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Education and Inspections Bill

I agree that LEAs perform what is called provision mapping, which works for some but not for others. The fact is that 27 per cent. of children with autism are excluded from school every day. Those are the national statistics, and they apply to all LEAs, regardless of their provision policies. I hope that the Minister will follow Baroness Warnock’s lead in respect of inclusion and say, when he replies to the debate, that he will not continue with the policy. I have mentioned a little boy called Jack a number of times in the House, and the one thing that I want him to take away from this debate is the fact that the Minister mentioned his name in the wind-up. Jack was the first child to come to my surgery. He has special educational needs, and on that visit he emptied my bookcase, turned my chairs upside-down and fizzed the lights on and off. He was excluded from school: his parents had taken him out of the school because the teachers could not cope with his very specific needs. He was beginning to be bullied, as happens to many autistic children in mainstream schools. Jack now attends the Moorhouse school, thanks to the fact that his well educated and articulate parents were able to go to a SENDIST tribunal and argue his case. He is flourishing there, but he offers a perfect example of what happens when a child is placed in the wrong school—something that happens to many children in this country. Some children have very complex special needs because they have physical as well as learning difficulties. I spoke recently to a teacher who has in her class a child with severe disabilities. The funding associated with that child has gone into the school pot, and the teacher has only a teaching assistant to help her. She believes that the funding allocated to a child should be velcroed to that child and used only to help him or her. The teacher to whom I am referring gave evidence about her job which was used in a recently published report. Once an hour, she has to suck out that child’s’ tracheotomy tube. She has to wash her hands, use the suction machine to clear out the tracheotomy tube, then wash her hands again and return to teaching the class. The process takes 10 or 15 minutes, every hour of her working day. Is that really something that teachers should be doing, on top of trying to teach the other 28 children in the class the national curriculum? The teacher has had training only from the child’s parents. She has had no specialist instruction, not even in how to lift the child. Is that to be the role of teachers? Do the Government expect them all to have a special needs child in their classes? I shall conclude by quoting the evidence that Baroness Warnock gave to the Select Committee, which reinforces my belief that LEAs are driving forward a policy of inclusion. Although the Bill emphasises parental choice as the great good, Baroness Warnock said:"““I think that produces a hollow laugh on the part of parents with children with disabilities because they have no choice. Everything depends on the assessment that their child gets and it is the local authority which conducts the assessment and also has to pay the money and naturally the parents do not believe the assessment is truthful because it is pitched as low as the local authorities can get away with because of the money. They really have…no choice.””" Parents of children with special needs do not have any choices. It is sad that special schools are being closed, and I hope that the Minister will assure the House that the inclusion agenda will be abandoned.