“While we welcome investment in providing more inclusion bases in secondary schools, this is only one half of the equation. It is also important to ensure that schools are funded for the staffing that they will need to support more children and young people with SEND, and that they are able to draw on sufficient numbers of specialists, such as speech and language therapists and educational psychologists. We look forward to seeing the government’s plans on how it intends to reform the SEND system in its forthcoming Schools White Paper.

“The present government inherited a backlog of maintenance work which is needed to the school estate estimated at £13.8 billion because of more than a decade of neglect by previous administrations. We therefore welcome its estates strategy as a step forward in getting to grips with these issues. However, the fact remains that there is a huge amount of work that needs to be done to make sure every school building is at an appropriate standard for pupils and staff, and we are not convinced that there is enough money in the pot to deliver this at the scale or pace that is required.”