My Lords, I declare my interest as set out in the register. It is a privilege to lead this debate on a subject that concerns me both personally and professionally. Team Domenica, the charity that I started in my daughter’s name, is, among other things, a specialist further education institution which provides training for students with learning disabilities, with the aim of transforming their lives through paid employment.
The 130 specialist further education colleges typically cater for people with more complex disabilities, whose needs cannot be met in a mainstream setting. However, there is no definition of such needs. The needs of my daughter, Domenica, as a young woman with Down’s syndrome would not necessarily be described as complex, but she is one of a large cohort for whom a mainstream setting cannot be reasonably adjusted.
Large general further education colleges, typically with over 3,500 students, are not always the best environments for these individuals. These colleges, incorporated under the 1992 education Act, were reclassified by the Office for National Statistics in 2022 as public sector bodies, and as such are out of scope of the pernicious new VAT policy, a tax on learning that we have never known in this country. However, specialist further education colleges are being treated as private schools, although all the students have an EHC plan and are therefore publicly funded. Yet these colleges will still be liable for VAT if they have pupils aged 16. As I have stated previously in your Lordships’ House, I hope that this is just an oversight and one that can be remedied as soon as possible.
Several of our candidates at Team Domenica have come from mainstream settings. One of them said: “At Team Domenica, I am treated fairly with respect—more like an adult. I used to fret a lot at the last place. I don’t feel that here”. One of our parents wrote: “When my daughter started with you she needed one-to-one support, but now she is a very much more independent young lady. She has learnt to fail without feeling like a failure, so if she doesn’t meet a target she tries again and again and again, and eventually she does reach the target. It has been an incredible journey”.
These specialist colleges, which offer a holistic approach, are such an important part of the education system but are all too frequently seen as an expensive adjunct. The alternative for this disfranchised group is a world of isolation. Institutions such as ours give them a chance to emerge from that bleak prospect.
Some of the larger general further education colleges cater for more than 3,000 students with special educational needs. They do a wonderful job. However, they are coming under increasing pressure to take students whose needs they cannot meet, which is a misuse of the duty to admit. Students are being placed against the advice of these colleges, as there are behaviours that the colleges know they will not be able to deal with. These decisions are bad all round. They are bad for the college but, of course, they are particularly bad for the young people involved.
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Monckton, on bringing this topic to our attention and on her speech. I was lucky enough to hear her maiden speech some weeks ago, when she addressed this issue. There is no better advocate for not just speaking about this issue but actually doing something about it, which is quite an important extra. I am grateful that we have had the opportunity to discuss this today. I say to my noble friend the Minister that I hope the Government may provide time, during the department’s consideration of the future of SEN policy, for us to have further debates and make further contributions.
The noble Baroness talked a lot about specialist colleges. They are important, because she is absolutely right that the alternative to that is staying at home. It is not a poor or inadequate school that gets you out of the house. We have let down younger adults with disabilities for many years. It is as though we assume that life stops when they reach the end of compulsory schooling, so I appreciate that point.
However, I want to start on two more positive points. There has been a transformation in special schools over the past 20 to 30 years. It is worth making note of that because it shows that progress can be made. In my lifetime, the law described this group of people as ineducable; that is what it said in the Education Act. Now, when we go to special schools or specialist colleges, we see young boys and girls and young men and women doing what anybody in any school does: working hard, hoping for better things, playing with their friends, sharing things with their teachers and family, and wanting to get on and be part of society. We have made improvements. What has changed most of all is our understanding of what can be achieved. It is society; it is education; it is politicians; it is all of us who have put the lid on the achievements of this group in the past. At least now when we see some excellent special schools and specialist colleges, we see that there can be change, but there is a lot more to be done as well.
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Monckton, on an excellent introductory speech, on acquiring this debate and on championing the issues of special educational needs and disability so effectively, before and since she came into this House. It is an honour to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, who was Secretary of State for Education in 2001-02. You can hear the wisdom and experience that flows from her in her speech, and it is an honour to follow that. I also thank Ashmount special school in Leicestershire for the helpful information that it gave me ahead of this debate.
I will come at the contribution that special needs schools and specialist education colleges make to education by referring to another often overlooked part of the system: the parents. Across the school system, school-level factors account for just 20% of the variation in pupils’ attainment, and pupil-level factors, including the home and the community children come from, account for the balance. Half of that 80% is determined by family factors, particularly what parents do. So working hand in glove with parents wherever possible can make or break whether children fulfil their potential and flourish while at school. This is particularly the case when children have special needs.
The closer one is to a family with a special needs child, the more one realises how profoundly every member is affected, especially where those needs are at a high enough level to make them eligible for a place at a special school. Parents’ and siblings’ own needs can be considered by special schools in a far more developed and bespoke way than mainstream settings permit. Far from cosseting them, this whole-family support is indispensable if special needs children are to attend, engage and meet appropriately ambitious educational expectations. To quote one special needs teacher:
“You know it’s going to pay off if you are supportive to the parents because working together is so important for this child’s emotional and behavioural regulation which make their education possible”.
