Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent steps he has taken to support pupils with SEND.

The department is taking steps to ensure that every child and young person with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) can achieve well in education, find employment and lead a happy and fulfilled life.

We will be investing over £700 million in additional high needs funding to support young people with complex SEND in education. This represents an increase of over 11% on the funding available this year, bringing the total high needs funding budget to over £7 billion.

We have launched a cross-government SEND review to improve how children and young people with SEND are supported in the current system. In parallel with the review, we have also committed to reviewing the SEND Code of Practice by the end of 2020 to identify where the code needs to be clarified or where additional guidance would be helpful, drawing on the expertise of stakeholder organisations.

The department has a contract with the Whole School SEND Consortium to embed SEND within approaches to school improvement and to equip the school workforce to deliver high quality teaching for all pupils with SEND. The programme of work includes building a Community of Practice with the involvement of 10,000 schools by 2020 and 15,000 schools by 2022, across the 8 Regional School Commissioner regions.