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Special Educational Needs (Information) Bill

I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for Buckingham (John Bercow), who made an interesting and moving speech. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead, East and Washington, West (Mrs. Hodgson) on her success in getting the Bill to this stage. It is the first big hurdle. Should this and further hurdles in Committee be cleared, as we hope they will be, and the Bill become law, she will be able to reflect in the years to come that she made a great difference to the lives and aspirations of children with special needs and their families. I know that my hon. Friend and her researcher Jonathan have worked extremely hard to get to this point. Having been elected in the same cohort, and now both appointed to the Select Committee on Children, Schools and Families, I can testify that she never misses an opportunity to lobby on these issues, but that she always does so with a beaming smile and much grace, be we friend or political foe. It is only right to share with the Minister and hon. Members the fact that in her early career she was a majorette—not only does she have nifty footwork but what she cannot do with a baton is nobody’s business. The Minister should be aware of that and help her to achieve her goals. I can think of no more committed Member than my hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead, East and Washington, West to guide the Bill through the House, and I pay tribute to her outstanding dedication and boundless enthusiasm on this as on all other subjects. I know that many Members wish to speak, so I will keep my contribution short and sweet, just like the Bill. Although the measure is small—it has just two clauses—its effects will be enormous. At the national level, the new information that is gathered can be used to influence policy and long term-planning, as well as to help us to monitor their effects. Last week, the Select Committee heard evidence from various statisticians and educationists, who all agreed that additional data, particularly data sets on SEN and a number of other categories, would be hugely useful, especially in assessing the progress of pupils and the relative success of different types of school systems, which is a subject of great debate at the moment. In addition, the Bill will assist with teacher training, planning and delivery, as has been said. The Training and Development Agency for Schools—or the TDA, as we are reducing our words—has recently published its SEN training strategy, most of which is to be applauded. However, as has been said, it is lacking in the area of postgraduate teacher training. A former postgraduate teacher myself, I well remember the inadequate training I received for SEN teaching. That training took place on three Wednesday afternoons—in some respects, we were quite advanced in Birmingham at the time—so it merely paid lip service to SEN. My first position was in inner-city Birmingham. I taught a class of 38 nine-year-olds, so hon. Members can imagine the disparate needs and abilities in the classroom. That was perhaps my greatest challenge—and surviving the first year was character building—and on many evenings I went home completely distraught, as I felt I had not been able to do my job properly as a result of inadequate training. There was also a lack of training in the job, but that has since changed significantly. Of my cohort of postgrad teachers, we lost nearly half in the first two years, which was heartbreaking. Although there have been improvements since then, the issue still requires lots of attention. Information that will be gleaned as a result of the Bill’s introduction will help to encourage wider training in this area, or at least make it easier to make the point to the agency. The profile of children’s disability is changing. Many children are born pre-term, giving rise to complex SEN problems that we have not previously encountered. The profession does not always have adequate teaching and learning strategies to hand to provide effective education for those pupils, let alone register their attainment. I am particularly concerned about pupils with foetal alcohol syndrome, which is estimated to affect between one and three of every 1000 live births. That means that 28 babies are born each week in the UK with FAS. That is a conservative estimate, because the syndrome is not always recognised, and there is a lack of diagnostic expertise. Some 7,500 babies a year are born with FAS.