Worcester MP Robin Walker has spoken in the Westminster Hall debate relating to assessment for autism and ADHD disorder.
Autism and ADHD are neurodevelopmental conditions. Identification and diagnosis at an early stage helps children to get the right support in school and also helps parents and carers to receive emotional and financial support. Receiving a late diagnosis of autism and ADHD is associated with difficulties across education, employment, family life and mental health.
Speaking in Westminster Hall, Robin said:
As Chair of the Select Committee on Education, I am passionate about ensuring that we have the provision to address children’s needs. One challenge with the current delays in diagnosis is that although local authorities have the statutory duty to measure where provision is needed and to provide places accordingly, if children are not getting the diagnoses, they do not have the statistics. One thing that we can perhaps do with this debate is encourage faster diagnosis so that we can help to meet that need and ensure that, where specialist support is needed, it is provided.
So many children are away from school because their parents do not feel that they are getting the support that they need. In many cases, clearer, earlier diagnosis and getting the right support in place would help us to solve that problem and help to make sure those children get the right support in the safest place for them to be.
Robin also took the opportunity to ask Maria Caulfield MP, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care
I welcome the expansion of those teams and the fact that we have more mental health support in schools, but does the Minister recognise that one of the big challenges, particularly with children waiting a long time for diagnosis, is children who are out of school and who are remote from the system, where parents do not feel that their needs are being met and children can wait a very long time for an EHCP? Does she agree that the system as a whole would benefit enormously from faster diagnosis to address that problem?
Minister Caulfield responded:
I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. The mental health teams will support children in schools so that, we hope, we can get in at an earlier stage and children are not excluded in the future. For too long, appeals from parents for assessments and diagnosis have gone unheard. I talked about my own constituency, where tribunals are very frequent, which means that children escalate, get into crisis and are excluded far more often than they should be. The teams will make a real difference by signposting for the children and getting them assessed much more quickly, and we will continue the investment to roll out support more widely. Last year, we invested £79 million to give around 22,500 more children and young people access to community services, which will make a long-term difference.
The pilot in Bradford was mentioned. We are investing in identification in educational settings and committing £600,000 to expand an autism early identification pilot to at least 100 schools over the next five years. I am keen to ramp that up further and faster if we can. Again, positive early findings from that pilot have seen staff reporting that they are better able to identify and support those children.
ENDS
Notes to editors
For the full Westminster Hall debate, please see:
https://www.theyworkforyou.com/whall/?id=2023-02-06a.207.0&p=24862#g243…
For more information on the debate, please see:
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cdp-2023-0023/