That this House has considered SEND provision in Kent.
It is a privilege to serve under your chairship, Sir John. Many dedicated people are working to support children with special educational needs and disabilities in my constituency—in schools, doctors’ surgeries and social services, alongside many other professionals—but I am afraid to say that children in Folkestone and Hythe are being failed every day by the broken SEND system in Kent, which is presided over by Reform UK-run Kent county council. This is not an entirely negative speech, but I do need to start by describing what we are seeing on the ground every day, before I move on to the way forwards.
The reality in Kent is that, under Reform’s stewardship, the situation for SEND support has deteriorated to crisis point. My inbox is full of emails from desperate parents. This is not a bureaucratic failure alone: it is a moral failure. In 2025, children in Kent with SEND are still denied the basic dignity, respect and support that any civilised society should provide. The stories from my constituency are not just troubling; they are harrowing indictments of a local authority that has lost its moral compass.
Let us take the case of one boy who was diagnosed with autism and pathological demand avoidance. He is now in year 6 at a specialist SEND school. His parents, supported by professionals, identified the secondary school that could best meet his complex needs, but instead, Reform UK’s Kent county council named a different school, which itself had admitted that it could not meet his needs. To compound this, the education, health and care plan, which is meant to be a living document, mostly referred to his infant years. He is 11 now. Disgracefully, his future is being locked to outdated paperwork. When his parents challenged the decision at tribunal, KCC brazenly admitted that its sole reason for choosing an inappropriate school was money. Let us call that what it is: institutional neglect, sanctioned from the very top of the council.
KCC is gaming the tribunal system as a delaying tactic, to push back the date when it must pay for SEND children’s needs. KCC spends far more on SEND tribunals than any other local authority in this country, amounting to millions of pounds every year, despite losing almost all of them. That is a failure of leadership of epic proportions.
My team is inundated with accounts of heartbreak, of children’s needs dismissed and of families abandoned. Another local child with complex SEND has been on a sharply reduced timetable since February 2025. The school was forced by a lack of resources to push forward a plan at pace and in a fashion entirely unsuited to him. He was failed not by his teachers but by the absent leadership of the council.
A child in my constituency was for an entire year denied any placement, simply due to the delays in drawing up an EHCP, which were a direct result of council paralysis. A further example, which is perhaps the most shocking and saddening, is a family whose child has been driven to despair by the failed system and has voiced the wish not to go on living. That should horrify all of us, and it is happening under the council’s watch.
I am grateful to serve under your chairship, Sir John. The stories that my hon. and learned Friend is recounting completely match those that I get in my inbox and hear in my surgeries—these stories are repeated across the county. My constituency has a higher than the national, regional and county average of people with learning disability needs, and we are just not getting the support we need.
I want to flag two things. The SEND team at the council is extremely unresponsive to parents and schools and, indeed, to me and my office—I am sure that is true for colleagues, too. There is also a pattern of schools saying they can care for a child but being turned down. That is happening over and over again, and people are being forced to travel many miles across the county in a way that is simply not possible for children with this level of need.
My hon. Friend’s experience is similar to mine. My postbag reflects a kind of ongoing unresponsiveness, which results in people feeling that they are just lost in the system. That is entirely unacceptable.
On a slightly different theme, for SEND children who wish to access a grammar school education in Kent, KCC seems to be refusing requests for extra time for the 11-plus test, in breach of the Equality Act 2010, and without giving any reasons. It is the law that extra time must be granted if a reasonable adjustment is required under that Act, yet Kent’s special access panel unfairly puts roadblocks in the way, stifling opportunities for our young people. The failures stretch beyond Folkestone and Hythe; they blight every corner of Kent, as my hon. Friend the Member for Sittingbourne and Sheppey (Kevin McKenna) said. This is county-wide neglect, shrouded in excuses.
I am not blind to the scale of the challenges, but I will not excuse the years of inaction and mismanagement, first under the Tories and now under Reform UK.
