Briefly to disaggregate my hon. Friend’s two points, clearly it is important that we know what is happening in schools on the delivery of SEN provision, and since September 2012 we have had a strengthened Ofsted framework that seeks to do that. I and my colleague in the Department of Health want to explore what more we can do to try to bring about a more multidimensional accountability and inspection regime for special educational needs that goes beyond the school gates and looks at it across education, health and social care, so there is more that we can do in that area. The Education Department is also looking at some of the destination measures in schools as a way of ensuring that we do not miss out on understanding the progress of children who sometimes fall below the radar because they do not count towards any of the measures of success that the school is being marked against. We need to get around that and make it more explicit that every child needs to be making progress whatever their ability, and there is no reason why all of them should not be doing so, and every school has a responsibility in that regard.
We made further changes in Committee, where I was pleased to include a specific duty requiring those responsible for commissioning health provision to secure the health care provision education, health and care plans. This is a hugely significant change and has been widely welcomed. Srabani Sen, board member of the Every Disabled Child Matters campaign and chief executive of Contact a Family, when giving evidence to the Committee on 5 March, said that
“it was phenomenally good news to hear this morning about the duty on health to provide. One of the things that that helps with enormously is bringing people together to work together at a service delivery level”—
a point that my hon. Friend the Member for Hexham (Guy Opperman) made—
“but it also gives parents something solid that they can use when they are having these discussions with their service providers about how they get the right services for their child. I do not think we can overestimate the potential of what you”—
I think that means me—
“announced this morning. It is phenomenally useful.”––[Official Report, Children and Families Bill Public Bill Committee, 5 March 2013; c. 47-48, Q103.]
The new duty builds on the joint commissioning duty set out in the Bill, which requires local authorities and clinical commissioning groups, and NHS England where relevant, to assess the needs of the local population of children and young people with SEN and plan and commission services to meet them.
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