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Special Educational Needs (Information) Bill

Indeed. In fact, the statistics on that front are seriously alarming. It is not just expressive speech and receptive language that are the problem; those people can also suffer a much wider set of difficulties. Hon. Members referred to the phenomenon of children suffering from autism. We know that children on the autistic spectrum vary greatly, but they all tend to suffer from what is commonly known in the trade as the triad of impairments—lack of social imagination, social interaction and social communication. It is important that we train staff so that we do not continue to experience the problem whereby innocently enough, but very damagingly, professionals in the education sector mistake a disabled child for a disobedient child. When we talk about people on the autistic spectrum being more likely to be excluded from school, let us be clear: that is what is taking place in so many cases. The professionals do not understand that the child is not in any sense a conventionally badly behaved child. The understanding even of autism, which is a relatively high-profile condition, is too limited. We have to try to stimulate awareness. I was with my young son in a park in central London only a week or two ago. My son has phobias about a number of things, as children often do, and perhaps autistic children do in particular. He is anxious about hand dryers. I have always explained that they cannot do him any harm and are not dangerous, but he hates the sound that they make. When we went to take him to the loo, I said to the park-keeper, who has to, quite properly, turn the key and open the loo, ““Would it be okay if my son went into the disabled loo?”” , because I happened to know that it had no hand dryer whereas in the ordinary loo there was one. She looked completely uncomprehendingly at me and at him—I make no personal gibe at her; I am simply making a wider point—and I repeated the question. She said, ““But he’s not disabled.”” Again, I put it to colleagues that there is an issue of understanding. People often think that to be disabled, someone has to sit in a wheelchair, lack a limb or have a demonstrable and immediately apparent impairment, such as blindness, but children with problems on the autistic spectrum or with speech, language and communication impairments—there is often a close link between the two—can, in some cases, be disabled. We need a great public debate on special educational needs as a whole. Jim Callaghan initiated such a debate on educational standards in the late 1970s, and it was of enormous benefit to the country in kick-starting issues on the consideration of provision, the adequacy of standards and the need to develop provision further. I would like to have a great public debate on special educational needs in this country to increase awareness of the issues and to make them very much more important in decision-makers’ minds. The challenge is to bring the issues from the back of the minds of Ministers, commentators, policy makers and decision makers to the front of their minds. I conclude simply by saying that over a period, special needs parents have become more demanding, more insistent and more determined to secure better provision. There will be cost implications, but it is right that we seize the challenge to improve provision in this field and ensure that the issues are regarded as part of front-line services and core provision. Special educational needs must not be relegated to a back room or a subordinate filing tray as though they are of secondary importance. I think it was Winston Churchill who said that one can often judge the quality of a civilisation by the way in which the Government of a country treat their prisoners. That view was right and far-sighted, as so often with that great man, for its time. If that is true in relation to the treatment of prisoners, and it is, it is true also of the way in which we treat, cater to and care for children with special educational needs. Whatever else the hon. Member for Gateshead, East and Washington, West achieves in the course of her parliamentary career, which may include ministerial office of high distinction—I do not know—I wish her well on her journey. However, I do not think that she will do anything more just, more noble or potentially more appreciated than what she is doing now.