6. Will the Minister make a statement on how students with special educational needs and their families are able to access legal advice? OAQ(5)0051(EDU)

Local authorities are responsible for ensuring access to independent information, advice and advocacy services for children and young people with special educational needs. Where legal advice is sought, children, young people and their families can seek out private legal representation and, in some circumstances, may also be eligible for legal aid.

I thank the Minister for his answer. Following cuts to legal aid funding by the British state, there are now only three legal aid providers working in education law in Wales and England, and not one of them is based in this country. We know how hard parents of children with special educational needs sometimes have to fight to get the special education provision that their children are entitled to, and given the divergence increasingly in policy and in law between Wales and England in terms of education, the lack of a Wales-based legal aid provider is a real barrier to accessing legal advice for those parents. So, will the Welsh Government intervene urgently to secure equality of access to justice for parents of children with special educational needs?

I would prefer, actually, to remove the need for that sort of process at all. The Member will be aware from yesterday’s business statement that I will be introducing the additional learning needs Bill to this place before Christmas. We will be introducing a tribunal system as a part of that, and the rationale and the philosophical underpinning, if you like, of that legislation is to provide each individual learner with additional learning needs with an individual development plan that will take them from pre-school through beyond further and higher education, to the age of 25, and will provide a means for resolving those issues without, I hope, the need for recourse to legal aid or to any form of litigation. Our approach here is to ensure that we remove that pressure from parents within the system, although I accept and certainly agree with the criticisms he makes of the UK Government and their approach to this policy area.

One of the criticisms of the Welsh Government’s approach to this area, of course, is the fact that, if you’ve got a young person in further education, they don’t have the same rights to be able to challenge decisions made about them in terms of the support that they can receive. Is this something that we can hope to see addressed in your additional learning needs Bill?

Yes.

Question 5 [OAQ(5)0059(EDU)] has been withdrawn.