‘Anyone with eyes can see it!’

In a press conference earlier today, Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson unveiled her sweeping reforms to special educational needs provision, vowing to dismantle a system she says has caused widespread distress to families across England.

Ms Phillipson said: “Inclusion is a choice. It is an educational choice, and it is also a political choice because we could duck this challenge, ignore the injustice of a postcode lottery in life chances putting off fixing the Send system yet again.

“The system works well for some at least. [But] that’s just not good enough. Our moment calls for courage because before us (there is a) once in a generation chance for change.”

Pressing Ms Smith on the “huge waste” of local council budgets on Send needs, Tom stated: “There is huge wastag. Anyone with eyes can see the explosion in spending that’s going on Send right now.

“It’s crippling councils, potholes aren’t being filled because taxis are being sent to, frankly, in many cases Send posh kids to their schools because their parents won’t do it.”

The Labour MP responded: “This Government has also invested in Lancashire an extra £57million to tackle specifically potholes, and it’s a very separate budget to the money that is currently being used to transport children to the schools that they are.”

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Hitting back at Ms Smith again, Tom argued: “Has the Labour Party just taken the opposite approach to how it did when it came to disability benefits reform, which failed in Parliament because of a massive Labour rebellion?

“Are you now taking the softly, softly, gently, gently approach that’s going to take decades to actually work because the Government is so scared of yet another rebellion?”

Ms Smith disagreed: “When you use the term softly, softly, there is no parent or family that is more deserving of a sympathetic and careful approach than a family with a Sen child. I rarely hold a surgery where I don’t have parents breaking down in tears, grown men in tears in front of me because they’ve been broken by a system that is failing them.

“We are doing something about it. We are going to stop it being adversarial, we’re going to stop that fight for parents, we’re going to move at a pace that enables them to trust the system before we bring in the changes.”

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Vowing to “move away” from wasted funding, Ms Smith concluded: “We want to move away from wasting money on taxis and on schools run by private equity firms.

“We have to believe and imagine now a system where your child’s needs are understood really early on, that the teaching that they experience and the schools they access meet their needs.

“And so parents no longer feel that this fight is the only way they have to meet the needs of their children.”

At Ms Phillipson’s press conference today, GB News Political Editor Christopher Hope quizzed the Education Secretary on the ballooning funding, asking her whether the “problems getting worse or are children not being diagnosed”.

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Ms Phillipson responded: “So what we project is that the number of children needing EHCPs will continue to rise. And part of the reason is all of the unmet need that we’ve seen develop over many, many years.

“If you’re a society that doesn’t have support when children are young and if where that support is being pulled away, as we saw in the past, then that does make a big difference to children as they arrive at school.”

She added: “It’s part of the reason that so many children arrive not ready to learn.

“And that’s why we’re investing so much money in support in early years and working with councils to deliver really high quality provision that will help parents and will meet them where they are.”