Asked by: Judith Cummins (Labour - Bradford South)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, if she will make an assessment of the potential merits of increasing funding for SEND teaching assistants in schools.
Answered by David Johnston - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
Many teaching assistants who support pupils with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) are partly or wholly funded from local authorities’ high needs budgets, as a result of assessments and consequent decisions about the additional support that those individual pupils need.
The department is increasing high needs funding nationally by £440 million (4.3%) in the 2024/25 financial year. This will bring the total of high needs funding to over £10.5 billion next year, an increase of over 60% from the 2019/20 allocations. Bradford Council is due to receive a high needs funding allocation of £42.2 million through their 2024/25 dedicated schools grant, which is a cumulative increase of 37% per head over the three years from 2021/22.