Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps she is taking to improve access for mobility impaired students in schools.

All schools have a duty under the Equality Act 2010 to make reasonable adjustments to prevent children and young people with disabilities from being put at a substantial disadvantage. Schools are not subject to the reasonable adjustment duty to make alterations to physical features, such as adding ramps. They must instead publish accessibility plans explaining how they plan to increase access for disabled pupils to the curriculum, improve the physical environment, and make written information more accessible to disabled pupils by providing information in a range of ways.

In addition to this legal duty, the department’s Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) and Alternative Provision (AP) Improvement Plan, published in March 2023, outlined plans to build a consistent national SEND and AP system that ensures all children and young people with SEND can access the support they need, and which parents and carers can trust, easily navigate and have confidence in.

A key part of the new system will be effective and inclusive education for every child, underpinned by excellent local mainstream provision. This will mean that every child or young person has access to high-quality teaching and curriculum, supplemented by targeted support where required. To support this, the department is investing £2.6 billion between 2022-2025 to improve existing provision and fund new specialist and AP places across the country. As part of this £2.6 billion, the department has published over £1.5 billion of High Needs Provision Capital Allocations for the 2022/23 and 2023/24 financial years. Local authorities can use this funding to deliver new places in mainstream schools (as well special schools and other specialist settings), and to improve the suitability and accessibility of existing buildings.

In the Improvement Plan, the department sought to prevent disability discrimination from arising by supporting schools to comply with their duties under the Equality Act 2010. The department also said there would be further consideration on how disability discrimination claims against schools are dealt with.

As a first step, the department published a blog on the education hub, which is available here: https://educationhub.blog.gov.uk/2023/04/10/what-are-reasonable-adjustments-and-how-do-they-help-disabled-pupils-at-school/. The aim was to raise awareness of the reasonable adjustments duty, share examples of the types of reasonable adjustments that schools can make, and explain how parents/carers and schools should work together to make reasonable adjustments. This builds on previous guidance on disabled children and the Equality Act 2010, funded by the department and published by the Council for Disabled Children in March 2022, which is available here: https://councilfordisabledchildren.org.uk/sites/default/files/uploads/attachments/Equality%20Act%20Guide%20for%20schools%20-%20FINAL%20EM%20EDIT.pdf.