Children with SEND: Assessments and Support Debate
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Meg Hillier
Main Page: Meg Hillier (Labour (Co-op) - Hackney South and Shoreditch)Department Debates - View all Meg Hillier's debates with the Department for Education
Children with SEND: Assessments and Support
Meg Hillier Excerpts(2 days, 6 hours ago)
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Dame Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Allin-Khan, and I congratulate the hon. Member for South Cotswolds (Dr Savage) and other colleagues on setting out the case so clearly. I want to focus on solutions and some asks for the Minister. I also want to highlight some of the work done in Hackney, where we have a high number of children with special educational needs. In the last financial year the council spent over £50,000 on top-up funding just to support pupils with SEND. That is an unsustainable position, although the funding is absolutely right for those children and families.
City Academy in Homerton, which the Minister’s predecessor came to visit, does very good work to integrate neurodiversity considerations into all teaching. It says that every teacher is a SENCO, and ensures that pupils with special educational needs and neurodisabilities in particular have a voice by being active on the school council and helping to shape it. That is co-production really living—nothing done about them without them. It means they have great trust among parents. It spreads the support available across the whole school and makes sure that lesson planning and support are shared. There might not always be one-to-one support next to someone; the one-to-one support might involve helping a teacher to create a curriculum that will work across the piece.
One in five children in Hackney have special educational needs and disabilities, so it is a very important issue, but cost shunting is also an issue. We have heard about the cost of tribunals. In London, with schools closing, which is a terribly sad thing, we need to look at opportunities when it comes to the premises available. On average, it costs £12,000 to transport a pupil to an outside placement, £58,000 for a place in an independent special school and up to £300,000 for residential placements. The cost is enormous.
There are signs of the green shoots of hope, with the Government focusing on early intervention—something the Secretary of State has really been emphasising—but can we see more early intervention to prevent the escalation to crisis point and, where it is more appropriate, can we integrate to make sure that we have swift support? Crucially, we need accountability so that parents can have trust in a system that is going to have to change, because the costs are spiralling out of control and children are being failed.