PARLIAMENTARY DEBATE
SEND Provision: Local Authorities - 3 March 2026 (Commons/Commons Chamber)

I welcome many aspects of the special educational needs and disabilities White Paper, especially those on early intervention and increased funding. We know that most local authority SEND staff care deeply, and we are grateful for them for that, but local authority SEND provision is chronically underfunded and too often this has led to corner cutting, a culture of dishonesty and brutalisation. I fear that the Government have seriously underestimated the scale of harm. One mum wrote on my Facebook page:

“My daughter is self-harming and suicidal. EHCP behind by weeks. Discharged by CAMHS as educational setting is the main reason for mental health struggles and has to change before any work can be done. We are just left watching our children suffer. How is breaking the law by all these services allowed and not prosecuted?”

To this point, Mathew Purchase KC has said that the schools White Paper has

“a lot of good intentions, but which, on the face of it, are going to reduce the ability for children and families to enforce what they are legally entitled to.”

Last week I published, with The Times, 20 cases of avoidable SEND child suicide caused by failures by local authorities. All 20 of those children would have had their education, health and care plan rights removed under the Government’s plan, so would potentially have been even more vulnerable. Three of their mums have asked me to speak about their children.

Patricia Alban is here today. Her son Sammy was autistic. His local authority removed his EHCP. Despite 13 referrals by the police to the council, it refused to provide him with any of the support he needed. After a history of suicide attempts, Sammy died, aged 13, after falling from a harbour wall. His inquest concluded that he died from

“inadequate support from the local authority and mental health services.”

My constituent, Jen Bridges-Chalkley, started college in October 2021. She was 17 and had been diagnosed with autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Her local authority failed to update the college, through her EHCP, about her risk of suicide. One month later, she was dead. Her 81-page inquest report detailed continuous and prolonged failures by her local authority to provide the support she needed.

Eivie White was 13 when she killed herself, after years of denials and failures by her local authority to provide the support she needed for her autism. Her older sister found her body. She had to continue sleeping in the same bedroom in which Eivie had hanged herself because the local authority would not provide new housing. Six months later, Eivie’s best friend killed herself, aged 13.

Those are just three of over 200 testimonies I have received about avoidable SEND child suicide—it is an epidemic. It is our country’s duty to protect our most vulnerable citizens. How can the Government even consider cutting children’s rights?

I thank the hon. Member for Dorking and Horley (Chris Coghlan) for his powerful and sobering speech, and for securing the debate. He and I have talked before about his research, which is heartbreaking and demonstrates powerfully the need for change. We have arranged a date for me to visit and speak to some of the families he is working with, and I am happy to make time after the debate to talk with the families who are here today. This is just unimaginable loss.

The hon. Member set out that he has gathered 200 stories, but I understand that there are thousands more stories in which children and families have been failed. I have travelled around the country to talk to families, and I have also heard so many stories.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Dorking and Horley (Chris Coghlan) for his truly emotional and very caring speech. While the Minister is travelling around the country, will she spend some time in west Somerset, where 2,500 children are on the crisis list?

I thank the hon. Member for inviting me to speak to families in her area.

The conversations that I have had have so often been about parents battling for years to get the support that they know their children need, as the hon. Member for Dorking and Horley said, and about the powerlessness they feel as they watch their children struggle and fall behind.

At my online advice surgery yesterday, I met constituent Jenny Wilson, who has fought tirelessly for her son Maxwell to receive support from their local authority—he is without a formal diagnosis. Jenny and other parents in my constituency would like to know what more the Government are doing to help children who do not have a formal diagnosis and are still being denied EHCPs or any additional support.

I very often hear that exact story: too much support is locked behind a diagnosis that takes years, or behind a bureaucratic process. The reforms that we have set out move investment directly into schools and services that wrap around schools. We are introducing two new layers of support—targeted and targeted-plus—that will be available to children, without that battle for external validation. Teachers will be able to draw on that to support children in their classrooms. That is backed up by two new pieces of investment: £1.6 billion going directly into schools; and £1.8 billion into a new “experts at hand” service, to pay for speech and language therapists, occupational therapists, educational psychologists, specialist teachers and others who will support schools. Their support will be available for young people, including the one mentioned by my hon. Friend.

