Mr Robin Walker (Worcester) (Con)
It is a great pleasure to speak in this hugely important debate. I am very grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for providing time, and to the Petitions Committee for organising and managing many of the important petitions to which it relates, some of which I hope to address.
I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Sir David Davis) on championing this vital campaign. Having worked alongside him on one or two challenging issues over the years, I now have the pleasure of doing so again. I support his motion for three key reasons. As we have heard, Members across the House have huge case loads relating to special educational needs. As Chairman of the Education Committee, and as a long-standing and committed supporter of f40 and its campaign for fairer funding, I think that getting the right support to children with special educational needs and disabilities is a vital challenge, and we have to be frank that it is a challenge with which successive Governments have struggled.
The Committee praised the aims of the 2014 reforms, but it concluded in 2019 that their implementation had not been effective and that funding was “wholly inadequate”. It is to the Government’s great credit that high needs funding has since increased substantially, more than doubling since 2015 and increasing by 60% since the start of this Parliament.
There has been a real focus on providing more specialist places but, while it is undoubtedly true that this Government have prioritised the needs of SEN children in spending reviews, it is also true that the real and substantial increases have not been enough to meet demand. The vast majority of local authorities are facing high needs deficits. Worcestershire is by no means among the worst, but it has told me that it expects its deficit to rise from £34.5 million at the end of March 2024 to £44 million next year.
Not only are specialist and mainstream settings in every constituency struggling to meet the demands of the parents and families that they do accommodate but, as my right hon. Friend made clear in his granddaughter’s case, too many children are not in those settings when they ought to be. The Education Committee has heard that non-elective home education is too prevalent in this space. It is therefore right that we use this debate to press for more resource for what is, legally and morally, a meeting of basic need and the fundamental right to education.
I pay tribute, as others have, to the incredible work happening in every single school in my constituency to support children with special educational needs and disabilities. I say every single school, because it is clear that SEN children and children with EHCPs are spread across the entire school estate—mainstream as well as specialist. I hear from teachers and leaders in mainstream primary schools, early years settings, secondaries, sixth forms and colleges, and, almost without exception, they speak about observing rising levels of need and complexity of need.
That is even more acute in specialist settings, which some years ago were dealing with a few highly complex cases of children with multiple and severe conditions, alongside larger numbers of children with a single diagnosis. Today, an increasing proportion of their intake is taken up by those with multiple and severe conditions, and both Regency High School and Fort Royal Community Primary School in my constituency have described the pressures that creates.
We should all be supporting the incredible parents and carers who support SEN children, while recognising, as the Government’s Green Paper and White Paper have, that the current system has been a source of frustration and confrontation for them. We should be supporting the aspirations of the Green Paper and the White Paper to deliver the right support in the right place at the right time, but to do so will require the scale of resource and investment in training, infrastructure and needs-based funding for which this debate is calling.
There are brilliant people providing support to SEND children across the country, but the rising tide of demand for specialist support needs to be acknowledged from the start. That is why the case for more funding, as well as fairer funding, is really important. Ahead of this debate, f40 prepared a detailed and instructive briefing setting out that the areas that have among the lowest overall school funding also have among the lowest extra funding for high needs. For the record, Worcestershire has the 30th lowest overall funding and the 32nd lowest high needs funding. That position has improved since 2010, but it still puts our school pupils, and particularly our special needs pupils, at a huge disadvantage compared with those with exactly the same needs in better funded areas.
I know that the Department for Education drafted legislation to take the next step in delivering on our manifesto promise of a fairer funding formula by making dedicated schools grant payments directly to schools, rather than through local authorities, but that the legislation fell victim to the demise of the late Schools Bill. I ask the Minister for an update on when the Department plans to take that crucial next step.
Today, f40 is calling not for reallocation but for growing the size of the pie, and for doing so with urgency. That call has been backed by the National Education Union, the Association of School and College Leaders, the National Association of Head Teachers, the Early Years Alliance and the National Governance Association, which all agree that the high needs block requires an extra £4.6 billion a year just to prevent the current crisis in high needs from getting worse. That has been estimated through the growth in the number of EHCPs since 2015.
