Official Report: Minutes of Evidence

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): I welcome John O'Doherty, chief executive of the Children's Law Centre; Kathryn Stevenson, solicitor and head of legal services at the Children's Law Centre; and Rachel Hogan, SEND specialist legal adviser at the Children's Law Centre. We have a lot of material to get through, so there is probably no need for any preamble. It is best to hand over to you for any opening remarks that you want to make, which should last for up to 10 minutes, and then we will move to questions and answers. We are all conscious that this is a technical piece of legislation or set of regulations, interconnected with other pieces of legislation and practical outworkings in a code of practice, so we appreciate you bringing your expertise on the SEN system to the Committee today.

Mr John O'Doherty (Children's Law Centre): Thank you, Chair. Thank you for the opportunity to provide evidence to the Committee on the proposed Special Educational Needs (SEN) Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2026. For over 20 years, the Children's Law Centre, as an independent charity, has represented children and families in Northern Ireland and advocated for meaningful reform to the SEN system. We have consistently highlighted the need for a system that works effectively for children and young people, and we remain firmly committed to supporting reform that delivers improved outcomes. We recognise the need for change. The challenges within the current system have been well rehearsed by the Children's Law Centre and others over many years and, as you will know, have been the subject of a number of critical reports. Reform must now be delivered in a way that is genuinely child-centred and focused on timely identification of need, early and effective intervention, cooperation across children's services and sufficient investment to meet children's educational needs in practice.

The Children's Law Centre has engaged constructively throughout this process and numerous review processes. We have worked alongside the Department of Education and the Education Authority (EA), providing advice and contributing to the development of the Special Educational Needs and Disability Act (Northern Ireland) 2016, as well as the revised SEN regulations and revised code of practice. We provide comprehensive input, legal analysis and detailed feedback throughout every consultation. We have actively participated in relevant reference groups and advisory groups. Despite repeated assertions to the contrary, we have made ourselves available to all agencies that have sought our engagement. We make no apologies for the robustness of our interventions and will use every avenue available to us to ensure that the reform process delivers what has been promised to children with special educational needs and disabilities and that decisions related to the education of children with SEND are rooted in producing positive outcomes.

We welcome aspects of the proposed reforms which reflect long-standing positions that have been advocated by the Children's Law Centre. However, there are areas of significant concern that started to emerge during the current long-delayed scrutiny process. My colleague Rachel will outline those in more detail shortly. In particular, we are concerned about the limited time available for scrutiny of the revised SEN regulations and code of practice, their potential outworkings and practical application by schools, the EA and tribunals. The Children's Law Centre's concerns are shared by many stakeholders who work directly with children and families. We set out those concerns in our recent correspondence to the Committee and in our public letter in April. The regulations and accompanying code of practice are complex, voluminous and highly interdependent, and they require careful consideration, not only in respect of their volume, accessibility and wording and the service access thresholds that they govern but in how they will operate in practice and whether they serve the best interests of the children or are weighted towards serving the needs of the system.

Our team has approached the process by drawing on extensive legal casework, observing developments since new systems have started to embed and testing the proposals against real-life scenarios to assess whether they will deliver better outcomes for children and families. Through that work, we have identified a number of areas where key concerns raised during previous consultations and ongoing engagement do not appear to have been fully addressed. When we take our concerns together across the regulations, the code and significant EA transformation programmes, in a context where collaboration and transparency has deteriorated, there is significant danger that the mistakes of the past will be repeated, entrenched and magnified and that the vision of the Department that every child should receive the right support from the right people at the right time and in the right place will not be realised.

Importantly, the concerns that we raised are not unique to the Children's Law Centre. They are shared by the community and voluntary sector, school leaders, teaching unions and other stakeholders. There are also a number of areas of overlap between our analysis and the Assembly's Research and Information Service (RaISe) briefing, which identifies areas for further scrutiny. At this critical stage, it is essential that the Education Committee can satisfy itself that what is proposed by the Department will result in the intended outcomes for children. We reiterate our support for reform that complies with the legal rights of children with special educational needs and disabilities. However, for reform to succeed, it must be properly sequenced, adequately resourced and grounded in the realities of the current system and existing pressures. In that context, where the Department has provided some detail regarding spending to date on school capacity building, there remains a lack of clarity on key issues such as how learning support coordinator (LSC) time will be funded on a sustainable basis. That is of particular concern given recent speculation regarding potential reductions in funding for that critical non-teaching time, which is fundamental to the effective operation of SEN processes at school level. Above all, reform must deliver meaningful and measurable improvements in outcomes for children and young people with special educational needs.

I will now pass over to Rachel, who will take you through some specific areas of concern for the Children's Law Centre.

Ms Rachel Hogan (Children's Law Centre): Thank you, John and Committee. The time that we have been permitted at this particular stage of the Committee's scrutiny has allowed us to take a high-level approach. As you said, Chair, there is a huge volume of interconnected information to be considered, so we have to caveat what we say today, in the sense that we cannot possibly have scrutinised everything to the level that would be required. At this very important stage, it is extremely important for the Committee to receive the assurance that you require to make sure that you are happy for this process to proceed. There is a great weight of responsibility on us to support the Committee, give our expertise and try to give you the best advice that we can. There is also a great responsibility on you to be expected to scrutinise the volume and complexity of material in a very short time, although it has taken a very long time to get us to this stage.

Schools had been trained on the operation of aspects of the revised SEN framework in advance of the SL1 coming to the Committee. Before scrutiny has taken place, there has been extensive training of special educational needs coordinators (SENCOs) and others from the EA's SEND implementation team. That is essentially based on the draft code that we have before us, alongside the revised regulations. Potentially, that is procedurally irregular, in that a system is being implemented before it has gone through the scrutiny process. When the Assembly enacted the SEND Act in 2016, it did so in good faith that the regulations and the code that provide the detail of the system would follow soon, but, unfortunately, due to circumstances often beyond the Department's control, such as suspensions of the Assembly and so on, we seem to have been scuppered at every turn. Every time there has been an attempt to bring this forward, there has been a bit of a blockage. Therefore, a significant amount of time has passed since we last saw the material, which obviously makes it very difficult to recollect all the intricate details and to see what changes have been made in the regulations and the code of practice. We do not have colour-coded versions. We cannot see what the amendments are, so we have to open four computer screens and have various versions in front of us, line by line. As a small charity, we have diverted significant staff and resources towards looking at the regulations, the code and the enhanced support framework that the EA is proposing against the SEND Act, looking back at Assembly processes and at the Assembly's intention during the scrutiny of the SEND Act. We concluded, with a great deal of worry, that the intentions that the Assembly had may not be fulfilled in the current format.

