---

Special Educational Needs

It is always interesting to follow the hon. Member for Harwich (Mr. Carswell), to whose comments I shall perhaps return. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield (Mr. Sheerman) for steering us through mounds of evidence and for producing a detailed and informative report. I also pay tribute to other members of the Select Committee for their helpful comments this afternoon and to the hon. Member for Buckingham (John Bercow), who made a number of excellent and insightful statements. I find myself agreeing with him quite a lot these days, although I do not know which of us should be more worried by that. A great deal of evidence was presented to the Committee, with the written and oral evidence being supplemented by visits. I should like to thank all the staff, students and parents who gave us a lot of helpful and detailed information on those visits. I also thank the Committee for considering the matter very seriously indeed. The report is correct to point to some confusion in Government policy and in messages about special educational needs. We perhaps ought not to be surprised by the confusion, because there have been changes in teaching practices, new challenges posed by new educational needs, and the inclusion agenda, which has been running for 10 years or so and is bound to change over time. Inclusion emerged as a thorny problem. In retrospect, I am not entirely sure why that was the case, because we were concerned about parents and students who thought that being forced to use mainstream education was inappropriate, and parents and students who thought that being forced to use special schools was inappropriate. It was the orthodoxy—one way round or the other—that was a concern for the Committee and a number of our witnesses, rather than simply the issue of inclusion, so I would challenge some of the comments that the hon. Member for Harwich made. From the visits and the evidence, we picked up on the general support in society for inclusion, providing that it does not prevent parents and students from receiving appropriate support. That is what should be uppermost in our minds. We also obtained evidence of a number of problems with the statementing process. That evidence related not only to the appeal system or the statementing system, but to the different ways in which local authorities throughout the country apply statementing, to the difference in the number of statements and to the correlation—or lack of it, in some cases—with the incidence of social deprivation. We became aware that other systems existed that did not have the stark cut-off point of the statementing process. That was combined with a growing knowledge that all children have a continuum of needs, which should be reflected in resource allocations across the board. We considered the Scottish system and thought that it might offer a way forward. We were also concerned about training. One of the Committee’s major conclusions was that there was a need for more teacher training on special needs, with a compulsory element for all teachers. I draw the Minister’s attention to our perceived need to move to a national delivery model. We put a great deal of time and effort into thinking what might be necessary in such a model. The key issues were minimum standards, local flexibility within a national framework and a review of statementing. Like other members of the Committee, I am disappointed by the Government’s response and by the tone of that response. The report was detailed and informed and therefore required a detailed and informed response from the Government. I am not clear whether they argue in their response that a national delivery model is necessary or whether they say that it is being delivered already, but through ““Every Child Matters””. If that is the case, there is a great deal more for the ““Every Child Matters”” agenda to do, because the necessary changes on the ground are not being delivered. The degree of local variability was what we were trying to address through minimum standards. Sitting suspended for a Division in the House. On resuming—