The substantial revenue funding ask in today’s motion is only part of the solution. We also need to reduce lengthy journeys, which have placed huge strains on home-to-school transport budgets but do nothing for the welfare of children. My local authority, like many others, is seeing huge increases in its home-to-school transport budget. That is contributing to another growing deficit, putting more pressure on local families and other services. Although I appreciate that the Department for Education is not the funder for those budgets, joint working with the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities to ensure that they are properly funded and effectively used is vital.
We need to ensure that the worthy aspiration set out in the last spending review settlement—the £2.6 billion to provide new places—is not just dealt with as a one-off; it needs to be continued in future spending reviews. With that in mind, I am very grateful for the investment that has gone into a new all-through specialist autism school in the neighbouring constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for West Worcestershire (Harriett Baldwin). However, I know that my primary special school, Fort Royal, and my secondary special school, Regency, are desperately in need of expansion. We need to see that capital continue to come and we desperately need a new specialist assessment centre for the early years in Worcester.
Spending to save in this area is very important, and the Government have rightly set out to halve the disability employment gap. My Committee’s inquiry on careers education highlighted how SEN children could benefit from more support in advice and guidance on their careers. I very much agree with what my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden said about the importance of speech and language therapy and investment in that area. I supported the calls for SEND in the specialists campaign last year, and I am glad that the Government have responded positively to a number of those, but we also need to look at auditory verbal therapy, teachers of the deaf, and the number of child psychologists and paediatricians in our health and care teams. Some areas that go beyond the education budget need to be looked at in this respect.
I briefly wish to touch on some of the petitions in support of this motion that related to training for SEN. They are very important, and I welcome the fact that the Government have made some moves to include more SEN content in the initial teacher training curriculum. I urge them also to look at the early career framework in that respect, and that echoes some of the calls that my Select Committee has made. Petition 591092 called for greater qualifications for SENCOs and for us to set a higher bar for their expertise and training. My Committee has welcomed the Government’s commitment to national professional qualifications for SENCOs and heard some positive information on the number of people taking the level 3 qualification. The Under-Secretary of State for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Wantage (David Johnston), who is on the Front Bench today, wrote to us in October to say:
“We have increased funding for an additional 2,000 SENCOs to be trained, taking the total up to 7,000… The project is on track to train a minimum of 3,000 SENCOs by August 2024.”
Can he confirm that that trajectory is being maintained?
This is a hugely challenging and important area. It would not only ease a large and growing financial burden affecting every local authority up and down the country, but particularly benefit children with SEND and their families if the aspirations set out in this motion could be delivered. I therefore commend it to the whole House.
Several hon. Members rose—
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (David Johnston)
I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Sir David Davis) on securing the debate. I know how passionate he is about ensuring that his constituents get what they should from the SEND system and ensuring that his granddaughter, Chloe, gets the support she needs. He made a powerful case for both. Before I go any further, I formally congratulate him on the announcement of his knighthood, which is a well-deserved honour for his decades of public service.
By way of background, I am an MP in an f40 area, so I am familiar with the case the organisation makes and I met the group towards the end of last year. I have been children’s Minister since the end of August, but in the two years before being appointed to that position, the issue of parents and teachers being unable to get the support they need for children with SEND was already in the top two items in my casework and surgery appointments. I pay my own tribute to all the staff supporting children with special educational needs in schools, colleges and alternative provision, both locally and nationally.
The issues raised in the debate are very familiar to me. In previous debates, I have talked about parents having what they feel is a war of attrition with the system to try to get the support they need for their children. That is a war that any parent would wage, but no parent should have to. We know the system is not delivering consistent support and outcomes and that there are significant financial pressures on it, despite considerable Government investment.
