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Education and Inspections Bill

As it happens, I can answer that question by telling the story of my morning. I visited TreeHouse School, a special school for pupils with severe conditions on the autistic spectrum. Its chairman is the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, and it does the most outstanding work with children with severe autistic conditions. The view of the parents whom I met—I met a good number of them there—and of the support staff is that it would not have been appropriate for those pupils to have been in mainstream provision, certainly not all the time, but, again, it is difficult to make bold generalisations. As a way of dealing with the complexities of the issue, I draw to the attention of the noble Baroness three facts that came out of my visit. First, most of the children at TreeHouse got there without needing to go through a battle on statementing and having to go to the tribunal. It was a consensual decision reached between the parents, the local authorities and the schools on the best provision for their children. There was no bias in the system that they should be obliged to go down an inappropriate mainstream route. Secondly, a number of the children and their parents share the provision between TreeHouse, a school with a special focus on severe autism, and a mainstream school. The children take the support that they have at TreeHouse into the mainstream school as a way of ensuring that they are better socialised and able to develop the skills and experiences that will be vital as they develop. I thought that that was a very interesting line of work from TreeHouse, which is also developing a training centre to enable more teachers to be trained, so that it has more interaction with the wider community of special schools and mainstream schools. Thirdly, the expense is striking. I was informed this morning that a place in TreeHouse cost £53,000 a year, which is a very large allocation of public resources. Therefore, when the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, asks whether we mean that parents should have an unfettered choice, we do not. It has to be a process of engagement by parents with local authorities as part of the statementing process to determine the best form of support and the right and efficient use of resources for their children. Equally, if parents express a preference for a school and the child has a statement that the local authority does not meet, they have every right to go to the Special Educational Needs and Disability Tribunal, which routinely enables parents to access those rights. I cannot give a straight yes or no answer to the noble Baroness. A lot depends on the provision available in the school that the child wants to attend and whether the parents are satisfied that it will meet the needs of their children. For many pupils who are at the severe end of the autistic or other special educational needs spectrum, I believe that in very many cases it would be appropriate for them to go to special schools. They therefore have an important, ongoing role. Our policy is to ensure that those schools are available to them.