Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps her Department is taking to ensure there is an adequate provision of SEND places in schools.

The department recognises the importance of accessing timely and effective support to improving the experiences of children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), and their families. Nationally, 17% of pupils are identified with some form of SEN, three quarters of whom receive SEN support from their mainstream school, funded from its own resources.

Local authorities must ensure that there are sufficient good school places for all pupils, including special schools and those with SEND. They are statutorily required to keep the services and provision for children and young people with SEND under review, including its sufficiency, working with parents, young people, and providers.

To support local authorities to meet this duty, in the SEND and Alternative Provision (AP) Improvement Plan, the department committed to investing £2.6 billion between 2022 and 2025 to fund new special and AP places and improve existing provision for children and young people with SEND, including announcing 41 new special free schools. This funding represents a significant, transformational investment in new high needs provision. As part of this investment, the department has published over £1.5 billion of High Needs Provision Capital Allocations for the 2022/23 and 2023/24 financial years. Of this, Durham has been allocated a total of £11.2 million. Local authorities can use their allocations to deliver new places in mainstream and special schools, as well as other specialist settings such as specialist post-16 institutions, and to improve the suitability and accessibility of existing buildings. This investment is on top of the department’s ongoing delivery of new special and AP free schools.

Through these reforms, the department wants to ensure that placements for children and young people with SEND are sufficient to meet need, allowing them to access the right support, in the right setting, at the right time.