Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps his Department is taking to improve outcomes for children with special educational needs.

The special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) reforms introduced by the Children and Families Act (2014) were the biggest in a generation. Since then, we have given £391 million to local areas to support implementation of the new duties under the act and a great deal of progress has been made with 98% of statements transferred to education, health and care (EHC) plans, where appropriate, by April 2018.

We want to ensure that families are able to participate meaningfully in developing local services and have a contract worth £20 million with the Council for Disabled Children (CDC) and Contact, to improve local information, advice and support and provide a national helpline; and a contract worth £3.8 million with Contact, in partnership with KIDS and the CDC, to promote and develop strategic participation by young people and parent carers.

We have in place a new contract with the Whole School SEND Consortium to embed SEND within approaches to school improvement in order to equip the workforce to deliver high quality teaching across all types of special educational needs. The programme of work includes building a community of practice with the involvement of 10,000 schools by 2020 and 15,000 schools by 2022, across the eight regional schools commissioners’ regions.

We are establishing a SEND Commissioning Board for children and young people with high needs to help support local authorities and Clinical Commissioning Groups to improve planning and commissioning of SEND provision.

We have published a roadmap for reforming alternative provision that will see us focus on sharing best practice across the sector and launched a £4 million innovation fund. We have also announced an externally led review of school exclusions, carried out by former children’s minister Edward Timpson CBE, looking into why certain groups of pupils – including those with SEND – are more likely to be excluded than others, and launched a review into the outcomes of and support for children in need.

Finally, we have asked Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission to design a programme of further local area SEND inspections to follow the current round and to develop an approach for further inspection or monitoring of those areas required to produce a written statement of action. The inspections consider how effectively local areas identify, meet the needs of and improve the outcomes of children and young people with SEND. They have proved a catalyst for supporting local areas to improve their services and deliver better outcomes for children and young people.