Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether proposed SEND reforms will provide funding for the SEND workforce including teaching assistants and specialist professionals.

The department is investing around £1.8 billion over the next three years for local area partnerships, including local authorities and Integrated Care Boards, to develop a new Experts at Hand offer. This offer is designed to strengthen the capability of mainstream education settings by providing access to support from health and specialist education practitioners, including speech and language therapists and support workers or assistants, occupational therapists and support workers or assistants, educational psychologists and trainees, and specialist teachers, both local authority-based and those based in specialist or alternative provision settings.

To support delivery, over £40 million is being invested in the specialist workforce, including £26 million to train more educational psychologists and £15 million to support more speech and language therapists to work with education settings. In addition, we are investing over £200 million during the course of this Parliament ensuring all staff in every school, college and nursery are trained to support pupils with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND).

We are further investing £1.6 billion in an Inclusive Mainstream Fund to support the development of a more inclusive education system. Funding will be provided to early years, schools and colleges to boost their existing core funding for SEND, with over £500 million per year over the next three years to help schools strengthen their inclusive offer. This represents the beginning of a deliberate tilt in funding towards mainstream inclusion, enabling settings to invest in their workforce alongside their core funding.

This funding will support schools to invest in the SEND workforce, alongside their existing core funding for SEND, which will help equip schools to invest in high quality, adaptive teaching, inclusive pedagogy and decision-making, and in creating safe, calm and accessible learning environments.