Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps her Department is taking to support children with special educational needs and disabilities.

On 2 March 2023, the department published the Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) and Alternative Provision (AP) Improvement Plan in response to the Green Paper. This outlines our approach to creating a sustainable system that is better for children with SEND and easier for their families to navigate.

The department will establish a single national system that delivers for every child and young person with SEND, so that they enjoy their childhood, achieve good outcomes, and are well prepared for adulthood and employment. We will also give families greater confidence that their child will be able to fulfil their potential through improved mainstream provision in their local setting.

For those children and young people with SEND who do require an Education Health Care (EHC) plans and specialist provision, the department will ensure they get prompt access to the support they need, and that parents do not face an adversarial system to secure this. We will strengthen accountability across the system so that everyone is held to account for supporting children and young people with SEND.

The department will test the key reforms by creating up to nine Regional Expert Partnerships through our £70 million Change Programme. Oversight of reform will be driven by a new national SEND and AP Implementation Board, jointly chaired by myself and my hon. Friend, the Minister for Mental Health and Women’s Health Strategy.

The department recognises that these reforms will take time to implement and continue to support the system in the immediate term to support children with SEND, which is why we are investing £2.6 billion between now and 2025 to fund new SEND and AP places and improve existing provision.

High needs revenue funding for children and young people with complex needs will be rising to £10.1 billion in this financial year 2023/24, which is an increase of over 50% from the 2019/20 allocations. This extra funding will help local authorities and schools with the increasing costs of supporting children and young people with SEND.