My Lords, I too strongly welcome this debate and congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Monckton, on her eloquent speech. I will focus on the general situation facing specialist colleges in a rather broader sense—including but not confined to those that we think of as special needs—which cater to small, specialist groups of students of various different kinds. I want to urge the Minister to ensure that this population and this type of institution receive more targeted and coherent attention and support at national level than has been the case.
Of course, much of this debate will focus on the large and important group of children and young people with learning difficulties for whom the mainstream curriculum is unsuitable or who struggle to cope with formal settings. We know that there is a real crisis here, especially in catering to those with complex multiple needs.
However, there is also an important and diverse group of students for whom the issue is not that they struggle and will probably always struggle with the mainstream curriculum or the classroom environment, but rather that they belong to a rather small group with special, distinctive requirements, which is widely spread across the country, so in any given area there will be only a few of them. This means that we need specialist institutions with wide and national catchment areas.
We actually do quite well at school level, albeit largely because of a legacy of charitable and privately established institutions. Central government has then done a pretty good job of recognising and incorporating these into the national schools system. I grew up near one of the most famous, the Mary Hare School for the deaf, which sends pupils on to a range of extremely demanding academic courses at university level. We have music schools, such as the Menuhin School and Chetham’s School, where more than 90% of students get financial assistance, including through the DfE’s music and dance scheme.
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Baroness Monckton, for securing this debate and offer my admiration for her commitment and eloquence in this field.
I formerly served as the chair of the National Society, as the lead bishop for education. In that capacity, I was given a very wide view of the brilliant provision that is made where specialist schools and colleges exist. I can point to such a school in north Wiltshire where teachers were so dedicated they were prepared to face a 150-mile round trip every day to serve in that special place.
I am also the bishop for the L’Arche community in the UK. With the Church of England, L’Arche, as part of its vision, seeks to educate people to live well together in a community. That seems to me something that is—or should be—a special part of any school, not least our special schools.
Along with the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, I want to see an integrated ecology of special and mainstream schools. When I was Bishop of Ely, we won a bid with the DfE to have a single campus with a free school in partnership with a special school on the same site. I appreciate that there were expense issues in relation to that, but it seems to be an excellent model of an integrated approach.
I understand that the Minister in the other place talked this morning about wanting to have most children with special needs in mainstream schools so they can be with their friends. Of course, if you had an integrated campus, you would not only have friends but perhaps siblings meeting in the same setting as well.
We cannot get away from the fact that, at the moment, 150,000 young people across England attend specialist schools and colleges, but there are 1.9 million children and young people who have special educational needs—a figure identified in January 2024. The special schools we have, doing a marvellous job under huge pressure, are systematically underfunded and underresourced. In its report published today, the National Audit Office calculates that the demand for education and healthcare plans has increased by 140% since 2015. There are simply not enough places and this needs to be addressed in the way that the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, eloquently described. Individualised and complex support cannot be provided in blanket terms in mainstream schools. Nor can mainstream schools provide what I have witnessed broadly: the key importance of college places for people with a disability up to the age of 25, and all that has already been said about how important that is for accessing employment and, as part of the vision for education that the Church of England sustains, how we exercise a proper understanding of the rare dignity of all people, not least those living with disability.
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Monckton, for organising this important debate. She is clearly such a passionate and moving advocate for her cause. In fact, a very dear friend—my best friend—who is a parent of two children with special educational needs has just messaged me to say that, watching the noble Baroness’s opening comments, she feels tearful that this is being debated in such a serious, sensitive and meaningful way.
The debate is also very timely. As has just been mentioned, the National Audit Office has just published a report which says that the special educational needs system is simply not delivering for children and their families, and very importantly, nor is it
“preventing local authorities from facing significant financial risks”.
I begin by paying tribute to the many excellent specialist schools and colleges across the country and their staff. They do such vital work for children and young people of all ages and backgrounds, many of whom have complex needs. As we have just heard so eloquently from the noble Baroness, Lady Monckton, they provide a safe, compassionate, respectful, and—we forget this word—fun environment for the individual to develop and learn. They are often a lifeline for parents and families. Many also have a real focus on practical, vocational skills, to help equip a young adult for future life, to get into the workplace and get a job. That is so important.
When we have these discussions about children and young people with special educational needs, we often talk about them as though they are a different species from a different planet. I say this as a journalist, and I think my profession can be very guilty of this. We often use negative, hostile language, calling them a “problem” or a “ticking time bomb”—but they are human beings, just like anyone else, and they are someone’s precious and much-loved child or grandchild.
My Lords, special educational needs, or SEN, and special education needs and disabilities, or SEND, cover a wide variety of needs, including dyslexia and autism.
