Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent assessment he has made of the adequacy of the number of SEND places available in schools in Canterbury.

The statutory duty to provide sufficient school places, including places for pupils with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), sits with local authorities. Therefore, the department has not collected central data on the capacity of special schools or of the availability of SEND places more broadly. However, starting from summer 2023, we plan to collect data from local authorities on the physical capacity of special schools and SEND units and resourced provision in mainstream schools, as well as corresponding forecasts of demand for specialist places. We expect this to be an annual data collection, forming part of the existing School Capacity Survey.

To support local authorities fulfil their statutory duties, the department is investing £2.6 billion between 2022 and 2025 to help deliver new places and improve existing provision for children and young people with SEND or who require alternative provision (AP). This represents a significant, transformational investment in new high needs provision. It will support local authorities to deliver new places in mainstream and special schools, as well as other specialist settings, and will also be used to improve the suitability and accessibility of existing buildings.

As part of this commitment, in March 2022 the department announced High Needs Provision Capital Allocations amounting to over £1.4 billion of new investment, focused on academic years 2023/24 and 2024/25. In June 2022, we announced that we will build up to 60 new centrally delivered special and AP free schools. The application process for special free schools will close on 21 October 2022.