The revised framework, including the impacts of implementation, may need to be scrutinised in fuller detail over a reasonable time period. One option is that it might need to be withdrawn and reformulated, or at least paused, so that everybody has time to scrutinise it properly. I have no doubt at all that the departmental officials who are dealing with this are equally under a lot of pressure in respect of the time and size of team that they have available and all the questions that we have to ask of them. There is no real analysis in the SL1 letter and memorandum that goes with it about whether the proposed revised regulations and closely associated code are proportionate and transparent or whether they reduce or increase the administrative and bureaucratic burden faced by children, families and education providers, which SEND reform was supposed to address. We would like to see an analysis along that line. It certainly appears to be very process-heavy. The majority of the activity to date on transformation has gone towards process and has not really focused on outcomes for children. We do not see evidence for measurement of that or focus on that at this time. It is unclear from the published documentation which parts of the revised regulations and code have been amended, deleted or added post consultation. As I have said, changing one word in a regulation can change completely the effect on statutory assessments, statements and so on. That is why we say it is so important that we fully understand that.

It is a feature of this particular framework that substantive provision such as the three stages of intervention in the code — formerly, the five stages of the code of practice — are delegated to the code rather than being part of the primary legislation. Due to that high level of co-dependence, the two were consulted on together by the Department in 2021, and prior to that we had consultations in 2016. They are interdependent, but they are also inextricably linked with a wide range of other pieces of legislation, such as the Education (Northern Ireland) Order 1996, which is the primary piece of legislation; the Special Educational Needs and Disability (Northern Ireland) Order 2005; the regulations; the code; the Children's Services Co-operation Act (Northern Ireland) 2015; the Special Educational Needs and Disability Act 2001; the recent Department of Education policy statement and five-year plan; the graduated response framework; and the proposed enhanced support model (ESM). It is impossible to unlink those. They are all interwoven, and I am sure that in your own scrutiny you have appreciated how overwhelming it is to try to analyse the actual impact that those regulations may have if they are not in top form and do not have in them all the matters that should be addressed.

We responded to the previous targeted consultation, setting out a number of concerns that we had. We need to have time to analyse whether those have been addressed. We know that the Department tried to address some of the concerns that we raised, and we thank it for that, but certain matters of grave importance have not been addressed to our satisfaction, and we fear that we will be left with a system that is weaker than the one that we started with. That is exactly the opposite of what we intended in the reform process, which was driven largely by the Children’s Law Centre and other organisations. I will summarise the issues that we raised in our paper, which we can share publicly at some stage once it is with the Committee. They are largely about the content and format of statements of special educational needs: what goes where in a statement, how enforceable it is and who provides advice to inform the statement. We had concerns about the upper time limit for the length of time that it can take for a statement to be produced, which is now 34 weeks, given that the purpose of all this was to shorten the time frame for statements from 26 weeks to 20, and we have ended up with 22 weeks. There are concerns about the experience required of learning support coordinators, the time that they will have and the funding for that time.

A lot of responsibility has been shifted onto schools. We want schools to play their part, and part of this work is to upskill them to build their capacity, but there may have been a disproportionate shift to schools, to the point where there may be an unlawful de facto delegation of duties that belong to the EA, and responsibilities falling to schools with regard to determining support packages, making arrangements and so on, and deciding what should be provided. That really sits with the Education Authority at statement level. The Minister has provided us with some written assurance that the law will be complied with in these processes, and we thank him for that assurance. However, we cannot see the basis for that, and we are not satisfied with the information that is currently available. We do not feel fully reassured by that. The Committee should seek that assurance and be vigorous in doing so, and it should feel absolutely confident in whatever recommendation it makes to the Assembly in relation to affirming or not affirming the regulations. The Assembly will have the ultimate decision in that regard.

The revised code of practice has 400 pages, and is very difficult to navigate. Against my better judgement, I had to use AI to find chapters in the revised code, because I could not find anything in it for the purposes of scrutinising it. It is too long, too bureaucratic and very directive. It does more than give instruction and support; it is extremely directive and unwieldy. In our view, it is not fit for purpose and not fit for issue. That creates a real difficulty, because the code and the regulations are closely tied together. We have not created that difficulty — the effluxion of time and the extensive delay have left us in it — but we are keen that the revised code should not be put into operation but redrafted and made fit for purpose. That feeds into the question of whether, if the code is not ready, the regulations are ready to go out. We need more time to get this right because, after all the work that we have put in for years, we are now in a hurry. It is too complex and too bureaucratic. We are having difficulty in assessing its impact, and we need more time to do that.

The other thing to say is that the code cannot be used to try to move children out of definitions that are set by primary legislation, nor can it be used to disguise special educational provision as ordinary provision to try to hold children back from the SEN register at stage 1 of the code of practice. Under the operative code of practice, children should be placed on the SEN register once the school starts to differentiate provision for them. Under the proposed scheme, they would not even be identified as having a special educational need at that stage and would have to jump through a lot of school-based hoops before being registered. The length of the pipeline and the thresholds within that in the proposed code and regulations need to be studied, looking back at article 3 of the 1996 Order, which defines "special educational needs" and "special educational provision". To narrow that or reverse-engineer it through the code would be against the intention of the primary legislation — article 15, which is on statutory assessment, and article 16, which provides for specification in statements, so how we put provision into the hands of children that directly helps them. Those thresholds all need more scrutiny; we would like to spend more time checking them. We are not saying that everything is wrong and nothing can be put right. We are saying that we do not know and cannot be assured. The vast majority of it may be perfectly OK, but we are not in position to say that, and there are some important matters that we are not happy with so we cannot recommend affirmation at this stage.

We understand that there is to be phased commencement of various parts of this but that the regulations and the code are to start on 1 September. Parts of the enhanced support model are also due to start in September, alongside new statutory assessment and statementing guidance which we do not have sight of that, and issues around specification in statements. If that commences on 1 September and all the teaching unions then tell us that they feel overwhelmed and are not content with the direction of travel, we will have a difficulty. Is our unstable system ready to cope with change? Is there anything that we can do to help bring this through in a more measured way? If we get it right to start with, that will help. If we make mistakes at the outset, we will not be able to fix this. It is our last chance to get this right, and we cannot turn away from the children and young people whom we have been sent here to serve. We have to get this right; we owe that to the children and young people who have been waiting for so long as well as to their families, teachers and classroom assistants.

