SEND Provision: South-east England

Debate between Edward Leigh and Catherine McKinnell

Tuesday 15th July 2025 Westminster Hall

[Catherine McKinnell]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. What we want is a system in which local partners work in partnership. Currently, that is inspected by Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission. I will come to the particular examples in Kent and the south-east that hon. Members have raised.

We want to support and challenge local authorities and health authorities to ensure that partnership is real, working and—most of all—delivering outcomes for children. Everything we do is focused on improving those outcomes, which is why we are prioritising early intervention and inclusive provision. We know that early intervention prevents unmet need from escalating. It supports children to achieve their goals alongside their peers, and we have a clear target for more children to meet their early development goals. We are absolutely laser-focused on improving those outcomes for children.

On accountability and inspection, Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission jointly inspected the local SEND provision. I read with great concern the inspection reports for Oxfordshire and Bracknell Forest, both of which have been inspected under the new Ofsted-CQC framework. They identified significant concerns about the experiences and outcomes for children with SEND in the local areas. The issues that have been raised are incredibly serious, and DfE officials and NHS England advisers are meeting regularly with leaders and representatives from schools, colleges and parent-carer forums to continue to review and challenge the progress against the improvement plans.

The Department has also appointed SEND advisers to provide advice and challenge to local leaders. That is happening is Bracknell Forest, Kent, Surrey, Slough, Oxfordshire, West Sussex, Medway, Milton Keynes, and the Isle of Wight. There are also additional packages of support to provide training and advice in those local areas. It is vital that rapid action is taken to improve SEND services where weaknesses are identified, and that leaders accept collective responsibility and accountability for delivering on these improvements. There is a relentless focus on driving improvement, supporting where we can and where necessary, but also ensuring that good practice, where it emerges, is spread. That is what we want to focus on with our reforms.

The number of education, health and care plans has increased each year since they were introduced in 2014. As of January 2025, there were over 630,000 children and young people with an EHCP—an increase of 10% in the last year alone. As a result of flaws and lack of capacity in the system to meet lower-level need, additional strain has been placed on specialist services, which has had a detrimental impact on families’ experiences of accessing support and contributed to creating an unsustainable system.

Many parents feel that the only way they can get any support for their child is by going through the EHCP process. However, independently published insights show that extensive improvements to the system, using early intervention along with better resourcing of mainstream schools, could create much better outcomes for children. I know that is what many constituents want to see, including those of my hon. Friends the Members for Aylesbury (Laura Kyrke-Smith) and for East Thanet (Ms Billington).

The insights show that more children and young people could have their needs met in a mainstream setting, rather than a specialist placement. That would ensure that they could go to school locally and help to tackle some of the incredible transport challenges and costs, as well as the time that young people spend travelling around. They should be able to go to their local school. We also know that it takes a vast workforce, from teachers to teaching assistants, early years educators and health professionals, to help children thrive. We are investing of each one of these to improve outcomes and experiences across the country.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Brighton Kemptown and Peacehaven (Chris Ward) said, high-quality teaching is central to ensuring that pupils with SEND are given the best possible opportunities to achieve. That is why we are implementing a coherent offer of high-quality teacher development for all teachers. It begins with their initial teaching training and goes into their early career teaching support, so that all teachers have the right skills and support to enable them to support students with special educational needs. It will enable teachers to identify those needs and to signpost if needed, as well as to adapt their teaching according to different learning abilities.

[Sir Edward Leigh (in the Chair)]

Order. The Minister needs to give the Member in charge some time to respond.

[Catherine McKinnell]

Okay, Sir Edward.

I take the points about the specialist teaching workforce, and how we need to invest in that.

Finally, on increasing the capacity in the system, we have already allocated £740 million to capital funding for high-needs capital allocations. Kent county council has been given £24 million as part of that funding. The funding is to create additional capacity in the system to ensure that mainstream inclusion can be a reality for schools—the capital allocation is there to make that happen.

I thank the hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells again for bringing forward this debate. My final word, as always, goes to those working across the education, health and care systems in the interests of our children and young people, both in Kent and the south-east and right across the country. They want to deliver the best for our children, and we as a Government want to support them to do so. I thank the hon. Member for bringing this matter to the House.

School Accountability and Intervention

Debate between Edward Leigh and Catherine McKinnell

Monday 3rd February 2025 Commons Chamber

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

In my experience, parents have a pretty good instinct for what is a good school, and the great generator of progress has been the academy programme, with headteachers responding to what parents want. We should be giving them more freedom, not less. Is there not a danger that if we create highly complex Ofsted reports with league tables across 40 different areas, we will replace headteachers concentrating on what parents want with a tick-box culture focused on appeasing the man in Whitehall? The solution is not endless auditing but delivering what parents want.

[Catherine McKinnell]

I find the notion that parents will not be able to understand more information about their child’s school a bit insulting to parents, who care deeply about their children and their education. Parents tell us they want more information, not less. A one-word judgment does not adequately sum up a school. The Ofsted proposal is to report on nine different areas, all of which are key ingredients of a child’s education. That may enable schools that perform in an exemplary or a very strong way on some measures to be given due credit—where they are tackling attendance or behaviour issues—so that they can share best practice. This will be a self-improving system and we will recognise good practice, but we will target—laser-focused—areas that need to improve.