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Special Educational Needs (Information) Bill

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention and he sums up the feeling in the House that not enough attention has been given to special educational needs. Inevitably, there has been a focus on raising standards and achieving the five A-C grades. If a school is making a decision on how to allocate its resources, it can be target driven and may not direct them to where the need is greatest. Collecting information on school action is especially important. Much funding for special educational needs is delegated to schools, and parents do not have confidence that that money is necessarily spent on special educational needs or the needs of their offspring. Clearer information would help schools to demonstrate that they are indeed allocating funds to the area for which they are designated. We all have a part to play in moving forward the debate on special educational needs, and that is why it is so important that we have excellent champions of the issue on both sides of the House to raise its profile. The Bill contains two basic proposals that would place a duty on the Secretary of State to collect and publish information on children with special educational needs. Both relate to England. Both duties are focused on information that could help to improve the wellbeing of children with SEN, and such information would have to be published each year. It is important that the information should go beyond educational achievement, and the reference to the five outcomes from Every Child Matters—stay safe, be healthy, enjoy and achieve, make a positive contribution, and achieve economic wellbeing—is very important. There are so many issues facing children with special educational needs and their families. The bullying and exclusion rates are well documented, so we know that we must address the whole child, not just the educational results. As the hon. Lady said, TreeHouse has just completed research into parliamentary answers on autism over the past 10 years. It was not surprising that the Government were unable or have chosen not to answer many of those questions, because—TreeHouse found—no estimate is made of the information requested or it is not collected; there are no plans to collect the information requested or it is not possible to provide it; records are not kept; data are not readily available; no information is available on the question; or the information requested is not held centrally. That sums up the huge gaps in our knowledge. It is important that the Bill addresses all types of special needs. I am very interested in the causes of dyslexia and autism, but those are perhaps high profile special educational needs that, as amateurs, we know a fair bit about, and there are many different types of special needs. The more we learn, the more we find that particular types need a particular approach in the classroom. I have received a representation from the Joint Epilepsy Council, and epilepsy is a condition that we have not discussed much in our debates on special educational needs. The JEC points out that children and young people with epilepsy routinely experience potential health, learning, behavioural and emotional needs as a direct or indirect result of their epilepsy. One has only to visit a special educational needs school to become aware of that. The JEC believes that the Bill could help the situation for children with epilepsy. If the Government were to collect more data on the population of children and young people with epilepsy, it could improve outcomes and education for those with the condition. It is important, therefore, that we ensure that we are covering the widest range of special educational needs possible.