We need to think about the financial and human resources that are available to support the system in terms of multidisciplinary input. We need to talk about Health and Education working together and about how the health workforce can service the education needs of children through their statements and also those children without statements. There is a lot of focus on statements in the issues that we raise, but I make it clear that we feel that earlier, pre-statement intervention is the goal. Children should have access to a wide range of multidisciplinary support at all stages, regardless of where they are in the code of practice. We have always said that, and we maintain it now. Reflecting on everything shows, I suppose, that the problems that we had when all this began 20 years ago are pretty much the same ones that we have today: blockages in the pipeline; statements that are not specific; long waits; frustration about trying to get adequate communication; and lack of proper best interest decision-making in which everyone is involved and has a stake. The Department, the Education Authority, the Committee, the Children's Law Centre, the unions and everyone else who has an interest need to work closely and collaboratively. If we do not pull in the same direction, this will fail, and we do not want to see that. We want it to be successful, and therefore we are willing to collaborate, as we always have been, with whoever would like to work with us.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): Thank you for the presentation. You set out very clearly the complexity and significance of what we are dealing with. I was very conscious of that as I tried to prepare for today's session. Ultimately, we in the Committee will be faced with a binary question: do we approve the regulations, or do we not? We cannot amend them. We do not have a future amending stage, so we cannot say, "Well, if we don't get it quite right at Committee Stage, we can sort it out at another point". It is yes or no, which creates a degree of pressure on the Committee to make sure that we do the work properly at this stage. I am also conscious that, on the other side, we have the Department saying, "You're going to entirely stymie SEN reform if you delay this". There is that sense of pressure in the mix, which is not a good context in which to be making decisions. If I have come to any conclusion while trying to prepare for today, it is that this is not the context in which we should be doing scrutiny.

Given what we are looking at and how you have set things out, this feels as complex as any piece of primary legislation. We have two private Member's Bills before the Committee that have two clauses and four clauses respectively, and we are talking about the Committee Stage of at least one of those Bills lasting for months. That is the norm for other Bills that Committees are scrutinising. No one in the Assembly debates that or says, "You should take less time with that. Scrutiny is a bad thing". However, I am concerned that, because these are regulations, they may be seen as something that we can just nod through. I share a lot of those concerns. In order to pin down a view, given that what we have at the minute does not feel like a good context in which to be doing scrutiny, can you give your assessment of what a good, effective and appropriate scrutiny process for regulations of this complexity would look like?

Ms Hogan: First, it involves everyone's having sufficient time to read all of the regulations and look at the changes in them, then look at how the code operationalises that, and link that back to the primary legislation — the SEND Act — which is also subject to implementation under the framework and is bringing in brand new provisions, most of which are uncontroversial in many ways. In addition, the original primary legislation holds all of the rights to assessment and statementing. There needs to be time to look at all of that in the cold light of day. We need to look at it together with the Department. It knows what the changes are. We do not, but we are getting there; we are trying to figure it out. Every time that we compare a page or two, we find some wee thing that has been changed, and we do not know why. There might be a very good reason for that change, or there might be a reason why we are not happy with it. You need sufficient time to do that. You need to feel confident that you understand what is changing and what difference that change is going to make. Is it going to make a positive difference, or is it possibly going to cause a difficulty?

At a very high level, I would like the Department to come to the table to speak about a number of important issues, particularly the format of statements, who provides statutory advice and who can make recommendations under a statement. Those items are red lines. The Department has said very clearly that it has taken legal advice and is absolutely not minded to move on them at all. That needs to be really taken apart. There are certain things that we need to dig into. There is a lot of stuff that we can just assure ourselves about and put to one side. We are not in a position today to say to you, "We don't need to look at this or that". We would like to be in a position to say, "Look, we don't need to worry about this. We're not worried about 90% of this. We are worried about 10% of it, and, for that 10%, it's crunch time". It is about making sure that we have enough time to look, article by article, at the ones that are causing concern and the Department explaining to us the rationale behind what it has done.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): Can you be more specific? The Department wants the regulations to be in place by 1 September, as far as we understand. To my mind, that means that, in order to get them through the next stages of the process so that they are ready to go for schools, we probably need to sign them off in the next two or three weeks.

Ms Hogan: The difficulty is that, if they are delayed —.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): Does a few weeks feel feasible to you?

Ms Hogan: It does not feel feasible at all. I do not want to complain — everybody has a job of work to do — but our team has been working until 1.00 am and 2.00 am on this for two weeks, and we have not touched the sides.

Mrs Kathryn Stevenson (Children's Law Centre): I have been looking quite comprehensively at the code to try to decipher what is in it, what has changed and what the practical application of it will mean operationally for schools. There are some very significant changes to duties and responsibilities in the regulations, but what does that mean on the ground from an operational perspective? The broader thing that we need to consider is the EA's operational and reform measures that have been put in place over the past number of years.

We know that there has been a very significant change in the complexity of need and in the profile of children in mainstream education. We know that there has been a huge increase in specialist provision in mainstream schools (SPiMS) classes. We know that the local impact teams (LITs) were rolled out in September last year. We have been trying to analyse, evaluate and review with our advice team what is happening with them and look at where the delays, pitfalls and stops in children accessing services are.

The first versions of the code and the regulations were drafted in 2021. They were consulted on in 2020-21. We are now in a very different environmental context, so we are looking at the operational aspects, such as the implications of the graduated response framework, as well as looking forward at the enhanced support model. None of those are adequately referenced in the code, and the implications for schools from trying to manoeuvre and work between all the different measures is very much lost here.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): I have a follow-up question. I am conscious that other members want to come in. Time is against us today. Our approach to the code was in my mind when I was thinking about this evidence session. Perhaps you can provide clarity on this: could we arrive at a scenario in which the Committee satisfies itself that the regulations are OK but that the code remains a lottery? The code is not part of the SL1. Rather, it is a separate document. Is there therefore a risk that we could agree regulations and end up not being content with the code?

Ms Hogan: I do not think that that is feasible. That is exactly what happened with the SEND Act 2016. The Committee and the Assembly approved the SEND Act and enacted it based on assurances that the regulations and the code were coming, but, 10 years later, we are in this situation. The regulations and the code cannot be separated. I take the point that the regulations are before the Committee, but you cannot understand the regulations without reading the code. They are inextricably linked, which causes a huge difficulty. There needs to be a very swift move made to redraft that code.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): Is there a need to publicly consult on the code before it is operationalised?