I commend the hon. and learned Gentleman for securing this debate. He is quite right to outline the issue of the growing demand and the complexity of needs. Similar things are happening in all of the United Kingdom, as indicated by the 51% increase in the number of SEND cases in Northern Ireland in seven years. Does the hon. and learned Gentleman agree that it is perhaps now time for a completely different approach to SEND? Does he also agree that the educational needs of and opportunities for children must be prioritised and funded? Otherwise, we will consign a group of children to a life of feeling not good enough and not achieving enough.
I completely agree with the hon. Gentleman. That is precisely why we need wholesale change in the system, which is what the Government are preparing to consult on. We will of course listen carefully to the proposals when they come forward.
Let me talk briefly about the system in Kent. Nationally, the demand for SEND support has grown, and EHCP requests have surged by 140% since 2015, as per the National Audit Office. In 2022, Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission handed down an improvement notice for nine glaring SEND failings in Kent. KCC scrambled to implement an accelerated progress plan and, after Government scrutiny in 2024, the notice was lifted. But still: where are the real improvements? My postbag tells a starkly different story.
I must raise concerns about the safety valve programme. The 2021 deal between the Department for Education and KCC was supposed to plug deficits, but in practice it has often made it even harder for families to access vital support. In areas like Kent with safety valve deals, EHCPs have become harder to obtain and parents are forced to jump over ever-higher hurdles. The priorities of the safety valve programme mean that financial savings are trumping the needs of children in Kent.
Oh, no—he is slightly older than me. [Laughter.] It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir John.
My constituency borders Kent, and we also have a safety valve programme, as well as an Ofsted judgment of “systemic failings”, so children in my constituency, who cross that border, experience similar issues. Will my hon. and learned Friend join me in encouraging the Minister to look, as part of the reforms, at how these issues work on a cross-borough basis when children live in one borough but use schools in another?
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. When we are looking at how to change the system overall, we have to avoid a situation in which we have postcode lotteries and inconsistency, because a child who lives on one side of a border should not take any blame for the failures of the two local authorities.
The safety valve system has created financial targets that have led to perverse incentives to withhold help, suppress demand and punish aspiration. That is not reform: it is rationing. The result is that we see inappropriate placement, adversarial council relationships and broken trust. Kent’s families have had enough. The safety valve programme was policymaking for short-termism, not for real change. It was exactly the kind of sticking-plaster politics that we saw in recent years under the Tories, and Kent’s children are paying the price. I demand from Kent county council urgent, transparent and measurable actions to improve SEND support in our communities.
I will say a few words about those who have been running Kent county council since May. Reform UK recently accused SEND parents of “abusing the system”—a view that shames that party and this country. Reform UK was elected in Kent because it said it would cut waste and abuse, yet when its baseball cap-wearing smart young guys turned up, they found what everyone else already knew: after 14 years of Tory austerity, there is nothing left to cut. They promised millions in savings, but delivered only empty rhetoric and more hurt for those in need. According to Reform, the reason for our SEND crisis is waste and abuse, but that grotesquely misreads the reality faced by the children and parents who are battling for support.
Genuine, practical, long-term change is needed, and long overdue. As Folkestone and Hythe’s first Labour MP, and as part of a Labour Government determined to repair what has been broken, I am committed to forging solutions, not division. I therefore welcome the Government’s drive to build a fairer and truly inclusive SEND system, and agree with the Government’s position that inclusivity for SEND students must be embedded in mainstream schools and accountability moved to the heart of the Department for Education’s schools group, led by the Minister for School Standards. Reform has to have inclusivity at its core. I fully support the Government programme, which covers one in six primary schools, to train teachers in understanding neurodiversity.
Order. I remind Members to bob if they wish to be called in the debate. I ask the hon. Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Daniel Francis) to forgive me; I should have recognised that the hon. Member for Poole (Neil Duncan-Jordan) is nowhere near as glamorous or youthful as him. The hon. Gentleman can put that on his leaflets if he likes.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir John. I thank the hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan) for securing this debate.
I was born in Kent and attended St Paul’s infant school in Maidstone in the 1960s. As the hon. and learned Gentleman said, SEND education is clearly an issue in Kent. Many families in Wokingham tell me about similar serious difficulties in getting appropriate SEND provision for their children, with mainstream schools declaring that they are unable to meet their needs.
