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Education and Inspections Bill

I hope it is in order for me to make an addendum to what the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, has just said. One of the justifications for introducing the system of statementing in the original 1978 report was precisely that the statement should follow the child. That was not included in the 1981 Act, for obvious reasons; no one was interested in the motivation of the statement, they were just interested in its introduction. This remained, at least in my mind, the most important element in the statement, and it has been gradually dropped to the extent that now, if a parent moves from one local authority to another, the statement is not automatically renewed or regarded, and the whole process of statementing, including a new tribunal, has to be started all over again. A child may miss months of education in that way. I support the amendment very strongly.