Ms Hogan: It just needs to be shortened. It is far too long, too directive and too difficult to navigate, and the thresholds in it are legally dubious. We said all of that to the Department before, and we are happy to sit down with officials again. We are happy to assist and support the Department, but, if it were up to me, I would go into a darkened room for two weeks and redraft it. I would shorten it to make it more accessible and to make it comply and sit comfortably with the thresholds in the 1996 Order.

Mr O'Doherty: Fundamentally, Chair, to go back to your previous point, one of the biggest issues has been transparency. We are trying to identify what has changed and why, but that information should have been forthcoming. If it had been forthcoming, our review process would have been much easier, but, as Rachel said, we are spending a lot of time trying to identify what has changed and to understand the reasons behind that and its possible impacts.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): I could be wrong, but I think that we have asked the Department for that information. We flagged it as an issue right at the start and said that we were struggling to track what had changed. I do not think that that information has arrived, but I am happy to be corrected.

The Committee Clerk: The Department feels that the explanatory memorandum is adequate for that purpose.

Ms Hogan: The RaISe paper is a stunning piece of work. We have relied heavily on it and are grateful for the work that two people managed to do in a very short time. The Committee can see how long and detailed that paper is. It is 78 pages long. It provides a bit of an overview and tells us something. There are a lot of scrutiny points in the paper, and we agree with many of them. There are no two ways about it; this is complicated. Even when the Examiner of Statutory Rules comes to look at the regulations, for her it will be about effluxion of time: between when the regulations were envisaged, where they are at now and the changes that have happened in society over that time.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): If nothing else, we are in an unusual position. The timelines are very odd.

I am conscious of time, and I have probably taken up a bit too much of it, so I will bring in the Deputy Chair.

Mr Sheehan: Has there been any discussion at all with the Department on what has changed and why?

Ms Hogan: We had a meeting with the Department before it released the regulations. The Department met a number of stakeholders. We had a meeting, but we did not have the regulations at the time, because it is the Assembly that publishes them. The Department was trying to go through the issues that we had raised in our consultation response and assure us that it had considered them all and made a decision one way or the other, which, of course, the Department has to do. We had a meeting with the Department on Monday of this week. At the meeting were a lot of people from the Department and the EA. It was a meeting at which everybody got to air their views, so that was good. Out of that meeting, we agreed that we will continue to work together and discuss things. We still do not have any insight into what the changes are and the reasons behind them, however, and we have not been able to drill down into them. There is quite a piece of work for us to do before we sit down with the Department again. We have had a fantastic working relationship with the Department for years.

Mr Sheehan: Rachel, would it not be easy for the Department to point out the changes and explain why they have been made?

Ms Hogan: One can only assume that the Department has a working version in which it can track — perhaps through colour-coding or by making comments — the changes that have been made since the previous version. Obviously, the Department knows that someone has changed wording for a reason. For example, the word "parents" was deleted from the statutory advice. Someone decided to delete that. We have made the point that we think that that looks very bad indeed, because it appears as though parents are not important. That also feeds into the drafting of a statement of special educational needs, because statutory advice ends up in part 2 of the statement. The first paragraph of part 2 is usually a summary of parental advice. That will now not be there. It may be that the Department is thinking that parents do not give advice, but it has taken that out when it was already in there. We have spoken to the Department a little bit about such things, but we have not really drilled down into the why.

Another important point to make concerns the format of the statement. Relevant health treatments and services appear in part 6, which is on non-educational provision. That came in through a Committee amendment to the then SEND Bill that was debated in the Assembly and approved at Consideration Stage. The Department has therefore gone against the wishes of the legislature and placed it in part 6 of the statement. That makes it unenforceable, which is the opposite of why the amendment was made to the legislation in the first place. The Department has said to us that it has taken legal advice on that, but we do not know what legal advice it has asked for or been given. We have given the Department legal advice, because we are very clear about the legal position. Why would we not want relevant treatments and services that serve the educational needs of children to be in the educational provision part of a statement, if not to avoid having to deal with health matters? We do not understand that. It makes no sense to us.

There are a number of issues that we do not understand. There are probably issues that we do not even know about yet, because we have not scrutinised everything. In the paper that we provided the Committee with, you will see 15 issues that we have identified so far.

Mr O'Doherty: For example, point 14 highlights the fact that "sufficient time" has been changed to "reasonable time" as it relates to time afforded to the LSC's role. Why has that change been made? What is the intent behind it? How will it practically change the position for LSCs? Those are the sorts of questions with which we are grappling. There are no answers in any of the papers, so we are trying to understand why those changes have been made.

Mr Sheehan: EA representatives were with us recently, just after you published the letter, and, as far as they were concerned, your assertion that some aspects of the framework may be unlawful is wrong. What is your response to that?

Ms Hogan: The EA has not told us why it is wrong. We do not believe that our assertion is wrong. We believe that it is correct.

Mr Sheehan: Tomas said that he had a doctorate in human rights law.

Ms Hogan: I wish, then, that he would explain to me why it is lawful to go against article 16 of the 1996 Order, which requires specification in statements. Our assertion concerns the enhanced support model in particular. I will read to you the wording in the 1996 Order that has caused me concern and makes us believe that the process may be unlawful. Article 16, which is about specification in statements, states that the EA has:

that a child needs by making and maintaining a statement. It has to "determine" that provision. It has a duty to "specify" in the statement the provision that is to be made to meet the child's needs. It then has a third duty, which is to "arrange" that provision. It therefore has to determine the special educational provision, specify it and arrange it. That is all very clear in article 16 of the 1996 Order.

In stating that it is the school that will make those decisions, the EA is delegating its own legal responsibilities to schools. That is our understanding of what it has written. The facts speak for themselves. The facts are what they are. It states in the consultation:

— classroom assistant —

Schools will design the support packages to EA standards. Who therefore is determining and specifying? In that situation, it is not the EA but the school. We consistently get information from our clients about how statementing officers respond to requests for specification, which is by saying, "We do not specify that in statements. That is up to schools".

In case I forget to do so, I will read something out to the Committee, because it is so important.

