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Special Educational Needs (Information) Bill

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his correction and apologise to Baroness Warnock—I must have inferred from her comments that she was a member of another party. The Warnock report rightly challenged many assumptions, especially prejudice about the potential of children with special needs. My hon. Friend the Member for Worsley (Barbara Keeley) identified very well the gap in attainment for children with hearing difficulties and deaf children. It is 24 per cent. at GCSE level, which is incredible. I suspect that it is the same for other disabilities such as blindness and it is shaming that we have not examined the matter adequately in the House. My hon. Friend is right to focus on that. Thirty years after the Warnock report, we still need to challenge assumptions. Many of the children whom we are considering need and deserve a properly resourced place in a mainstream school. Many deaf children would be better off being stretched educationally in a mainstream school, but with properly trained secondary school teachers, as other hon. Members have said. They do not need a return to the prejudice and second-rate provision of the 1970s that Warnock identified. The system that I advocate is based on the needs of the child, not the assumption that mainstream provision is always wrong and special needs schools are always right. It clearly depends on collecting and analysing the correct data—that is why the Bill is crucial. It seems like a small point, but it is a huge matter. We should be able to base our actions on the right information. The education of all children in my constituency concerns me greatly and I believe that the measure will be the gateway to improvements that are necessary to continue the trend of improvement that we have experienced in the past 10 years. It is important that special educational needs policy is allowed to develop and that best practice is allowed to flow from that. The Bill will be the oxygen to invigorate the process. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead, East and Washington, West, I am frustrated when I submit a parliamentary question and receive the response, ““This information is not collected centrally.”” It is disappointing to hon. Members and our constituents. I look forward to tabling questions in future and receiving full and correct information from the Department. The case for collecting information on the specialist support for children with dyslexia is even more compelling. My hon. Friend and I belong to the all-party group on dyslexia and specific learning difficulties. We know the despair of some of the parents and professionals involved. They are often condemned as fanciful in their belief that dyslexia exists and they are frustrated and angry about that. However, those campaigners need access to the facts. That will enable us all to assess where local authorities are best meeting the identified needs of the children and end the current postcode lottery of provision. My local authority has a good record on dyslexia, despite being small. However, the information for parents is not there because it is not collected centrally. Some of my local parents are frustrated in that they feel, when they compare the provision for their child with that in other local authorities, that the provision for their child is not adequate. It is impossible, as a Member of Parliament, to say whether that is true because we are not collecting the data. Sometimes, parents feel guilty and blame for not fighting hard enough for their child, and we cannot tell them whether that is correct. Again, we fall back on emotion rather than on what is right for the child. The Bill strengthens the Secretary of State’s power to collect information and will assist in improving outcomes for children with special educational needs. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Worsley, I am pleased that the National Deaf Children’s Society is supporting the Bill. Dyslexia Action also supports the measure. That is important to me and my hon. Friends. A big question for parents, teachers, schools and organisations such as Dyslexia Action is the lack of specific information about what is happening to special education in schools. The Bill demands transparency for that complex provision, which is often frustratingly patchy—good in some places, bad in others. I am pleased that Ofsted will examine SEN provision in its review in 2009. We hope that schools and local authorities will be more accountable for detailing the specific provision that is on offer. I hope that the Bill will be law by 2009 so that it informs the Ofsted report.