I will begin with investment and funding, as that has been the biggest issue discussed this afternoon. As has been touched on, the Government have increased the higher needs budget considerably. In 2024-25, it will be £10.5 billion, which is 60% higher than the figure in 2020. In the past two years, there has been a 32% increase in per head funding in the constituency of my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden. Most Members would agree that that is a considerable amount of money, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell (James Sunderland) said in his speech. Some Members may only agree with that privately, but not many Government budgets, under any Government or in any area, have increased by 60%, which demonstrates the Government’s considerable support for and commitment to the area.
We have two programmes supporting local authorities that face financial pressure in their SEND system, and a number of Members in the Chamber have local authorities involved in those programmes. First, the safety valve programme, which includes 34 local authorities with the highest percentage deficit, helps local authorities pay down accumulated deficits and reform their systems. By March 2025, the Department will have allocated nearly £900 million through that programme, and if what we are trying to deliver is delivered, those deficits will be eradicated.
Secondly, we have the delivering better value programme for those with substantial but less severe deficits, which involves 55 local authorities, including East Riding of Yorkshire in the area of my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden. That is helping to deliver high-quality outcomes with sustainable costs. Under that programme, each area develops a reform plan and receives £1 million to support its delivery.
As has been touched on, the high needs budget has doubled since 2015, but even if a Government were able to triple or quadruple it, that would not by itself deliver the outcomes we all want to see. Parents and teachers know that and frequently say that the issue is not just about money. My hon. Friend the Member for Mansfield (Ben Bradley) made that point well in his speech, and I intend to pick up with him the discussion about conflicting priorities.
The system needs reform, which is why we published our SEND and alternative provision improvement plan last year, with the aim of getting children and young people the right support, in the right place, at the right time. There is a lot within the plan, but I wish to draw out three key areas briefly, because they are the ones that have come up most this afternoon and are in the petitions attached to this debate.
First, on special school provision and capital funding, which was raised by the hon. Member for Harrow West (Gareth Thomas) and others, we are making a £2.6 billion investment, £1.5 billion of which has already been allocated. That is on top of our delivery of new special and alternative provision free schools. There are currently 106 special free schools open and a further 78 have been approved to open in the future.
Secondly, on combatting regional variations, the plan will move us towards a national system with national standards, which we have never previously had. Across the country, we now have nine change programme partnerships, which each have between two and four local areas, together with local schools, health services and parents. What they are doing is, for example, testing an EHCP template that we hope can be used nationally, which will improve the timeliness and quality of EHCPs. We are developing national standards of support for special educational needs, beginning with one for speech and language, which will be released later this year. We are also publishing a local and national inclusion dashboard, which parents will be able to access. They will be able to see how their local area is doing, which will drive accountability.
Thirdly, my hon. Friend the Member for Torbay (Kevin Foster) asked about the skills and knowledge of staff in mainstream schools. Our teacher standards already include clear expectations that teachers must understand the needs of all pupils, including those with special educational needs, but we are reviewing the core content framework and the early careers framework to improve their confidence in this area. We have a universal SEND services programme, which more than 11,000 staff have already accessed to improve their knowledge and skills. We are also funding the training of 7,000 early years staff with a level 3 SENCO qualification, as my hon. Friend the Chair of the Education Committee said. Some 5,200 staff have begun that training, so we are on track with that target.
There are many other points that I wanted to respond to, but I have only eight minutes, so I will just say to my right hon. Friend the Member for West Suffolk (Matt Hancock) and my hon. Friends the Members for Tewkesbury (Mr Robertson), for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous), for Gedling (Tom Randall), for Waveney (Peter Aldous), for Aylesbury (Rob Butler) and others that I understand their point about regional variations. It is based partly on deprivation and other factors and partly on the historical spend factors that have been referred to. I am happy to sit down with anybody to talk about those things.
To the hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Olivia Blake), I say that it is already the case that a school has to be outstanding in all areas to receive an outstanding grade from Ofsted, and it is not the case that we have a 20% target for reducing EHCPs, or indeed any other such target.
In conclusion, I reiterate my thanks to my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden for securing this debate and to all Members who have contributed to it. We may disagree on certain aspects of how to achieve this, but we are united in our desire to ensure that the SEND system provides excellent outcomes to all children and young people, and that is what this Government are determined to deliver.