Category: Education Select Committee

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Committee Education Select Committee SEND Review

NNPCF gives evidence to the Education Select Committee

The NNPCF co-chair Mrunal Sisodia gave evidence to the House of Commons Education Select Committee on 24 May, when a session was held on the SEND Green Paper consultation.

Mrunal was joined by IPSEA chief executive Ali Fiddy, Local Government Ombudsman Michael King and Imogen Jolley, Head of Public Law at Simpson Millar.

In the evidence session Mrunal spoke to key points on the SEND Green Paper, including:

  • The need for the incentives in the overall education, care and health system to be aligned with the needs of SEND children, young people and their families.
  • The need for improved accountability in the sector to ensure that when needs were not being met issues could be addressed.
  • The need to listen to families and drive early intervention and stop families getting to crisis point before help is given. This increases needs, creates anger, frustration, mistrust, and costs more money.
  • The need for the Green Paper to say more about long term outcomes for young people with SEND beyond education such as employment, community inclusion and independent living.
  • NNPCF support for national standards in SEND provision that, if set properly and implemented effectively, would help to drive greater clarity in what families can expect and what services need to provide.
  • Parental concerns about naming a setting from a suitable list for children with EHCPs.
  • The importance of strong advocacy and independent support for parents, for example through SENDIAS services and keyworking.
  • The role of Ofsted and the desire from parents that no school should be classified as good or outstanding without being good or outstanding for SEND.

You can find a recording of the session here: The Government’s SEND Review – Committees – UK Parliament

Categories
Education Select Committee

Education Committee Inquiry into Home Education

In October 2020 the NNPCF started collecting evidence to submit to the Education Committee for their inquiry into Elective Home Education. The inquiry will seek to understand the extent to which current arrangements provide sufficient support for home educated children to access efficient, full-time and suitable education, and establish what further measures may be necessary in order to facilitate this.

To view the NNPCF’s submission, it has been published on the committee’s website

https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/203/education-committee/

Categories
Education Education Select Committee

Education Select Committee publishes its report into SEND

The Education Select Committee has published its long-awaited report into SEND. The NNPCF steering group met this morning and reviewed the key messages. You can find the report here

Education-Select-committee-report-on-state-of-SENDDownload

We are pleased to see that the report reflects many of the key themes that we have heard from our membership and we raised to the committee in our written and oral evidence. You can see the evidence that we gave here, Parliamentlive.tv – Education Committee,

and further written evidence below.

NNPCF Response to Commons Select Committee SEND InquiryDownload

We highlighted and called for:

· Adequate funding for SEND services

· Greater accountability across the system

· Low prioritisation of SEND across Health and Social Care

· Incentives across the system are not aligned to be inclusive

· A greater voice for families

We are pleased all of these themes are reflected in the report and parent carer forums and individual stories are referenced in the report.

Going forward, we will continue to represent the views of our membership through the work being done in the SEND review. We are also working with the Department for Education to ensure that parent carer forums have input into the work of the review team. We will keep you updated.