2nd reading in the Lords
- Speaker
Baroness PitkeathleyLabour- Quote
- My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a second time. It is a pleasure for me to introduce the Bill today. Like all good Private Members’ Bills it is a short and simple piece of legislation, which I hope will have a strong and sustained effect if it takes its place on the statute book. Some noble Lords will know that I have form as regards Private Member’s Bills. Building on the success that I have had with carers Private Member’s Bills, I believe that we should use such Bills as building blocks. If this Bill makes progress today, as I hope it will, we must continue to try to build on its provisions and unlock its potential as time goes by. As many knowledgeable noble Lords around the Chamber will know, there are an estimated 1.6 million children identified as having special educational needs in our schools. That is 19.7 per cent of the school population. Each and every one of those needs is different. Although we categorise type of need, we all know that each child faces a unique set of circumstances and challenges, as do their parents. These differences may lie in the classroom, the playground or the home, but one factor is constant throughout: there is not sufficient information available to those who are best placed to support these children. We need to obtain better information for parents, for schools, for governors and, most importantly, for the children themselves. This Bill will help to secure that information. It contains only two provisions. First, it would give the Secretary of State further powers to collect information which he considers will help to improve outcomes for children with special educational needs, and explicitly states that this information, when collected, must be published annually. Secondly, the Bill outlines exactly what outcomes must be monitored. These outcomes are broadly in line with the Government's Every Child Matters agenda and reflect not only educational attainment but emotional and physical well-being, contribution to society and economic well-being. In my view the Bill fits very neatly into the framework for SEN set out in the Children's Plan published earlier this year. If it helps to deliver on some of the proposals within the plan, that should be welcomed, but I hope too that it can go further and provide Ministers with a basis on which they can make further strides in mapping out existing provision and plans for the future. In time the practical implications of this Bill should assist Ministers in ironing out the variations in provision which exist across the country. If we are serious about improving not only outcomes but raising expectation, we must first put an end to the drastic differences in policy and provision which exist across local authorities. The scale and complexity of policies to deal with special educational needs in our schools are as complex and varied as the needs themselves. That is precisely why we need greater information in order fully to understand the existing web of provision. Local authorities are faced with local challenges whether they are cultural, social or economic. Depending on the local authority's policy there are bound to be some discrepancies in the recording of special educational needs and the awarding of statements. However, the fact still remains that at a local level there is far too marked a variation in recorded incidence of SEN from as low as 13.5 per cent in one local authority to more than 27 per cent in another. That is unacceptable. The provisions laid out in the Bill give us a golden opportunity to place a spotlight on the performance of local authorities in delivering for children with SEN. We can identify and introduce best practice and ensure effective use of time and resources among staff. A report from the Audit Commission published last year showed that the average cost of placing a pupil outside their home local authority is just over £57,000 a year. Ensuring quality provision across the board will help to cut back on the number of out-of-authority placements and, in time, reduce the cost incurred by the public purse. I understand that Ministers have undertaken to assess the possibility of increasing the categorisation of children with SEN down to the school action level of need. That would be a very welcome step which would provide clarity to approximately 1 million children and their families who are currently in the position whereby they have been told that they have a special educational need but have not been told what that need actually is. Many parents face a frustrating experience as they try to navigate their way through the system to secure the best possible support for their children. I used to see that all the time when I headed up a carers’ movement, when distressed parents were trying to find their way through the bureaucracy and form-filling. Although parent partnership services do a valuable job, there remains a suspicion among parents that those services are not always as impartial as they could be, and that needs to be addressed. It would be of little use simply to add to the myriad statistics that can be found in the backwaters of the DCSF website. Therefore, I hope that it would be the intention of Ministers, should this Bill go on to become law, to produce a hard copy report that would be made available annually to parents. I emphasise that the report should be in plain English and easily digestible for the reader. From previous experience with Private Members’ Bills, I know that their passage through this House and the other place can at times be tricky. The Bill has reached us with no amendments from the point of its conception, and I hope that it can remain in its current form. None the less, in the other place there was much discussion about the role that the teaching workforce plays in identifying and supporting the children concerned. Improving outcomes for pupils, which after all is the intended consequence of monitoring them, must go hand in hand with improving the skills and training of teachers. The Minister may inform us of plans for the introduction of a survey of the teaching workforce that will be introduced in the next few years, which is to be welcomed. It is important to note that there is unanimity of opinion that initial teacher training must instil confidence in our teachers to accurately identify children with SEN. In addition, we need to give teachers access to the kind of ongoing professional development that will enable them to build on initial training and develop specialist skills for supporting pupils with special educational needs. There have been discussions in the other place and outside about amendments to the Bill to place an obligation on Ministers to monitor both initial training and ongoing professional development, and there is significant support for that across the sector. However, this Bill cannot be the vehicle for achieving that goal. I hope that as part of a wider and sustained campaign we can not only monitor teacher development but improve it. It may well be that having this Bill on the statue book would be a useful hook for such a campaign. As a former campaigner, I know how important ongoing campaigns are, and I know how tremendously important it is that the charities that have these children as their main concern have given their support. I thank them for the crucial part that they played in building the necessary groundswell of support to see it make progress. I pay tribute to the Special Educational Consortium, which is an umbrella group of over 100 organisations that have an interest in special educational needs. Its briefing paper, which I am sure many noble Lords have received, states that the, “lack of information on children with SEN prevents a clear focus on whether the provision made for these children is promoting the best possible outcomes for them. The lack of information at a central government level has been highlighted in responses to parliamentary questions, which often concede, ‘This information is not collected centrally’. The information this Bill will secure is required to provide a better basis for national planning, particularly as the pattern of needs changes over time”. The autism charity TreeHouse has a vision to transform through education the lives of children with autism and the lives of their families. TreeHouse has put its weight behind the Bill, having found that 60 per cent of Written Questions to Ministers go unanswered. The needs of deaf children also deserve strong consideration when looking to improve provision for children with SEN. I am pleased that the RNID has given the Bill its support, on the basis that 42 per cent of deaf children are less likely than their hearing peers to get five GCSE grades A to C and that the educational achievement of deaf pupils is well below the national average. I must give a mention to the dyslexia charities Dyslexia Action, the British Dyslexia Association and Xtraordinary People for their input. The challenges faced by dyslexic children in our schools must be overcome so that we can unlock their tremendous potential. In conclusion, I return to the underlying reasons for the Bill. None of us can pretend that securing the publication of information relating to a wide range of outcomes will change anything by itself. It will, however, be a very powerful catalyst for improving outcomes and improving provision. Publication of information can only give us a snapshot of the situation, but by securing regular publication of information we can build up a clear view of the direction in which we are moving. Millions of people will be waiting to scrutinise this information should it be collected and published, and they will all have but one motive: to improve the lives and life chances of children with special educational needs. The Bill would ensure greater collection of information and greater publication of information. That information would be just one tool, but a very important tool, so that parents, schools, teachers and campaigners will have more of what they need to build a better future for children with special educational needs. That is what we all want to see. I commend the Bill to the House. Moved, That the Bill be now read a second time.—(Baroness Pitkeathley.)
