Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment her Department has made of when mainstream schools will have the baseline staffing levels required to deliver the universal inclusion expectations set out in the Schools White Paper.

Recruiting and retaining expert teachers is at the heart of the government’s Plan for Change, with good progress already being made: the teaching workforce has grown by 2,346 FTE between 2023/24 and 2024/25, in secondary and special schools; the schools where they are needed most.

We are investing £200 million in special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) training to upskill staff in every school, college and nursery over the course of this Parliament. This training will cover children with SEND in their earliest years, through to age 25.

We are providing around £1.8 billion over the next three years for local area partnerships, including local authorities and Integrated Care Boards (ICBs), to work together to develop a new ‘Experts at Hand’ offer, which will give schools direct access to support, advice, training and specialist expertise from professionals such as speech and language therapists (SaLTs), educational psychologists (EPs) and specialist teachers.

We are investing £15 million to establish new speech and language therapist advanced practitioners in every ICB geographical area, to get more SaLTs working in educational settings.

​In addition, we will continue to train at least 200 EPs per year in 2026 and 2027, backed by £26m.

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