One of my clients sent me some information that she got from a statementing officer about her child, who has cerebral palsy, autism and severe learning difficulties and who, for all of her life — I have known the child since she was about this height — has required physiotherapy, occupational therapy, speech and language therapy and a range of other supports, including classroom assistant support. We went to tribunal to get all those provisions put into part 3 of the statement, because the EA refused to put them in as educational provision, even though there is a long line of case law requiring it to do so. We got it all done, and then she had to move school. She got a new statement, but everything in it had been whitewashed. We therefore had to start again by getting it taken out of part 6, which is on non-educational provision, and put back into part 3, which is on educational provision. She is now on another iteration of a statement for transfer, and this is what was said to her by a statementing officer. I would like to know what statementing officers are being trained in. My client was told:

It will, because it will not be enforceable. I want to give the parent's views on the whole situation. She has fought tooth and nail to get those supports in the part on educational provision, where they belong. She wrote:

We then get a new format of a statement that has not been flagged in any consultation that states that relevant treatments and services are to go into part 6. I rest my case. Those are the facts. If somebody wants to provide me with another legal interpretation, I am ready and willing to listen.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): Before I bring in the next member, I will let the Deputy Chair make a point.

Mr Sheehan: This is all very technical and complex. There is a massive volume of material involved. I do not think that anybody on the Committee would claim to be an expert. I am certainly not. That is one of the reasons that we request evidence from organisations such as the Children's Law Centre. In fact, as far as I am concerned, when constituents come to me with any children's rights issue, particularly for children with special educational needs, if I do not immediately know what to do, I signpost them to the Children's Law Centre. As far as I can see, the statement is critical when it comes to how the rights of children, particularly those with additional needs, are supported in the education system. In the context of all that we are dealing with here today, what advice would you give the Committee? What should we do?

Ms Hogan: We think that it is essential that we pause the process in some form or other and allow sufficient time. If the Department does not come with us on this, pause the process and give us time, the other option is that there is a possibility that the regulations will not be affirmed, resulting in everything being pulled down. Nobody wants that to happen, so it is much better to pause and take a breath. The Department can still do a lot of things on an operational level to try to manage the budget and all of that. It is doing that anyway, but we need to get the legal framework right. If we allow the legal framework to be weakened by a process that was meant to strengthen it, we will be doing a grave disservice to children and young people, and we could not possibly stand over that.

Ms Hunter: Thank you so much for coming to the Committee. We know how hard you work, and we really appreciate your being here today. In the interests of time, I have three questions. The first one is on the fact that parents of children who have special educational needs always voice how they feel helpless and hopeless. They are up against what is a big and complex system. Taken as a whole, do you feel that the regulations sufficiently rebalance power towards children and families or largely preserve a system in which parents still have to become a sort of legal expert in their own right to advocate in order to get basic provision for their children?

Ms Hogan: In a sense, the regulations go in both directions. There is some strengthening of rights for children and young people. For example, on the compulsory school age, they will have their own appeal rights. When we consider how parents are being taken out of the advice-giving part of the regulations and even consider the visuals of that being done, it looks as though they are being disempowered.

If our teachers and school leaders cannot get a grip on that in order to understand why it is being done, what earthly chance do parents have? The Department may take the view that the code of practice is not for parents, but it is for everybody. There are duties to "have regard" to the code of practice. We often give the previous code of practice to parents and say to them, "Look, this is really well written and in plain English. If you want to look into annual reviews, go to the chapter on annual reviews, read it, and you will understand". We could not possibly say that about the current code. If we cannot understand it and do not trust it, how can we ask someone else to do so?

Mr O'Doherty: It is four times the length.

Ms Hogan: Yes, it is four times as long. Based on the facts that I have just stated, there is a fear on our part that there is a move to take the opportunity to weaken the system in favour of public authorities.

Mrs Stevenson: There are some very positive things being done. For example, the code reinforces the independence of the dispute avoidance and resolution service (DARS). Mediation is a strong and useful tool to help families avoid the stress and anxiety of having to go to tribunal. There are therefore some exceptionally good things in it.

One thing that concerns me, and it is linked to the ESM, is that annual reviews are to change. What we call an annual review will become a "periodic review", which will happen at the milestones for children: at every Key Stage and on transition. There will no longer be a meeting every year. There is a caveat to be applied to that, which is that parents will be able to request a meeting. That is OK for parents who have the wherewithal to understand or who have been down that road before and will therefore ask for a meeting, but we come across many parents who do not have that understanding. There are parents who, without coming to us and asking, will not know that it is their right to have a meeting to get involved in the discussion about their child's statement. We are therefore very concerned that parental opportunities for participation and involvement in their child's outcomes in their statement are being rolled back.

It is a mishmash. Some are positive, and we will not challenge them, but we are concerned about some other things.

Ms Hunter: People do not know what they do not know. That is why you are so important. The fact that you, the legal experts, are afraid causes me and, arguably, many on the Committee real concern.

What are the greatest risks from the regulations being implemented before the system is truly ready for change? What is your biggest concern?

Mr O'Doherty: It is that that would result in worse outcomes for children. It is that children who have needs would not have those needs met and that we would continue down the route that we have been going down over the past 20 years, which is that of consistent appeal and challenge of decisions and processes for meeting the needs of children with special educational needs and disabilities. It is as simple as that.

Ms Hunter: That summarises it.

Mr O'Doherty: As is in our paper and was in our public letter, our concern is that we would continue to repeat the mistakes of the past.

Mrs Stevenson: If the enhanced support framework will not in any way impact on parents' rights of appeal and, in time, children's rights of appeal, why does the EA need to issue new guidance on the statutory assessment and the statementing process? We have asked that question. It is doing that so that, from September, EA operatives can start looking at every new statement to decide, "What are we going to do to augment this so that children's individual rights are not going to be maintained or enforceable?". That is the worst-case scenario, but it is the concern that we have.

Ms Hunter: It is a scary time. From speaking with parents, I know that it is the uncertainty that fills them with dread.

Finally, when it comes to implementing the regulations, do you feel — I suspect that I know what the answer will be — that the Department has demonstrated well enough that the Education Authority and the likes of our health and social care trusts, educational psychology services and tribunal system are adequately resourced in order to be ready for further change?

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): I have to ask that you give a brief response, because we are really up against it with time.

Mrs Stevenson: I will say something about the regulations and the upper limit on a statement. In one respect, having an upper limit on a statement is a good thing, because we have seen the statutory assessment process roll on for months and months without ever ending.

We looked at the regulations on the extension of time with "valid exceptions" for health and social care trusts to provide advices. In the previous version of the regulations, if a trust was looking for additional time, it had to go and get that approved by the EA. Now, it is in the hands of a trust to say, "We need the extra time". Under the new regs, a trust just sends in a notice saying, "We're taking the extra time, and this is the reason". That is a really big concern. We know that there are huge pressures on health and social care trusts to provide those advices in addition to their other duties and responsibilities in the health world. However, if there is not very clear review and monitoring of when "valid exceptions" may be used, it could be open to abuse. Ultimately, you could have children waiting up to the 34 weeks as a matter of course rather than —.

