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Special Educational Needs

Like other Members, I pay tribute to the work of the Select Committee. I have been a member of it for most of the five and half years that I have been in Parliament, although I returned to it after an eight-month break and was just in time to help to write the report. However, I did not do any of the hard work or take any of the evidence that led to the report. Certainly, in the time that I have been in Parliament, the most useful things that I have done have been connected with the Committee’s work. As we have heard, the Government response to the report was extremely disappointing, and if that response was disappointing, then so too would be their response to the Audit Commission reports of 2002 and 2003, which raised many of the same issues as this report. There is also the report that will be launched at 4 o’clock this afternoon in the Strangers Dining Room, to which the hon. Member for Blackpool, South (Mr. Marsden) referred. Obviously, we cannot attend that event, because we are here, but that lengthy report, which was produced as a result of the parliamentary hearings on services for disabled children, touches on a number of points on the same issues of SEN education that we are discussing here and which the Select Committee report considers. For example, page 41 of that report says:"““Overall, our review took evidence from parents that the statutory framework is not delivering appropriate support to every child with SEN…Access to statements should not be used as a means of rationing resources, nor should the absence of a statement be used as a reason to deny services.””" The subsequent paragraphs refer constantly to the Select Committee’s findings and recommendations, and the authors regret that the Government have rejected them. The Government response ignores most of the Select Committee report and misrepresents part of it, as the Committee’s Chairman has explained. The response is 80 pages of largely self-congratulatory details about what has already been done, as opposed to what more needs to be done. The Government’s rosy view bears little relation to the parents’ perspective. The Committee received an e-mail from a parent last week, after the Government response was published. This parent is the mother of a profoundly autistic nine-year-old girl, and she says:"““I am bone tired of the current system. It has sucked our family dry…The fighting with the LEA is endless and highly unpleasant. It wears one out. When I felt most drained your report came out and it was like a breath of life into our house. It felt like some people somewhere are understanding our plight and are fighting for us and for all the other families in our situation. You have no idea how much comfort we took from your report.""Now the government response is out and it has made me so angry and frustrated reading it. I feel eaten with impotent anger. Eighty pages of self-congratulatory backslapping. We parents have never had it so good apparently””." That response very much matches the views of parents whom I have met regularly over the past 20 years. I was first elected as a councillor in 1987, and for 16 of the 20 years since, I have been an elected politician in various capacities. I have met parents as part of my constituency case work and ward case work, and those who are struggling with issues such as statementing for their children are a regular feature. In the past couple of months, parents have come to my surgeries about their children who are autistic, or who have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or cerebral palsy. Those parents are fighting huge battles to get the specialist education that their children need, which does not reflect the rosy view given in the Government’s response to the report. Neither does my experience of 22 years as a professional in education, teaching in schools of the 11 to 18 age range, before I was elected as an MP. Before the Minister waxes indignant and says that credit has not been given for what has been done, I do not say that there has been no improvement. In the past 20 to 30 years, there has been a massive improvement in attitudes at every level of society towards such issues. Pupils with special educational needs now get a much better deal than they did 20 or 30 years ago. There is no question about that. In the past seven years, there have been improvements in funding, since the bottom of the 20-year funding pit was reached in 1999, and we have reached average western European spending on education. That is a big improvement on where we were, but it will take a lot more than one year of average investment in education to provide a system that our children—those with special educational needs, and children in general—deserve. The report identified several major issues, such as SEN training for teachers, which the hon. Member for Blackpool, South has already discussed in detail, so I shall restrict myself to two or three items. One that has been touched on once or twice already is the question of special schools versus integration in the mainstream. For the last two thirds of the 22 years in which I was teaching, I worked in schools with very good reputations for integration. During that time, as a mainstream teacher, whether in year 7 or in GCSE or A-level classes, I had experience of teaching children with a wide range of special educational needs, including children with degrees of autism, cerebral palsy, spina bifida, 20 per cent. sight or Fragile X syndrome, or children who were profoundly deaf—the list goes on. Integration in the mainstream works brilliantly in many situations. Having been my party’s spokesman on disability for four years from 2001 to 2005 in the previous Parliament, I know that many disability organisations regard anything but total integration as apartheid or segregation—the Committee’s Chairman has referred to such evidence. Their point of view is that there should be no special schools. However, many parents and disability groups do not agree. The Government denied to the Committee that they were pressing for special school closures—clearly they have not officially pressed for them—but the Committee took a lot of evidence from local authorities to the effect that they felt a strong background pressure, even if that was not explicit, to close special schools. The Committee