Lord Browne of Belmont – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Education
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Lord Browne of Belmont on 2016-01-20.
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are currently taking to improve support to children with disabilities in their early years.
Lord Nash
This Government is committed to ensuring that all families have access to high quality, flexible and affordable childcare. Children with disabilities should have the same opportunities as other children to access high-quality childcare.
Local authorities are required by legislation to secure early education places offering 570 hours a year over no fewer than 38 weeks of the year for all three- and four-year olds, including those with disabilities. The Childcare Bill is delivering extended entitlement to free childcare for working parents of three- and four-year-olds. This will provide eligible parents with a total of 30 hours of free childcare per week, over 38 weeks or the equivalent number of hours across more weeks per year.
Early Implementers of the extended childcare entitlement will focus on key delivery issues, including access for children with SEND, in order to provide critical learning to inform national rollout.
All early years providers are required to have arrangements in place to identify and support children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), and to promote equality of opportunity for children in their care. These requirements are set out in the Early Years Foundation Stage Framework 2014. The SEND Code of Practice, introduced as part of the wide-ranging reforms set out in the Children and Families Act, gives guidance on how children between the ages of 0 and 25 with SEN or disabilities are to be supported and providers are statutorily required to have regard for this Code of Practice.
The Government has invested £5.3 million to voluntary and community sector organisations this year. A number of these programmes are delivering specific SEND training to the early years workforce. In particular, the National Day Nurseries Association’s current SEND Champions grant has proven very popular amongst the workforce.
The Department funds local authorities’ high needs provision in both the early years and schools through the Dedicated Schools Grant; local authorities have reported that they are planning to spend over £90 million from their high needs budgets on children in their early years. The Spending Review provided a generous uplift in the funding early years providers will receive from April 2017 and protection for the majority of high needs funding. We recognise the critical importance of childcare to parents of children with special educational needs and disabilities; we will consider SEN funding for early years as part of wider consultations in 2016 on how we introduce a fairer funding system.
This Government is committed to helping parents with disabled children. For example, from early 2017 working parents with children under the age of 17 who have a disability will be able to access support under Tax-Free Childcare (TFC) worth up to £4,000 per child, per year. This is double that offered for children without disabilities for whom support is offered until the age of 12.
