Debate contribution: Transforming Capital Investment: Supporting Children with Special Educational Needs

Debate contribution by Mr Paul Givan on 30 April 2024.

MLA

Mr Paul Givan

Party at the time

Democratic Unionist Party

Date

30 April 2024

Type

Debate contribution (made as a minister)

Business

Ministerial Statements

Heading

Transforming Capital Investment: Supporting Children with Special Educational Needs

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4486964

Read the official Assembly record

Text

Today, I will set out my vision for the development of school facilities to support our children with special educational needs (SEN) across Northern Ireland. The profile of our children is changing. One in five children has a special educational need, and some of those children require specialist places in a special school or in a specialist provision class in mainstream schools, commonly referred to as "SPiMS". In recent years, there has been an unprecedented increase in the number of children with SEN. Since 2019, the total number of children with statements has risen from 19,000 to 27,000, and we have seen a 21% rise in pupils attending a special school. The increase is forecast to continue year-on-year to 2032, with a need to provide over 6,000 specialist special educational needs places across the education system over a 10-year period. The changing profile has presented us with significant challenges in ensuring appropriate places for all children. It has overtaken all previous planning assumptions and placed an unsustainable pressure on my Department’s capital budget. Consequently, when I took office in February, I made it clear to the Assembly that Education could not continue with the current levels of capital funding. We were at risk of failing in even our most basic responsibilities to keep schools open and children safe and to provide places for our most vulnerable learners. I also made it clear that transforming the existing special educational needs system must be a priority. Transformation of the scale needed will take time, but ensuring that our children with special educational needs have access to the right placements to meet their needs is the most important first step. I am delighted to have secured over £60 million of additional capital funding for education this year. That allocation is vital to provide those much-needed specialist school places. However, the funding is only the beginning of what is required to meet our children’s needs. Therefore, today, I am announcing the biggest step change to capital planning in education for a generation, with an ambitious and far-reaching programme of investment in special education needs facilities that will transform our education system and the lives of our most vulnerable children and their families. My Department’s new special educational needs capital programme will require sustained and increased capital investment of around £0·5 billion over the next decade. That must be additional investment; it cannot be at the expense of other essential capital investment in our schools. I am committed to delivering a modern, fit-for-purpose education system that truly meets the needs of our society and our pupils in the 21st century. A wide range of much-needed education investment projects need to be delivered. I hope, in the coming weeks, to bring forward further plans for the wider education estate. Our special school sector, in particular, however, has a legacy of historical underinvestment. It is simply not good enough that many of our most vulnerable children are being educated in ageing facilities, too often without adequate equipment and resources. Our special school staff, who work with our most vulnerable learners, need and deserve facilities that match their skills and expertise. I have seen for myself the impact that a poor physical environment has on our most vulnerable children. As a society, we can and must do better. Inclusive and well-designed school buildings can enable and empower those with special educational needs and disabilities to participate fully in life at school and in the wider community. The right learning environment can support and inspire those pupils to thrive and achieve not only in school but throughout their lives. To meet projected need, it is essential that we plan effectively for the delivery of capital investment of unprecedented scope and scale over the next decade. I have, therefore, asked my officials to establish a special educational needs capital investment programme as a discrete, stand-alone capital programme. The programme will be led by a dedicated SEN capital programme team in my Department. They will work closely with the Education Authority (EA), sectoral support bodies, school leadership teams, boards of governors and sectoral bodies to ensure a whole-school system approach to special educational needs investment. The new programme will provide visibility and coherence to SEN capital investment and be an integral part of the Department’s SEN transformation agenda, driven through the end-to-end review of SEN. The new programme will have four main strands. The first is an annual maintenance and equipment programme for special schools and SPiM classes. That investment is the building block for success.

I have asked my officials to ring-fence £5 million annually to provide a programme of continuous planned maintenance across the special school estate. That will start to redress the longer-term maintenance backlog and ensure that our most vulnerable pupils are educated in fit-for-purpose classrooms. It will address health and safety, adapt facilities to meet children's needs and make much-needed repairs to the buildings, grounds and other facilities. In addition, I have allocated £4 million to provide equipment grants to special schools and schools with specialist provision in order to make sure that they have the right resources to support their pupils.

