New extended rights for children with SEND and specialist SEND support in every school in Wycombe.
Labour believes that your background shouldn’t dictate where you end up, but too many children with SEND in Buckinghamshire have been held back by an education system that doesn’t work for them.
The SEND system designed a decade ago for a small number of children is now at breaking point after ten years of Tory rule. That’s led to parents having to fight tooth and nail for entitlements on paper that don’t see them getting additional support – and children’s lives and chances have suffered as a result.
Thousands of children with SEND in Wycombe will benefit from groundbreaking new legal entitlements to an individual support plan under new plans announced by the government.
The plans, backed by £4 billion of investment in SEND support to make every school inclusive will end the one size fits all education system that has damaged the lives of too many children.
In a radical expansion in rights and support for every child, there will be a new legal requirement for schools to create Individual Support Plans (ISPs) for all children with SEND.
Every ISP will draw from a national framework of actions which schools can take to give children the best education and life chances, personalised by the teachers and specialists who know them best.
The support ISPs set out will be easily available, without a fight, thanks to the government’s multi-billion-pound investment in specialist school places and services like speech and language therapy.
EHCPs will be retained and improved – offering a wider legal entitlement beyond the ISP to more intensive or complex support than schools can routinely provide. A triple lock of transitional protections will mean no child loses effective support already in place.
These changes come alongside plans set out in the White Paper that mean that at every level of the SEND system, things will change for the better: every classroom, in every school, teachers and support staff will be trained to meet the needs of children with SEND, based on the latest evidence, and backed by £200 million of investment.
These plans will take children with SEND from sidelined and excluded to seen, heard and included. Every child will get the brilliant support they deserve, when they need it, as routine and without a fight.
Only Labour will help our children achieve and thrive at school so they go on to lead better lives and build a brighter future.