Ms Hogan: We also have to listen to our teaching and non-teaching workforce, who are telling us very strongly that they feel really overwhelmed and ill-equipped. That is not the Department's fault; it is to do with budget and the availability of money — resources and finance. The capacity of schools has slipped back, but all of this is built on increased capacity for schools to include and provide for children. We also have the shift in the complexity of the population in mainstream schools. We need to make changes happen and to keep moving, but this is not the bit of the process to rush; this is the bit to be careful about.

Ms Hunter: That was well articulated. Thank you very much.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): I apologise again. The theme of the day is that we are under time pressure: with the regs and with our agenda. I want to make sure that every member gets the opportunity to come in.

Mrs Guy: Folks, I genuinely thank you for raising this with us in the way that you have and for the interventions that you have made. Looking at this, we are a bit overwhelmed. If you, too, are overwhelmed, I feel a little bit relieved [Laughter.]

Some of the changes are already being implemented operationally, but they have no legal basis because they have not been passed yet. Where are children, schools, the EA and the Department left legally in that operational roll-out?

Ms Hogan: Legally, it is very dubious. It is fine if everything works out well in the end, in a sense, but, if a challenge becomes necessary, you will be looking at a procedurally dubious process, whereby a code has been brought in through the back door. We have been saying that for several years; it is documented all over the place. In project advisory groups, we have been telling the EA, "You are bringing in a code and calling it a graduated response framework". If you compare the two side-by-side, which one of our solicitors has done, you can see that it is basically the same document. The same wording is used across those two things. All of the EA's training support materials have been prepared along the lines of the draft code. The draft code, and the guides attached to it, were published on the EA's website — as were, for some reason, guides for parents. I am not sure exactly when those were published; it might have been around 2024.

It is like weeds; it infiltrated the system before we finished scrutinising it. Part of the reason for that is all the delays. The Department provided money to do the training. The EA wanted to spend that money and do the training in order to upskill the workforce. However, we are looking at it and saying, "There are problems with this, and you've trained on it". The EA will not want to roll back on any part of the code of practice, because it has done all the training on it. It is really messy.

Mrs Stevenson: The EA says that the code is informed and co-designed by the SENCOs who attended the training. It justifies the content on that basis. However, we do not think that the document is fit for purpose for schools, legal advisers or parents. The EA says that it will do some easy read guides and provide online resources to make it simpler, but those are not available now.

Ms Hogan: The current code is perfectly good in that sense. It is very accessible. The new code should be along similar lines.

Mrs Stevenson: It is 90 pages, with glossaries and annexes, as opposed to 400 pages.

Mrs Guy: It sounds like a dog's dinner.

Mrs Stevenson: It is the original code that is 90 pages.

Mrs Guy: I just mean the whole process.

Mrs Stevenson: That code is good, but we are now looking at it being 400 pages.

Ms Hogan: I am keen to say that it is not necessarily the Department's fault. Some of the delay might be with the Department, but a lot of the delay is not. Just as we were about to start moving on it, the Assembly was suspended. When we got back, the team had changed. We lost Sharon Lawlor and Jan Matthews with whom we had worked very closely in the Department and had a very good working relationship. A new team came in, and, again, we built up a very good working relationship. Some of those people are still going. The doors have always been open, and there have always been conversations. Then, however, there was another pause. Five years elapsed without any conversations really, and, now, everyone has been left to try to pick up the pieces.

Mr O'Doherty: We are doing so in a changed world, post-COVID, in which the presenting need has substantially changed.

Mrs Guy: You cannot plan for things like COVID, which come out of the blue, but this situation is an illustration of why it is completely unacceptable that a party can collapse the Assembly. You mentioned time passing and the impact of that. If we do not get this right, there will be consequences for the children.

You have covered some of the stuff that I was going to ask about. The following issue was raised with me recently. If, when kids are transitioning to adult services, their statement says "learning difficulty" and not "learning disability", they have problems accessing those adult services. Could the provisions in the new regulations be helpful in resolving that ? It feels like it is a new issue, but it —.

Ms Hogan: That has never been within the remit of these regulations. These regulations come from the 1996 Order, which talks about "learning difficulty", and a learning difficulty and a learning disability are not the same thing under those definitions. "Learning disability" is a health concept that involves a health professional. Close cooperation between Health and Education is required to fix that problem, because a learning disability is IQ-based, whereas a learning difficulty may not be.

Mrs Guy: That is where I wanted to go next: cooperation between Health and Education. Will you tell me more about how that will operate under these regulations and any concerns that you have in that regard? It seems that, like with so many things to do with SEN, that cooperation is critical but does not happen effectively.

Ms Hogan: A cooperation duty was brought in through the Special Educational Needs and Disability Act (Northern Ireland) 2016. There is a separate duty for Health to help Education in identifying the relevant health services and treatments. That duty to help is subject to resources, so a trust could legitimately say, "We'd like to help you, but we don't have the resources, so we're gonna leave you to it". Then, the EA would have to source the help privately. We tried to get that changed at the time, but that was not agreed and it was not changed. Health has to help: it has to identify needs. The two Departments need to work together.

The impression that we have got over the past while is that there is a level of cooperation, maybe in data-sharing and things like that, but that we are at a very early stage of cooperation and that it is not where it should be. A Health/Education oversight group meets monthly. I am not aware of what progress has been made there: it would be good to find out a bit more about that. The general impression that I get is that, even under the enhanced support model, there is a move away from working with Health and nearly an attitude of, "They're not gonna help us, so we're gonna go off and do our own thing". However, where are they going to get those people to do their own thing? There are no spare speech and language therapists sitting around out there; speech and language therapists are serving the health service. It is all very difficult. Those are challenges that we all have to face — there is a shortage in the workforce, and we have to use what we have to better effect — and that is fair enough. However, it is very important to scrutinise that cooperation piece.

Mrs Guy: Thank you. I appreciate that.