recommendation is for an appropriate balance: there should be a proper network of specialist schools for the children in question and the parents who feel that their children will gain most benefit from that environment, but there should be full integration in the mainstream wherever possible and where there is parental support for it. That all costs money. Both systems cannot be adequately maintained unless the funding is put in, as opposed to robbing Peter to pay Paul. Another major issue that the Committee discussed was statementing. The Committee took evidence over and again that dealing with statementing was a nightmare for parents. We heard from the hon. Member for Buckingham (John Bercow) about a parent who waited 10 years for a statement for their child. The Government say that it is not a problem, but that is wishful thinking, and everyone knows it. The Committee recommended separating out the LEA role as commissioner-provider—that is, the LEA roles of making the statements and providing the places and cash to deliver them. Inevitably, if the LEAs are delivering both sides of the equation, there will be downward cost pressure on what is provided, and on the number of children who are statemented. If the Committee’s recommendations are to be carried out—the Government response suggests that they are not—there are cost implications. A couple of members of the Committee argued, almost, for a blank cheque approach, by which whatever statements or recommendations were made the cost would somehow be met. Of course, in the real world, costs must be met, and for all three of the parties represented in the debate it is necessary for the Members concerned to argue the matter with their respective Chancellors and shadow Chancellors, but the funding needs to be made available to turn warm words about SEN education into reality. For mainstreaming to work, it must be well funded. Last Friday, The Times Educational Supplement contained an article by Fiona Leney, the mother of a child called Oliver, who is deaf and has had a cochlear implant. He attends a mainstream primary school with a specialist deaf unit. She writes:"““Oliver…has…done so well because of specialist support. In class, specialist teaching assistants make sure he fully understands what he has to do. He can be withdrawn from class, with a small group of friends, for parallel lessons taught by a qualified teacher of the deaf.""This is labour-intensive, expensive schooling. It is also what high-quality mainstreaming is all about.””" It works very well, but Kent county council, which runs the service, is consulting parents and educationists about slashing funding to deaf units such as the one attended by Oliver, to put the money towards support for autistic children instead. Fiona Leney comments:"““What sort of view of mainstreaming holds that funds should be cut from one group of special needs children to fund another?""If the government is as committed to mainstreaming as it says, it should realise that quality education for SEN children can’t be done on the cheap.””" All that has parallels in my classroom experience. I could give many examples, but I shall not. In the latter half of the 1980s, more and more SEN children were coming into the school where I taught, and it worked well. Then, because of funding cuts—whether due to national or local decisions—support workers were removed. It was a disaster for a year, until, following a struggle, funding was brought back for particular children. Mainstreaming cannot be done on the cheap. Done properly, it works brilliantly and transforms the life chances of children, but it costs money. Much of the emphasis must be on the role of central Government, because under the system that has been established we have the most centralised control over local government in Europe, with 75 to 80 per cent. of the budget of any local authority coming as handouts from the Government and clear strings attached concerning what they are spent on. If there is not enough money to deliver the system at local level, the people who are providing 75 to 80 per cent. of the funding must do something about it. The Liberal Democrat party would rather that the power and the fundraising power returned to local level, but that is a matter for another debate. The Government must set minimum appropriate standards, so that around the country where local authorities exercise different judgments they cannot fall below an acceptable standard on which everyone agrees, although they may choose to invest well above that standard if that is their local priority. My final point is about league table pressures, an issue that the Select Committee report did not really go into. Many children with special educational needs are very able academically. I could reel off examples of children in that category whom I taught and who went on to university, although some such children will never achieve high academic success because of the nature of their disability. All children with special educational needs, whether or not they are academically able, present schools with extra issues, costs and problems. There is pressure from the Government in the form of league tables, Ofsted and professional pay reviews—I underwent one of the first of those in my last year of teaching—for which an individual teacher must show how they are achieving group success for the classes that they teach, so that they can get their pay award. The pressure of all those things on ““standards”” means that some schools are less open and welcoming to SEN children than they might otherwise be. I could give anecdotal evidence of schools in Derbyshire where that happened, although it would be unfair to do so now, because it was six years ago and the head teacher in one of the schools concerned has been changed, so the policy might also have changed. However, all that one need do is consider the various professional analyses that have been done of, for example, the intake of the top 200 schools in the league tables and compare the smaller percentage of SEN children attending those schools with the figure for other schools. The Government must think again, they must withdraw their bland, self-congratulatory response to the Committee’s report, and they must listen to and take action on the widespread expressions of concern by parents, disability groups and teachers about how we treat our SEN children.