Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what discussions she has had with Cabinet colleagues on ensuring children and young people with a visual impairment in a) Newcastle-under-Lyme and b) Staffordshire get the support that they need.

The Department for Education and Department for Health and Social Care ministers are jointly engaging stakeholders to ensure our reforms work in practice. As part of this engagement, I took part in a roundtable earlier this year to discuss visual impairment with representatives from various organisations, including the Royal National Institute of Blind People.

We want every child, including those with special educational needs and visual impairments, to have the best start in life, with help available earlier and locally when families need it. To support this, we are investing £1.8 billion over the next three years for local partnerships to develop and deliver an Experts at Hand offer, giving mainstream settings greater access to specialist education and health professionals, including specialist teachers such as qualified teachers of the visually impaired

Alongside this, we are developing the National Inclusion Standards, which will set out what ordinarily available provision should be in every setting to support children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities. They will also include tools and approaches to identify and respond to needs through the targeted/targeted plus layers of support. Specialist Provision Packages will provide support for those children and young people with the most complex needs.