- Time
- 10:55
- Source
- View in Hansard ↗
- Speaker
Lord AddingtonLiberal Democrat- Quote
- My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Pitkeathley, for introducing the Bill. She used the analogy “the hard yards” in explaining how such Bills make progress and function. As someone who has experience with Private Members’ Bills, she is probably the right person to do it. I declare my series of interests, primarily around dyslexia. I am vice-president of the British Dyslexia Association, and I have connections with numerous other related charities. A report in the Guardian claims that the dyslexia movement is primarily responsible for the Bill. As the noble Baroness has pointed out, even if it might have been the inspiration behind the Bill, the information provided will not be exclusively for that group. We discovered a long time ago that in special educational needs, any disability rights tend to cross-reference across the field, no matter which group they come from initially. What really attracted me to the idea the information should be published and recorded is that we might find out what does not work. It is odd, because we are always told what does and does not work, and the lack of information and clarity means that we do not know what is going on or what is appropriate for which situations. Being able to say, “This used to work”, or “This worked for X and Y”, and being able to clarify what we have done and what is appropriate will be very helpful. I love the way that parliamentary drafting is so friendly to dyslexics. Under, “332E Interpretation of sections 332C and 332D”, the Bill lists, “physical and mental health and emotional well-being … protection from harm and neglect … education, training and recreation … the contribution made by them to society … social and economic well-being”. That is important because of the tone. It implies that this is something to do with special education that goes beyond the classroom. I have taken it as a bit of a campaign of late to talk about not only trying to solve problems but coping with problems. That comes from my experience with dyslexia. There is something of a mantra, which I hope that the Minister will not use today, “If we get early recognition, we are great”. The fact is that we have not done that, and we are unlikely to do so in the immediate future. If you want confirmation of this, noble Lords should look at yesterday’s speech of the noble Lord, Lord Elton, on the prison population and young offenders. He put his finger on the fact that there are huge numbers of people in prison with special educational needs who are not being picked up. As they are young, it is probably today’s teachers who are not doing that. This Bill may allow us to find out why. We can also start to find out through coping strategies how to cope with a problem once it has been identified. Although the evidence would suggest that for the foreseeable future there will continue to be late recognition of the problem, we can here, using this Bill, start to collate information that will tell us how best to handle not only the education system but adult life. When we talk about education, we tend easily to forget that adult life is what it is supposed to be about; education is not an end in itself. I hope that the Bill will provide a few more levers on the system of government to allow it to fulfil what it states its objectives to be. If one wants to look for a down side, the middle-class parent, who is good at finding out information and pushing local authorities, may, unfortunately, benefit the most and more quickly. But once the education authorities find out what works and what does not, what works best and what works in certain areas, they are much more likely to take action themselves. This is a very good Bill. I also congratulate Members of the House of Commons on sending us a Bill that does not need amendment. They can take a pat on the back for that and we hope that they do it more often. That is where we are. The Bill is a good step along the path and has practical suggestions on how to tackle later life and the ongoing process of life, particularly when people are in education until they are 18. This Bill may be a small building block, or, perhaps I should say, the first step down a very practical road. I wish it well.
