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.

All schools have duties under the Equality Act (2010) towards individual disabled children and young people, including:

• to make reasonable adjustments, including the provision of auxiliary aids and services, to prevent them being put at a substantial disadvantage;
• not to discriminate in relation to their disability; and
• to publish accessibility plans setting out how they plan to increase access for disabled pupils to the curriculum, the physical environment and to information. (Local authorities have parallel duties to publish accessibility strategies.)

Complementing this, the Children and Families Act (2014) places duties on schools to use their ‘best endeavours’ to make special education provision for those who need it, many of whom will have disabilities.

Taken together, this amounts to a range of exacting duties on schools in relation to disability.

To support schools in meeting those duties, in relation to vision impairment and more broadly, we are providing £3.4 million funding over 2018-2020, for the special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) schools’ workforce contract, which will be delivered by the Whole School SEND consortium, led by the National Association for Special Educational Needs, nasen. Our 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. As part of this programme of work, we are also reviewing the learning outcomes of specialist SEND qualifications, including the mandatory qualifications for teachers of classes with vision impairment, to ensure they reflect the changing needs of the education system.