Recommendation 14

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.

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