- Time
- 11:06
- Source
- View in Hansard ↗
- Speaker
Baroness WarnockCrossbench- Quote
- My Lords, it is very satisfactory to welcome such a sensible Bill. I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Pitkeathley, on bringing it forward to the House and on explaining its contents so clearly and what it implies. The idea behind it is simple, as the noble Baroness said. I am sure that we shall sometimes hear from local authorities that its execution is not simple and there may be objections regarding the bureaucracy that might be involved in keeping, publishing and monitoring the information that we need; but it is essential that the Bill should be executed and should become part of the framework within which local authorities make their provision for special needs. I cannot think why the amendments to the 1996 Act in the Bill have not been brought in previously, nor can I think of why they were not part of the original 1981 Act, because the need for the knowledge that the Bill will provide is pretty obvious. It is necessary partly because endless claims are made and much heat is generated on the question of what does or will work and what does not work, as the noble Lord, Lord Addington, said. Those claims are made—and I confess to frequently having made such claims—but they have never been based on proper evidence, because it was not available. The Bill, if enacted, will go a long way towards making possible proper evidence-based assessments of how things are going and what will do and what will not do for individual children. Until now most of the claims of what is best for children with special educational needs have been based either on theory or anecdote. Many noble Lords will have shared my experience of receiving a flood of correspondence from dissatisfied parents who are desperately seeking to do the best that they possibly can for their children’s education, but who find, as we have heard, that it is almost impossible to fight their way through the difficulties because they have no evidence on which they can base what they are going to argue if they have to face a tribunal. I hope that if this Bill is passed it will enormously help those unhappy parents and those of us who have been more theoretical in our claims regarding different forms of special educational needs. The concept of what works for a child, however limited the progress is, must relate to the progress that the child makes. In educational progress I of course include, as does the Bill, progress in interacting with other people, joining in shared activities and all the things that were included in Every Child Matters. Provided that the methods of recording a child’s progress and that the methods of monitoring it are properly and professionally devised, and strictly carried out, now at last we shall be in a position to know what works and how it works. Publication of these results will greatly aid the sharing of best practice, wherever it is found. Touching on the concept of the Bill as a building block, I hope that the new knowledge that we can obtain will lead us in the first place to a much greater and a much more honest communication between schools and parents, which, in turn, might help to generate a more co-operative and less adversarial relationship than is often the case at present. That is one of the horrors for parents, who come to regard their local authority as an enemy to be overcome by every possible strategy that they can think of. I hope that if local authorities see from the records that a child is not making educational progress in this wide sense they may be willing with the parents to explore alternative placements, especially for those children who are difficult to place, or whose parents are deeply dissatisfied with what is being offered. I hope that local authorities will not adopt the attitude that they sometimes adopt, which is, “We are doing our very best and it is working, whatever you may think”. I hope, too, that the evidence that we shall now have will show how different from one another children are and how differently their disabilities affect them. I hope that local authorities may cease to lump all SEN children together and all support for them together as if they were all one and the same and as if that support were a kind of substance like milk which everyone should have but what it is and how it differs is totally disregarded. Above all, I hope that the new duty to be laid on local authorities may make them more open, especially with parents. I believe that most parents would prefer to deal with the local authority if, instead of being told sometimes that the extra help offered to their child is working perfectly well for his good, they were told that more could not be afforded. It should come out in the open that the provision for children with special educational needs is very expensive. Local authorities would win the support of parents if they were more honest and said, “We will do what we possibly can to meet the child’s needs, but we cannot afford everything”. Only then can we go back to a situation that obtained many years ago when parents of children with special educational needs trusted local authorities that they really did have the best interests of their children at heart and that they really did have an interest in their widely interpreted educational progress. Finally, I congratulate the Government on the spirit that lies behind Every Child Matters and the broad understanding of what education is, which has sometimes been lacking and was certainly lacking back in the 1970s when I first became interested in this subject. I congratulate the Government warmly and very much hope that the Bill will go forward smoothly.
- Time
- 11:12
- Source
- View in Hansard ↗
- Speaker
Lord Low of DalstonCrossbench- Quote
- My Lords, I shall not detain the House overlong on a Friday morning. I join other noble Lords in congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Pitkeathley, on having taken up the Bill and bringing it before this House, as well as Mrs Sharon Hodgson MP, who took it through its various stages in another place. It is always a particular pleasure and privilege for me to speak after the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, who is such an authority on these questions, and with whom I have shared a commitment to these issues for over 30 years. My purpose in speaking today is simply to add my voice to all those others in welcoming the Bill as a modest but useful measure designed to strengthen the resources available for meeting the needs of children with special educational needs in our education system. I will make one small but important point in its support and I encourage your Lordships to give it a speedy passage on to the statute book. The Bill seeks to strengthen the system for meeting the needs of children with SEN in respect of information, which even after all this time still appears to be defective in a number of ways. Specifically it is inadequate for enabling a sufficiently refined analysis of needs, which of course limits the scope for any kind of sensitively targeted planning of provision to meet needs. The Secretary of State has wide powers to require information from schools. The Bill would require him to use those powers to collect and publish information about pupils with SEN that will facilitate better planning of provision nationally and locally to meet their needs. I can illustrate the value of this from the field of visual impairment, which of course I know best from my work as chairman of RNIB. I declare an interest. Let me tell your Lordships about the children whom RNIB tries to help. They are of course all visually impaired, but half of them have other difficulties as well. The pupil-level annual school census—PLASC—routinely undertaken by DCSF is limited in that it asks only for children’s primary disability. As many children with visual impairment—and other children without visual impairment—have more than one disability, this means that school staff have to make a judgment as to which is their primary disability, which means in turn that information is collected in a form that does not do justice to the complexity of need and future planning nationally and locally is based on data that we think are an underestimate, giving a distorted and incomplete picture of the true incidence of need. This is particularly important for children with multiple disabilities and complex needs. We estimate that at least 30 per cent of visually impaired children have severe, profound and multiple difficulties and that a further 20 per cent have other, additional difficulties. If this is correct, it means that the incidence of multiple disability is far more widespread than is disclosed by official statistics. Visual impairment is a low-incidence disability. If, as I suspect, it is not untypical of other low-incidence disabilities, in that strategies and services are based on underestimates, we have some way to go to develop services that are sufficiently sensitively attuned to meeting the true needs of such children. The aspirations of this Bill may seem simple and modest, but the greater understanding of the needs of children with SEN that they could bring about could be out of all proportion to their modesty. I warmly welcome the Bill, therefore, and commend it to the House.