Two out of four of our children are dyslexic. When our younger son Josh was in kindergarten, it was spotted by a teacher. His next school gave up on him by the age of seven, and he went to a specialist school across the river, Fairley House, where they tried, and then he went on to Bruern Abbey at the age of nine, a boarding school near Oxford, which specialises in dyslexia and dyspraxia. He entered that school barely able to read or write and was innumerate—he could not even hold his pencil. He left four years later, coming top of the school in his common entrance, and scraped into what is—whether you like it or not—one of the best schools in the world, Eton. At that school, where they mark you out of the whole year, he came 262 out of 262 in his exams in his first couple of years: bottom of the school. With special-needs, one-to-one help at that school and everything else it offered, he left Eton with three A*s in his A-levels, entered the London School of Economics and has just graduated with a first-class degree in international history.
Why was that possible? First, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hazarika, said, it was because of early detection: that teacher who spotted it when he was in kindergarten; and, secondly, intensive help, which was provided to him at Fairley House, at Bruern Abbey and at Eton. What are the Government doing to encourage those two things? For early detection, we should train every teacher in this country to be able to spot dyslexia or dyspraxia and to provide the special needs.
I qualified as a chartered accountant with Ernst & Young—EY—here in London, which produced a report in conjunction with Made by Dyslexia called The Value of Dyslexia: Dyslexic Capability and Organisations of the Future. There are a couple of quotes in there. Steve Hatch of Facebook said:
My Lords, I declare my interests in the register, including as a councillor in Central Bedfordshire. I thank my noble friend Lady Monckton for this debate on the important contribution that specialist schools and colleges make to SEND education.
I want to focus a bit more on the broader landscape and the valued role that they play as part of the SEND system. As many noble Lords have mentioned, the SEND system is failing. It is failing children, parents, schools and local government. We have a system that is hugely expensive, is complex, is adversarial and delivers poor outcomes.
I say “system”, but I am not sure that it is a system. That is the problem. Although there are many good parts—noble Lords have mentioned some great special schools, individuals who work hard to deliver great outcomes and parents who do their best to support their children—it does not operate as a system. It is not coherent. Not all parts are working together co-operatively and coherently to achieve the best outcomes for children.
The facts speak for themselves. Since 2014, we have seen the number of children with EHCPs more than double. The national high needs block funding for SEND has increased from around £5 billion to nearly £10 billion. Councils are spending an additional amount of nearly £1 billion on top of that. School transport costs have ballooned. The cumulative high needs deficit has risen from £300 million five years ago to more than £3 billion now.
Despite investment in special schools, it has not kept pace with demand. One noble Lord said that there had been an increase in demand of 140%. We have seen a 51% increase in placements in state-funded special schools and a 164% increase in non-maintained special schools over the last 10 years. This leaves those special schools under huge pressure.
Despite the increasing numbers and a significant increase in investment, there have not been improved outcomes. If anything, it has got worse. Young people with SEN with achievement at level 2 at 19 are declining faster than the mainstream average. Other indicators such as employment have not improved, despite some great examples in certain places, as my noble friend Lady Monckton mentioned.
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The Government tend to have a focus on the general further education colleges, often to the exclusion of other types of provision. This can be frustrating. We see this in the apprenticeship sector, where around 70% of the provision comes from private training providers yet they are frequently overlooked in policy discussions. I emphasise the role that specialist independent institutions play, and point out that general further education colleges cannot, as they themselves admit, meet all the needs. Of course we need both: an inclusive mainstream and a thriving specialist sector.
I suggest that specialist colleges not only contribute to the education sector but play a critical role in the skills agenda, particularly in supporting people into employment. One area of concern is apprenticeship access. SEN students who are capable of and keen to pursue apprenticeships can be disadvantaged by their requirement to achieve a level 1 in maths and English. These subjects used to be embedded in the programme but are now stand-alone qualifications.
People with learning disabilities can do the practical aspects of training, but for many the academic side is completely beyond them; abstract is not what they do. The result is that some students are unable to pursue this apprenticeship route even though they excel in their practical skills. Why can we not just value the skills that they have and that businesses need, and let them develop at their own pace, making their own unique contribution? The system is setting people up to fail and undermining their hard-won self-confidence. I also see this in the jewellery business, where I have made my career. Apprentices for silversmithing and jewellery making are very hard to come by without adding these unnecessary qualifications. Superb craftsmanship is its own language, which requires no translation and certainly not an English exam.
The Government have announced some flexibility for people with special educational needs, allowing an exemption if they can demonstrate an evidenced judgment of reaching entry level 3. This is a positive step, but I am concerned that the process still remains too unwieldy, complex and costly, which will continue to disadvantage these students and add unnecessary burdens on the college—believe me, we have enough already.
The tribunal system is not working. Some 96% of parents who are turned down for an EHCP by the local authority win their tribunals, but this comes at a huge financial and emotional cost. Unfortunately, the process is protracted and some parents cave in under the pressure; they do not even get to tribunal or, if they do, it is too late for the start of the academic year. This, therefore, is a year’s savings for the local authority, but it is all too frequently a year without education for that young person.