Mr Baker: Thank you so much. I want to start with your point about implementation through the back door. We hear from officials at Committee all the time, and you would think that everything is rosy in the garden as regards the direction that they are going in. There is a real arrogance in what they have done by implementing the regs and putting resources towards them. It will be very difficult to get them to row back from stuff that the Department is so committed to. There should be a pause. We were asking about the regs for so long. Two years ago, I was asking, "Where are these regs?", and there was nothing; the response was, "They may come". Then, these regs just come with no warning. I am trying to be kind by saying that it is arrogance. It seems to be deliberate.

Ms Hogan: They are in a fixed position, and we need to get them out of that.

Mr Baker: Yes, that is a massive problem.

Ms Hogan: We would be helping them by doing that, because, if we can get some movement on these important provisions, the whole thing could move forward in a much more cooperative manner.

Mr Baker: I have another worry. In debates that we have had in the Chamber, the Minister has stood up and said, "No child should ever need a statement". That sounds brilliant in an ideal world, but, with these regs coming through, they are almost showing us what they are doing: if they remove or dilute the statement, they take away the rights of the parent and the child. That is how it looks to me. I am not a legal expert in any way, so I really am relying on your evidence.

Ms Hogan: If the reforms work, the number of statements will fall off naturally, because children will get early intervention.

Mrs Stevenson: In a utopian society, the local impact teams would deliver at that early stage — stage 2. The local impact teams would deliver every time, and they would be given a level of support that would take not every child but a large proportion of children out of requiring a statement. However, we know from the evidence that we get, including the evidence that the EA has given to the Committee, that the EA is understaffed and under-resourced. Even if the EA had the money now, it would not be able to find the staff to make that viable for every child who is waiting.

We go out and talk to principals and SENCOs, and we go to union meetings, to get a flavour of what is happening on the ground. We hear from SENCOs that they are frustrated and exhausted. The responsibility for personal learning plans (PLPs) and the wider strategic focus in schools on developing plans falls to the support coordinators. An educational psychologist used to be the gateway to getting a service; now it is a PLP. The PLP is the most important document. It has to be created — they are not all created yet — revised, monitored and reviewed. All the services that a child gets and any delay to services should all be noted in that document. It should be a living document that follows the child all the way through their journey in education. SENCOs therefore have a very significant role. SENCOs are overwhelmed, because, when they go to look for a service, they have to provide a PLP and document all the tests and internal processes that have been done in the school in order to show what they have implemented and that the need has not progressed to a different stage. Under the new provisions, schools are also being asked to put in place whole-school provision. That will be another potential barrier to children being registered as having SEN and moving through the process of getting access to support. The overwhelming of the teaching profession is really significant, and I do not think that we can avoid doing something about that.

Mr Baker: School leaders are being flooded with many different consultations and changes. We are talking about SEN here, but when you look at TransformED, for example, you see that the scale of curriculum reform is huge, and these changes are running in parallel to that. School leaders are overwhelmed, and they are really concerned that this will all get dumped on them. These changes may mean that the responsibility and the traditional reviews end up landing at the door of the school rather than the Education Authority. That view is building among the school leaders I have talked to. Is it a fair assessment?

Ms Hogan: The last thing that we want is for schools to be put in a position where the challenge function is exercised. Schools have responsibilities, and the purpose behind whole-school provision is to make sure that schools do everything that they can within their resources. They should do that for their children, and they largely do, but all schools need to pull their weight on that. However, we should not delegate too much responsibility to schools, because with great responsibility and power comes great difficulty, potentially. If a school makes a decision about designing a package, and someone does not agree with it, the school will be challenged. We all know from our work, and you will know from your constituency work, that that is the worst possible path to go down, because the child has to go to that school every day. Teachers need to be teaching, not fighting judicial reviews and having to follow legal processes. We do not want legal processes coming into this. We want the EA to maintain its responsibilities and ensure that it can stand over the decisions that it is legally obliged to take and not try to push those towards schools.

Mr Baker: Is there a danger that that will be the outworking of the regulations, as they stand, and the code of practice?

Ms Hogan: When you take them together with all the things that the EA is doing that are inextricably linked, there is a danger of that, subject to our receiving more information that clarifies otherwise.

Mrs Stevenson: If you push children back from getting into the statutory arena, legal challenges will not come to bite. Responsibility is being put on schools in the knowledge that they cannot deliver, because they are not equipped to do so, they do not have the capacity, and they have not had the training. The EA knows that, if you have not gone through the statutory process, you do not have an appeal right. There is a real risk.

Ms Hogan: There is a concept of putting a team around the child in a school. That sounds great, and it would be great, but will we be able to do that? That is the question.

Mr Baker: In a recent case that came to me, a link officer contacted a parent and said, "Can we remove severe learning difficulties (SLD) assessment and replace it with a moderate learning difficulties (MLD) assessment in order to get the child placed there, because I cannot get them placed here?". That was only a couple of weeks ago. That is the type of stuff that is going on. It worries me that the legal protections will completely go.

Ms Hogan: We are sliding back to where we started or even a bit further back than that.

Mr Baker: Yes. Thank you.

Mr Brooks: Thanks for your presentation. I have a few questions, but I will jump back to where you finished with Michelle. I am interested in this, and it has been raised at a number of Committee sessions. You said that you feel that the enhanced support model is about the Department moving on and seeing what it can do itself, because it does not feel that there is the support from Health. Officials, when they come to us, are understandably reticent to speak against officials in other Departments. Is it your observation that the problem is largely with Health, even if it is for understandable reasons, not wanting to or not being able to become fully integrated partners with the local impact teams?

Ms Hogan: There is a huge problem with a lack of integration. You have hit on a really important question about the relationship between Health and Education. Health has a duty to help Education. That is strengthened through the SEND Act, if its provisions are implemented, as it says that Health "shall" help on request, although that is still subject to Health's resources.

There may be a failure in communication between the two when plans are made. Health may feel, "SPiMS has opened, and now they're looking to us to service it. Sure, we didn't know it was coming". Education may feel, "Health has taken the nurses out of schools. We can't manage without them". It all comes from a lack of resources, obviously. Health and Education are both trying to protect their resources. We would really like to see Health and Education making a concerted effort, under the Children's Services Co-operation Act, to sit down together and ask, "How can we help each other? How can we pool our human, financial and other resources to make things better for the children we all serve?". They are the same children, so Health should help Education, and Education should talk to Health when it makes plans. A lot of the discourse has been about classroom assistants — we are always talking about them — but what about that integrated support? That is a really important matter to raise, and I would like to hear more conversation about it.

Mr Brooks: I feel that, when Education officials come before us, they always try to reassure us — certainly, the Minister reassures us — that those conversations are happening. I do not always feel that Health is as enthusiastic. I understand that Health faces huge pressures, although Education faces a £600 million deficit next tear, and I am fearful about what that will mean for the system.