The second key work stream in the SEN capital programme is the creation of additional specialist provision classes in mainstream schools across Northern Ireland. Specialist provisions are not new. Smaller, more specialist settings have long been a feature of our education system in providing suitable learning environments for some of our children with special educational needs. We know the benefits of inclusion through SPiMS for pupils and staff. For many schools, having such provision has enriched the entire school community. We now have almost 500 SPiMS classes providing small-group teaching in nursery, primary and post-primary schools across Northern Ireland. We require, in total, around 100 new SPiMS classes for September. We have agreed 48 new SPiMS classes to date, as well as 69 new special school classes. However, ensuring places for all children is a major challenge for us collectively as an education system. It will take considerable effort and commitment, alongside investment and strategic planning. To help meet that challenge, the permanent secretary of my Department wrote to all schools last week asking them to consider establishing specialist provisions for September. My officials followed up with an expression-of-interest survey. The response has been truly outstanding, with over 200 schools expressing interest in setting up SPiMS classes. It has been an extremely challenging time for school communities, and I am deeply encouraged by the positive response from so many schools and heartened by their commitment to play their part in one of the most important collective endeavours facing our education system. I am confident that we are making significant progress, and I thank those schools that have come forward so far and encourage others to do the same. This is a critical phase in our SEN planning, and my officials continue to collaborate closely with their colleagues in the Education Authority in order to engage with those schools that have responded positively to our request to establish SPiMS provision and deliver the necessary accommodation. We know, too, the life-changing impact that a successful special school can have on pupils and their families. We are, rightly, proud to have wonderful special schools across Northern Ireland. They must have the right facilities to support their work. Therefore, alongside the establishment of specialist provision, we will need to expand the available special school places in order to meet the individual needs of our pupils in the right setting. The third key element of capital investment will, therefore, be the extension of existing special schools in order to provide additional places in high-quality accommodation. There are 10 special schools in my Department's school enhancement programme, which provides extension and refurbishment projects across the school estate. Those special school projects will be prioritised and expedited for delivery. We will also consider the longer-term needs for places at each of those 10 schools and, where required, adapt the project to increase the number of available places. To facilitate that, I have directed my officials to set aside the funding thresholds for school enhancement projects in order to deliver those projects at the scale that is required. The Education Authority has also been asked to review all special schools across Northern Ireland and to submit applications for large-scale extension projects for any schools where additional places are needed. We will now take forward special school extensions at pace and scale in a planned, visible and expedited manner with a master plan for each school. The final element in the SEN capital programme is new special schools. I am delighted to announce that planning of new-build schools for Sperrinview and Knockevin will begin immediately, as will the much-needed second campus for Ardnashee School and College. In addition, projections indicate that there may be a need for up to eight entirely new special schools across Northern Ireland over the next decade. Capital planning will also commence for other new special schools over coming months. A new special school in Belfast that will provide 275 additional places for children aged three to 19 has already been agreed, and capital planning work is well under way. A further special school in east Belfast will be taken forward. Our hopes and ambitions for our children with SEN should be the same as those for any other child. That is why I am setting out a programme of capital investment that is wide-ranging and, necessarily, ambitious. Inclusion is not a strategy to help our children and young people to fit into the systems and structures that exist in our society; it is about transforming those systems and structures to benefit all learners. I will continue to listen to young people and their parents, and to school leaders and governors, so that we get this right. Together, we can achieve so much. Fairness does not mean that everyone gets the same. Fairness means that everyone gets what they need. We need to give every child the opportunity to reach their full potential, regardless of their background or circumstance. My Department's vision is for an inclusive and high-performing education system that enables all children to be happy, learning and succeeding. This capital investment programme will bring that vision closer for our children with special educational needs. I commend the statement to the House.

I thank the Member for the question. We had a meeting this morning that my colleague Alan Robinson asked me to facilitate, and Cara attended. The Finance Minister was able to drop in as well, and we discussed the needs of Rossmar at that meeting. The principal spoke passionately about the needs of the young people in her school setting. Ten schools are currently in the school enhancement programme. They are at various stages of that process. Members will be familiar with how those processes work: after feasibility, a business case and design, you to get to the point at which a project is at a state of readiness so that, when capital becomes available, you move to construction. The 10 schools are Roddensvale School in Larne, Riverside School in Antrim, Clifton School in Bangor, Hill Croft School in Newtownabbey, Longstone School in Dundonald, Sandelford School in Coleraine, Thornfield House School in Newtownabbey, Beechlawn School in Hillsborough, Kilronan School in Magherafelt and Lisanally School in Armagh. I have asked the Education Authority to take forward the prioritisation of those schools by accelerating the various stages so that they get to that state of readiness. There are over 70 school enhancement programmes in my Department across the school estate. Those 10 will be prioritised for delivery. I am also asking the EA to assess the needs of other special schools that are not currently in the school enhancement programme. Where it is identified that they need to move into the school enhancement programme, they will be taken into that process. This statement will benefit every single special school in Northern Ireland by virtue of our assessment and how we take forward meeting the need that comes out of that assessment process.

I thank the Chairman for his comments and his question. The very reason that I have made this statement is so that we are on the front foot and that we strategically address the issues in special education. I am taking forward this transformational piece of work in the Department so that we are not in a space of crisis management. There is obviously a critical need to address the provision for this September. I outlined in my statement the process that I have taken and how I commissioned my permanent secretary to engage directly with the schools with which we are carrying out the survey so that we can identify the need and provision in order to match it up with the right child or young person. We are responding to the immediate pressure, but I have also outlined the vision for special educational needs and how we will meet those and provide what is required in Northern Ireland.

2,174 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

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Assessed 21 October 2026 at 10:02 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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