Meeting of the Parliament 22 January 2025
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The Government must also address long waits and gaps in provision of key public services, including child and adolescent mental health services, educational psychology and speech and language therapy. Nearly one in six children and young people who needed treatment waited more than four months for help. There is also growing prevalence of communication needs among children, with 6,000 waiting for speech and language therapy and 53 per cent of those waiting more than 18 weeks.
We have to address all that if we are serious about the school environment. That means finding ways to support joint working between education and the national health service, so that things such as speech and language therapy are positioned closer to education services and to the child.
All that can have a detrimental impact on the school environment, and MSYPs echoed that this morning, saying that we have faced years of real-terms cuts to the NHS, cuts to youth work and cuts to community services. We are seeing the degradation of community services all round, and we are left with the inevitable result that education needs to pick up the slack.
That is why we must take a broader view of the issue. It is also why we support the committee’s finding that we need to design school buildings that are accessible and welcoming environments.