Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps her Department is taking to ensure that children with special educational needs and disabilities have equal access to work experience.

The careers statutory guidance makes it clear that schools and colleges should offer every young person at least one experience of a workplace by age 16 and a further experience by age 18, in line with Gatsby Benchmark 6.

The department funds the Careers & Enterprise Company (CEC) to support schools and colleges to provide high quality experiences of workplaces. The CEC undertake targeted work with employers to stimulate employer engagement that will support young people with special educational needs and disabilities. The department will continue to make the case for employers to provide work experience for young people with special educational needs.

For young people aged 16 to 24 with Education, Health and Care (EHC) plans, the department offers Supported Internships which are personalised study programmes, specifically designed to help young people to prepare for and transition into sustained, paid employment.

In February 2022, the department announced that it is providing funding of up to £18 million over the next three years to build capacity in the Supported Internships programme. The aim is to double the number of Supported Internships to give more young people with an EHC plan the skills to secure and sustain paid employment.

As part of this funding, the department has a contract with the Internships Work consortium, led by the National Development Team for Inclusion, to deliver activities to expand and improve Supported Internships provision across the country.

The Internships Work consortium will be working closely with local authorities to double the number of Supported Internships per year by 2025 and will engage with all partners in the system to level up the quality of internships across the country. Over 700 job coaches will be trained by 2025 to ensure interns receive high quality support on their work placements.

Finally, in the Spring Budget 2023, the Chancellor announced up to £3 million to pilot extending Supported Internship to young people without EHC plans. Through this pilot, the department will seek to establish whether the Supported Internship model is an effective approach for learners with learning difficulties and disabilities but without an EHC plan. The department will identify the benefits and challenges of using the Supported Internship model to support this cohort and use learning from the pilot to consider if and how the approach could be rolled out more widely.