Tony Vaughan

I beg to move, That this House has considered SEND provision in Kent. It is a privilege to serve under your chairship, Sir John. Many dedicated people are working to support children with special educational needs and disabilities in my constituency—in schools, doctors’ surgeries and social services, alongside many other professionals—but I am afraid to say that children in Folkestone and Hythe are being failed every day by the broken SEND system in Kent, which is presided over by Reform UK-run Kent county council. This is not an entirely negative speech, but I do need to start by describing what we are seeing on the ground every day, before I move on to the way forwards. The reality in Kent is that, under Reform’s stewardship, the situation for SEND support has deteriorated to crisis point. My inbox is full of emails from desperate parents. This is not a bureaucratic failure alone: it is a moral failure. In 2025, children in Kent with SEND are still denied the basic dignity, respect and support that any civilised society should provide. The stories from my constituency are not just troubling; they are harrowing indictments of a local authority that has lost its moral compass. Let us take the case of one boy who was diagnosed with autism and pathological demand avoidance. He is now in year 6 at a specialist SEND school. His parents, supported by professionals, identified the secondary school that could best meet his complex needs, but instead, Reform UK’s Kent county council named a different school, which itself had admitted that it could not meet his needs. To compound this, the education, health and care plan, which is meant to be a living document, mostly referred to his infant years. He is 11 now. Disgracefully, his future is being locked to outdated paperwork. When his parents challenged the decision at tribunal, KCC brazenly admitted that its sole reason for choosing an inappropriate school was money. Let us call that what it is: institutional neglect, sanctioned from the very top of the council. KCC is gaming the tribunal system as a delaying tactic, to push back the date when it must pay for SEND children’s needs. KCC spends far more on SEND tribunals than any other local authority in this country, amounting to millions of pounds every year, despite losing almost all of them. That is a failure of leadership of epic proportions. My team is inundated with accounts of heartbreak, of children’s needs dismissed and of families abandoned. Another local child with complex SEND has been on a sharply reduced timetable since February 2025. The school was forced by a lack of resources to push forward a plan at pace and in a fashion entirely unsuited to him. He was failed not by his teachers but by the absent leadership of the council. A child in my constituency was for an entire year denied any placement, simply due to the delays in drawing up an EHCP, which were a direct result of council paralysis. A further example, which is perhaps the most shocking and saddening, is a family whose child has been driven to despair by the failed system and has voiced the wish not to go on living. That should horrify all of us, and it is happening under the council’s watch.