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Education and Inspections Bill

moved Amendment No. 17: Page 2, line 14, at end insert- ““( ) In exercising their functions under subsection (3A), a local education authority in England shall have regard to the need to provide sufficient special schools to enable parents to exercise choice in relation to a child for whom a statement is maintained under section 324.”””” The noble Baroness said: I wish to speak to Amendments Nos. 17, 36, 84 and 163. These amendments seek to improve two areas of educational provision for special needs pupils. Amendments Nos. 36 and 163 seek to ensure that the Bill does not miss a great opportunity finally to tackle the difficult allocation of places for special needs pupils. The amendments would ensure that both choice advisers and school improvement partners are given adequate training on existing special educational needs and disability legislation. This important point is supported by the Special Educational Consortium. The roles of choice adviser and school improvement partner provide links between parents, governors, teachers and local authorities in differing capacities. The role of choice adviser could affect parents’ choice of school. Likewise, the school improvement partner stands to influence a school’s direction and policy. While we shall debate the implication of these roles further in your Lordships’ House, the principle ties in directly with the duty in Clause 1(1)(c) of, "““promoting the fulfilment by every child…of his educational potential””." I am highlighting this aspect of these roles in the light of a debate on attitudes towards special educational needs because I fear that without adequate awareness of special needs legislation, school improvement partners will not have appropriate knowledge of what a school ought to be achieving with regard to special educational and disability needs, as a result of which choice advisers will not be able to direct parents to schools which offer the very best for individual children. The Special Educational Consortium (SEC) has voiced its concerns that the absence of these requirements could result in inadvertent discrimination that could result in pupils with special needs missing out on the very best opportunities available to them. I am sure that any choice adviser or school improvement partner would wish to act with the greatest discretion, which is why I suggest that they are given all the information that they might need. My other two amendments in this group, Amendments Nos. 17 and 84, address a very similar area. Amendment No. 17 would work in tandem with Amendment No. 84 to ensure that parents of children with a statement of special needs are provided with good information on all the special needs options open to them in their area and are given a real choice of schools. That point was raised by the noble Earl, Lord Listowel. In referring to statemented children only, I am making an important distinction that we shall come to in another debate. Suffice to say for now that statemented children make up a small proportion of the whole special needs register but are the children most in need. That is why my amendments on special needs focus only on them. Currently, parents of special needs pupils face a daunting task not only of obtaining a statement for their child but also of navigating their way through the complicated and varied special needs provision. Not only can they consider provision in their area but in others also. The pressure to make the right decision for the future well-being of their child is huge. The Committee will be well aware of the current bias towards mainstream education for special needs pupils. That came about following the report of the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, of the late 1970s, which was implemented in the 1981 legislation. I am sure that your Lordships recall the recent developments in that debate, led notably by the noble Baroness, who has stated publicly that in the light of modern educational thinking and practice, the bias towards integration does not work. We have come a long way since the 1970s and 1980s, where ““special educational needs”” was an emergent phrase pushing away the now outdated references to ““handicapped children””. Yet in the past nine years we have seen no major review of attitudes towards special needs education, and no review of the assumption that drives special educational needs provision in favour of inclusion in the mainstream. I can safely say that we have reached a stage where the debate reaches far beyond a simple question of inclusion and segregation. As the Minister in another place stated, the picture is one of shades of grey rather than black and white. The priority in choosing between special schools and mainstream schools must be the interests of the child and, by the same token, the wishes of the parent, considering that child’s best interests. The amendments would ensure that the parents of special needs children would have a realistic choice of where to send their child to school. One-size-fits-all education has been proven not to work. Successful schools use streaming within the school; specialist schools select talented sportsmen and musicians by aptitude—or ability as we call it on these Benches. In the same way, special needs schools offer a specialist education that does not make a lesser provision for each child’s education, but enhances their potential. I can think of a wonderful example in Gosden House School in Bramley, Surrey, which is a maintained special needs school. It is into the fifth year of a collaboration with the Globe Theatre education department, where children with a wide range of special needs work together with their teachers and Globe actors to produce the works of Shakespeare in their complete, unabridged form. The productions form the bulk of their year’s work, with the end production as eloquent and finely tuned as any other school play. The children do not suffer by not attending a mainstream school; indeed, they flourish. The problems with an automatic bias towards inclusion are well-documented. Noble Lords will be well aware that the resources necessary to meet the stated needs of children rarely follow them into mainstream schools. Teacher and assistant training leaves much to be desired on the special needs front, which has already been raised in this evening’s debate. At the same time, teachers are being stretched to cope with a wide variety of needs and abilities in one classroom. A recent report from the University of Cambridge, The Costs of Inclusion, charts the pitfalls of an automatic bias towards the mainstream. It describes how teachers in mainstream schools are forced to leave teaching to teaching assistants who are not qualified to teach, so that they can provide for children with SEN or vice versa. As schools exert themselves to raise standards, the report tells us that a tactical approach to ensuring the highest value-added score focuses teachers’ attention on demonstrable results, and special needs students may be ““disapplied””. The curriculum demands for children in the mainstream are often completely inappropriate for children with complex behavioural and learning needs. The report goes on to describe higher exclusion rates for statemented children in the mainstream. Those children are nine times more likely to be excluded than children without statements. A permanent exclusion is likely to result in social exclusion and, in the future, even more challenges for those children than they already face. A Times Educational Supplement study last year was discussed by my honourable friend in another place, John Hayes. It showed that two-thirds of teachers received less than one day’s training in special needs and disability teaching. Some 90 per cent of head teachers thought that their schools did not receive sufficient resources to fund integration. Yet, when I asked the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, whether there could be a moratorium on the closure of special needs schools, her response was firmly negative. She had moments earlier stated: "““The Government do not believe that it is a case of either/or—of either special schools or mainstream schools””.—[Official Report, 14/6/06; col. 207.]" We on these Benches believe that children with special educational needs should be able to choose a special education and that they should have a real choice between schools. I am sad to say that the noble Baroness failed to go the extra mile to substantiate her statement. I hope that this Minister can inform the Committee precisely what was meant by that statement. Did the Minister mean that there was no either/or, because each child with a statement of special educational needs should be able to choose the school that was best for them, or did she mean that there was no either/or, because the system retains a bias towards mainstream schooling? The noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, pointed out that special needs funding had risen in the past nine years—and that may well be the case. But I would refer to two statements: one by the Education Secretary yesterday, when he told head teachers that, in spite of an extra £58 billion of investment in schools, new Labour had not delivered; and another from the Cambridge University report, which emphasises that, "““resources on their own will not bring about change. The issues run deeper and challenge the very nature of current policy…It is time for a through review of policy and practice””." As the reforms that the Bill introduces evidence, investment alone does not bring about change. That is why we support this Bill, which for mainstream education brings about changes that we on these Benches have considered necessary for the past 20 years. It is now time to think inclusively, but not coercively, about special needs education. I beg to move.