One constituent wrote to me that increasing specialist school places is essential, but schools are reporting that they cannot offer SEND places because of workforce shortages, not just because of a lack of building space. The issue needs to be tackled in Kent, as it needs to be tackled in Wokingham. That is why my constituent is calling on the Government to build specialist workforce capacity, including educational psychologists, therapists and specialist teachers, alongside new places for children with SEND.
In areas where there are severe shortages, the Government need to introduce fast-tracked training pathways to tackle the backlog. They also need to implement guaranteed minimum SEND training for all teaching staff, as well as incentives to retain specialist staff, many of whom have high caseload pressures.
Surely the Minister agrees that the Government need to listen to families such as the residents of my constituency and Folkestone and Hythe, who have had such negative experiences of the SEND system and know what needs to be done to fix it.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir John. I thank my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan) for securing this incredibly important debate. We have had a number of debates in this Chamber about the SEND crisis, particularly in Kent.
I speak as the former leader of the opposition at Kent county council and I served on the SEND scrutiny committee, which looked at the SEND measures. I have also been a teacher and have worked in schools with young people with special educational needs.
I want to go through the various aspects of the problem, because the system is incredibly complicated. Like everybody here, I have met parents in utter desperation, in tears—in a place of hopelessness—because there is nowhere else to go. When they pick up the phone or send an email, there is no answer. I have brought them together with We Are Beams, a fantastic charity supporting our constituents in north Kent, and they have unburdened themselves and shared their frustration about the lack of communication and incorrect information being provided. My hon. and learned Friend spoke about EHCPs not being updated, which means that they are not implemented rightly in the classroom, so the young person does not get the right support. Parents feel gaslit; they feel that they have no one on their side. It is absolutely heartbreaking.
Children and young people I have met feel that they are not getting the right information and that they are not being included. They are missing out on key aspects of socialisation—the key skills that will enable them to work in the future. We know that early intervention at a young age can help to get young people and children on track to thrive. It is well established now that we are not all neurotypical; some of us are neuroatypical or have additional needs. An education system should support, encourage and bring out those wonderful talents, but sadly I fear that that is not happening.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir John. I am regularly contacted by parents or guardians of children to express their concerns about the provision of SEND education in our area, so I am grateful to my constituency neighbour, my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan), for securing this important debate, and I congratulate him on his excellent speech.
At the end of the summer and the start of the autumn, I organised a series of meetings for constituents with direct experience of the SEND system in Kent. I am grateful to the primary and secondary school headteachers and staff, as well as the representatives of local charity Differences Not Disabilities, who gave up their time to meet me. I especially thank the parents and carers who spoke so powerfully about the difficulties they have faced and, in many cases, continue to face with Kent county council in securing a suitable education for their children. I also appreciate the constructive and thoughtful way in which all attendees approached our discussions.
As the Government look to bring forward their proposals for reform of the SEND system across England, my constituents urge Ministers to ensure that abrupt change is not made to those areas that are working well. Otherwise, there is a risk that the successful parts of the system could be lost. My constituents would also like reassurances regarding education, health and care plans. They do not want to see them scrapped and would like to see a personalised plan like EHCPs remain in the reformed system.
There was strong feeling among my constituents about the need to strengthen early support for children and families and ensure that early intervention is not a one-off, but consistent. The headteachers and parents at my meetings were firmly of the view that when it comes to early intervention, a “little and often” approach will bring far greater benefits than waiting until a child falls behind or ends up needing specialist provision later on.
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I recently read an article in The Economist about how Portsmouth is providing an inclusive approach to supporting children with SEND. In Portsmouth, students with behavioural and learning difficulties are no longer automatically referred to the NHS for a medical diagnosis. Instead, each school’s SEND co-ordinator, or a designated teacher, sits down with parents to draw up the child’s neurodiversity profile, which allows teachers and parents to identify how best to accommodate the children’s needs and to identify stressors that make it harder to learn. This helps to identify specific things that could help the child. Only if that approach does not work are medical professionals brought in.
