Jack Abbott

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Lowestoft (Jess Asato) for securing this important debate on a subject close to my heart. Although the SEND crisis is a national issue, the devastating testimony from colleagues from across our region shows that hundreds if not thousands of families in Suffolk have been failed by this deep-rooted, unrelenting issue. The failure is not only structural but cultural, and it is not new. I have campaigned alongside families and campaign groups for many years and have battled to get them the support they need. There is nothing as heartbreaking as a parent breaking down in tears as they beg for help for their young child, exhausted and broken by a system that works against them, rather than for them. In Suffolk, we have seen the same cycle over and again. There have been multiple versions of the damning Ofsted/CQC report. I say gently to the hon. Member for West Suffolk (Nick Timothy) that it was not the first report, but the third in less than a decade. Warm words and hollow promises of change and improvement follow, yet little change ever comes. The lived experiences of families across our county have not improved, and in many cases have worsened. As I highlighted in my maiden speech, five years ago, after yet another damning report on SEND provision in Suffolk—the one before last—our local newspaper, the East Anglian Daily Times, carried a hauntingly memorable front page with the faces of children and families across Suffolk who have been badly let down by a failed system, accompanied by the headline, “We must be heard”. That simple plea has gone unanswered time and again. I could give many examples to highlight the crisis in SEND provision in Suffolk, but in the short time I have I want to focus on school exclusions. It was absolutely right that the new Secretary of State for Education, Bridget Phillipson, has made driving up school attendance a priority—if a child is not in school, they cannot learn—but too often our education system fails to meet the needs of many children with SEND, and in the worst cases they are removed entirely. Over the summer, the Department for Education released the latest school exclusion figures from English schools for school year 2022-23. Once again, they showed an increasingly familiar, and therefore increasingly alarming, trend across the east of England, in particular Suffolk. In our county this year, children with special educational needs received all but one of the primary school permanent exclusions.