Thank you Mr Betts,
It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship. Let me thank the member for Leeds East for securing this important debate.
I also want to put on record that I welcome the Children’s Wellbeing Bill announced in the King’s Speech.
I want to start by citing the case of one of my constituents, Chloe – who contacted me in July.
She managed to get an EHCP for her 12-year-old son last year. Since then, she has been in a constant battle with the city council to get a school placement.
She wanted specialist provision but did not get it.
Her son lasted just 6 and a half days in mainstream before she was advised to pull him out of that school.
In June, she had to go to tribunal. The judge ruled her son needed a special school.
For months, she has been trying to get a response from the council to even acknowledge her case.
When she contacted me in July, her son had been out of school since October 2023.
To give her son an education, she has been homeschooling him, working 2-3 nights a week while looking after him in the days.
She told me this was having an impact on her son’s anxiety as well as her own mental health.
As of this week, I have still not heard back from the Council.
Mr Betts, Chloe’s story is just one of dozens of cases I and my team are dealing with, that shows that the current special educational needs and disabilities system is broken.
I mention Chloe’s story because it is reflective of the sad state of affairs across the country:
· There has been a 250% increase in appeals to the SEND Tribunal since 2015, with 97% of cases awarded in the favour of parents.
· Over 20% of students are recorded as ‘persistently absent’.
· There has been an increase of 33,485 students attending alternative provision and special schools since 2015.
· And increasing numbers of Local Authorities are unable to fulfil their statutory SEND requirements and are experiencing associated financial unsustainability.
As an ex-children’s services manager in Birmingham, I am particularly concerned about the decimation of early years services under the previous government.
We need to think more about how we get children ready for school, identify special educational needs early, so we can provide that child the support they deserve.
Children with SEND who are being locked out of education are being consigned to a bleak future. That isn’t acceptable.
I know that the previous Government’s SEND and Alternative Provision (AP) Improvement Plan was an attempt to address some of these challenges. But it did not address the root causes of the current issues, in part because it ignored thousands of consultation responses. As such, it offers only a piecemeal response to this crisis which is leaving too many families without the support they need.
I hope that with the new government’s Bill we will see meaningful consultation with affected families, and an announcement of funding to go with this in the forthcoming budget, so councils have the resources they need to deal with the huge increase in demand for ECHPs.
There are not enough special schools in Birmingham; mainstream schools frequently don’t have the resources to support children with complex needs, and so often, when children’s needs are not identified and responded to early on, they are set back for years at a critical stage in the development, with their parents left to pick up the pieces.
As this new government seeks to deliver on its mission to break down the barriers to opportunity, I hope that the Minister will have firmly in her mind people like my constituent Chloe and her son, who deserve much better than the broken system left by the last government.
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