Special Educational Needs: Birmingham Selly Oak

(asked on 6th January 2023) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent assessment she has made of the level of demand for school places for children with special educational needs and disabilities in Birmingham, Selly Oak constituency.


Answered by
Claire Coutinho Portrait
Claire Coutinho
Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero
This question was answered on 11th January 2023

The statutory duty to provide sufficient school places, including places for pupils with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), sits with local authorities.

To support local authorities to fulfil their statutory duties, the department is investing £2.6 billion between 2022 and 2025 to help deliver new places and improve existing provision for children and young people with SEND or who require alternative provision. This represents a significant investment in new high needs provision. It will support local authorities to deliver new places in mainstream and special schools, as well as other specialist settings, and will also be used to improve the suitability and accessibility of existing buildings.

As part of this commitment, in March 2022 we announced High Needs Provision Capital Allocations amounting to over £1.4 billion of new investment, focused on academic years 2023/24 and 2024/25. Birmingham received a total of just under £27.3 million through the allocations announced in March 2022. Birmingham also received over £6.5 million through previous allocations announced in April 2021, to deliver new places for academic year 2022/23.

From Summer 2023 the department will be collecting data from local authorities on the physical capacity of special schools and SEND provision in mainstream schools, as well as corresponding forecasts of demand for specialist places. We expect this to be an annual data collection, forming part of the existing School Capacity Survey.

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