In the academic year 2022-23, just 136 of the nearly 8,000 appeals that went to a hearing upheld decisions by councils. A study by Pro Bono Economics estimated that councils wasted £46.2 million on tribunals in 2021-22. An inevitable consequence of VAT on fees will be a significant rise in tribunal cases, as parents struggle to find the right setting for their learning disabled children. It will be the sharp elbowed who have the best chance. Yet again, it will be the most vulnerable, the isolated and those parents who struggle to fill in the forms who will be forgotten and fall off the radar.
The Government should commit to an independent review of the VAT policy after six months. There has not been a full consultation on the plans or on their impact on SEND provision. Last year, the Department for Education had to pay the courts more than £13 million so it could deliver these SEND tribunals—double the figure the year before, and it will undoubtedly rise much further as a result of the impending education tax.
The system is broken and unnecessarily adversarial. Kate Foale, SEND spokesman for the County Councils Network, said:
“There desperately needs to be action at a governmental level to ensure local authorities and schools have the funding required to meet the needs of all children and young people”.
Councils are already struggling to fund SEND provision. The Local Government Association and the County Councils Network published a report in July, noting that SEND costs will increase to £12 billion by 2025, having doubled over the past decade. They say that this puts council finances on a “cliff edge”.
We are in a divide-and-rule situation whereby local authorities with a statutory duty to fund are at odds with the providers, and the providers end up fighting on all fronts. I have first-hand experience of this, and it wastes an enormous amount of time and energy. We need to work together. I know the Minister is fully aware of how important this is, and I thank her for her intervention on our behalf last month.
The current high-needs funding system came into place in the academic year 2013-14, which is when it was decided that local authorities should both undertake the assessments and provide the funding, thus becoming poacher and gamekeeper—a clear conflict of interest. Before that, assessment and funding decisions were handled separately. The Department for Education maintains that bringing them together was necessary because of spiralling costs, with needs being identified without any thought of the money involved. But it has not published any data demonstrating that the separation of these two processes, rather than increased need, was causing the spiralling costs. It also has not commented on the fact that, despite bringing the two together, costs have spiralled anyway. What it has done is made it much harder for families to get an assessment, because the councils know that, once they have assessed, they have a statutory duty to provide.
The Secretary of State for Education told parents that the SEND system is “fundamentally broken”. She also said she is “serious” about reform and “determined to do it”. She added that she would like to do this on a “cross-party basis” and
“listen to parents and staff”.
I stand here in that spirit of co-operation, determined that, above all else, the interests of learning-disabled people be accorded the highest priority.
When I look at the lives of our many candidates, post-college and in paid work, I see the difference it has made—how much it means to them and to their families, and how much it impacts their well-being and sense of self-worth. That makes me even more determined to fight on their behalf. I will continue to raise my voice in your Lordships’ House on behalf of people with learning disabilities.
One of our candidates died last month, in his early 20s. He was part of our story, and we became part of his. His father told us that he would be buried in his work uniform because it meant the world to him that he had found a job and a life beyond his family, in the community, where we all belong and where his life, lived to the limit of its capacity, touched so many, fulfilling his potential. What more could one possibly want for any of our children or anybody with a learning disability?
There is a second area where I want to point out good things that I have always taken from this sector. When you go into a special school, you try to work out what is different from a mainstream school. To me, it is something like this: the teachers are very well trained in their specialism; they know what they are talking about and are practised in delivering that. When you look around the staff, you see that it is not just teachers but physiotherapists, play leaders and assistants; it is people with a range of professional skills trying to meet the needs of the child. They invariably have close links with parents. Special schools are interesting in that social class does not matter; social class does not choose the children who attend, so you often get socially mixed schools. Each child has a programme tailored to meet their needs, and there are partnerships beyond the school. Teachers who know their subject and can deliver it, working with a range of other professionals so that a range of needs can be met; precious and close links with parents; and working with a community that wants to provide support—that it is a definition of what we should have in every school, special or mainstream.
When I was a Minister in the education department, a lot of the work we did on classroom assistance, extra administrative help for schools and using the school as a location for people with other skills was modelled on the best of special schools, so they have a lot to teach all the other schools in mainstream education.
However, there is no doubt that these are troubled times for the whole SEN sector, and there will be opportunities to discuss that. There are a number of policy challenges in respect of special schools which I ask the Minister to reflect on. First, I welcomed the Prime Minister’s announcement at the Labour Party conference about level 2 apprenticeships—that will help this group—but for all the good that goes on in special schools, the assessment and qualifications framework in which they are asked to work does not meet their needs. I chair the Public Services Committee, which has recently produced a report on the transition from education to work for young people with disabilities. The story is one of doing well in schools and being blocked from thereon in. Part of that is expectations, but a lot of it is the qualifications for which they are encouraged to study not being fit for purpose in moving them on to the next stage of their lives.