- Time
- 11:20
- Source
- View in Hansard ↗
- Speaker
Lord James of BlackheathConservative- Quote
- My Lords, when I first came to your Lordships’ House, the kindly noble Lord who was coaching me said: “There is a thing called speaking in the gap. Know about it. Never do it”. This is the first time in two years that I have been tempted to do it. I find it irresistible, out of a sense of obligation to others who have been placed in a similar situation to mine. I have never admitted it to this House, but I think that I am classified as some sort of mental defective. That may have become apparent to most of you during the past two years, but I want to explain how it occurred, and why I believe that one potential impact in this otherwise excellent Bill needs a little attention. In 1940 we were bombed and evacuated. We came back to London in January 1945 and I was sent to the local school. The local school had also been bombed and was overrun with rats and mice. As a result, we had a cat in the classroom the whole time. Nobody knew it at the time, least of all me, but I had the worst cat allergy ever. I can get cat allergy from just sitting next to a cat owner in a theatre. As a result my eyes streamed and closed, and I could not hear or understand a word of what was going on. In 1947 the school reported me to the local education authority as unteachable. I was classified as educationally subnormal—that was the phrase on the certificate at the time. The authority was quite right. I could not even read the 11-plus exam paper. I was first asked the alphabet and I could not get beyond the letter F. It was a great misfortune, but it had one great benefit. My mother contacted my father, who had left us at the end of the war. He came back and never left my mother again. He also engaged a retired schoolteacher who taught me to read in three weeks, and four years later I played for England at chess. So I could not have been that stupid. Eight years later, I gained entrance to Oxford but could not take it up because there was not enough money. My point is that many years later, when I was 24, my career had prospered to the extent that I had got a very good job in Ford Motor Company and was offered a very good promotion at a point where they had to bond me, because it was a big financial-exposure job. When they tried to get me bonded they could not, so instead of confirming the promotion they called me in and said, “We have got to fire you because you are registered as a mental defective. We found it on the record. You didn’t declare it when you joined us”. I was horrified at this and pleaded. Eventually they let me keep my job in Ford albeit at a lower level, and I had another 10 wonderful years there. More recently, in the two years I have been here, I have been on the Merits of Statutory Instruments Committee. One day I found myself at an interview with people from the Department for Education about an instrument that was coming through. I recounted this story to them and said, “Why am I still on the record? Why not have an arrangement whereby it is cancelled when you work your way out of it, so that it doesn’t haunt you for the rest of your days?”. I was told that it cannot be removed. It is there for ever. I get up in the gap today to say to you: please, do something about this and, please, do not let the past cast such a long shadow on those who, like me, had the problem and got out of it. Thank you.
- Time
- 11:26
- Source
- View in Hansard ↗
- Speaker
Baroness WalmsleyLiberal Democrat- Quote
- My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Pitkeathley, on introducing the Bill and Sharon Hodgson MP on blazing the trail in another place. The Bill is deceptively simple because it appears only to allow the Secretary of State to collect and publish information on children with SENs in England in order to improve their well-being. That is focused on the five outcomes of the Every Child Matters agenda, not just on educational achievement. Would that the process of evaluating all schools had a better balanced focus on all five outcomes and not just the achievement bit of the enjoying and achieving one. Before I go any further, I shall say that I share the cat allergy of the noble Lord, Lord James of Blackheath, although mine is nowhere near as bad as his. It causes your eyes to close and is extremely painful and debilitating. I have great sympathy with his suggestion that these situations should be expunged from the record so that they have no further effect on people’s lives. Misdiagnosis can have a long-term effect. My noble friend Lord Addington tells me that at the age of seven he was thought to be blind because he was unable to repeat the names of the letters on the blackboard. That was because of dyslexia, not because of any visual problem. It is important that we identify special needs early, but it is not the only thing that we need to do. In preparation for this small but important Bill, we have had some good briefings from the Special Educational Consortium, the RNID and the National Deaf Children’s Society. They all support the objectives of the Bill. The lack of information about children with special needs prevents us having a clear focus on whether the provision made for such children promotes the best possible outcomes. As the noble Baroness, Lady Pitkeathley, said, it must be extremely frustrating to ask a question to which the answer is important and find that the information is not collected. Ofsted has looked at these issues. Its 2004 report found that only a quarter of local authorities had strong strategic management of special needs and the majority had weak evaluation systems. High-quality information is a crucial element in evaluating outcomes and informing the development of local provision and is important for the Department for Children, Schools and Families in order to produce national policy. In the same report, Ofsted found that underexpectation was a significant factor in the underachievement of children with SENs. I was surprised to discover in the briefing from the National Deaf Children’s Society the underachievement of deaf children. As it rightly points out, deafness is not a learning disability and there is no reason why deaf children should not achieve just as well as their hearing peers. I was staggered that deaf children are 42 per cent less likely than the average to achieve the expected level of attainment in their GCSEs and that that is the only known published statistic on the educational attainment of deaf children. We need to know more. There has apparently been no major government research into the issue since a literature review in 1998. I hope that the Bill will change that situation. It can improve our understanding of what works, raise expectations, provide a better basis for the evaluation of programmes, give us a better basis for good practice, improve our understanding of the training and continuing professional development needs of professionals and provide a more secure basis for national policy. The potential is a lot wider than just the academic attainment of children, and that is particularly welcome. A lot of issues were discussed in the House of Commons. I welcome the fact that the Government are listening and responding. I hope that the Minister will respond to the call that the provisions of the Bill will extend to children at school action level and that he will be able to say something about whether the information will be published at school level, because parents of children with special needs need to be able to choose a school that will be good