Richard Burgon

My hon. Friend makes his point well and passionately. He is correct; that is what parents and people who work in our schools have been saying to me. I will highlight some of the most appalling statistics. More than half of SEND pupils have been forced to take time out of school due to a lack of proper provision, and some children are missing years of schooling. Two in three special schools are at or over capacity; there are 4,000 more pupils on roll than the reported capacity. There are eye-watering delays for children to get their education, health and care assessments and plans, and fewer than half of the plans are issued within the 20-week legal limit. Nearly a third of parents whose children have special needs have had to resort to the legal system to get them the support they need, and many have spent thousands of pounds to do so. Seven out of eight teachers and 99% of school leaders say that SEND resources are insufficient to meet the needs of our children, according to National Education Union and National Association of Head Teachers staff surveys. Councils face huge SEND deficits, which now stand at £3.2 billion but are expected to reach £5 billion by 2026. The core £10,000 sum that special needs schools receive on a per-pupil basis has been frozen since 2013, despite spiralling inflation. That cost them hundreds of millions of pounds last year alone. I could go on and on, but that alone is a damning indictment of the system. Child neglect is defined as: “the persistent failure to meet a child’s basic physical and/or psychological needs, likely to result in the serious impairment of the child’s health or development.” That is what this failure is, and we should be deeply angry that children are being neglected in such a way. The SEND crisis is part of the wider crisis in education. There are too few teaching assistants, too few educational psychologists, too few special school places, and Sure Starts have been closed. All that and more means that schools are unable to provide the support that children need. It means that effective early interventions are not possible; that can deepen children’s needs with the result that they require more costly support. When schools face such difficulties, talk of bringing more children into mainstream schools, rather than specialist provision, is just empty rhetoric. All that is exacerbated by national curriculum changes, a much more rigid, prescriptive focus to learning and a greater emphasis on performance measures that simply do not provide the flexibility needed for genuinely inclusive education. We cannot solve this crisis by looking at the SEND system in isolation; we have to consider the wider education system as a whole.