I have two more points to make. I have met a lot of people with special needs children who think we ought not to have special schools at all and that the inclusion debate ought to be such that every child’s needs can be met in mainstream community schools. It is not a view I take, but we should acknowledge that that debate across the sector about where all children with special needs are taught is a live one, and we have to work it out. To my mind, the easy decisions are that those with needs that cannot be met in mainstream schools should be in special schools and that if they can be included in mainstream schools and their parents want it, every effort ought to be made to remove any barriers that may exist, and that may be something as little as physical obstacles.
It is the ones in between who are at the borders, where there is no agreement on whether special schools or mainstream schools would be appropriate. That is where the debate is difficult—it is about the numbers of people with EHC plans who are trying to get to special schools, when the authorities think that their needs might be met in mainstream education; that is where the difficulties lie, and where we let down a lot of children. What I am absolutely sure about is that no one should have to want a special school because of a poor mainstream school that they are trying to turn their back on. It should be because the child needs the special school, not because we have no mainstream schools that are catering as well as they can for special needs children.
We have not got this right, and it is not easy. If you look across the 24,000 schools making up our school system, we have a very small number of special schools. Most of them are mainstream schools. We have never been sure what the role of the special schools should be in the whole education system—but all the talent, all the highly qualified teachers and all the experience are in the special schools. What we have always tried to do is to find a way of using their expertise across all schools to benefit all children with special needs. Of all the solutions that we have come up with over the years, whether it be collocating special schools on the same campus as mainstream schools, having units in mainstream schools without specialism or having teachers who move from one school to another, I have seen excellent examples. But nowhere do I see a cohesive and coherent plan about how the offer from special schools sits easily in the whole education system so that we can meet the needs of those who have needs that can be met in special schools and those who do not, as well as the many in between who just want the best of both.
Many schools also take steps to help parents build a support network with each other. The House of Lords Library briefing identified frequent contact with parents or carers and close tracking of children’s progress as one of the important benefits of attending special education. That contact often starts before a child has had their first day at school. Early home visits help to identify the whole family’s needs and particularly their psychological state.
When children start at special school, there is awareness that parents are on a grief curve, which needs to be respected and accommodated. This includes trauma, emotion and stress about things that might seem insignificant but are highly significant to them. First, many had to fight to get the child into special school in the first place and disagree with professionals, which is rarely easy. It is an early priority to relieve anxiety and assure them that they no longer need to convince anyone that their child cannot be in mainstream. Secondly, they are often experts in their child’s needs, including their medical needs, and fear something being missed in case it means the difference, quite literally, between life and death. Many special needs children have had life-threatening conditions, requiring long and complex operations. Parents have handed their children over to anaesthetists and surgeons, unsure whether they will survive. As many conditions are ongoing, sending a special needs child to school is far from straightforward.
Easing families’ burdens can include helping parents fill in the complex paperwork for school transportation, where needed, and for disability living allowance. Such extra cash is essential as it is very hard for both parents to work when care needs are so high, but forms can seem overwhelming when time is cut short by myriad health appointments and associated administration. It is not unusual for profoundly disabled children to have two hospital appointments a week, which might be in different cities.
A child’s education, health and care plan routinely requires special schools to work with multiple professionals, such as speech and language and occupational therapists, social workers and medical consultants. They write letters to GPs on the family’s behalf and make referrals to child and adolescent mental health services. Many special needs children are doubly incontinent, for genuine medical reasons, and teachers literally get their hands dirty providing personal care. Some schools allow parents to use a child’s direct payments to fund a staff member to give respite care on a Saturday afternoon or after school. Teachers’ deep involvement in health and social care means that they are, in effect, triple-hatting in a way that a mainstream teacher would find impossible in a much larger class size where they are required to be driven by data and development deadlines. Ministers have said that they will improve mainstream inclusivity and pick up special needs earlier, but do the Government agree that we will always need special schools?
To reiterate, parents are vital to the education sector. Teachers with experience across both settings refer to a significant lack of understanding in mainstream about what life is like for parents. Will the Minister confirm that this will also be an area for improvement?
Where things are not going so well is at college level. Education does not end with school—less and less so. We need to recognise areas of specialisation that cannot be offered in each and every locality or even region, but which are none the less vital. We cannot just rely here on our inheritance of a few well-established institutions, such as the Royal National College for the Blind or, indeed, the wonderful sounding college that the noble Baroness, Lady Monckton, helped to establish. We need to think more coherently and creatively about what sort of specialist colleges we need for this older age group and how they should be funded and run.
Noble Lords may know the sad story of the specialist national colleges. This was actually a very good idea, trying to create national institutions with specific areas of expertise. But, although lots of money was put into capital, there was no coherent thinking about how they would recruit and be funded. I remember visiting one early on and being horrified that it was expected to operate, recruit and fund itself as though it was just another local FE college with a particular, small catchment area. Not surprisingly, most of the national colleges have now closed.
