Children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities

1. What steps she is taking to improve support for children with special educational needs and disabilities.

5. What steps she is taking to improve support for children with special educational needs and disabilities.

7. What steps she is taking to improve support for children with special educational needs and disabilities.

18. What steps she is taking to improve support for children with special educational needs and disabilities.

21. What steps she is taking to improve support for children with special educational needs and disabilities.

We will all know somebody with special educational needs or disabilities and understand how vital it is to get a child with special educational needs or disabilities the right support early on. In recent years, we have seen a massive increase in special educational needs in our country, which is why we have expanded funding to a record level—at £10.5 billion, up by 60% in the last five years—and why we are reforming the system to deal with the increase in demand, including the biggest investment in building special educational needs school places in our country’s history.

Children in Lewisham are waiting on average two and a half years to get an autism diagnosis. This is wrong and unacceptable. It is also a national issue, but it is made worse by a shortage of clinical staff. The Government are failing to recognise the seriousness of the shortage of educational psychologists. Can the Secretary of State tell me why they have failed and what is being done to recruit more educational psychologists as well as to tackle education, health and care plan waiting times?

I thank the hon. Lady for her question. Around half of new EHCPs were issued within the statutory time limit of 20 weeks, and some local authorities are delivering over 90%, but of course we recognise that the system is under pressure, post both the pandemic and the massive rise in demand for special educational needs support. That is why we have increased the budget and put an improvement plan in place. With regard to her question about educational psychologists, we are training 400 more, which is a big increase.

I have a constituent—it could be many of the constituents who come to me—who has a child with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism and other severe learning difficulties. She had to wait an awful long time for an EHCP for her child and, in the end, the plan listed the very school that says it cannot cope with the needs of the child. This happens routinely—a school that says it cannot cope is still listed on the EHCP. What is the Secretary of State doing to ensure that councils and other people who do the EHCP are not just ignoring what the school says and are actually putting down the schools that can cope with the needs? My constituent’s child now has only one hour a week of education. That is surely not good enough.

We need to do all we can to support children with special educational needs; they are vulnerable and need the support as early as possible. We have programmes in place to support local authorities, but the biggest thing that we are doing is increasing the number of special educational needs school places. This will be the largest increase in a generation—60,000 more school places—and it is in stark contrast to when Labour was last in power, when the number of places reduced by 4,000. That is something we are very focused on doing. Many of those have already been delivered, some are work in progress and some will be in the hon. Member’s area.

Far too many families know what a battle it can be to secure an EHCP assessment for their child, but for forces families this battle can become a recurring nightmare, as they are forced to restart the process all over again if required to move base before it completes. It cannot be right that those who sacrifice so much for our country are so let down by the current assessment system. How can we put this right?

Of course, we are always looking to improve the system and we do have an improvement plan in place. I will take away the hon. Gentleman’s specific point about people who move around from place to place, but the most important and fundamental thing is that we have increased the budget, which has now gone up to £10.5 billion—a 60% increase in the last few years. We are also investing in building the right provision, the number of educational psychologists and the workforce. We have a thorough plan in place and we are working to deliver it.

Parents in Portsmouth are rightly concerned that fewer than half of the primary schoolchildren in the city are achieving the expected standards in reading, writing and maths, while, under the watch of the Lib Dem-run council, waiting lists for SEND support continue to rise. Does the Secretary of State agree that families in Portsmouth deserve better than a council that is failing children and failing families?

Yes, and that is the Conservative Government.

The Royal College of Psychiatrists has found that autistic children are 28 times more likely to think about or attempt suicide than other children. Not getting the support they need can affect autistic children into their adult lives. This is a matter of extreme concern, as is the fact that more than 9,500 Wirral children were persistently absent from school in 2022-23, which is double the pre-pandemic figures. I note the Minister’s earlier comments, but what assessment have the Government made of the percentage of children in Wirral and across England who are missing from school and who have special educational needs and disabilities? What specific measures will the Government take to address their needs?

The hon. Lady is right to identify the crossover between special educational needs and absence from schools. This can sometimes result in poor outcomes, which can lead to mental health issues later. That is why it is important that we get early help to children as quickly as possible. We have a special educational needs and alternative provision improvement plan, and in terms of workforce, which is the most important thing on top of the places, we are training more special educational needs co-ordinators; we have changed the training for new teachers; we are making sure that we invest in a new national professional qualification to upskill teachers; and we have more educational psychologists—400 more in training—and more speech and language therapists. There is a huge workforce element in the plan to improve our special educational needs offer.

I call the Chair of the Select Committee.

I welcome what Secretary State has just said about the workforce, and it is vital that we get that into place, but a week on from the publication of the Buckland review and two years on from the Education Committee’s call to bolster careers support for children with SEN, can she update us on what Ministers and the Department are doing to work with the Department for Work and Pensions to provide wider opportunities for young people with autism?

We all know that most people with learning disabilities want to work, and with the right support they can work. The SEND code of practice is clear that all children and young people with special educational needs should be prepared for adulthood, including employment. We are investing £80 million in a supported internship programme, which is very successful, and we will be doubling this by March 2025. We are working with the DWP on a number of programmes and, following the Buckland review, the DWP is setting up a task group to consider all the recommendations.

With a 60% rise in complex needs funding over five years, reaching £10.5 billion in 2024-25, with £105 million of funding for special free schools in the spring Budget and with the special educational needs and disabilities and alternative provision plan to support everyone with needs and disabilities to age 25, does my right hon. Friend agree that it is this Conservative Government that are working hard for the life chances of every child in our country?