National Autism and Education Strategy

Lord Addington Excerpts

Wednesday 16th May 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

My Lords, we have invested £373 million for local areas to implement SEND since 2014 and have just renewed a grant to the Autism Education Trust to help improve the training of education staff. It has trained some 150,000 staff since 2011-12. Awareness is very much rising in the education sector.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, the Minister talked about awareness. Awareness only goes so far. Have the Government identified how many specialist support teachers they need—people trained specifically to meet the needs of this group—and at what density? Without that, you can have all the awareness you need but not know how to implement it properly.

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

My Lords, the approach has very much been to include autistic children in mainstream education, and 72% of autistic children are. As I mentioned a moment ago, we are rolling out the training to staff to ensure that awareness of the condition is more widespread. That is certainly the intention. We have also invested substantially in the creation of special schools. Some 600 local authority maintained schools have a specialism for autistic children.