Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment her Department has made of the training places required to supply the proposed Experts at Hand offer.

The department is investing around £1.8 billion over the next three years for local area partnerships, including local authorities and integrated care boards (ICBs), to develop a new ‘Experts at Hand’ offer. This offer is designed to strengthen the capability of mainstream education settings by providing access to support across health and education, including from educational psychologists and trainees, speech and language therapists and support workers or assistants, occupational therapists and support workers or assistants; and specialist teachers, both local authority-based and those based in specialist or alternative provision settings.

To support delivery of the offer, we are investing over £40 million in the specialist workforce, including £26 million to train at least 200 educational psychologists per year from 2026 and 2027, followed by additional funding from 2028 to train more educational psychologists than we currently do, subject to future spending review. This is in addition to the £31 million already invested to train educational psychologists since 2023.

Upon graduating, trainees who have had their training funded by the department are required remain in local authority employment for a minimum period (three years, or two for earlier cohorts, dependent on when their training started). Investment in this vital workforce will therefore help to ensure that the local authority educational psychology workforce is able to support all children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities.

The remaining £15 million will be invested to establish new speech and language therapist (SaLT) advanced practitioners in every ICB geographical area, to get more SaLTs working in educational settings.