Special Educational Needs: Young People

(asked on 3rd June 2019) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps he is taking to ensure young people with special needs in non-local authority schools receive the education and care they need.


Answered by
Nadhim Zahawi Portrait
Nadhim Zahawi
This question was answered on 10th June 2019

The provisions of the Children and Families Act 2014, together with the associated statutory regulations and Special Educational Needs and Disability (SEND) Code of Practice, apply to academies and free schools as well as to schools maintained by local authorities. All schools are required to use their best endeavours to identify and address the SEND of pupils and to apply the graduated approach to support that is outlined in chapter 6 of the SEND Code of Practice.

Academies and free schools are inspected by Ofsted under the same framework as local authority maintained schools. The quality of education and support for pupils with SEND is taken into account by inspectors when making a judgement on the performance of a school.

The department has a contract with the Whole School SEND Consortium to embed SEND within approaches to school improvement and to equip the school workforce to deliver high quality teaching for all pupils with SEND. The programme of work includes building a community of practice with the involvement of 10,000 schools by 2020 and 15,000 schools by 2022, across the 8 regional school commissioner regions.

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