at providing help for their children. I have six or seven main concerns; I shall be brief about each of them. First, I am concerned that the collection of information does not involve any additional testing of children but will be just putting together information from tests that are already carried out with the children. I am aware that that might require a certain amount of standardisation so that information from all the various sources can be collated meaningfully. Secondly, the information must be meaningful and helpful in determining what works. As several noble Lords pointed out, that is a more complicated task than it sounds, as there are so many kinds of disabilities and special needs and there is no one-size-fits-all solution. The Government collect information on the attainment of different ethnic groups, so it should not be impossible to do this, but I suspect that the task that the Bill asks the Secretary of State to do is even more complicated than obtaining information about the attainment of different ethnic groups because of the wide range of different disabilities and, as the noble Lord, Lord Low of Dalston, said, multiple disabilities. Thirdly, I would like to see parents’ views collected. I would like to have parents asked what they think about the help or treatment that their child is getting. What difficulties did they have in getting that package together? Is it what their child needs? Is the current package fulfilling their child’s needs? Did they have a battle to get it? That information would tell us a lot about what needs changing in how people go about getting the right support for their children. As the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, said, it can be a horrendous trial. Fourthly, will there be expert evaluation of the various strategies after the information has been collected, in particular about their effectiveness and their value for money? I was at a seminar only last week, I think—days pass so quickly in this House—where someone was talking about the contrast between two packages of support offered to two children with the same level of dyslexia. One package was many hours of unskilled support in the school and the other was a much smaller number of hours of expert support from a well trained dyslexia professional. Of course, the latter was much more effective and much cheaper. It is not just a matter of intervening in a timely way, as early as possible; it is also about knowing the most appropriate and cost-effective method of intervention. I hope that the information collected will help us to do that. It is most important that the right intervention and support are given. I have a friend with two grandchildren who were profoundly deaf, although I am pleased to say that because of advances in medical science they are both now hearing. Their middle-class parents were able to move to a place near a school that had a good special unit—it is near to where I used to live. The boys had good support and did well. They are both very bright; as the society said, deafness is not a mental disability. Later, the family moved to Scotland because of the father’s job and again deliberately bought a house near a school that had a good deaf unit. Both boys have done remarkably well and have tremendous personalities, as well as having achieved academically. The right support at the right time can be absolutely magic and take away the disadvantage to these young people. My fifth point is that I particularly welcome the bit in the Bill that respects children’s privacy and ensures that the information is anonymised. However, if ever it is necessary to reveal the identity of the child, it is important that the parents’ consent is obtained. My next-to-last point is that I hope that the Bill will expose the serious underfunding of special needs in many mainstream schools. The inclusion agenda, welcome though it often is, is undermined when teachers struggle with inadequate training and inadequate specialist support. Training is a hot issue, and I echo the words of the noble Baroness, Lady Pitkeathley, on it. The one-year PGCE has to pack in an awful lot, which is why I welcome the Government’s stated intention to make teaching a masters-level profession, particularly because that may give more time for better training in SEN. Finally, the Bill gives the Secretary of State powers. I hope that he or she will use those powers and that government policy will respond to what is discovered through their use.
- Time
- 11:30
- Source
- View in Hansard ↗
- Speaker
Baroness Morris of BoltonConservative- Quote
- My Lords, I, too, join all noble Lords in the House today in thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Pitkeathley, for presenting this Private Member’s Bill. As we have already heard, it was introduced in another place by Sharon Hodgson MP. She and I are both officers of the All-Party Group on Breast Cancer, so it gives me particular pleasure to speak on the Bill. We assure her and the noble Baroness, Lady Pitkeathley, of our support for the Bill, which makes a welcome contribution to the provision of special needs education. The noble Baroness spoke with conviction, sincerity and great experience when describing why the Bill is needed. She described the difficulties and the reality of the problems faced by the parents of children with special educational needs, and highlighted the importance of all those children reaching their potential. If ever there was an example of someone overcoming their difficulties and realising their full potential, my noble friend Lord James of Blackheath demonstrated that in his moving speech. I join the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, in asking the Minister to heed my noble friend’s sensible words. The support that the noble Baroness, Lady Pitkeathley, has received from across the House, as in another place, reflects the importance that we attach to this vital subject and the experience that so many of us have of special educational needs, either through our links with organisations involved in this area or through our families. My own son, who like Sharon Hodgson’s son was as bright as a button, never enjoyed reading. Yet it was years after he was diagnosed as being dyslexic before we discovered that when he looked at a book or a page, the words danced before his eyes; so I know at first hand the difficulties that parents face when their children have special needs. As the House knows, I, too, suffer from a mild form of dyslexia. It is not that bad, but it is enough to cause me grief when I am closing for the Opposition and have to scribble notes as the debate goes on, separated from my computer. I shudder to think what Hansard makes of my spelling. The noble Lord, Lord Addington, speaks with great authority, particularly on dyslexia, and I echo his call for clarity and an understanding of what works. It is so important that we in Parliament devote time to making things easier for people out there in the real world. Parents and support groups work selflessly to better the plight of some of our more vulnerable children, but so, too, do our special needs teachers, and we should place on the record our appreciation of the excellent and often challenging work that they do. The important point has been made that the Bill should not be an additional burden on schools, and we agree. We should rationalise the data that are collected and focus on what will create a real difference to help these children achieve the best possible outcome. Given that we are talking about a problem that is experienced by one in five