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Speech and Language Difficulties (Education)

You will have no problem with me, Miss Begg. It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs. Miller), whom I entirely support in her desire to prevent the closure of special schools. I shall deal with that subject, but first I want to comment on the speech of the hon. Member for Edinburgh, West (John Barrett). He spoke extremely well. I am intrigued by the information pack initiative, and I wonder if he could make one available to me as well. I am sure that I shall not be the only hon. Member in the Chamber to ask for one. I see him nodding his assent, and I thank him. My hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (John Bercow) spoke with his usual eloquence and great passion. He and I are at the two ends of the spectrum where speech making is concerned. Perhaps I may tell hon. Members a story of a boy who did not, they tell me, say a word until he was six years old. Then he went to speech therapy, until he became a teenager. He stopped going there not because they cured him but because it was too embarrassing to sit there with all the tiny children. In fact, in Yorkshire they all said that they eventually wished that when they mended him they had put in a switch—they said, ““He couldn’t speak till he was six and he hasn’t stopped since.”” Those are the sort of comments that this child had to face. I am sure that we all accept that being unable to speak does not necessarily mean one is stupid. There are many people with complex needs who have learning difficulties as well, but there are those who just have speech difficulties. I want to talk about the closure of special schools. There is pressure on such schools in Essex. In my constituency, a wonderful school for those with moderate learning difficulties, Cedar Hall, is under great pressure. The pressure is largely on MLD schools, not those dealing with severe learning difficulties. There is a feeling that it is more appropriate for children with moderate learning difficulties to be taught in an inclusive environment in the mainstream, and that is exactly right for some children. However, there are children for whom an MLD school is right. It is necessary to keep those schools open and support them fully, and not to refuse to refer children or tell parents about those options. We need to make sure that county councils support the MLD schools, as well as the important SLD schools. Closing MLD schools and moving the children into mainstream schools tends to exacerbate the difficulties in giving them speech and language support. That is my experience. I have two points to make to the Minister, to which I hope he will respond, because, as he knows, I sincerely believe that he is a good chap. One is that children who require speech and language therapy—even those whose requirement is statemented—sometimes do not get that help from trained specialist speech and language professionals. They receive help from other people, who work with fantastic good will and enthusiasm, but who cannot provide what is needed to help those children as quickly as possible, which is very important. I hope that the Minister will deal with the issue that emerged this morning from the remarks of my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham: the shortfall in numbers of professional therapists. We are looking for the Minister to give us comfort and to tell us this year, if not this morning, what he will do to ensure that the gap in the provision of trained professionals is closed before the end of the decade.