Select committee: Women and Equalities Committee
Recommendation 14
Fourth report: Unequal impact? Coronavirus, disability and access to services: full Report
Published 22 Dec 2020
Paragraph 98
Addressed to Government Equalities Office
Women and Equalities Committee Unequal impact? Coronavirus, disability and access to services All items in this report Report on parliament.uk ↗ Inquiry on parliament.uk ↗
Recommendation (the committee's words)
Delivering effective support for children and young people with SEND during a public health crisis was inevitably a massive challenge, to which some local authorities were unable to rise. The pandemic demonstrated and exacerbated a widely acknowledged pre-existing crisis in SEND provision. As set out in our interim Report, many children and young people received little or no support for three months. The Government must now prioritise its SEND review, launched over a year ago, and bring forward as a matter of urgency reforms which address fundamental problems of funding, consistency of support, accountability and integration of services, identified by the Education Committee and the National Audit Office in 2019. The outcome of the SEND review must be published no later than the first quarter of 2021 and set out the Government’s plan to reach a sustainable funding model while achieving the core aims of the 2014 reforms.
From: Women and Equalities Committee, Fourth report: Unequal impact? Coronavirus, disability and access to services: full Report (HC 1050), paragraph 98, 22 December 2020
Government response
The government responded to the whole report on 14 April 2021.
Summary written by Accountability Index from the government's response. It is not the government's own words.The government welcomes the Committee's report and sets out measures taken during the pandemic, while declining some recommendations and committing to publish the National Strategy for Disabled People in Spring 2021.
- On a statutory Code of Practice on the Public Sector Equality Duty, the government says it "does not see any compelling need to depart from the normal preference of its predecessors against additional statutory codes of practice".
- On publishing assessments of disabled people's food needs, it says that, "in line with the practice of successive administrations", it "does not routinely publish EIAs".
- On the SEND review, the Department for Education "intends to publish proposals for consultation in the spring of 2021", saying the pandemic "has unavoidably delayed" the review.
- On an independent inquiry and social care reform, it says there will be "opportunities to look back" at COVID-19 but is "focused entirely" on the response for now, and will "bring forward proposals this year" on adult social care.