of the total school population and is growing, the positive effects of the Bill will be welcomed across the country. As we have heard, the Bill is very straightforward. It aims to collect and publish information about outcomes for pupils with special needs and to highlight information about the quality and efficiency of special educational needs support that is delivered in schools and by local authorities. This should allow parents to access data that will inform their choices and allow them to take the best course of action for their children. Greater parental choice is central to driving up standards in the provision for children with special educational needs, and greater availability of information, as outlined in the Bill, will, I hope, go some way to achieving this. The Conservative Party has long held the view that the state should provide information to parents and equip them to take their own decisions. After all, it is parents who have the best idea of what to do for their own children. The noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, whose report so many years ago gave rise to important legislation on SEN, is so right when she says that parents are simply seeking to do the best for their children. I echo her plea for not lumping together all children with SEN. The type of data that are collected and published is key. There is all manner of statistics, figures, numbers and information out there. Much of it is no doubt very useful, but we must remember that we are not legislating to make the statisticians and number crunchers happy. The information that is published needs to be relevant and easy to access by parents and to be understood by them. The plea for it to be in simple English should be heeded. As my honourable friend Maria Miller said in another place: “The collection of data is not an end in itself; it has to be made available in a form that parents will be able to use”.—[Official Report, Commons, 16/5/08; col. 1666.] That means that the information should be clear and relate to those things that parents care about. We have a slight concern that the Bill places the discretion wholly in the hands of the Secretary of State. Perhaps it would be helpful for the Bill to be more explicit about what sort of information is gathered and released, including information on the quality and quantity of training in special needs skills that teachers and classroom assistants receive, and the nature of that training. During our Second Reading debate on the Education and Skills Bill, my noble friend Lord Elton spoke passionately of the need to pick up special needs as early as possible. He is quite right; early diagnosis will lead to more confident children who can achieve those important Every Child Matters outcomes of enjoying and achieving and making a positive contribution, which will, we hope, lead to economic well-being. As my noble friend also pointed out, early diagnosis ultimately saves money, but teachers need to be trained to spot problems and to have some understanding of the steps to take. That is why we agree with the Government, who stated in 2004: “Every teacher should expect to teach children with SEN, and must be equipped with the skills to do so”. The General Teaching Council has just published a parliamentary briefing on special education needs. It notes that, “children and young people are bringing more pronounced emotional, social and behavioural difficulties into mainstream schools”. It also notes that there is an increase in mental health issues, more autism and more speech and language difficulties. It sees these challenges as drivers for more professional practices, with initial teacher training and continuing professional development in special educational needs. Why this is necessary becomes only too apparent when you look at the detailed research carried out by the NUT last year, which revealed that in the previous 12 months the vast majority of teachers contacted had not received any training and development in severe or moderate learning difficulties; nor in behavioural, emotional and social difficulties. Moreover, as my honourable friend John Bercow pointed out in another place, a YouGov survey, which was commissioned by the Communication Trust, showed that 73 per cent of teachers did not feel that they had received adequate training to help children with speech, language and communication needs. Experts in the field from voluntary organisations, such as the excellent Xtraordinary People, are at a loss to understand why proven teaching methods for dyslexia are not part of teacher training. I am sure the Minister would be most upset if I did not mention this; if only more schools taught synthetic phonics, we could avoid many of the problems that children with reading difficulties encounter. It would free up precious resources for children with more complex needs; yet we have no idea of the number of teachers trained to teach synthetic phonics. I heed the words of the noble Baroness, Lady Pitkeathley, on whether this Bill is the right vehicle for the issue of training, but we remain convinced that this is a vital component and that it must be addressed somewhere. It would be helpful for the information collected to be broken down to as local a level as possible. In its briefing, the RNID quoted a 2004 Ofsted report, which found that only 25 per cent of LEAs had strong strategic management of SEN and that the majority had weak evaluation systems. Lucy Wilkins, in her excellent pamphlet, Learning the Hard Way: A Strategy for Special Educational Needs—the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, went to the seminar on this, but I, unfortunately, was unable to attend—observes that only 47 per cent of local authorities currently detail the help they are giving to SEN children on their websites, although this is a legal requirement. The more localised we can make this information available, the better; not least for those children with the complex, multiple needs of which the noble Lord, Lord Low, spoke. What is going on in one’s own area is of much more immediate concern than what is happening nationwide. This would allow valuable comparisons to be made. I know that statementing is a cause of concern to parents who sometimes feel, rightly or wrongly, that statements are tailored to fit the budgets of local authorities. That dual role has been described as the local authority acting as both poacher and gamekeeper. This Bill presents us with an opportunity to gather information on statementing, which would assist in monitoring the process, be more transparent and would help to dispel parents’ worries. Although we support this Bill because the information which is to be published will be invaluable to parents of children with special educational needs, I am sure it goes without saying that the information to be published must not be personal details or compromise privacy in any way. The Conservative Party has a proud tradition of special needs legislation and we welcome this much needed Bill, which we will not seek to amend. It provides us with yet another opportunity to shine the spotlight on special educational needs, an area which is sadly too often a battlefield where parents feel bemused and exhausted. The publication of information will allow us to keep an eye on the progress that the Government are making. Of course, the passing of this Bill is not an end in itself; rather, it provides the means with which we can gauge progress in schools all around the country to ensure that all children get the education that suits them and which they deserve.
