Children with SEND: Assessments and Support

Helen Hayes Excerpts

Monday 15th September 2025 Westminster Hall

[Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Dr Huq. I thank everybody across the country who signed this important petition, and the Petitions Committee for granting time for the debate. It is no surprise that the petition attracted such interest. Across the country, children and their families are being failed by a SEND system that the previous Conservative Education Secretary described as “lose, lose, lose”. For too many children and their parents and carers, the system is slow, adversarial and fundamentally failing to meet children’s needs.

The Education Committee, which I chair, chose to focus its first full inquiry of this Parliament on solving the SEND crisis, because it is the single biggest challenge in the education system, from the early years all the way through to further and higher education. Many Members from both sides of the House heard directly from their constituents during the general election campaign, and subsequently—over and again—about the impact that the failing system has on their daily lives.

[Helen Maguire (Epsom and Ewell) (LD)]

Four-year-old Maeve lives in my constituency and has cerebral palsy. She requires constant care, is unable to walk, has limited speech and has multiple ongoing medical conditions that require attention. Despite that, and despite the fact that her parents applied to Surrey county council almost a year ago, the council has refused to even assess her for an EHCP. She started last week, but still does not have an agreed plan in place. Does the hon. Member agree that the Government must improve funding, tackle waiting lists and boost specialist care so that SEND families get the support that they need?

[Helen Hayes]

My speech will turn to some of the points that the hon. Member raised. I will not give way to further interventions, because many Members want to speak and it would eat into their time.

The Committee spent eight months examining evidence and hearing in person from a wide range of witnesses, including children and young people with SEND. I put on record my thanks to every person who took the time to submit evidence or who gave evidence to us in person. We also travelled to Ontario in Canada and within the UK to look at examples of good practice. We will publish our report later this week, so I cannot speak about its content today, but I am very much looking forward to sharing it with everybody.

I began the inquiry with only a sense of the overwhelming difficulty of the challenge, but at the end of it I am convinced that meaningful reform of the SEND system is possible and deliverable.

[Jamie Stone (Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross) (LD)]

Will the hon. Member give way?

[Helen Hayes]

I will not give way again because of the time constraints.

I will point to a few of the big themes that came through in our evidence, to which our report will speak. There are major problems with accountability in the SEND system. Accountability is overwhelmingly loaded on to the statutory part of the system, which means that if ordinarily available provision is not there or goes wrong, there is no recourse for parents. That problem needs to be fixed.

There is a problem with how we equip teachers. There are children with SEND in every single school, in every classroom, up and down the country, but we do not routinely equip teachers to teach the children who are in front of them. The funding system is broken. There are problems about place planning, both in the inclusivity of mainstream schools and for specialist schools within the state sector.

Most importantly, the trust and confidence of parents in the system is utterly broken. In seeking to solve the crisis, the Government must turn their attention to the ways in which that trust and confidence can be rebuilt, so that children across the country who deserve far better than they get at the moment can access the education to which they are entitled.