We do not make clear provision for scarce and valued crafts and trades with small workforces. Training in some, such as musical instrument making or clockmaking, have clung on by being turned into fully fledged residential honours degrees in a couple of institutions, but the lack of national planning is evident. College-based courses have closed. In other countries, we would have apprenticeships, with specialist colleges providing the off-the-job training, and there is no mechanism somehow, in our central government, for thinking about and providing these.
Another group which suffers from being small and low-profile is our rural population. Agricultural and land-based colleges, which have to offer residential accommodation, are often struggling. There was supposed to be a proper review of these colleges a few years back. If it happened, it certainly never saw the light of day outside DfE. Specialist adult colleges survive in London; outside, there is just Northern clinging on by its fingertips. We have a construction skills crisis and only one of our specialist construction colleges is left standing. All this has relevance because it points up that, at college level, there is no real mechanism for thinking about specialist groups, of which one of the most important is young people with learning difficulties and physical challenges. But they are not the only ones and their colleges are not catered for, because we have no proper national mechanism for thinking about such specialist provision. I urge the Minister to ensure that, within her department, more focused attention is paid to looking at what national provision is needed for post-school college opportunities.
I also want to raise a very specific issue, because I think it speaks to the current absence of dedicated attention. Many specialised colleges are not standard public sector institutions, and many rightly offer qualifications ranging right through to levels 4, 5 and 6, which is higher education. At present, there seems to be real confusion over how the new VAT requirements for private school fees will apply to higher-level qualifications in institutions that also offer lower-level ones. This issue has been raised with me and other noble Lords, with respect to the dance and drama awards, but the lack of clarity speaks to this general point I am trying to make.
Our higher education sector also has a multiplicity of institutions and, as far as I know, there has been no discussion of introducing VAT on fees in higher education, which would, of course, feed through to student loans. My sense is that the lack of clarity on what is happening in specialist institutions—which would have a knock-on effect—comes from the fact that nobody is in a position to demand and get clear guidance. Can the Minister ensure that the Government clarify this particular challenge?
I also have a much more ambitious request. For what we normally think of as the special needs population, but also for the other small, spread-out, critical, specialist and often needy groups, we need to think far more coherently about specialist college provision across the country as a whole.
The deficit in special needs education in mainstream schools is also very clear. I recently opened a new building at one of our 142 Church schools in the diocese of Lincoln: St John’s, Spalding. The school is experiencing a serious rise in the number of children with profound SEND needs. Clare Robinson, the head teacher, emphasised to me the impossible position that her staff face when SEND funding is entirely insufficient to cover the cost to employ the requisite personnel with training and expertise. This is also where specialist schools come into play, as they can actually send out experts to support mainstream schools in the delivery of special education in those other places. Clare and her colleagues have gone to extraordinary lengths to support their students. For instance, this has involved making a new multi-purpose area to serve as both a kids’ club and a space for interventions with SEND pupils. I saw this for myself, and it is a marvellous development, but the measure merely scratches the surface of what is needed because the school can cater for only its youngest students in this way.
I plead that the Government make sure that special schools not only continue and grow but continue to offer the specialist medical care, occupational and physical therapy, small class sizes, and all the activities and bespoke support which provide and ensure consistency of care for children and mitigated stresses for families.
As I said, the Church is committed to educating for dignity and respect. Given that Church schools are in such demand, I hope that it is possible for the Government to consider the Church being allowed to engage in developing special schools, not least because of falling school rolls and the reallocation of Church school buildings, which could become Church-based specialist schools. This, I hope, would help to improve the access for children in any kind of need.
I submit that denying children and young people with special needs the access to the specialist support they need is in fact a fundamental issue and affects everyone’s human rights. I am delighted that the Government are determined to continue to expand their work in this area, and I look forward to full developments brought to us very closely in the near future.
We should also want every child to have the best chance to make the most of themselves. Not only is it the right thing to do but it is the right thing for wider society. We want people to find suitable and sustainable work and to make a contribution. On a very basic human level, we want people to be able to build a good life.
Many children and young people just cannot access all these specialist facilities. That is why, like many others, I will move the debate on to what is happening in mainstream education. Many children with special educational needs who end up in a specialist institution will have often started out in mainstream education, so that part of the jigsaw cannot be ignored.
There are around 1.9 million children who have special educational needs, although this figure is probably much higher in real life. Whether you like that figure or not, we have to accept that there is real demand for special educational needs and that we all have a stake in improving the situation, because the current system is not working.
It is also unhelpful is to make comments such as those made by one of the contenders vying to be the next leader of the Opposition, who endorsed a pamphlet that argued:
“If you have a neurodiversity diagnosis”
and if
“you are a child, you may well get better treatment or equipment at school”.
