Children with SEND: Assessments and Support

Charlie Maynard Excerpts

Monday 15th September 2025 Westminster Hall

[Munira Wilson (Twickenham) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship today, Dr Allin-Khan. I thank the Petitions Committee for granting this important debate and my hon. Friend the Member for South Cotswolds (Dr Savage) for opening the debate with such a powerful speech. I welcome the new Minister to her place, and I look forward to working with her. As I think she has heard today, she has her work cut out.

I start by paying tribute to the now over 125,000 people, including 323 in my Twickenham constituency, who have signed the petition and brought this important debate to the House. I pay tribute to the numerous campaign groups and charities that have been championing this cause, and I thank the many thousands of teachers and support staff up and down the country who are trying their very best to make our broken SEND system work in the best interests of our children.

Many of those who signed the petition will be parents, carers and family members of children with special educational needs or disabilities, who are deeply worried about the proposals that have been reported in the media over recent months. These are not families who are gaming or hijacking the system, as I think some Reform Members have suggested, or taking the system for a ride. They are simply parents and carers who are juggling advocating and caring for their children, while also being subjected to a drip-feed of rumours in the press about their children’s future and how their rights might be reduced.

MPs across the House know only too well from their inbox and mailbag, as we have heard so clearly and powerfully today, the many painful stories of how their constituents have had to fight for their child or children to get the support they need to learn and thrive. Sadly, some have struggled for so long that they have had no choice but to remove their child from school. Those are not decisions that parents or carers make lightly.

It is clear for many families that the current SEND system is not working. The Conservatives left a system that their own former Education Seretary, Gillian Keegan, described as “lose, lose, lose”. Despite increased funding, outcomes for children and young people have not improved, and far too many are left without adequate support. At the same time, as we have heard, local authorities are being driven to the financial brink.

The system is far too adversarial. Parents should not have to fight for their child to receive an education. We urgently need an overhaul of the whole system—but any reforms without children and families at their heart will fail. Scrapping EHCPs in a vacuum will not work; we need to see fundamental changes in how we deliver SEND support.

The Minister may be aware that my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Ed Davey) and I wrote to the Prime Minister and the Education Secretary back in July, outlining five principles for SEND reform. We Liberal Democrats believe that these five principles should be the guiding light for any reform of our SEND system. First, we must put children and families first. Any reforms cannot be a repeat of the welfare reform disaster, which was a Treasury-driven, cost-cutting exercise. The voices of children and families should be at the heart of any reforms brought forward. However, it was clear from the rally today that many feel that their voices are not being heard. Children’s rights to SEND assessment and support must be maintained.

Secondly, as many hon. Members have said, early identification is key. We know that the earlier we act, the quicker we can prevent needs from spiralling. That means investing in early identification and intervention now. There are several educational and developmental checkpoints during a child’s early years and throughout primary school that could be expanded to identify additional needs; I would welcome information on what work Ministers are doing in that area. The Education Policy Institute has found that children with special educational needs who started reception last year were more than a year behind their peers. Staggeringly, those with an EHCP were already 20 months behind. We must work on narrowing that gap in the early years, and on giving children the help they need as soon as possible.

The former Minister for Early Years, the hon. Member for Portsmouth South (Stephen Morgan), failed to answer this question when I asked him on the Floor of the House. I hope the new schools Minister will address how much of the £760 million for SEND transformation announced in the spending review will go towards early identification and intervention.

Thirdly, we need to boost specialist capacity. With 19.5% of pupils in England identified as having special educational needs, capacity in state school provision must be increased, alongside improvements to inclusive mainstream provision. That means investment in new school buildings and staff training. The Liberal Democrats urge the Government to proceed rapidly with the opening of the 67 special free schools stuck in the pipeline, and I welcome measures in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill that will allow local authorities to open special schools. We know that applications were repeatedly blocked by the previous Conservative Government, despite the desperate need for our state special schools, which are bursting at the seams.

[Charlie Maynard (Witney) (LD)]

On the point about upskilling teachers, the Mulberry Bush school in my constituency does a fantastic job with outreach from specialist schools to regular schools. Does my hon. Friend agree that upskilling teachers and using skills inside the SEND schools to teach teachers in the broader environment would be a great thing?

[Munira Wilson]

I agree with my hon. Friend. I have heard about that hub-and-spoke model and would like to go and see it; I think it could be a good model to scale up.

I also implore Ministers to look at the bureaucratic hurdles that local authorities face in putting specialist units in mainstream schools. I think it was the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Dame Meg Hillier) who mentioned that London and other areas have falling school rolls. There is space opening up in our school estate for specialist units. My own local authority managed to take advantage of that in Nelson school, which is a primary school but, as of last week, has a specialist unit for secondary pupils with SEMH needs. That could provide a rapid expansion of specialist provision for children to be educated closer to home and among their friends and peers.

Fourthly, we need support for local government. We have heard today that local authorities are racking up billions of pounds of deficits. Some of those costs are driven by the eye-watering fees charged by private equity-run special schools, some of which have a profit margin upwards of 20%. That is just wrong and immoral, and it is bleeding our councils dry. Local authorities are also spending £2.26 billion on SEND transport.

In the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, the Government have proposed a potential profit cap on private social care providers. I was disappointed that every Labour MP voted down Liberal Democrat proposals earlier this year to cap the profits of private special schools; I hope that, with the new Minister in her place, they will think again on their stance on that amendment while the Bill is in the other place. Liberal Democrats are also calling for a new national SEND body to oversee and fund some of the most complex cases, where needs exceed a particular cost, to put an end to the postcode lottery of support, so that no child is left waiting and no council is left with unmanageable costs.

Finally, we need a fair funding arrangement. We need to get rid of the perverse incentives enshrined in the £6,000 notional budget that schools are given for SEND support. The performance and accountability regime should not penalise schools for accepting SEND pupils. Mainstream inclusion is vital, but it is not a silver bullet; for inclusion to work, it must be properly resourced. Teachers need training, classrooms need resources and schools need the capacity to meet needs, but we know that budgets are already stretched to the max. I hear in my own constituency that teaching assistants are among the first to go, yet they are the ones supporting the children with special needs.

Reform must be rooted in improving children’s lives, not simply managing down costs or limiting access to support. As we have heard today, some of the local authority funding reforms will significantly penalise local authorities—particularly my own, but also authorities across London and other parts of the country.

In conclusion, it is abundantly clear that the SEND system in its current form is too slow, too inconsistent and too adversarial. We need and want a system in which children get the right support at the right time, regardless of where they live. Change is urgently needed for families across the country. They cannot afford to wait.

I sincerely hope that the Government reshuffle will not cause further delay to the White Paper. We Liberal Democrats have offered to work constructively with Ministers on getting this issue right, with our five principles for reform. The Government cannot afford to sleepwalk into another Treasury-led disaster. They have to get this right, because every child, no matter their background or their needs, deserves every opportunity to thrive.