The Education Secretary has acknowledged parents are having to “fight to get the right support” for children with special educational needs, days after figures showed around two in three special schools in England were at or over capacity in the last academic year.
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00:00 Well we've got 59,600 more teaching assistants since 2010, so we have been building up teaching
00:06 assistants, we've also been building up the places. This investment is the end of £2.6
00:11 billion, the last tranche, which is aimed at building 60,000 more places. But we do
00:16 recognise that, and every parent with a child with special educational needs will recognise
00:21 that sometimes they can feel like they're battling the system, so that's why we do have
00:25 an improvement plan, it includes training more educational psychologists, it includes
00:29 training more special educational needs coordinators, 7,000 more of those, more speech and language
00:34 therapists as well, so there's a lot of work that we're doing jointly with our colleagues
00:38 in the NHS, but also to provide more capacity in the system, because fundamentally there's
00:43 been a large increase in the number of children with special educational needs, probably because
00:47 we know more, we understand more, we know how to diagnose, and we care more to get it
00:52 right. So this government's actually focused on increasing the places. In previous governments
00:56 actually there was a decrease in special educational needs places, so I think we're doing everything
01:01 that parents would expect us to do to get a system that's fit for their child.