repay itself in the future earnings of their parents and would help the Government to meet their worthy aspiration of halving the disability employment gap and ensuring that work pays for future generations.

I should acknowledge some welcome local progress. In Worcestershire, two new specialist settings for children with autism have opened in the past few years: the one mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for West Worcestershire (Harriett Baldwin), and one in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Wyre Forest (Mark Garnier). The county council is in the process of commissioning a new secondary school with a specialist autism base in Worcester. We have seen expansions in the number of pupils supported at both Regency High School and Fort Royal Community Primary School in Worcester, and we have seen improvements in the opening of new settings in alternative provision. An exciting partnership between Heart of Worcestershire College and the National Star college in Cheltenham promises better local progression opportunities for further education students with SEND. Our university prides itself on being one of the most inclusive in the country.

The demand on all our settings is rising insatiably. Fort Royal in particular has seen a huge increase in severity among the population of pupils it serves. That has led the school to seek agreement with the county council to reduce its intake so that it can ensure that pupils with highly complex needs are properly and safely supported. The principal of the school has recently written to local politicians to highlight that and the risk of local needs not being met by 2030. Will the Minister look at that correspondence and consider carefully the need for small specialist provision in Worcestershire, particularly at primary level? I have over many years made the case to move Fort Royal Community Primary School—a brilliant school on a highly constrained site—to a location where it could grow and expand.

I also want to raise the concerns of respite settings such as New Hope Worcester, which provides vital support to SEND families during the holiday. New Hope has seen a reduction in the number of places that it is commissioned to provide. Parents from that setting have raised with me their concern that more support is urgently needed for respite care, which helps to ensure that their children can engage in specialist education and avoids the far greater cost of children being taken into homes. Although that support comes from the budget of the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities rather than the DFE, we need to acknowledge the importance of cross-departmental working to better support need.

The Local Government Association’s helpful briefing for this debate, which I have touched on already, majors on that issue and makes a number of constructive recommendations. It calls for a cross-Government strategy for children and young people, arguing that DLUHC should co-ordinate capacity issues impacting on children’s social care, SEND and the early years. The LGA wants councils to have the powers to lead local SEND systems, and hold health and education partners to account for their work supporting SEND children and young people.

The LGA calls on the Government to use the SEND improvement plan to recognise the vital interconnection between SEN and mental health. Children and young people with learning difficulties are over four times more likely than average to develop a mental health problem. That means that one in seven of all children and young people with mental health difficulties in the UK will also have a learning disability. The report points out that good-quality early years provision can generate sustained and significant improvements in children’s outcomes, reducing disparities in later life, but neither councils nor early years providers feel that they have sufficient funding, resources and tools to properly support children with SEND and their families.

This morning, I attended the excellent briefing by the Children’s Services Development Group on the launch of its “Hopeful Horizons” report. Among the key recommendations of that report are urgent clarity on the banding and tariffs arising from the new national standards, and speeding up the building and registration of new services. The group pointed out that independent specialist advisers have a wealth of knowledge and want to work closely with the Government to make the process a success.

It is good to see the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell) in her place. I look forward to hearing her proposals for ensuring that any future Labour Government address SEND funding and provision better than they have in the past. I expect her to point to her party’s flagship policy of imposing VAT on independent schools as part of the solution for providing the resource to meet needs. However, having heard many of the uses to which Labour wants to put that theoretical money, I am at a loss to see how any of it would provide the revenue or capital needed to better support SEND children.

In fact, in our last debate on this issue, in which no Labour Back Benchers spoke, we heard from the hon. Lady’s colleague that Labour does not plan to exempt specialist settings from its tax grab—only pupils in independent settings with an EHCP. I profoundly believe that that is a policy mistake that Labour would come to regret if it ever carried it out. Many pupils with SEND are supported either by their families or by local authorities in independent provision, including many highly specialised schools, and a small proportion of those pupils currently have EHCPs.

The decision to make that, and solely that, the gateway for avoiding a 20% increase in costs would create enormous and immediate demand for EHCPs, which local authorities and health structures are already struggling to provide in a timely manner. It could result in many pupils with SEND leaving, or being taken out of, settings that are currently meeting their needs and then seeking EHCPs in order to access settings that might. I do not believe that Labour has thought this policy through, or that it has factored into its calculations that £86,000 per place for public provision.

The DFE estimates show rising spend on public education and schools and, within that, a rising level of investment in high needs. All of that is welcome, but not sufficient. In 2014, this House legislated to better support the needs of SEND children, and as the Government themselves have acknowledged, the potential of that legislation has not yet been realised. I hope Front Benchers of whatever colour will reflect on the need for future estimates to better support this vital and worthy cause.

In conclusion, I will support the departmental estimates, because they provide record levels of funding for education in general and SEND in particular, but I believe there is a strong case for increasing both capital and revenue investment in the latter.