I agree with what the Minister says, and it is good that all this provision is coming in, but I simply do not understand why, if she is so confident that these reforms will work, it is necessary to reduce children’s rights. I know that she is likely to say that the Government are not doing so, but it is the view of KCs—an authority I trust—that that is happening. In theory, if the reforms succeed, the demand to exercise those legal rights should naturally fall, because families should not need to use them, so whether or not those rights are there should be slightly irrelevant. However, if the reforms do not succeed, those rights gives families whose trust has collapsed the peace of mind that they can, in the worst cases, go to a tribunal and save their children’s lives.

It is really important to say to families that we are expanding their support and their rights. There will be new legal duties on schools to develop these new layers of support, which will mean that support is available earlier.

I thank the hon. Member for Dorking and Horley (Chris Coghlan) for securing this debate. It is so important that the lived experiences of parents are valued by local authorities and other services, and too often they are not. In 2023, two of my constituents, Jo and Chris, tragically lost their son Leo to suicide. Leo was a bright, intelligent, inquisitive child. He was also neurodivergent and struggled with his diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder. He is featured in the Times article that the hon. Member mentioned. The coroner’s report into his death found that he had been failed by multiple agencies over a sustained period. The hon. Member kindly reached out to Jo and Chris to learn more about what happened to Leo and the lessons that could be learned, and I am really grateful to him for doing so. Will the Minister agree to meet me, so that we can ensure the voices of parents like Jo and Chris are given the weight that they deserve?

I thank my hon. Friend for sharing that tragic story. Of course I would be willing to meet him to discuss it further. These are stories of failure, and we need to do better for these families and change things. We need a system in which every school is set up to support children with special educational needs and disabilities. We are making it mandatory for every teacher to be trained to support children with special educational needs and disabilities, investing directly in schools to provide that support and setting out new national standards and new accountability for schools.

The hon. Member for Dorking and Horley made a really important point about families still being able to apply for specialist support. Any individual who feels that their child is not getting the support they need through the targeted or targeted-plus offer will be able to have a needs assessment. If they are unhappy with the needs assessment, they will be able to go to the tribunal to challenge that decision, so there will be individual redress in the system.

But it cannot just be for individual families to hold the system to account, because that is the system we have at the moment, with families having to take on legal battles, and for those who do not have the resource, it is not possible to do that. We in the Department for Education and Ofsted have to hold institutions to account. We are really clear that we will provide more support for councils—we are supporting them with 90% of their deficits—but with that support comes much stronger accountability.

I have repeatedly raised with the DFE over the last year very serious misconduct by Surrey county council, including concealing for over 14 months the fact that it had the highest number of complaints in the country and reclassifying complaints as inquiries to reduce complaint volumes. As far as I am aware, no disciplinary action has been taken. This is not a party political point, because it is a Conservative county council, and I know that, off the record, some Conservative county councillors feel exactly the same way about their own administration.

I worked with the Department of Health and Social Care on reforming the Mental Capacity Act 2005, and I was very impressed by its willingness to acknowledge misconduct and the need for accountability and transparency in that case. To be frank, all I have seen from the Department for Education is a culture of protecting one’s own and of cover-ups. When will serious action be taken against local authorities that commit misconduct on SEND and systematic lawbreaking? The Secretary of State for Education said that local authorities will be held to account, but given what has happened with Surrey county council, how can we have any confidence that they actually will?

Following the letters that the hon. Member and others wrote to the Secretary of State, she instructed further intensive activity in Surrey, including a number of deep dives into the issues that were raised, which will report back shortly. There are SEND advisers going in, and there is very close monitoring of what is happening in Surrey and the progress being made, but I take the wider point that families have made to me and Members across the Chamber that there needs to be greater accountability for local authorities. We recognise the challenging circumstances that local authorities have been in, but more investment is going in, and with that investment has to come stronger monitoring, accountability and intervention when there is failure.

As is set out in the schools White Paper, we are strengthening what we are able to do in a number of areas. We are very clear that if there is repeated and long-term failure, we will take SEND from local authorities. Working with the Disabled Children’s Partnership, we are setting out new conditions under which local authorities will need to learn from tribunal judgments, publish action plans on the back of them and show much greater transparency and action.

I thank the Minister for giving way, and I particularly thank my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Dorking and Horley (Chris Coghlan) for securing the debate and for the manner in which he introduced it. Since he has been in this place, he has been a strong advocate for SEND families, and I thank him for that.

