Special Educational Needs
(asked on 19th April 2023) - View Source
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps her Department plans to take to ensure local authorities fulfil their obligations to (a) existing legislation and (b) proposed National Standards on the provision of support to children with special educational needs.
There are existing statutory duties on local authorities, education providers and others to plan and deliver services for children and young people with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND), including those in the Children and Families Act 2014 and the Equality Act 2010. The department holds local areas to account for meeting these duties and the needs of children and young people with SEN and/or disabilities, including through Ofsted and Care Quality Commission (CQC) inspections, academy trust funding agreements and support and interventions in local areas.
In the SEND and Alternative Provision (AP) Improvement Plan, published 2 March 2023, the department committed to a range of strengthened accountability measures to ensure effective local delivery against existing legislation and the proposed new National Standards.
In terms of inspection, this includes the new Ofsted and CQC Area SEND inspections, launched in January 2023, and a greater focus on SEND in the Ofsted education inspection framework. The recently published, Academies Regulation and Commissioning Review provides clear descriptors for academy trust strength. This year we will also develop a holistic intervention approach for local areas, focused on improving outcomes for children and young people with SEND or in AP. This will be based on evidence and data, including that in new SEND AP inclusion dashboards and the implementation of local inclusion plans, as well as inspection outcomes.
In addition, this year the department will review evidence of where statutory duties are met and not met across the SEND and AP system to inform our considerations of how we can better hold partners to account, should they fail to meet their statutory responsibilities.