As the son of a teacher, I was brought up to take education very seriously. My mom gave her heart and soul to teaching science in tough comprehensive schools, and when we lost her at the age of 52 to pancreatic cancer, it was not just our family who was heartbroken—it was many of her pupils too.
Maybe it’s my mom’s influence, but ever since I was elected as an MP 20 years ago, I’ve made it my business to visit a school in the constituency every couple of weeks.
Not only is it a sheer pleasure to meet a school council or take an assembly, and I’ve come to learn that headteachers are among the first to pick up on things that are going wrong in our community. Right now, headteachers across my constituency are telling me that there is a crisis in special educational needs that we must address.
In many ways, the problem has worsened since Covid. Many of the babies born during lockdown spent their first months surrounded by people wearing face masks. This has had a huge impact on communication skills, as well as a host of other problems for infants who were not able to socialize with other youngsters.
Over the summer, I asked the House of Commons library to research just how many young people in our schools need tailored, extra help. The answer? Over 4,000 children across Hodge Hill and Solihull North, with over 400 needing more specialist Education, Health, and Care Plans (EHCPs). These are big numbers, and behind the statistics are the stories I hear about what is going wrong.
On one hand, we have school leaders who are finding it harder and harder to secure the funding needed to provide the right level of teaching for children with special educational needs.
One headteacher told me that she knows of children coming to her school soon, with needs so expensive to serve that she may have to make a teaching assistant redundant.
And what I hear from parents—often exhausted parents—is the sheer battle they face to get the right plans in place or the right provision at the school of their choice.
The figures for Solihull show that 99.4 per cent of EHCPs are issued within the statutory 20-week deadline. But what I hear from parents is the difficulty in getting a diagnosis for their children in the first place. Many then get turned down for a plan, or can’t get the school of their choice and then have to go through the painful process of appeals or re-applying, just to get the best for their kids.
The bottom line here is that there simply isn’t enough money in the system—in our schools and our councils—to deliver the kind of first-class service our children deserve. The new government’s investment in 6,000 more teachers will help, as will better mental health services in schools, and I’ve been pleased to see a big pledge from the new Education Secretary to make the system of applying for help less adversarial.
But this is something I intend to champion in the House of Commons. Every child deserves the best—a flying start in life. And too many today are denied that chance. Maybe it’s my mom’s influence, but I think that’s wrong, and it has to change.