The Minister has heard me talk about Sara Sharif before, and my hon. Friend has talked about her during the debate. We are clearly very concerned about children’s services in Surrey county council and I hope that we have shown that intervention is needed. The Minister may disagree, but I beg her to take away that we want to ensure that the culture of children’s services at Surrey county council is not transferred to West Surrey council or East Surrey council in the future. If the Government agree with my assessment that intervention is needed now, they need to intervene to ensure that that culture is not transferred, so that we have the fresh start that vulnerable children in our constituencies so desperately need.

As I set out, we have appointed a SEND adviser who is offering that challenge to Surrey county council. We will continue to monitor the situation very carefully and I await the outcomes of the deep dives. I will be meeting parents, along with the hon. Member for Dorking and Horley, to hear directly from them. I am committed to continuing to work with all the relevant MPs to ensure that children are getting the support that they need in Surrey. More generally, I am committed to ensuring that there is strong accountability and monitoring of performance, as well as putting in new investment and support.

I want to address the concern mentioned by the hon. Member for Dorking and Horley that some young people who had previously had support will no longer get that support under the new system. I refer colleagues to the draft annexes that set out the specialist provision packages. I hope that those annexes reassure them that, as well as looking at children who have physical disabilities and complex learning difficulties, two of the specialist provision packages focus on social and emotional needs, and the interface with mental health.

I fully believe that the Minister’s heart is in the right place, but for me the test is what lawyers and KCs—not to big them up too much—are saying about the White Paper: specialist educational lawyers are clear that the White Paper is reducing children’s rights. I would love to support the White Paper, but our country desperately needs reforms in this area, as this debate has highlighted. If the Minister wants my support, she will have to satisfy KCs that there is no reduction in rights, and at the moment there is.

Attached to the schools White Paper and the SEND consultation document is our own analysis of children’s rights and all the areas where we are strengthening them. I want to be really clear that the intention of the reforms is to bring in more support earlier and to extend the rights that children have access to.

The Minister is being generous with her time and I thank her for giving way. I want to reiterate the point about the families who have already gone through the system and who have fought for EHCPs, many of whom have had to go through tribunals and feel like they are having to do everything on their own. I come from a mental health background, and I am surprised that the system does not have what I would call a care co-ordinator to support families who are going through this difficult process.

Families are genuinely scared that the Government’s proposed reforms will lead to a stripping away of support. In my constituency, where we are served by Surrey and Borders partnership NHS foundation trust, it takes a year and a half to get an autism diagnosis, and even longer if people need medication for ADHD. I have raised that in this place with Ministers from the Department of Health and Social Care, but can the Minister reassure me that as part of the approach to SEND, she and her Department are looking at the interface between education and health? I understand what she says about the absence of a diagnosis not meaning that a child should not be supported—we could have another debate about that—but for many children a diagnosis is very important, and it needs to be timely and treatment needs to be quick and effective.

Finally, before I test your patience, Madam Deputy Speaker, may I invite the Minister to come to Meath school, a special educational needs school in Ottershaw in my constituency? It is an amazing place and every time I go there I learn so much, so it would be great if she could come along and meet the fantastic kids and teachers there.

I confess that I think I have committed to go to every constituency in the country, but I will do my best. [Laughter.] I cannot promise that every single ask will be responded to quickly, but I want to get to every community, and we will also be doing a number of online events as part of the consultation to ensure that everyone has the chance to feed in.

To respond to the hon. Member’s questions, first, it is important to make clear that we are not saying that children do not need a diagnosis. Diagnosis plays an important part in the system for children and young people, but it cannot and should not be a barrier to accessing support in the education system. Schools must have the tools to identify and respond to need, and the resource and well-evidenced interventions to wrap support around children without a diagnosis. However, we are committed to working with Health colleagues on improving the whole system, and the SEND consultation document is clear about that further work on accountability —not just for local authorities, but for integrated care boards. The hon. Member will know about the review of some of the inequalities in access to diagnosis.

The point about care co-ordinators and parental support is well made—that is something I have heard a lot from families. Within the consultation, we have asked a question about how that can be better delivered, and we are committed to doing more in that space. Lots of different ideas have come forward from different disabled children’s organisations and from parents, but I want to use the consultation to hear directly from parents about what is most helpful for them. In some models, parents who have been through the system are paid to support other parents, and the special educational needs and disabilities information advice and support service already exists. We want to look at all the different models, and I would welcome insights from across the House.

