Special educational needs and disability green paper

9 March 2011

Richard Hawkes, Chief Executive of disability charity Scope, responds to the Special Educational Needs and Disability Green Paper:

“The green paper has some interesting ideas and we welcome the focus on creating a joined-up approach to assessing children's support needs and giving parents greater control over how their child is supported at school.

“While plans to allocate personal budgets to children with SEN is a move that we have long supported, this needs to go hand-in-hand with ensuring that suitable and affordable services and support are available, and that parents have a genuine choice of school for their child. Given that the government's plans to devolve decision-making and funding down from councils to individual schools, we worry about schools' ability to commission services for children with low-incidence, but complex support needs effectively or at a reasonable cost.

“We are also concerned at proposals to abolish statements and other support schemes for children with less complex needs and devolve this responsibility to individual schools, especially in the current financial climate. This could lead to many children with lower levels of SEN no longer receiving the early intervention or ongoing support they need.”

---

Press releases, papers and documents published on this page are the intellectual property of an organisation unrelated to ePolitix.com. We promote their parliamentary and political campaigning activities as they are subscribers to the ePolitix.com service.

As such, ePolitix.com does not edit, endorse, or attempt to balance the opinions expressed on this page. The content of press releases and other such types of content are the responsibility of the originating organisation.