SEND Provision and Funding

Vicky Ford Excerpts

Thursday 11th January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Vicky Ford (Chelmsford) (Con)]

I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Sir David Davis) for bringing this important debate on SEND to the Chamber.

Before I speak about SEND let me say that some young people and children have been sitting in the Gallery in different groups throughout the debate. I would like to say how incredibly proud I am of our nation’s children and how incredibly proud they should be of themselves. Today our children rank 11th in the world for maths and 13th for reading. I do not know whether they are year 13s, but if they or any children watching today are in year 13, I can tell them that when they started school in reception, they were 27th in the world for maths and 25th for reading. It has been a massive change.

I fundamentally believe that every child should have the right to a world-class education, because that education is what will give them the freedom to make choices about what they do with their future. Every child should have that choice, and that is why special educational needs children are so important. We should ensure that they have those choices, too. No child should be left behind; they should have the right support, opportunities and places.

The high-needs budget has doubled since 2015, so it is not fair to say that there have been funding cuts—it is not true—but there has also been a significant growth in demand. As Children’s Minister during the pandemic, I know that the toll the pandemic took on children, not just in this country but globally, breaks my heart. We know that it took a big toll on those children who were already known to have SEND, but it also meant that more children present today with special educational needs than in the past. Part of that is to do with the early years, which are so crucial to a child’s development, particularly their communication and education skills. Very young children missed out on those crucial three years.

When I visited a primary school in my Chelmsford constituency last term, I was told that 50% of the children in their reception class are not properly toilet trained. That is a massive change. Other primary schools have told me that they see more reception and year 1 children presenting as somewhere on the autistic spectrum, as well as with some ADHD needs, but because they were not assessed earlier or given more support in the early years environment, they have arrived at school without support that could have helped them cope more easily with mainstream schools. I have been working with Essex County Council and some of my schools to see what we can do about that. There is clearly a backlog in assessing children. Could we, for example, encourage or do more with educational psychologists to see whether they could see more children? We know we have a shortage of educational psychologists, and they are in great demand, but could they be seeing more children in the time they have? I am sure we could do more with specialist hubs within mainstream schools, which are key—where they work, they work really well.

Anecdotally, I am concerned about the rise in children being put on part-time timetables, especially those who may not yet have an EHCP. Part-time timetables should only be used for a very short time. I wonder whether there are some systemic social issues that are impacting on young people’s mental health—in particular, some have pointed out to me a suggested link between an increase in online gaming, poor mental health and non- attendance at school.

I wanted to mention school attendance, because it has been in the press a lot this week with the new statistics showing that the proportion of students that are persistently absent from schools has more than doubled. As colleagues have pointed out, where children have unmet SEND needs, that can lead to them missing school because they face issues with attendance. There can be good reasons why children with SEND sometimes have higher rates of non-attendance than others, but we need to make sure that their needs are met.

That is not a new issue this week, however. The Department for Education has focused on it and produced new guidance, “Working together to improve school attendance”. The Select Committee also produced a detailed report, the No. 1 recommendation of which was that that guidance should be made statutory. Before Christmas I presented a private Member’s Bill to the House, the School Attendance (Duties of Local Authorities and Proprietors of Schools) Bill, which will do two things: it will make that guidance statutory and it will require local authorities to support families, schools and children with their attendance.

Within that guidance there is the understanding that children with special educational needs need bespoke support and that that support needs to be carrots, not just sticks and fines. I hope that every single Member of this House will get behind my private Member’s Bill as one of the things we should be doing to support children with their attendance, including making sure that more children with SEND get the support they need.

--- Later in debate ---

[Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)]

I congratulate the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Sir David Davis) on securing this important debate, and I thank the Backbench Business Committee for allocating time. I pay tribute to the teachers, support staff, educational psychologists, speech and language therapists and all who work with children with special educational needs and disabilities.

I am grateful to every right hon. and hon. Member who has contributed to today’s debate. We have heard heartbreaking stories from across the country of the desperate situations facing the families of children with special educational needs and disabilities, and we have also heard about the impact on local authorities and professionals of a system that simply is not working. The sheer number of contributions this afternoon speaks to the magnitude of the issue and the depth of the crisis.

We have heard from the hon. Members for Worcester (Mr Walker), for Mansfield (Ben Bradley), for Tewkesbury (Mr Robertson), for Hastings and Rye (Sally-Ann Hart), for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Steve Tuckwell) and for Aylesbury (Rob Butler), and from my right hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) and my hon. Friend the Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Ruth Cadbury), about the funding crisis in SEND.

We have heard from my hon. Friends the Members for Harrow West (Gareth Thomas) and for Selby and Ainsty (Keir Mather), and from the hon. Members for Gedling (Tom Randall), for Twickenham (Munira Wilson) and for Bracknell (James Sunderland), about the pressures on school places.