- Time
- 11:40
- Source
- View in Hansard ↗
- Speaker
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Children, Schools and Families (Lord Adonis)Labour- Quote
- My Lords, first, the idea that the noble Lord, Lord James of Blackheath, might at any stage of his life have been unteachable or educationally subnormal is the most preposterous proposition I have ever heard put forward in this House in my three years of membership. However, his story demonstrates, in a way that no statistics can, how important it is that our teachers are trained and that our local authority systems take full account of the needs of children with special educational needs. His experience, which I am glad was now 60 years ago, I hope would not be repeated today and that it would not be in any way revealing of current practice in providing for such children. On the treatment of the noble Lord’s personal data, I would be pleased to look at that personally if I can be of any assistance. I am not clear what advice he was given by the officials from my department when they appeared before his committee, but I will see whether anything can be done. However, I imagine that his career and job prospects will not be affected by anything that was recorded by that local education authority in the 1940s. The Government are very glad to be supporting this Bill, initiated in another place by my honourable friend Sharon Hodgson and introduced to the House of Lords by my noble friend Lady Pitkeathley with her customary clarity and expertise. I am also delighted to hear from the noble Baronesses, Lady Morris and Lady Walmsley, that there is strong cross-party support. I echo the tribute made by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, to all teachers and staff who support children with special educational needs. There is no more important work undertaken in our society and they deserve our full and unstinting support. Both my honourable friend Sharon Hodgson and my noble friend Lady Pitkeathley are champions of the cause of children with special educational needs. So, too, are the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, and the noble Lords, Lord Low and Lord Addington, all of whom have made immense contributions in this area. We also pay tribute to their work today. I and my department absolutely support the work of all organisations to which noble Lords have referred, as well as the many other voluntary organisations which give assistance to children with special educational needs and those who have declared their support for this Bill. The proposal in the Bill is very sensible; that is, children with special educational needs should be specifically taken into account as the Secretary of State exercises his powers in relation to gathering data. It is my department’s highest priority that all barriers to education should be removed for all children, whether they arise from physical, financial, or family circumstances. It is even more imperative for those who are already set at a disadvantage against their peers, including the 570,000 children living with a disability and the 1.6 million children with special educational needs. The Government’s Every Child Matters reforms have begun to embed a more personalised approach to removing barriers to learning. They have helped professionals work together more effectively, with greater focus on the individual needs of particular children and young people. The Children’s Plan, published last December, builds on these foundations. In the plan, we announced £1.2 billion of investment over the next three years to support the personalisation of education, which will include support for children with SEN—for example, through improved training, and more small-group and one-to-one help where this is appropriate. Over the past six years, local authority planned expenditure on SEN has increased by £2.1 billion, which is a 75 per cent increase and signifies the importance that the Government attach to this area. The collection and effective analysis of accurate information is important to ensuring that the education system provides better support for pupils with SEN, not least those with multiple disabilities and needs, as described by the noble Lord, Lord Low. In particular, the noble Lord said that the school census allows schools to identify only a primary type of need. I am pleased to tell him that the school census allows schools to record a primary and a secondary type of need for children at the level of school action plus and with a statement. I will write to the noble Lord to give him further information of the primary and secondary needs of those with visual impairments. My department already gathers data on children with special educational needs from a number of sources, including the school census and the SEN2 survey. It is published annually and provides useful information from individual pupil to local authority level. However, formalising and extending the Secretary of State’s powers and duties in respect of children with special educational needs when gathering data is a sensible next step forward, for all the reasons set out by the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, in her remarks about accountability to parents, the sharing of best practice between local authorities and the promotion of better evidence-based policy. It is for all those reasons that the Government support the Bill. I also accept my noble friend Lady Pitkeathley’s point about the importance of the format of the publication of any such information. Plain English and the DCSF are not always the easiest of bedfellows, but we are giving careful attention to how we can best make additional detailed information available in an easily digestible format. What more can be published or made available at school level, as mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, will be part of that consideration. It will be subject of course to the concerns which she and the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, quite rightly raised about data protection and about ensuring that individual pupils are not in a position of being identified. Our aim is to provide an accessible and valuable reference for parents and professionals, but of course one that respects fully the privacy of individuals. The Bill builds on steps we have already taken to improve the quality and use of data we collect on children with special educational needs. We have incorporated new indicators into the national indicator set for local government to measure the gap between children with SEN and their peers. We have incorporated into the national curriculum attainment scales for children with SEN who are currently falling below national curriculum level 1. From summer 2008, schools will be required to provide information at the end of each key stage on teacher assessments for those pupils still falling below level 1. And in response to the points made by the noble Baronesses, Lady Walmsley and Lady Warnock, about parental engagement and confidence that the system provides well for children with special educational needs, we have committed to research into how these parents feel about the way their school and local authority assess and provide for their children’s needs. This work is being led by Brian Lamb, the respected chair of the Special Educational Consortium. It will also look at the statementing process referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris. Brian Lamb will report to us next year and we will look at what further improvements we can make in the light of his recommendations. Under the Children’s Plan that we launched at the end of last year, an additional £18 million over the next three years will be specifically targeted at children with special educational needs. Part of this investment will be used to develop better SEN data for schools and guidance on what constitutes best practice. The guidance and materials will be published in the spring of next year. To review our progress in this area, we have asked HM Chief Inspector of Schools to undertake a review of SEN provision in 2009-10, and to include in her consideration the collection and use of data to support the improvement of provision. We will consider whether changes are necessary to the SEN Framework and our information-gathering arrangements in the light of HMCI’s recommendations. My noble friend stressed the importance of teacher training and staff support in improving the provision for children with SEN, not least so that they can