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Special Educational Needs (Information) Bill

That is true. There are great variations in intake and that is then reflected in the results of the school. We now have admissions policies, in which children with special educational needs should be given a fairly high priority, and I hope that the Government will take that into account when ensuring that the admissions policies are followed. I recently tabled a written question to the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families that asked"““how many children aged (a) 1 year, (b) 2 years, (c) 3 years, (d) 4 years and (e) 5 years were identified as having a special educational need in each year since 2001, broken down by local authority.””" The answer read:"““The information requested can only be provided at disproportionate cost.””—[Official Report, 28 January 2008; Vol. 471, c. 176W.]" I have two concerns about that. The first is the mention of disproportionate cost, because it is claimed that this Bill will not require any extra resources. We should be wary of that claim, because it might have cost implications. I would not want us to pass a Bill and raise expectations if resources were not available to match them. But my greatest concern was that I was trying to obtain information on early years, on the basis that early identification, matched with appropriate support or treatment, is crucial. It is really important for us to know how many children have been identified at age three or age four and all the way through, because we could then track how effective we are at making early identification. We could track how good our early years provision is and the training of early years workers, which is just as important as the other training that has been mentioned. Some special educational needs will be identified only when the child is slightly older but there are nevertheless a number of conditions, some of which the hon. Member for Buckingham (John Bercow) is involved with, that would benefit from specialist early intervention. We should see any costs in the SEN sector as an investment. If we identified special needs at an early age and intervened appropriately, there would be large savings over years in money spent in the school system and perhaps even in the prison system. It is important that we see the measure as a way of raising expectations, by improving information about children’s progress and helping to establish the right infrastructure. We must be wary, however, of raising false expectations. Will data collection bring utopia? I am not at all sure that on its own it could possibly do so. Implementation and teacher training across all courses is all-important. The special educational needs co-ordinator is important. One of the recommendations of the earlier Select Committee report was that the SENCO should be a member of the senior management team. That is absolutely vital. There can be no working SEN leadership in schools unless the SENCO has status in the school. That person will of course be selected for their leadership qualities. We need a whole-school approach. Educational psychologists have been mentioned briefly. I have spoken about them quite a lot in Parliament. From my contacts I understand that there is still uncertainty about who will fund training for educational psychologists and how it will be funded. The Government have responded to the concerns that arose due to the change in qualifications for educational psychologists and in the training process, but we face the prospect of at least a year when there will be few new educational psychologists coming through the system. There is a sense of insecurity; people have told me that they do not want to go in for that career because they are not sure how their training will be financed. That is serious. We need to address much more than just data. We must make sure that we are not simply collecting data for data’s sake. We do not want bureaucracy for bureaucracy’s sake. We do not want league tables to emerge from the process, but evidence-driven policy sounds like a pretty good idea—a good thing—if we can use the evidence at individual school, local and national level to improve outcomes for all our children with special educational needs. I give the Bill my support, but I look forward to the Committee, because there is a lot of detail to be teased out to make sure that we have information that is monitored and used so that it leads to better outcomes.