Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what estimate his Department has made of the number of schools in England (a) have or (b) are planning to close their resource base provision for children with special educational needs.

The Department does not collect data on changes made to local authority maintained schools, as local authorities are responsible for making such changes.

Since September 2016, three academies have removed provision reserved for children with special educational needs (SEN); this includes “resourced provision” and “designated SEN units”. A further academy has proposed to close its SEN provision.

Although one of these academies closed its provision due to financial unviability; in the main, SEN provision is removed from a particular school because of reorganisation, so the provision is retained but delivered elsewhere.

Within the same timeframe seven academies have added new SEN provision, one academy is due to add provision in September this year and a further two have proposed to do so.