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Special Educational Needs

It is a great pleasure to pay tribute to the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr. Sheerman) and the other members of his Committee for an excellent report. I must apologise to you, Mr. Hancock, to the Minister and to others that I will not be able to stay to hear the end of the debate as I have to see a constituent elsewhere in the building. I wanted to hear what the Minister had to say, particularly his response to the hon. Gentleman’s points and others on his Department’s response to the report. There are three special schools in my constituency. One is maintained and two are non-maintained. They are all excellent in their own way, but I do not want to take up time boasting about local excellence. I simply want to raise a specific point about the non-maintained special schools sector. The national body that represents the non-maintained sector welcomes, as do I and many hon. Members in the Chamber, the Select Committee’s call for the Government to clarify their stance on inclusion, in particular what it means for special schools such as the Mary Hare school for the deaf and Prior’s Court school, which specialises in provision for children with autism. Both are in my constituency and are filled with pupils placed there by local authorities that are unable to meet the needs of those pupils within their own provision. It must be understood that such children are the vast majority of pupils provided for in the non-maintained sector. Both those schools are remarkable places. They achieve superb results, and one cannot visit them without being moved by the dedication and professionalism of the staff and the achievement of the pupils. They are doing the Government’s bidding by delivering special needs education, but they are getting a raw deal out of it. The Government’s response to the report is disappointing, and I share many of the sentiments that have been expressed. Despite continuing to promote a continuing role for special schools, the Government do nothing to ensure that it becomes a reality. Non-maintained and independent special schools consistently produce some of the best contextual value-added scores in the country, even though they are not widely publicised by the Department for Education and Skills and will not be reported in future years. Non-maintained special schools are not included in the Government’s online programme for raising attainment and individual standards in education—RAISE—and they are unable to submit pupil-level performance data. In a climate in which outcomes and evidence are ever more important, non-maintained special schools are at a great disadvantage. I should declare an interest as a trustee of the foundation that raises funds for the Mary Hare school for the deaf. It recently opened its new performing arts centre, and as a trustee I have been closely involved in the fund-raising effort. We had the truly bizarre situation of receiving a welcome and superb grant of £300,000 from the Department towards that project and then having to pay back more than that amount to the Chancellor in VAT, which would not have been payable had the school been in the maintained sector. That money-go-round is a daft waste of civil service time, before one even starts to think of the central absurdity that it demonstrates. At a time when the ““Every Child Matters”” agenda should be putting whole-service schools, such as the two I mentioned, at the centre of local and regional planning and provision, the reality is very different. Such schools feel that the focus on their provision is too much on cost alone, with no discussion of values or outcomes. Pressure on local authority funding and on health means that the schools are frequently considered only as a last resort after a child has been through and failed in mainstream education and every other service available from the local education authority. The Government assure us that they view the development of local authorities more as commissioners than as providers. Despite that, schools are having great difficulty in gaining access to the commissioning process. The Government paint a picture of stable special school numbers and falling SEN and disability tribunals. That is not a picture that is recognised across all non-maintained special schools. I pay particular tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (John Bercow) for his important point about the conflict of interest that lies at the centre of the tribunal process. Almost all the pupil placements in many special schools come through tribunals. Tony Shaw, the principal of the Mary Hare school for the deaf, spends nearly half his time attending, fighting and usually winning at tribunals across the country. I hope that the Government learn to value the report, develop an understanding of the problem across the special skills sector and understand that children with special needs will suffer if the non-maintained sector is allowed to wither on the vine.