I want to provide some important reassurance to those parents who the hon. Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Dr Spencer) talked about who are concerned about the changes. First, any child at a special school will remain there for as long as they want. We have deliberately taken a careful and staged approach and are putting investment up front, so we are building a new system before we look to transition into it. We are also asking the Children’s Commissioner to take an independent view of system readiness. Secondly, we are clear that any child transitioning from an education, health and care plan must move on to an individual support plan, with the wraparound support I have mentioned.

Will the Minister give way?

I will give way one final time.

The Minister is being very generous with her time, and I am being slightly cheeky.

I have a horrendous case involving a child in Dorking who is 12 years old. I saw the mother in September, a week after the child’s second suicide attempt. The child and adolescent mental health services wrote to the GP one week later, saying that their risk of suicide was low, but there have been more self-harm incidents since then. This child has autism, and last week the county council rejected them from getting an EHCP, so I am literally at my wits’ end about what to do on this case. First, if I were to write to the Minister about this particular case, I would be hugely grateful if she could intervene. Secondly, how would she envisage this child’s situation improving after the reforms?

That is a truly tragic case. Of course, I cannot comment without knowing the full circumstances, but I encourage the hon. Member to write to me. There are two ways that the reforms could improve the situation. First, rather than having to wait for years, that support will go in a lot earlier. As well as the particular support for children with special educational needs and disabilities, we are working to bring more mental health support into schools to support children and young people. I mentioned the specialist provision packages and the drafts there, because I often hear from parents whose children do not get as much attention in the system because they internalise their social and emotional needs. Children who externalise those needs are sometimes not well supported either, but where they are internalised, those children get missed. We focused on those children and their need for specialist provision. For those children who can be supported in the mainstream, we want to put that support in earlier, but we want to have pathways into specialist support for those who need them.

I declare my usual interest, as my wife is a special needs co-ordinator and one of our children has an EHCP. I thank the hon. Member for Dorking and Horley (Chris Coghlan) for bringing forward this debate. My constituents have seen our London borough of Bexley council have a safety valve agreement and an Ofsted inspection of systemic failings, which we are hopefully about to come out of. I have seen those things as a councillor and as a parent. I am the parent of twins, and I can tell the House that despite having an EHCP, the transfer for my daughter with an EHCP was so much more stressful than it was for my other daughter. I welcome the changes, as the Minister knows. There are still a few things we need to iron out in these conversations about transition, support for schools and the role of ICBs. Can the Minister commit that, through the consultation and legislative process, we will continue to hear those voices to get the package right? I know at first hand that the system is broken, and we have to get it right for these families.

I thank my hon. Friend for his long-term advocacy on this critical issue and for how much he has inputted into our work to improve the system. I am glad that he asked that question, because I wanted to finish with the voices of children, young people and families. We are committed to the accountability that has been asked for, and we will shortly be writing to all local authorities asking them to develop SEND improvement plans. We will be monitoring that carefully and will ensure that the voices of families are part of the intelligence that we receive about performance.

I apologise for being late for the debate; business was going more rapidly than I expected.

Many of us strongly believe that it is important that children are educated as close to home as possible. Unfortunately, I have a piece of casework in my constituency where one child is doing a three-hour round trip every single day just to get to school, which is unacceptable. With the new changes, will there be an option to change that? It would be helpful if the Minister could expand on that.

That is such a critical point, and we have heard too many stories about long travel times, and how having to be in transport provokes stress for children, which holds them back. We are determined that every community has access to that support, whether that is inclusive schools or a range of specialist places. That is why we have put £3.7 billion into creating those specialist places around the country, and it is also why we are working on specialist provision packages to ensure that each area has that range of provision. We are determined to build up local provision so that children can grow up close to their friends. I have spoken to young people who have been in the position that my hon. Friend describes. They come back to their communities at 18, and they do not have support networks or friends, and it is so hard to build a life. That has to change, and we are determined to do so.

We have set out our plans after more than a year of engagement, but we want to hear from the constituents of all the Members here and beyond. I am personally committed to travelling and speaking to different voices around the country. We have heard from all the different contexts how things work in rural communities and different parts of the country. It is critical that we get it right. This is a generational opportunity to make change for families who have been let down. I am determined that this will be a full and an open consultation. I ask everyone who is here today, and everyone who is listening, to help us to spread the word so that we hear the families’ voices. Having heard these stories, I feel very deeply—as, I am sure, does the hon. Member for Dorking and Horley—the responsibility to change things for those families, and I am committed to working with Members on both sides of the House to get this right.