Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps she is taking to ensure that the proposed Education for All Bill allows children in Yeovil constituency with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities to receive support from a teaching assistant when required.

The department’s consultation ‘SEND reform: putting children and young people first’ has now closed after a 12-week consultation period including over 200 engagement events, meetings and roundtables. We are carefully reviewing and taking into account all responses submitted to the consultation and continuing to engage widely on our proposals

Under the proposals, we would place a duty on settings to produce an Individual Support Plan (ISP) for any child or young person receiving support within the proposed targeted, targeted plus or specialist support layers. The ISP will be developed by settings together with parents and young people, giving every child or young person receiving targeted or specialist support a clear and consistent record of their needs and the help they receive, so that support is joined‑up, timely and genuinely centred on what will help them to thrive

Support in settings will be underpinned by National Inclusion Standards which will set out what ordinarily available provision should be in every setting across the 0 to 25 system, as well as the evidence-based tools, strategies and approaches for educators to support children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND)

The national inclusion standards and specialist provision packages will set out what the evidence base tells us about what good provision looks like including where teaching assistant support is an effective way to support a child or young person in mainstream or special schools

We are investing to support the mainstream system to be more inclusive. This includes investing over the next three years:

• £1.6 billion in an Inclusive Mainstream Fund to support settings to improve their inclusion offer, and
• £1.8 billion for local area partnerships, including local authorities and Integrated Care Boards, to develop a new ‘Experts at Hand’ offer designed to strengthen the capability of mainstream education settings by providing access to support from key services and health and specialist education practitioners.