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Education

8.1 Special Educational Needs and Disabilities Act 2001

Contents

This legislation amended Part 4 of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 by introducing new duties on Local Education Authorities and schools in relation to disabled pupils.

LEA's and schools are now required to prepare accessibility strategies and accessibility plans respectively for increasing over time the accessibility of schools for disabled pupils. This is referred to as the Planning Duty.

Legal Position

All LEA's have a legal duty to prepare accessibility strategies for all of the schools for which they are responsible. Individual schools must prepare accessibility plans.

An accessibility strategy or plan is a strategy or plan for:

• increasing the extent to which disabled pupils can participate in the school curriculum;
• improving the physical environment of schools to increase the extent to which disabled pupils can take advantage of education and associated services; and
• improving the delivery to disabled pupils of written information which is provided to pupils who are not disabled. This should be done within a reasonable period of time and in formats which take account of views expressed by the pupils or parents about their preferred means of communication.
  

These plans should be made publicly available as follows:

• Maintained schools have a duty to publish information about their accessibility plans in the Governors' annual report to parents;
• Non-maintained special schools are required to reproduce their accessibility plan in their annual prospectus;
• LEA's are required to make their strategies available for inspection to interested parties at reasonable times.
  

Monitoring by OfSTED

As part of their inspections, OfSTED will monitor LEA accessibility strategies and school accessibility plans .

Deadlines

The planning duty came into force in September 2002. LEA's and schools were required to start formulating strategies and plans and to have written strategies and plans in place by April 2003.

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