We have from the right hon. Members for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes) and for West Suffolk (Matt Hancock), and from my hon. Friends the Members for Leeds North West (Alex Sobel), for South Shields (Mrs Lewell-Buck) and for York Central (Rachael Maskell), about the terrible battles that parents face.

We have heard from the hon. Members for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous), for Bracknell, for Waveney (Peter Aldous) and for Torbay (Kevin Foster) about the intolerably long waits that families face for diagnoses and EHCPs.

We have heard from the right hon. Member for Rossendale and Darwen (Sir Jake Berry) and my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Olivia Blake) about the intense shortage of staff to support children with special educational needs and disabilities. We heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery) and others about the financial impact on families of a system that cannot deliver the support that they need.

After 13 years of Conservative Governments, the system of support that children with SEND and their families rely on is beyond breaking point. Far too many families of children with SEND face a battle for the support their children need. It is often a battle that has to be fought many times over throughout a child’s life: a battle for recognition and diagnosis in the early years; a battle for support in primary school; another battle to find the right secondary school and ensure that support is put in place; and a further battle to secure a place in further or higher education.

The consequence of this failing system is heartbreak for families; precious children being made to feel that they are the problem; and, ultimately, attainment of children with SEND going backwards. That leaves families increasingly reliant on going to the courts to get the support to which their children are entitled. It cannot be and is not right that the Government’s failure to provide an efficient courts system is now rationing access to the entitlements children have. We each get only one childhood, and support delayed is support denied.

This issue should be an urgent priority for the Government. The current system is failing children and their families, and it is an increasingly prominent factor in the number of councils issuing section 114 notices—in effect, declaring bankruptcy—because they can no longer balance their budget. This issue is on the national risk register for the Department for Education. So what has been the Government’s response? They delayed their SEND review, first announced in 2019, three times. Much of the SEND and alternative provision improvement plan will not come into effect until 2025, six years after the review was announced. During that time, 300,000 children with SEND will have left secondary school having spent the entirety of their school education under an increasingly failing system of SEND support.

The Childhood Trust has found that families of children with SEND are disproportionately affected by the cost of living crisis and are more likely to be living in poverty than families of children without SEND. That is in no small part driven by the great difficulty that families of children with SEND have in finding a suitable childcare place throughout the early years; for before and after-school care; and, for older children, during the school holidays. We know that one in four parents across the board have had to give up work due to the cost of childcare, and the figures are much higher for parents of children with SEND.

Our education and childcare systems should deliver for every child in the country. Children with SEND deserve so much better than the complacency and neglect they have suffered for the past 13 years, and the piecemeal, sticking-plaster measures that are now being proposed. Labour believes in high and rising standards for every child. We will work with parents and carers, local authorities, health services and professionals to deliver for children with SEND. We will work to make mainstream schools inclusive for children with SEND. We will ensure that teachers and support staff have the training they need to work with the diverse range of children who are in every classroom throughout the country.

[Vicky Ford]

I am pleased to hear of the number of things the hon. Lady is suggesting, but will she also support my private Member’s Bill to tackle the issue of school attendance?

[Helen Hayes]

I am grateful to the right hon. Lady for her intervention. She will know that it is not the protocol for Front Benchers, on either side of the House, to support private Members’ Bills. She will also know that my colleague the shadow Education Secretary comprehensively set out this week the priority that Labour places on school attendance and the package of measures we will put in place to start to improve a situation where we have a dire crisis across the country. The right hon. Lady is right to bring that issue forward through the means available to her—her private Member’s Bill—and I wish her success with her attempts to raise the priority of the issue and to seek action from the Government to address it.

We will ensure that teachers and support staff have the training they need to work with the diverse range of children who are in every classroom across the country, with a new annual continuing professional development entitlement. We will ensure schools are inspected on their inclusivity as well as the attainment of children by changing the Ofsted inspection framework. We will roll out evidence-based speech and language interventions for the youngest children, because we know that unlocking communication is an essential foundation for learning. We will increase mental health support in every school and we will join up records to reduce the exhausting battles parents face as they have to retell their child’s story to every professional they meet.

[Vicky Ford]

On that point, will the shadow Minister give way?

[Helen Hayes]

I will not. It has been a long debate and the Minister needs to come in shortly.

We will build an early education and childcare system that works for children and families, from the end of parental leave to the end of primary school. And we will put money back in parents’ pockets, with free breakfast clubs in every primary school, ensuring no child has to start the school day hungry, and by placing limits on the cost of school uniform.

This Government have been failing children and families for 13 long years. Labour will put children first again and we will work to rebuild the support for children with special educational needs and disabilities, which has been so badly broken on this Government’s watch.