Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, with reference to the report by the Children's Commissioner for England entitled Voices of England’s Missing Children, published in June 2022, if he will make an assessment of the potential merits of locating (a) education psychologists, (b) emotional learning support assistants and (c) speech and language therapists within (i) individual and (ii) networks of schools.

Education is a devolved matter, and the response outlines the information for England only.

The department is grateful to the Commissioner for her report on the ‘Voices of England’s Missing Children’, and her commitment to ensuring that the voices of children and young people are heard. The department shares her ambition to support the most disadvantaged and vulnerable children and young people, through high-quality education and local services, to ensure no one is left behind.

Through the Special Educational Needs and Disabilities and Alternative Provision Green Paper, the department is publicly consulting on a number of proposals to bring together a multidisciplinary support offer, and to provide more timely access to specialist support from health and social care partners.

Meanwhile, the department is taking steps to increase the capacity of the specialist workforce. Since 2020, we have increased the number of educational psychologist trainees that we fund from 160, to over 200 per annum, and have invested £30 million to train three more cohorts for academic years 2020, 2021 and 2022. In February 2022, the department announced a further investment of over £10 million to train over 200 more educational psychologists, who will begin their courses in September 2023.

The department is actively exploring the impact of embedding multi-disciplinary specialist teams in education providers. Since November 2021, we have established specialist taskforces in 22 alternative provision schools, in areas where serious youth violence is most prevalent. Through this work, professionals, including speech and language therapists, youth workers and mental health specialists, are delivering targeted support to minimise the risk of children and young people disengaging from education.

The department has worked with the Youth Endowment Fund to commission an evaluator to understand the impacts that the specialist taskforces are having.