Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps she is taking to provide more effective support to children with disabilities in their formative years.
In September 2012 we introduced a new early years progress check for children at the age of two, as part of the reformed Early Years Foundation Stage. This will help to pick up potential difficulties early and ensure that support plans are in place for tackling them.
We are working with the Department of Health to co-ordinate the new check at age two with the Healthy Child Programme’s health and development review at age two to two-and-a-half. The aim is to create a fully integrated early years and health review from 2015.
This will be supported by the reforms set out in the Children and Families Act and the new 0-25 Special Educational Needs and Disability (SEND) Code of Practice. These are part of wider educational reform in England to ensure that all children and young people have access to high quality teaching and equal opportunities, regardless of background or circumstance. The SEND reforms aim to join up support across education, health and care from birth to 25. Help is to be offered at the earliest possible point, with children and young people with SEND and their parents fully involved in decisions about their support and what they want to achieve.
The reforms will create a more streamlined and transparent system that gives children with SEND and their families individualised support from birth until adulthood. There will be much more of a focus on outcomes, not hours. Professionals will need to focus on the progress each child or young person makes as a result of interventions, not just how much time, resource or money is being put in to support them.
All maintained nurseries, schools and colleges must work with their local authority to develop a ‘local offer’. This will outline all the support available across health, education and care, to children and young people with SEND and what to do if things go wrong or parents and young people are unhappy about the support they are getting.
The new system will be introduced from 1 September 2014 with the transition from the old to the new system to be complete within three years.