My Lords, I support Amendment 98A moved by the noble Lord, Lord Low, and I echo his comments that accountability must be at the heart of SEN reforms in the Bill. I will also speak to Amendment 99, which is a better version of my Amendment 98, which I withdrew.
Times are tough for all families, but for families with disabled children the challenges are even more acute. The current SEN system has led to parents with disabled children all too often feeling powerless, overwhelmed by the seemingly endless bureaucratic hurdles that they need to jump over to access the support their children need. Parents are exhausted, demoralised and unable to understand why it is such a battle for their children’s needs even to be recognised, let alone given adequate support.
Recent evidence shows that one in eight families in England who have a child with SEN are being pushed to breaking point by a lack of support. Scope’s Keep us Close report found that 62% of these families said that the services they need are not available in their local area and that that has a serious impact on their family life. It is vital that robust accountability measures are in place around the local offer. This would give parents the confidence that their needs would be listened
to and that local support would be in place to enable their children to be a part of their community and part of society, and to have the same opportunities as their non-disabled peers.
Amendment 98A would ensure that the local offer was not merely a “Yellow Pages” of SEN support, as many fear it will be, but was rather a living document, responsive to the needs of families with a clear intention to improve local services. The current requirement in the Bill for local authorities to publish comments from parents on the local offer, although an important first step, does not go far enough and will not fulfil the Government’s ambition to, in the words of the Children’s Minister, put the child and their family in the driving seat. The amendment would require that local authorities actively involved parents and young people,
“in producing an action plan to revise the education and care provision”,
outlined in the local offer,
“review and report on progress against its action plan”,
and then,
“revise the local offer accordingly”.
That would give Clause 27 some much needed teeth. It should confine the battles, fights and struggles faced by parents to the SEN history books.
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I turn to Amendment 99. It would require a local authority to perform a funding check before proceeding with implementing the reforms. At Second Reading, I highlighted the fact that many local authorities are already cutting support services for children with SEN. The National Deaf Children’s Society has found that 29% of local authorities will be cutting specialist support services for deaf children this year, and RNIB and Sense are concerned that similar cuts are being made to other services for children with SEN impairments.
This SEN reform has the potential to do more harm than good unless it is adequately funded and implemented properly. Earlier this month, the Department for Education published its impact evaluation of the SEN pathfinder programme. It found that in the first 18 months of the programme the median cost to pathfinders of implementing the reforms was £330,000. If that was applied across all local authorities, we would be looking at a total cost of more than £50 million. Earlier this summer, the Department for Education announced that non-pathfinder areas would receive start-up funding to support the implementation of the SEN reform. That came to a total of £9 million, or about £75,000 per authority. There is a huge funding gap between those two figures.
The impact evaluation report warns that actual costs may in fact be higher. That is already identified, given that pathfinders have been working with relatively small numbers of children to date. That leaves me very nervous that we are asking local authorities to deliver these reforms without adequate resources. I urge the Minister to respond positively to those concerns.