Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps her Department plans to take to ensure that mainstream education settings (a) support learners with SEND and (b) spend adequate amounts of funding on students with SEND.

In the Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) and Alternative Provision (AP) Improvement Plan, the department has set out the mission for more children and young people with SEND to have their needs met effectively in mainstream settings, reducing reliance on education, health and care plans to access support.

The department will improve mainstream education through setting standards for early and accurate identification of need, and timely access to support to meet those needs. The standards will include clarifying the types of support that should be ordinarily available in mainstream settings, who is responsible for securing the support and from what budgets.

Head teachers working directly with children and young people in schools and colleges are best placed to make decisions on how much to spend on the additional support their pupils and students need. To help mainstream schools in making those decisions, local authorities are required to identify for each school in their area an amount as a notional budget, within their overall budget allocation, for the costs of support for their pupils with special educational needs, up to £6,000 per pupil per annum.