It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Fovargue, and a real pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Olivia Blake), who made a powerful speech. Sharing her personal experience in this place is a brave thing to do. It has informed our debate, and I am sure that the Minister will refer to that when she sums up.
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Newbury (Laura Farris) on securing the debate. Like her, I have been contacted by so many distressed parents of children with special educational needs. Their experiences of trying to get support for their children are summed up in exactly the word she used: a battle—it is really a battle. EHCPs are the entry ticket to specialist support, but the whole application and appeal processes seem designed to be difficult and time-consuming. As my hon. Friend said, too many times people have to repeat things that they have already said again and again. We must ensure that we have a tell-it-once approach to such things, however long the waiting list might be—she spoke movingly about that as well.
My constituent Samantha King’s four-year-old, for example, was receiving one-to-one nursery support in Wales before they moved to Newcastle-under-Lyme. She supplied extensive documentary evidence of the child’s need when they moved, yet she described having her child’s application refused on the basis that she had not included the reports that she had in fact submitted. That is all too common—things get lost and people have to fill in almost exactly the same form again or for another authority. It is extremely tedious and it breaks people down, and that is why this is such a battle.
Parents then find that they have to appeal to SENDIST, the special educational needs and disability tribunal, as the main route to access an EHCP. We need to analyse the proportion of successful appeals. If local authorities are turning down applications that are successful on appeal, those at the top of that league table need to think about why that is the case. They need to consider applications more carefully in the first place.
Even when someone gets an EHCP, the battle continues. Parents in my constituency report annual reviews not taking place, or the plans not being updated for months following review, severely impacting on a child’s progress through education. A lot of things go wrong in the transitions between stages of education or into work.