You said earlier that you believe that the enhanced support model could be unlawfully delegating more to schools. Can you help me understand what exactly you think is being delegated directly to schools and what —?

Ms Hogan: Yes, it is what I spoke about earlier. Really, it comes down to article —. I could do half a day of training on this, by the way. [Laughter.]

Mr Brooks: The problem for all of us is that we could speak about it for a long time, but trying to get it all in in five minutes is —.

Ms Hogan: I try not to overburden people. It is about the format of statements. The enhanced support model seems to focus very much on statemented children. I would love to see it focus more on pre-statement children, to be honest. I cannot understand the match between the two. We will want to hear more from EA about that when we get the chance to speak to it.

Under article 16 of the 1996 Order, it is the duty of the Education Authority to determine the provision. The EA has to identify those children for whom it is responsible who may have SEN. Then, the EA has a legal duty to determine the provision that it requires. However, the enhanced support model says that schools will design the packages. Then, the school has a duty to specify that provision on an individual child basis. It is special educational needs, not everyone's educational needs. Statements are for individuals; the duty to specify is about individual children. The EA is now saying that schools do not have to link it to individual children, and schools get to design the packages. I can see the EA's rationale for that: it is saying, "We don't have enough money, and we think that children might do better doing group work, so we'll put pooled resources into schools. We'll give schools a bit of this and a bit of that, and they can decide what individual children need".

Mr Brooks: You talked about teaching unions. I have genuinely asked this question at almost every school that I have gone into. I recognised, when coming on to this Committee, that I was not an education expert, so I wanted to soak up information from my local schools. Nearly every mainstream school that I have spoken to has said that they would rather have more autonomy around resources. Those schools feel that, rather than having six classroom assistants —. They are at pains to put across that they value their classroom assistants very much, but, rather than be oversubscribed when it comes to classroom assistants at the back of a classroom, those schools would like to be able to use some of that resource to bring in an extra specialist teacher who could help with this or support their work in other ways. Some schools are doing that and see the benefit of it.

Ms Hogan: We have no difficulty with that. That is happening. From what the EA tells us, we know that at least 150 schools have been innovative and have come up with —. We see it in individual cases: there is a crisis, and the funding is repurposed to ensure that the child gets something else that meets their individual needs. There is no difficulty with that legally, as long as it can be specified in the statement. In loads of statements, one-to-one classroom assistance does not have to be specified. I do not know the proportion of statements that have that; it is only in statements where parents have fought for it. Most statements just say that there should be access to a level of classroom assistance. The EA gives a bunch of money to the school, and the school decides what to do, which is potentially unlawful.

The unlawful part relates to who determines and specifies what the child should have. Any provision can be specified: a range of provisions could be specified; it does not have to be one-to-one classroom assistance. If the school, parents and everyone else agrees, the statement can be changed. The statement does not have to be overly rigid or prescriptive if that does not suit the needs of the child. It all comes down to the individual. If a school has a group of such individuals, it might need to think about how to manage child A, child B and child C, and that is where the school will have conversations with EA. However, we are extremely concerned about the lawfulness and enforceability of the way that it is set out at the moment. If an individual child and their parents cannot see what they have in their statement — someone may decide not to bother showing them the statement — they cannot enforce it. That is our only concern about that. We are on the same page on a lot of the changes that are needed.

Mrs Stevenson: The enhanced support model is not operational; basically, it is a "grand scheme" thing. The consultation document does not say how schools will implement that model. The EA is looking at phasing it in this year with the schools that it has worked with already. It is trying to model it and see what that produces. That should have happened before the code and regulations were implemented, so that the EA had some idea of the alternative provision models. It would be fine as long as the statement specifies what a child would get through alternative means.

The funding is set out in three strands. The first strand looks at the profile of the school; it is like blanket funding. Secondly, there is funding for training and the other resources that the school might need. Individual funding is the third strand. It worries me that, in that continuum, very few children will continue to get the provision that they require under their statement. There should be more of an explanation about the funding. The big problem is that, with the document as it stands, we cannot make head nor tail of how the model will work. The problem for the Department and the EA is that they have not tested it yet. Lots of individual schools have done things, but, in the first year, it will be about looking at how to gather the data and information. There may be better ways to do things, but they are doing that testing a bit late.

Mr Brooks: All that I will say to finish is that we should not do something, or do something quickly, just for the sake of doing it, but I have an abiding fear of the opportunity cost. We already have a broken system that is not meeting need and that is under-resourced, because, let us be honest, the Executive do not have the resources. I fear that, if we do not reform the system and move it forward, we will end up with the collapse of an unsustainable system.

Ms Hogan: We can do the things that you have talked about without a new model. I do not know what the new model is, because I have not seen a model. Those changes can be made under the current system.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): Thank you. That is probably a good place to leave the discussion, because the Department will be before the Committee next week, and that needs to be at the core of the evidence that it gives us. I worry that the Department will try to suggest that SEN reform cannot be done without introducing these regs now. We have begun to feel our way into a position where we feel we can do SEN reform, and perhaps we are —.

Ms Hogan: We already are.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): Yes. We already are. If it is about testing new models and how they might work within the existing framework, the regs could be refined to work with a new model.

Ms Hogan: Talk to us, and we will help.

Mr O'Doherty: This is not the point at which to rush.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): Yes. If anything is to be rushed, it should not be legislation. We need to be clear on that.

I really appreciate your time. Apologies if the session felt rushed in any way. We are dealing with a lot of material, and we have a big agenda today. We will see what comes from next week's evidence session with the Department.

I have one more practical question to ask. The tracking of changes is a clear recommendation, and it seems so basic. We have sought that tracking but not got it. Should we specifically ask for tracking of the changes between the previous draft regs and the new draft regs — those two key documents?

Ms Hogan: It would be easiest to compare the current regulations and the new regulations. We will look at the in-between versions, but we do not expect others to do that. It would be useful to look at what we have now and what we will be changing to.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): We will look at the current and draft versions; we do not need to worry about the in-between versions. If members agree, we should seek that tracking from the Department again.

Mrs Stevenson: It would be useful to have tracking of any variations to the code as well, but that might be a bit of a stretch at this point.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): That would be a lot, as it has gone from 90 pages to 400, but we can certainly ask.

Mrs Stevenson: It would be a big ask, yes.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): Thank you, all, for your time. We really appreciate it.