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Special Educational Needs (Information) Bill

I accept that point. There are examples in my constituency of children’s centres reaching out through their outreach work to such people. May I also in passing pay tribute to the hon. Gentleman for his undoubted expertise in this area, which the House and the country at large benefit from? In their detailed response to the Select Committee report, the Government acknowledged that it highlighted the need for better use of data on children’s progress by schools. It was also stated that parents needed to be able to access good information, as well as good support. The Committee also suggested that it is necessary to improve accountability, so that parents can assess their children’s progress and the outcomes they achieve. There was also an acknowledgement that Ofsted has urged more effective use of data in setting appropriate and suitably challenging expectations for children with SEN and in tracking their progress. I hope that the Bill contributes to that. Better use of data is at the heart of school improvement and should also be a key part of the evaluation of services. The Government acknowledged that in their response to the Select Committee report. They said that they needed to improve accountability regarding the outcomes that children achieve, as well as improving provision for children with behavioural, emotional and social difficulties, and with autism. Members have mentioned today the need for services to be more focused on the latter category. The Government said that the Department for Education and Skills, as it then was, would need to take forward the inclusion development programme from 2006-07 onward, and that it would hopefully transform the understanding of SEN and disability in schools and significantly improve earlier identification and intervention. They mentioned the need to do this specifically in the areas of speech, language and communication needs; dyslexia; autistic spectrum disorders; behavioural, emotional and social difficulties; and moderate learning difficulties. However, I contend that it will not be possible to measure whether the Government have taken these steps forward unless more information is available and is put into the public domain to enable a proper assessment of the strategies. We know that we need better use of data to track progress and to evaluate services correctly, but we must ask ourselves why we are doing this. It is not about putting information into the public domain for the sake of the information itself, but about knowing which approaches work best for specific difficulties. Parents want to have a better understanding of the needs of their children with special educational needs, what is being done to meet them and how effective those approaches are. This Bill will assist us in securing not only more help for parents and better and targeted support for young people, but, most importantly, for SEN pupils themselves. The hon. Member for Buckingham (John Bercow) was entirely correct in saying that early intervention is the key to securing better outcomes for all children with difficulties, but particularly for those with special educational needs. When I started teaching in a university more than 20 years ago, nobody mentioned dyslexia or, indeed, any learning difficulties. There were no diagnostic tests or special measures in place to support students with reading difficulties in particular. It is a measure of how our discussion of this issue has moved forward over the years and how our services have improved that such measures are now fairly standard in universities and colleges throughout the country. However, it is a failure of our system that someone can get to university or college before having dyslexia diagnosed; it will have impacted negatively on their life chances along the way. I therefore really want to push the Government for early intervention and proper measures to show us how the life chances of children with special educational needs can be improved.