Minister of State at the Department for Education, Robert Goodwill MP, has recently announced a “Multi-million pound package …. to support children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities”
Relatively speaking, the cost is a small percentage of what is spent on meeting the needs of children and young people with special educational needs and a disability.
The majority of the funding will be used by local authorities to press ahead with the (not so recent) “reforms to the SEND system”.
It is easy to be quite dismissive of such initiatives but, on the face of it, at least part of the package should be welcomed by even the Government’s harshest critics.
Specifically, £9.7 million of the funding is to be used “to establish local supported internship forums, which will create work placements for young people with SEND to provide them with the skills and confidence they need to move into paid work. The funding could also be used to train job coaches, who are vital to the success of supporting those with learning difficulties into paid work”
Granted, the sum is quite small, but it is significant.
Full details of Robert Goodwill’s announcement can be found here