Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps she will take to ensure that changes to the SEND system do not make it more challenging for parents to receive support for their children.

The department published the Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) and Alternative Provision (AP) Improvement plan on Thursday 2 March 2023. This set out our intention to deliver a new national SEND and AP system, underpinned by creating new national SEND and AP standards for identifying and meeting needs, covering early, years, schools and post-16 provision. This approach will enable children to receive appropriate, evidence-based support for their needs at the earliest opportunity and without unnecessary bureaucracy. For those children and young people with SEND who do require an Education, Health and Care (EHC) assessment, we have set out our vision for a reformed and consistent EHC plan process. This will ensure that children and young people with SEND get prompt access to the support they need, and that parents don’t face an adversarial system to secure this.

The department recognises that children with SEND may require support from a range of services, including social care. We have developed children's social care and SEND/AP reforms in parallel to ensure the two systems will provide high quality support for disabled children and their families. We will continue to deliver commitments for disabled children, as announced in the ‘Stable Homes: Built on Love’ implementation strategy and consultation, which was published in February 2023. These specifically include improving access to family help and accepting the recommendation of the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care for the Law Commission to review children's social care legislation for disabled children, so that entitlements are clearer and easier for families to understand. These reforms will also build on the evidence we are gathering from the Short Breaks Innovation fund, a £30million investment over three years to test more effective approaches to providing short breaks for specific groups of children.