David Smith

Three hundred of my constituents signed the petition. SEND is a major issue in North Northumberland and, over the summer, 130 families completed a consultation that I carried out on the issue. I will share the information with the Secretary of State in due course. The conclusion was unanimous: the system has to change. Let me share three points that those families would want me to share. First, the EHCP process is complicated and isolating. Only 6% of respondents described it as “very positive”. Parents said that the majority of EHCPs granted on the first application took over 30 weeks to be completed. Secondly, a persistent theme was that there was a lack of teacher and staff understanding of how to support pupils with ADHD or autism. Schools are reluctant to acknowledge needs until a crisis point is reached. One respondent said: “It took for my child to have a breakdown” and “get medically signed off before they listened”. Our overstretched teachers do not have the capacity to manage, and they need support and training. Thirdly, perhaps most concerning is the increase in non-school attendance. Some 25% of the parents who responded to my consultation said that they had home-schooled their children for a time due to a lack of suitable provision. This is not just a SEND crisis; it is a crisis of trust between families and parents, and teachers and local authorities. It is a crisis that has been a decade in the making, and our children are growing up bearing the consequences. That is why I welcome the fact that the Government are tackling the issue head on. The Conservative party watched the SEND crisis destroy families, yet was unable to fix it, while Reform seems to think that children who need support are just badly behaved. But parents in North Northumberland are desperate for their children to thrive. They are desperate for someone to listen to their children and to them. That is why I look forward to the reform of the system that the Government will shortly introduce.