Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent assessment she has made of the extent to which mainstream schooling in (a) East Midlands and (b) Leicestershire has the capacity, expertise and resources to support children with Special Educational Needs.

The department is investing in all mainstream settings to ensure they have the capacity, expertise and resources to support children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND).

This includes a new training package, backed by £200 million, to ensure that staff across early years, schools and post-16 settings can be trained to support pupils with SEND. We are also investing £1.6 billion in an Inclusive Mainstream Fund to support the development of a more inclusive education system.

We will develop National Inclusion Standards that set out evidence-informed tools, strategies and approaches for educators to draw on to identify and support children and young people with additional needs.

We are investing around £1.8 billion over the next three years for local area partnerships to develop a new ‘Experts at Hand’ offer so that mainstream settings can more easily access specialist expertise, including educational psychologists, speech and language therapists (SaLTs) and occupational therapists without needing to wait for a diagnosis. To support this, we are investing over £40 million to train more educational psychologists and get more SaLTs working in education settings.