SEND Provision: South-east England

Danny Chambers Excerpts

Tuesday 15th July 2025 Westminster Hall

[Dr Danny Chambers (Winchester) (LD)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Sir Edward, and I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells (Mike Martin) for securing this hugely important debate. Like many other Members here, SEND is probably the subject that I get the most emails about, and it is very closely related to children’s mental health, which I will start by discussing.

The process of struggling to access an educational support plan starts right from trying to get a diagnosis. It is difficult to get a diagnosis through CAMHS for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or for being on the autism spectrum. Delays of more than two years are not only awful for individuals, but make up a huge chunk of their time in school. If a child is eight or nine years old and has to wait two years for diagnosis, it is very difficult for them to make up for that lost time.

Although we should be clear that ADHD and being on the autism spectrum are not themselves mental health issues, if such conditions are unrecognised and undiagnosed, and are not supported in school, that can lead to mental health issues, including children feeling inadequate and struggling to achieve what they should. That causes a lot of stress and anxiety.

[Monica Harding]

In Surrey, for example, 1,800 children with special educational needs are missing education because there is no provision. They are sliding into poor mental health as a result, and that needs to stop. Does my hon. Friend agree?

[Dr Chambers]

I completely agree. The issue that everyone has brought up today is that the system is adversarial right from the point that parents try to get a diagnosis in the first place to show that their child needs support. When they finally do, they then have to fight tooth and nail—including in time-wasting tribunals, which take a large emotional and financial toll—to get the support that their child is entitled to.

Even once the child gets the support package required, that is not guaranteed all the way through schooling. Let me give a bit of an extreme example: I was recently contacted by a parent whose child, who has just one week to go in primary school, still does not know where he will go to secondary school. The parent and the headteacher of the primary school have asked continually, but there is no clear response. In this instance, Hampshire county council has failed to plan on time and ignored parental choice. It is insisting at the last minute on a wholly unsuitable mainstream school, which has no record that the child is coming and says that it cannot meet his needs—and we are talking here about a parent who managed get the package required for their child in primary school.

I could talk about this for half an hour, given the amount of casework I have. There is a huge issue about how we pay for SEND, but we must also consider what happens if we do not pay for it, as some other Members have touched on. The issue is a little like free school meals: if a child goes to school either hungry, or with undiagnosed learning needs that are not being met, they are clearly not going to fulfil their full educational potential. They will not get a job that pays as well as one they could otherwise have got and they will be more likely to end up on welfare throughout the rest of their life.

We have a prison in Winchester, and some 25% of the prison population are diagnosed with ADHD, compared with 3% to 4% of the general population, while 9% have autism spectrum disorder, compared with 1% to 2% of the general population. It costs £50,000 a year to keep someone in prison, yet apparently we cannot afford to give people the support they need in school to help them to make better life choices. If we did that, it would be better for those individuals and more cost effective for the taxpayer in the long run.