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Education and Inspections Bill

Whatever the Minister says about LEAs, there is still far too much disparity between behaviour in one LEA and another to suggest that they are merely variations around some agreed and benevolent mean. The differences to which parents are being subjected are, to my mind, not the result of some rational, reasonable process of thought and consideration. When we come to AmendmentNo. 179, we will consider that further. The Minister said that there was a move to units. Indeed there is in some parts, but other LEAs are abolishing units. I can think of one LEA that is clearing out all its units in favour of something called resourced provision. I think that that is the Nottingham model, which may already exist in Nottinghamshire, but I am thinking of another part of the country. It is crunching provision which, only a few months ago, was in receipt of glowing letters from the Minister himself for its undoubted quality. I agree; it is very high-quality provision. That is an LEA imposing a blanket model of SEN provision on all its schools. That eccentricity is unwarranted and should be brought under some form of informed guidance, because having one authority favouring units and building them up—saying that that is the right division between inclusion and special schools and working well at that—while having the neighbouring authority abolishing them cannot be a rational state of affairs. We return again to the second part of Amendment No. 179. The money needs to follow the child and, perhaps under trust status, the school must have the ability to maintain its units in the face of whatever the LEA decides to do to allow us to get into a pattern of provision that can truly respond to parent demand rather than being—I say this advisedly—subject to the whims of individuals and individual local authorities.