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Special Educational Needs

My hon. Friend makes the point well. In an attempt to be brief, I shall not comment on it any further than to say that I support that view. In recommendation 34, the Select Committee has suggested a way forward. There is an opportunity for us to prevent statements from becoming a barrier to children getting the support that they need. My third point is that we need to empower parents. They need to have recourse to an independent body that can advocate on their behalf. Too often, as the hon. Member for Buckingham (John Bercow) said, summing up the problem for many parents, local authorities assess, decide, finance and provide. That places parents in a difficult position as they try to challenge a local authority that, for reasons of expediency, as all of us who have been involved in local government will understand, is trying to spread a thin budget widely. We can understand the pressures that those authorities are under and the decisions that they are trying to make, but we have to recognise that parents and children have rights. To secure those rights, they need some form of independent advocate away from the local authority to ensure that they get them. In short, future funding for special educational needs—I hope that this will be taken on board in the next comprehensive spending review and in subsequent ones—should deal with the hidden problem of children with special educational needs in classrooms and of children who are not given the proper statements that they need, or else we will continue to fail many children. If we are to deliver on our policy that ““Every Child Matters””, we must start to make a difference in this area.