Dr Danny Chambers

I completely agree. The issue that everyone has brought up today is that the system is adversarial right from the point that parents try to get a diagnosis in the first place to show that their child needs support. When they finally do, they then have to fight tooth and nail—including in time-wasting tribunals, which take a large emotional and financial toll—to get the support that their child is entitled to. Even once the child gets the support package required, that is not guaranteed all the way through schooling. Let me give a bit of an extreme example: I was recently contacted by a parent whose child, who has just one week to go in primary school, still does not know where he will go to secondary school. The parent and the headteacher of the primary school have asked continually, but there is no clear response. In this instance, Hampshire county council has failed to plan on time and ignored parental choice. It is insisting at the last minute on a wholly unsuitable mainstream school, which has no record that the child is coming and says that it cannot meet his needs—and we are talking here about a parent who managed get the package required for their child in primary school. I could talk about this for half an hour, given the amount of casework I have. There is a huge issue about how we pay for SEND, but we must also consider what happens if we do not pay for it, as some other Members have touched on. The issue is a little like free school meals: if a child goes to school either hungry, or with undiagnosed learning needs that are not being met, they are clearly not going to fulfil their full educational potential. They will not get a job that pays as well as one they could otherwise have got and they will be more likely to end up on welfare throughout the rest of their life. We have a prison in Winchester, and some 25% of the prison population are diagnosed with ADHD, compared with 3% to 4% of the general population, while 9% have autism spectrum disorder, compared with 1% to 2% of the general population. It costs £50,000 a year to keep someone in prison, yet apparently we cannot afford to give people the support they need in school to help them to make better life choices. If we did that, it would be better for those individuals and more cost effective for the taxpayer in the long run.