Iain Duncan Smith MP: speeches

Speeches

• 25 Feb 2025 · SEND Education Support · Hansard source

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  It is very good to see you in the Chair, Mr Twigg. I will obey your strictures and try to keep this brief. I want to focus on a very narrow aspect of special educational needs. I congratulate the hon. Member for Suffolk Coastal (Jenny Riddell-Carpenter) on securing this debate. As we can see, many Members have issues with the supply of SEND education support. I want to focus on something that originated in a special educational needs school in my constituency called Whitefield, which has calming rooms. I have been to see the Education Secretary about this issue, because I discovered, thanks to a BBC programme, that there is no regulation as to the nature of calming rooms in special educational needs schools and what happens in them. For the most part, those schools are very good, but when it comes to calming rooms there is a big variety of capability and, for that matter, quality. Children in that school were locked away in calming rooms. I would have thought that that was illegal, but it is not in special educational needs schools. What happens in those rooms makes the children’s behaviour worse. If they are suffering in one way or another, that suffering gets worse, particularly when they suffer from autism. What happens in those rooms becomes abusive, as has been captured on video. A survey has shown that more than 500 schools use this kind of lock-in for children with severe autism. The videos I have seen show some of them in cages, and some of them being put in what we would consider to be padded cells, with no visits for long periods of time. I simply want to put this point to the Minister. I have seen the Secretary of State and put it to her that this issue needs to be looked at and embraced in some kind of guidance or regulation, so that the rooms, if they have to be used, are used sparingly, and that there are regulations about the times that people should visit, to make sure that children are okay in them. Frankly, the rooms should be an absolute last resort, and should be used only very briefly. They are now definitely being abused in different schools. That is the one point I want to make. I ask the Minister to take this issue up again with the Secretary of State, so that at the next legislative opportunity, Ministers can sit down and figure out how we regulate this. These children often have no voice for themselves, for obvious reasons, and their parents now find their behaviour even worse, and do not know whether their children have been locked into a calming room, such as I have seen and been horrified by. We must make that change so that those with very severe autism who go to special needs schools will not have to suffer as though they were criminals or prisoners—and in ways that we would not even treat those.