I am afraid that idea is woefully out of touch with the lived reality and experience that so many parents face. Most parents in this situation are absolutely exhausted; they have been ground down and are tearing their hair out, trying to navigate and battle their way through this punishing, broken system. As we have heard, trying to get an education, health and care plan can become a full-time job. I know so many friends who are parents—most of whom are mums—who have had to stop working to battle away on behalf of their children. That is a loss of income for that family, a loss of a job for that parent and a loss for the economy. What about the parents who do not have the time, stomach or ability to take on the system? Do their kids simply get left behind? That cannot be right.
Having spoken to some parents and excellent teachers in preparation for this debate, I have a few ideas that they have put forward and that I hope my noble friend the Minister will consider. So many people have said that transport is absolutely critical. It sounds like a small thing, but it makes all the difference; it is something that can really help to get children to school. Yesterday in this Chamber, we discussed absenteeism and we all agreed, across the House, that it is so important to get children into school.
Teaching assistants also came up in my conversations. Again, they can make a massive difference to support teachers and pupils in schools. Perhaps now is the time to start treating teaching assistants with greater status and make the role more like a graduate job—giving them greater respect and maybe paying them a bit more—so that they can specialise in special educational needs, such as speech and language therapy.
We also need more resources in mainstream schools. Some very good work has been done on secondary schools, but we must also focus on primary schools. Early detection and intervention are vital, particularly at key stages 1 and 2, to help with identification, which will help children and their parents.
We also know that better mental health provision is important here and that waiting lists have soared post Covid. Getting mental health services into schools, and making them hubs, is important. This new Government are keen to do that, and I am sure that we will all welcome it.
The fiscal climate is incredibly difficult right now and we are of course waiting for the much-anticipated Budget, but we simply cannot afford not to fix the system. It is not all about throwing more money at the issue; it is about how it is used. As one excellent SEN teacher told me, money alone will not fix this; having the right people in place is what will make a difference. This is an important debate, and I hope that there will be agreement across the House that the hallmark of a good society is the welfare and education of all our children.
“Dyslexic thinkers are often able to see connections that others may miss, and create narratives that can simplify complex products or tasks”.
There is another quote from Jonnie Goodwin, whom I know:
“Dyslexia should not be viewed as a disadvantage, but a strength”.
The report summarises the top dyslexic strengths and trending competencies in all industries that they are exceptional at: active learning, originality, spatial abilities, idea generation and reasoning abilities, creativity, social influence, innovation, and leadership. I have seen this at first hand.
I am privileged to know one of my heroes, Dame Stephanie Shirley—we call her Steve. She is the biggest benefactor of autism in the world and has set up a school in memory of her son, who was severely autistic: the Prior’s Court school. When I asked her what her school does that helps autistic children, she noted: specialised education, which can
“help mainstream schools to support autistic learners”;
inclusive expertise:
“Special schools often act as centres of excellence”;
holistic support:
“Integrate education with mental and physical therapies, reducing call on public health services”;
vocational training; advocacy for student rights:
“Raise awareness of rights and needs”;
assistive technology:
“Specialist school pilot of the use of assistive technology”;
parental involvement:
“Support the child within the family”;
and structured environment:
“What is essential in special education is good practice generally”.
She is 90 years old and is still going strong.
By the end of 2023-24, there were 1.6 million children in England with SEN—the noble Baroness, Lady Hazarika, gave a figure of 1.9 million—and of these, around 434,000 had an education, health and care plan, with autism being one of the most common situations.
I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Monckton, for leading this debate and for her excellent opening speech. In special education settings, if you have smaller classes, specialised staff, tailored equipment and focus on life skills training, 90% of parents whose children attend special schools feel that their children are well supported compared with only 59% of parents with children in mainstream schools. We need more special schools. The Government have spent £2.6 billion on SEND provision; I point out to the Minister that we surely need to spend more on this. In addition, by May 2023, two-thirds of special schools were operating at or above capacity, leading to further strain on the sector.
This debate is very timely. On 21 October, just a few days ago, the Financial Times ran an article headed “The funding crisis threatening England’s special needs education”, which said:
“The Department for Education said it was focused on ‘fixing the foundations’ of local government, providing long-term stability through multiyear funding settlements and ending the need for councils to spend time and money bidding for pots of government cash. However, with the number of children with EHC plans in England rising to more than 434,000 over the past eight years, surging Send deficits leave many councils with near-impossible choices to meet their obligations”.
Do the Government recognise this?
The article went on to say:
“Sam Freedman, a former government education policy adviser, said the rapid rise in EHC plans reflected a decade of cuts to other Send support in mainstream schools, such as specialist teachers and occupational therapists. This had led to a ‘vicious cycle’ in educational funding as parents turned to EHC plans to get support. ‘The lack of early-years intervention and a lack of other kinds of provision means that the only way for parents to obtain help and funding is by obtaining a statement, which means more money is sucked into plans, so there is less money for everything else,’ he added.