The adaptions that are needed are often quite simple. At one school, some students have a time-out pass to leave class for a few minutes when they need a quiet space, a reset, or a short break to run up and down the stairs. Tinted plastic overlays can help children with dyslexic symptoms. Teachers use an empathetic approach to things such as missing a uniform tie: a friendly greeting before asking nicely about the tie’s whereabouts prevents the build-up of tension, which causes problems.
The approach ensures that help for children with additional needs does not depend on a formal medical diagnosis or referral, and creates a culture where everybody can receive timely assistance through flexible, graduated support. Portsmouth’s commitment to shared best practice and ongoing collaboration makes SEND support a normal part of mainstream education, which benefits everybody. I am glad to say that Kent has started to pilot the same approach.
I support the Government’s work to ensure that Ofsted now grades down any school that excludes or off-rolls SEND students. The additional investment from the Labour Government, including the real-terms increase to the core schools budget, is crucial for SEND children, as well as for recruitment and retention. Frontline staff deserve security, reward and respect. Last year’s autumn Budget pledged an additional £11.2 billion in education spending by 2025-26, with £1 billion ringfenced for SEND. The new funding will enable more children with SEND to thrive, and not simply survive, in our schools. It is right that the Government are carefully considering how SEND should be reformed, and I support the Education Secretary’s commitment to real co-creation and to reform that is designed with—not for—children, families and practitioners.
I want to end on a positive note. I recently visited the Beacon school in my constituency, which supports children and young people with profound, severe and complex needs. I was blown away by the dedication of the staff, who were not just educating children but setting them up for life. I enjoyed meeting the children and young people, who were learning, creating, building and thriving. The school’s work to prepare children and young people for the world of work was cutting edge.
To every teacher, support worker and professional working with children with special educational needs across all Folkstone and Hythe schools, and in Kent, I say a huge thank you. They hold the system up. I will make sure that the system backs them and the children whose lives they change every day. We must ensure that every child gets the support they need to thrive and achieve their potential in life. That is the mission of this Labour Government. Despite the scale of the challenge, we will and must make this hope a reality.
I was a teacher under the last Government, and saw some of the changes that the then Education Secretary Michael Gove brought in. I remember starting a year with five statemented children in my year 8 mixed-ability class. I had two teaching assistants who were brilliant at helping me navigate the wonders of science education—but by the end of that year, those teaching assistants were taken out because the funding was not there, and the Education Endowment Fund said that TAs were high cost but low value. It could not have been more wrong. Years later, we can see that specialist teaching assistants are often the bedrock supporting our teachers. The hon. Member for Wokingham (Clive Jones) said some fantastic things about teachers and their workloads; it is a team effort.
I have visited a number of schools. Ifield is of course a fantastic special educational needs school, but there are so many young people there that they need more space. I have visited mainstream schools and seen how they are catering for children with special educational needs, but they lack the specialist TAs and the resources to help. I have had parents tell me about schools that are off-rolling students because they cannot meet their needs. There is nothing in writing; they are merely saying, “Please do not enrol your child here” at parents’ evenings. That cannot be fair and right.
The challenge that some heads pose to me is league tables and percentages of students passing their exams. They can either keep their exam grades up and high, or they can be inclusive—I am not defending that argument; I am just saying it has been presented to me. I do not think it is fair, and I think we should all be there to help young people succeed no matter where they come from or what their needs are.
There are parents, young people and schools, but the other part of the picture is the council. When I sat on the SEND scrutiny committee, it was striking even back then—maybe four or five years ago—that the caseworkers for SEND had double the number of recommended cases from the Government that they should have had. One SEND caseworker should in theory, by the Government’s then standards, have had 125 children to monitor and update plans for. In Kent at that time, it was double that. Although those caseworkers are inundated with parents and needs, they have been positioned as the gatekeepers rather than the supporters. A large part of what I hear from parents is that they do not feel that anybody is on their side. If there are to be changes to the system, we need to position caseworkers so that people can trust that they have their back and that they have their children’s best interests at heart.
The other paramount thing that I saw was the changes to the free school and academy system, which meant that local authorities could no longer build schools based on needs. It meant there was a delay in schools—including specialist schools—coming forward. Thankfully, we have a few green lights in Kent, but they should have been here years ago. Because the ability of local authorities to plan, prepare for and build schools was taken away, Kent was reliant on private specialist schools.
