Contribution
I thank the right hon. Lady for advance sight of her statement, and her officials and advisers for briefing me over the weekend. I pay tribute to those who have pulled together a 300-page document, which I will now attempt to scrutinise in the five minutes that I have available to me today.
I turn first to SEND. The principles of more support in schools, evidence-led packages, early intervention, and more speech and language therapists are welcome, but despite the 300 pages there is still much that we do not know. We do not know exactly how children will qualify for an EHCP in the future, and no clear eligibility criteria for the so-called specialist provision are set out. There will be around seven packages of support when someone gets an EHCP, but we are not told what these packages of support are, how people qualify for them or how much money will be associated with each. That makes it quite difficult to judge how effective the new system will be, let alone legislate for it.
Many questions also spring from the individual support plans, or ISPs, which will take place in schools. It is not clear from the document what will trigger an ISP, nor the funding that will be associated with it. At the moment, schools generally have to cover the first £6,000 of support before an EHCP is triggered. What will be the new threshold for schools to cover?
On funding, I note the £1.6 billion pot for inclusive mainstream provision over three years, which equates to £24,000 per year per school if divided evenly across every school in England. That is nowhere near enough for the extra work that schools will have to cover to write individually tailored ISPs for every SEND child. This is a mammoth burden to place on schools—one that I do not necessarily think is misplaced, but £24,000 a year is not enough to help them manage it. It is not a recipe for inclusion, but a recipe for disaster. Can the Education Secretary tell schools what additional funding will be available to help them hire extra SENCO support to help them deal with these pressures? Unbelievably, the workforce plan for 6,500 teachers—incidentally, it will not deliver 6,500 more teachers—says nothing about special educational needs provision within the workforce, perhaps because it tries to ignore primary schools altogether.
On wider funding, the Government have still not said how the £6 billion black hole in SEND funding, identified by the Office for Budget Responsibility, will be filled. The latest I read today in the Financial Times is that the money will come from councils. Would the right hon. Lady care to confirm that? Are the funding pots announced today new money, or will they be coming from the Department’s existing overall budget? Has the DFE’s budget expanded beyond what was set out at the spending review at the Budget, and if so, by how much? Will these reforms save money, and if so, over what time period? Lastly on SEND, Ministers repeatedly failed over the weekend to give clarity on reassessments, so I will give the right hon. Lady one more opportunity. Will she rule out any child who currently has an EHCP having it removed—yes or no?
Turning to the wider schools issue, we have the absurdity of a White Paper saying that trusts will be the main driver of system-led improvement, but the Department proposing, in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, to remove the academy order by which underperforming schools are taken over by trusts. Either trusts are a driver for improvement of schools or they are not. I think they very much are a driver, and it seems the Education Secretary now agrees, so will she, with the zeal of a convert, disavow her earlier sins and reinstate the academy order?
On that theme, the White Paper says:
“Our best school trusts…innovate and drive excellence in standards”.
Well, they used to be able to do that, but the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill takes away their ability to innovate in the curriculum, on who they employ, on the terms and conditions of employment, and even on uniforms. Again, I am delighted by the turnaround from the Education Secretary, but I ask that that is reflected in the legislation she is putting through the House.
I fundamentally disagree with the proposal in the White Paper to emphasise inclusion when it comes to suspensions and exclusions. That is the wrong approach. If a pupil is behaving in a way that makes fellow pupils or a teacher unsafe, it is utterly wrong to hesitate to exclude because of inclusion. When pressure is put on schools not to exclude, we have seen tragic cases of how wrong it can go, such as that of Harvey Willgoose, and we must not make the same mistake again.
There is much more to cover—funding reform, admission codes and work I would actually praise such as on maternity pay—but I dare not risk your wrath, Madam Deputy Speaker, so I close by saying that we support the principle of reform, but there is precious little clarity for SEND parents today.