---

Special Educational Needs (Information) Bill

I am pleased to be able to support the Bill. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead, East and Washington, West (Mrs. Hodgson) on introducing it and on her great wisdom in coming so far up the ballot list. I also pay tribute to her enthusiasm and ongoing commitment to improving educational outcomes for children generally and for children with special educational needs in particular. I, too, have a personal interest in the matter, although it is not perhaps quite as direct as my hon. Friend's. My sister has been a special educational needs teacher for about 25 years and, like my hon. Friend, she never misses an opportunity to champion the needs of her pupils and to tell me what the Government must do to improve matters further. I was a member of the Education and Skills Committee when it carried out a major review of special needs education in 2006. The first sentence of the summary of the report states:"““One of the key issues in making provision for children with special educational needs is ensuring that parents have confidence that professionals are genuinely seeking to provide appropriate support for their children””." To achieve that confidence, of course, parents need to have better information about the educational outcomes achieved by their children and how that relates specifically to the support available to them. Providing that information is exactly what my hon. Friend’s Bill seeks to do. A strong theme of the report is that enough information is not in the public domain to enable comparisons of provision and support and how they impact on SEN children to be made across local authorities and nationally. The Committee carried out detailed visits to a number of schools throughout the country. We saw examples of best practice in a wide range of authorities as diverse as Essex and Darlington. Darlington had the only education village that we visited. A number of professionals in the field suggested to us that that was a model of best practice and that it signalled the way forward for SEN education. I agree, and I pay tribute to two people and two schools in my constituency—Joan Sjøvoll of Framwellgate school and Julie Connolly of Trinity school—for putting forward a proposal for Durham city to have an education village that is not only science focused, but has a special school integrated into the plan. If Treasury Ministers are listening, I would like them to fund that proposal. Before concluding that that is the best way forward for special needs education, however, we need to know that the strategies adopted by the village are reflected in improving educational outcomes for the children involved.