Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what recent assessment he has made of the accessibility of (a) community and (i) green-space amenities for children in (i) Dudley and (ii) England with special education needs and/or disabilities.

The provision of community and green space amenities, including their design and equipment is the responsibility of the Local Authority. The Local Authority has a duty of care under the Equality Act of 2010 to make reasonable adjustments to prevent those protected characteristics, including disability, experiencing a disadvantage. Section 149 of the Act places an over-arching duty on Local Authorities to eliminate discrimination, promote equality of opportunity and foster good relations between those who share a protected characteristic and those who do not. The duty expressly includes taking steps to meet the needs of disabled persons. Further detail can be found in the Act which can be accessed here: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/contents. The responsibility for local authorities falls to MCHLG.

The Children and Nature Programme is a major programme funded by Department for Education which aims to support children from disadvantaged backgrounds to have better access to natural environments. The programme prioritises pupils’ mental health and wellbeing, and engagement with school. The main target audience for the programme are schools with the highest proportion of disadvantaged pupils, Alternative Provision Institutions (API) including but not limited to Pupil Referral Units, and importantly special schools, so many of the children who are impacted by the programme will have special educational needs and/or disabilities.

The Programme comprises three delivery projects and an evaluation project. The largest project in the programme is the Nature Friendly Schools Project, which is delivering greener grounds and pupil visits to green spaces for schools with the highest proportion of disadvantaged pupils. The Government is planning to start delivery to two schools in the Dudley area from April; Hawbush Primary School in Brierley Hill and Crestwood Secondary School in Kingswinford. We are also supporting the Community Forest and Woodland Outreach Project, which aims to increase and help sustain community forest and woodland outreach activities being delivered to school children, particularly those in disadvantaged areas. In addition to this the Growing Care Farming Project aims to achieve a transformational change in the scale, scope and uptake of care farming services in England for children and adults facing disadvantage or social exclusion, to benefit their health and wellbeing and their social and educational development. The evaluation project will deepen our understanding of the effectiveness of nature-based interventions and how activities in nature impact pupils’ health and wellbeing. We are also supporting national landscapes in their aim of helping everyone, including children and young people, discover and engage with protected landscapes to benefit the health and wellbeing of the whole nation. The responsibility for these programmes falls under DEFRA.