However, I fear that the council’s improvement notice may have been lifted in error when the Government came in last summer. A target of reducing the number of children with EHCPs on the council’s books, set under the last Government, is incredibly perverse. How does that put the needs of young people first? How can the parents of Kent have faith in the system? The council is under an improvement plan to reduce the number of children with EHCPs, yet parents and schools believe that having an EHCP will entitle them to further support. It is a complete perversion.
I say to our wonderful Minister that the message I have heard from parents and schools is that we must not water down the legal protections. They are long fought for and hard won, and when they work, they work really well. The problem is with their implementation. If there are any announcements or communications, the Government must be really clear about how they will preserve the legal protections.
Many aspects of the curriculum review can be welcomed. I would reduce the exams, for instance—there is an awful lot of pressure on youngsters at the moment, so that would be a good thing—but I encourage the Minister to look at other ways to demonstrate the sheer talent we have in this country, such as coursework and practical tasks. I am sure she knows never to underestimate the scale of the challenge; it is vast, but we are ready to help and support.
My constituents want to see a national training programme introduced for EHCPs. If they were well written from the start, there would be no need for the constant reviews that currently take place. We also heard that in Kent, delays in the issuing of EHCPs are the norm, with too many being issued well beyond the statutory deadlines. My constituents were clear that when EHCPs are eventually issued, they are not well written, and key provisions are being left out—often those that involve money.
There was also strong feeling among my constituents that the Reform administration at Kent county council does not properly take into account the views of parents when writing or amending EHCPs, nor give them the full information they are entitled to. That is also reflected when I make representations to the council on behalf of my constituents about the education of their children. I have to wait too long for responses and, when they do come through, often they are inadequate and cannot help my constituents.
In one case, I wrote to the council in February and again in March on behalf of a constituent regarding their daughter. The family had moved to Kent in December, and the daughter, who has an EHCP, was not in school at that time. Although I received an acknowledgment from the council in March, I did not receive a full response until last month—some seven months after first writing to the council. My constituent’s daughter only secured a placement at a special school at the start of the new academic year in September.
In another example, I wrote to the council in mid-July on behalf of a constituent who had expressed concern to me that her child was not in school. The council acknowledged my letter in August, but four months later, I am still waiting for a full response. The final example also dates from July, when I wrote to the council on behalf of a constituent to ask whether it intended to comply with a court order against it. I have recently received a reply asking if I could provide assistance by arranging and facilitating an effective and meaningful method of alternative dispute resolution.
As with most issues, funding for SEND and how it is allocated is critical. I warmly welcome that, thanks to the Labour Government, Kent county council has received an increase of £15 million in funding for SEND provision. It is important that my constituents now start to see the difference from this increase in resources. In our discussions, my constituents expressed a strong belief that SEND funding for mainstream schools must be ringfenced. If money is allocated for a child’s support, it must be spent on that child’s needs, and not diverted elsewhere.
Parents and teachers were clear that, instead of relying on new independent schools being built, Kent county council should be assisting local state schools in our area to adapt their facilities. With the right investment, my constituents expressed the hope that we could see more specialist hubs created in existing schools across Ashford, Hawkinge and the villages. Too many children at the moment have to travel long distances to receive their education. More specialist hubs in existing schools would allow more children to be educated closer to where they live.
It was clear from my discussions that we also need to reform the tribunal system. I have evidence from casework of how adversarial it has become, with solicitors and representatives on both sides—that message came across loud and clear in my meetings about SEND provision. Parents told me how most cases now end up at tribunal, and the majority find in favour of the child. The high number of cases that end up in tribunal and the fact that so many are successful are a clear indication of parents’ dissatisfaction with how the system is operating in Kent and that it is not working properly. The headteachers I have met believe that effective reform of the way that tribunals work would mean that the money that is currently spent on unnecessarily taking some cases to tribunal could instead be allocated to state schools.
I have written to the Secretary of State in more detail on some of the wider points that might be helpful as the Government bring forward their proposals, but I look forward to the Minister’s response to what Members and I have said in this debate about the situation in Kent.