Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent estimate he has made of the number of young people with complex special educational needs and disabilities in (a) St Helens North constituency, (b) Merseyside and (c) the North West currently not able to take up a college place due to shortages of specialist staff working in the SEND sector.

Local authorities are best placed to understand the number of young people with complex special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) in their area and the capacity of their local further education (FE) provision to accommodate these needs.

The department does not currently collect data centrally on available capacity in high needs provision. However, we are continuing to work with local authorities to better understand future demand for SEND provision, including in FE settings, as we consider how we can best support the sector going forward.

It is essential that all learners in the FE sector, including those with complex special needs, experience the highest quality teaching. The department recognises that teacher recruitment and retention can be challenging for providers. To support this, the government is investing £50 million in programmes designed to improve the supply and quality of FE teachers in the current financial year.

In January 2022, we launched a recruitment campaign to raise awareness of the opportunities to teach in FE with a wider audience. For those choosing to specialise in SEND teaching in the FE sector, the department has also announced that we will offer tax-free training bursaries worth £15,000 each, for a further academic year of 2022/23. This will help to boost the supply of teachers with specialist training to support learners with SEND in the FE sector.

The department is also investing £2.6 billion between 2022 and 2025 to deliver new places and improve existing provision for children and young people with SEND, or who require alternative provision. This funding represents a transformational investment in new high needs provision. It will help deliver tens of thousands of new high needs places, including in post-16 and FE settings.