The chair of the Commons Education Select Committee has urged chancellor Jeremy Hunt to extend capital funding to create more school places for pupils with special educational needs.
Robin Walker, a former schools minister, has written to the chancellor ahead of this week’s Spring Budget to highlight a series of education spending priorities.
His letter, seen by Tes, highlights special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) as a key area and calls on the government to invest in the workforce of staff who can assess pupils’ needs and ensure that they receive early support - including paediatricians, educational psychologists and speech and language therapists.
Mr Walker’s letter makes a number of SEND spending recommendations.
These include a call to “extend the £2.6 billion investment announced at the last spending review to expand capacity for meeting SEND needs through a mixture of new special schools, expansions of existing ones and bases in mainstream schools”.
The letter comes after leaders in mainstream and special schools warned that the government’s plan for a new wave of SEND free schools would not solve the places crisis.
Mr Walker’s letter also calls for an investment in training for all teachers, through both initial teacher training and the Early Career Framework, to support the inclusion of children with SEND.
And it says the government should support local authorities in meeting need earlier, through expanding the family hubs network and ensuring that there are sufficient numbers of specialist assessment centres working with children in the early years.
Appeal for more SEND support funding
Mr Walker highlights the need to invest in “the capacity of crucial workforces to assess needs and make sure [children] can be supported earlier, including paediatricians, educational psychologists, speech and language therapists, auditory verbal therapists, teachers of the deaf”.
The letter also includes a series of recommendations on wider school funding.
It urges the chancellor to “extend the hugely beneficial investment in tutoring that has taken place since the pandemic”.
The letter says this dedicated funding has “a BCR [benefit-cost ratio] of over 6 and clear evidence of a direct link to better results, especially in maths”.
Tes revealed last week that Mr Walker was among a group of cross-party MPs urging the chancellor to extend tutoring cash.
The group asked the chancellor to use Wednesday’s Spring Budget to extend the National Tutoring Programme (NTP) and the 16-19 Tuition Fund, which are both slated to end this academic year.
Mr Walker’s separate letter to Mr Hunt, sent last month, also calls on the government to commit to a direct funding formula for schools, as set out in the Schools White Paper of 2020 and the draft Schools Bill of 2021. This would see money sent directly to all schools rather than being channelled via local authorities.
And it says the government should expand the rollout of attendance mentors across the country.
The letter includes broader recommendations beyond just spending decisions, including a call for the creation of a qualification or accreditation in numeracy for those who currently miss out on level 4 grades, as an alternative to repeated retakes of GCSE maths.
Mr Walker said this would “ensure that the full benefits of study of maths to the age of 18 are realised”.
