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Special Educational Needs (Information) Bill

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, because I agree that that is the case. The Government have committed—I believe in response to the first of the Select Committee’s reports—to provide more continuous professional development. I would like some hard information on that. Is it really happening? Is the supply cover being provided in schools to release teachers to receive that training? That training is essential not only because of the postgraduate certificate of education, but because we also have school-centred initial teacher training—SCITT—and even ““Teach first””, where the very talented graduates go straight into the classroom. I would not think that they would be experts across the whole SEN sphere, so such training is vital. As the Special Educational Consortium, reinforced by the Royal National Institute for Deaf People, says, having more information has the potential to improve our understanding of what works, to provide a better basis for the sharing of good practice, to improve our understanding of training and professional needs and to provide a more secure basis for the development of national policy. The Ofsted report of 2004 found that under-expectation was a significant factor in the underachievement of children with SEN and that too little is known about the attainment of pupils with SEN. We know that the RNID is flagging up the incredible statistic that only 32.9 per cent. of deaf children across the board achieve five GCSEs at grades A to C, whereas the average for all children is 57.1 per cent. We need to know more about that underperformance. I received an interesting representation from a teacher, and as we are all acknowledging that teachers are so important, I should like to go through it. The teacher stated:"““As a teacher with over 20 years’ experience in special education, I know how current legislation inadvertently hinders the development of inclusive provision for all learners. There is currently insufficient information available on the extent of diversity of learners in schools; this means that there is not enough information on pupils identified as having special educational needs and, as a result, provision cannot be effectively planned or monitored. Current statistics available do not even sufficiently record the number of pupils said to have special educational needs…This will have a direct bearing on strategic planning for effective provision””." The statistics will also obviously inform how the range of teacher training that we have mentioned needs to take place and the development of best practice. It is pretty obvious that good information is needed to underpin strategy at local and national level. We need to address the individual school, local authority and national levels. The Ofsted report of 2004 said that only a quarter of local education authorities had strong strategic management of SEN and the majority had weak evaluation systems. It is a long time to wait for 2009 and the next big Ofsted report. It is therefore important that this Bill is being introduced today, so that we can start digging in to some of these important issues.