Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps he is taking to ensure that every young person with vision impairment has access to the same learning materials as their sighted peers, adapted to their reading needs.

All schools have duties under the Equality Act 2010 towards individual disabled children and young people. They must make reasonable adjustments, including the provision of auxiliary aids and services for disabled children, to prevent them being put at a substantial disadvantage. This would include ensuring that pupils with visual impairment have access to appropriate reading materials.

Schools must publish accessibility plans and local authorities must publish accessibility strategies setting out how they plan to increase access for disabled pupils to the curriculum, the physical environment and to information. Schools also have wider duties to prevent discrimination, to promote equality of opportunity and to foster good relations.

The Department for Education is providing £3.4 million funding over 2018-2020, for the Special Educational Needs and Disabilitiies (SEND) schools’ workforce contract, which will be delivered by the Whole School SEND consortium, led by nasen. The SEND schools’ workforce contract aim is to embed SEND into school led approaches to school improvement in order to equip the workforce to deliver high quality teaching across all types of SEND, including children and young people with vision impairment.