make effective use of the additional information that this Bill will promote. Helping teachers to identify children with SEN and then to give them the additional support they need is essential if we are to raise outcomes, and we recognise that many teachers feel they lack confidence in this area. That is why, working with the Training and Development Agency for Schools, we have been pioneering accredited training for special educational needs co-ordinators in all schools, which will soon be mandatory for all new SEN co-ordinators. We have also developed new specialist training units for trainee teachers designed to improve SEN and disability skills. These units, developed for primary undergraduate initial teacher-training courses, have been successfully piloted and will now be rolled out more generally from the summer this year. Further, I will hold a meeting with teacher-training providers next year to promote these units and see that they are offered as a matter of course in teacher-training institutions across the country. Work is also beginning on similar units for secondary undergraduate courses, and primary and secondary PGCE courses. We aim to roll out these elements in the summer of 2009. Further, as the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, rightly said, the development of the masters degree in teaching and learning, which was also announced in The Children’s Plan, will provide an opportunity for teachers, as part of their ongoing professional development, to undertake further training in the needs of pupils with special educational needs. In addition, we are continuing to strengthen and extend opportunities for trainees to undertake placements in special schools or other specialist provision, and we are looking for ways of strengthening induction arrangements for SEN and disability. For those teachers already in post, last October we launched our Inclusion Development Programme. It is disseminating new, specially produced training resources in areas that we know teachers find particularly challenging. These materials are designed to bolster the confidence of serving teachers. This year, the materials focus on children with dyslexia or speech, language and communication needs. Next year, the programme will focus on children with autistic spectrum disorders, and in 2010 on children with behavioural, emotional and social difficulties. We intend to commission an independent evaluation to look at the take-up and impact of the teacher-training support being developed, that will in no small part help to form our views about the design of the masters degree in teaching and learning. In terms of the Inclusion Development Programme, the evaluation team will look at how the resources are being delivered locally, how further needs identified through that training are being pursued, and critically how far the materials are improving the confidence of serving teachers. We envisage that this major piece of work will begin later this year and run through to 2011 with interim reports at regular intervals. To make sure our teacher training programmes remain up to date, we are continuing research into best practice in identifying and supporting children with SEN. The issue of dyslexia, I know, is a particular cause of concern to the noble Lord, Lord Addington, and I am glad to be able to tell him that we are working with a number of partner organisations, including the British Dyslexia Association, on “No to Failure”, a pilot project for schools in three local authorities which will help to identify pupils with dyslexia and then provide individual specialist tuition. We are also looking at whether such specialist tuition should be extended more widely across the country. Around £1 million of funding over three years is being provided to support the project. In addition, we have asked Sir Jim Rose to make recommendations on the identification and teaching of children with dyslexia as part of his broad-ranging review of the primary school curriculum which is being undertaken at the moment.
- Time
- 11:52
- Source
- View in Hansard ↗
- Speaker
- Lord AddingtonLiberal Democrat
- Quote
- My Lords, I thank the Minister. I want to put one question to him. In my speech I pointed out the fact that there is a lot of late diagnosis, particularly in people from what used to be called working class backgrounds, possibly because there were no expectations. Is any work going on into how best to help those who are diagnosed later, for instance only when they are in secondary school, who may well be resistant to any form of classroom support for things like spelling and reading?
- Time
- 11:52
- Source
- View in Hansard ↗
- Speaker
- Lord AdonisLabour
- Quote
- My Lords, that work is being undertaken, and we are not just talking about specialist teachers being introduced at the primary school level, but whether they could be utilised more extensively at the secondary level as well for the reasons given by the noble Lord. Of course, part of the training teachers undergo is precisely to ensure that they can address the needs of pupils who for good reason might not be forthcoming about their own learning difficulties. We are also seeking to improve data collection by introducing the School Workforce Census in 2010. We will be seeking data on relevant qualifications for all teachers. One of the categories under which post A-level qualifications can be described in the census is “Training teachers—special needs”, which would cover training in non-standard methods to teach children with special needs. However, I should stress that it is early days and that some further work needs to take place before we know how the census can best reflect information relevant to SEN. Finally, perhaps I may take up the point raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, on the underachievement of deaf children. My officials are working closely with the NDCS and RNID to look at how we can address their concerns. This relationship has been constructive. We have shared further data with them and are looking at how they can be published in due course. This is a worthwhile Bill that will help improve services and outcomes for children with special educational needs. We look forward to its passage into law.
- Time
- 11:52
- Source
- View in Hansard ↗
- Speaker
- Baroness PitkeathleyLabour
- Quote
- My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords for their support today. It has been a humbling experience to hear the wisdom and experience of noble Lords who are far better informed than I about the needs of children with special educational needs. I am particularly honoured to have had contributions from those with such fine records in this area as the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, and the noble Lords, Lord Low and Lord Addington. The response to the Bill has been a mixture of the practical and the visionary. This was summed up in the contributions of the noble Baronesses, Lady Walmsley and Lady Morris. The visionary is seeing the Bill as a very important step towards making progress for these children, whose needs have been articulately set out by both noble Baronesses; the practical is to remind us of the difficulties, the limitations and the complexities that lie ahead. I am grateful to both noble Baronesses for that. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord James, too, for reminding us of how far we have come and the importance of early and proper diagnosis of special educational needs. I am very grateful to the Minister for his support, for his assurances of how the Bill will work in practice and for setting it in context with the other major and welcome initiatives being undertaken by the Government in this area. It has been an honour and a pleasure to work with Sharon Hodgson MP, my honourable friend in another place, and her colleague, Jonathan Tanner. Their passionate commitment to this issue has made an impression on parliamentary colleagues and throughout the campaigning charities. I am most grateful to them for their support. The point has been made several times today that the Bill is simple and modest—and that is absolutely right. But it will not have a simple outcome; it will have an important outcome for children with special educational needs. That is what we all want, as is evident from the welcome cross-party support. On Question, Bill read a second time, and committed to a Committee of the Whole House. House adjourned at 12.11 pm.
- Time
- 12:08
- Source
- View in Hansard ↗