Demand has far outstripped the capacity of state-funded special schools, forcing councils to pay for much more expensive privately run alternatives … The Department for Education said children with Send had been ‘let down’ by the system and it was determined to tackle the issues with better inclusivity and expertise within mainstream schools. … Freedman said any solution must involve giving parents other options than seeking a Send plan for their child, although he admitted this would be challenging at a time of fiscal belt-tightening”.
Surely the Government realise that the solution is more funding overall for government schools, including special needs schools.
Just yesterday, my friend, the noble Lord, Lord Hacking, wrote a letter to the Prime Minister about the proposals for VAT on independent schools’ fees. Of course, this issue affects all private schools specialising in special needs as well. I quote the noble Lord’s letter, with his permission:
“It is true that from December 2018 to December 2023 there has been a 20.4% increase in independent school fees but this is over a six-year period during which the average yearly increase in fees was 3.4%. Similarly, since 2005 there has been an increase in independent school fees of 77.2% but the average yearly increase from December 2005 to December 2023 has been 4.06%. It is, therefore, complete nonsense to conclude that this provides the evidence of the ability of independent school parents, having coped with these small yearly increases in fees, often being matched by increases in their wages … It will cause great damage to the Government, which you lead, to have launched a policy which provides no benefit to the state sector and much suffering by pupils and their parents of ordinary working people whose only ‘sin’ has been, at their considerable cost, seeking to provide for their children a better education”.
In a survey by Isos of people working in the system, 97% said that the system is not working well in supporting children and young people with SEN to achieve good outcomes. The system is broken. We have moved to an exclusive rather than an inclusive system, with more pupils attending specialist schools, which is appropriate for some but not necessarily for everyone, often some distance from where they live, increasing numbers of specialist payments and, as the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, pointed out, an alarming increase in the number having home education with specialist, bespoke packages.
It is a system based on legal frameworks that has driven a complete lack of trust. Schools find themselves lacking resources and specialist support for SEN pupils, and hence are incentivised to get an EHCP to get more resources or to offload a high-resource pupil. Parents seeking support for their child find that it is not available and can be achieved only through an EHCP. The noble Baroness, Lady Hazarika, mentioned the difficulties of navigating this complex process. Local authorities have responsibility but neither the resources nor the levers to support SEN pupils, leading to rationing. There is a lack of capacity in mental health support, educational psychiatrists, speech and language therapists, specialist SENCOs and so on to deliver what is needed. The legal framework is vague and open to interpretation. It encourages an adversarial and legal-based approach, with prescriptive plans delivered through legal argument rather than being focused on children.
The system is opaque and hard to navigate for parents. The pushing of pupils to special schools means that there is a shortage of capacity for those who most need it, and the financial costs are simply unsustainable. In short, it is a system with perverse incentives that has led to a vicious circle, encouraging a legal-based, specialist approach. It sucks resources away from much-needed mainstream support and support to enable those needing more specialist support to receive it, as my noble friend Lady Monckton pointed out.
It can be done differently. It happens in some parts of the country and there are many good examples in Europe, so it is not impossible. We know how to fix this system. We need a system where inclusion is the norm, where parents and schools do not need an EHCP to get the support they need, where local authorities have not just the responsibility but the resources and levers to deliver, and where there is clear understanding for all parties of what support to expect and the confidence that it will be delivered. We need a system that does not require resorting to legal process and with a clear focus on delivering improved outcomes.
This will not be easy, not because it is technically or financially difficult—as I said earlier, successful models exist—but because there has been a complete breakdown of trust in the current system from all parties, which understandably are very protective of what they have. This mould needs to be broken, and it needs to be done on a cross-party basis.
Fortunately, there are good proposals on the table as to what can be done, as outlined in some of the proposals from the previous Government’s SEND review and the recently published Isos report commissioned by the LGA and CCN. What do we need? The Government should set out a new national ambition based on two core principles—promoting inclusion in education and preparing young people for adult life. We need a clear framework that describes levels and types of needs, including reform of the statutory framework so that it is clear what support should be available for each level of need, whether that is mainstream or in special schools. We need a clear framework for how partners will work together, aligning responsibilities with delivery and aligning transition points, and including, as the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Lincoln pointed out, linking specialist schools to mainstream so that there is mutual support.
We should be ambitious for our children. All plans should seek to improve outcomes and support the transition to adulthood. As noted by the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, early identification is important and we need to get it right. We need to move away from a legalistic, tribunal-based system, which does not help anyone.
While it requires upfront investment to build capacity in mainstream schools and additional specialist support—such as for speech and language, with educational psychologists and in specialist schools and colleges—the savings from reducing higher-cost placements and transport, legal and other costs would more than compensate, while delivering better outcomes and sustainability. This will enable special needs schools and colleges to fulfil their important role as part of a positively functioning system. The Government’s proposals to require all schools to co-operate with local authorities on SEND admission, SEND inclusion and mental health support are a positive first step, but we need to go much further.