---

Special Educational Needs (Information) Bill

I too congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead, East and Washington, West (Mrs. Hodgson) on moving this excellent Bill. I was particularly delighted when she invited me to sponsor it, which I am very pleased to have done. Special educational needs is an issue that has always required more serious attention, but only recently have I had serious problems with my own local authority regarding such matters. My hon. Friend’s Bill will make a significant advance, and I hope that the Minister will take it forward, that the Government will help it on to the statute book, and that they will move on from there and make better SEN provision for all our children. My interest in, and concern about, SEN goes back a long way. I am certain that I went to school before anyone else in the Chamber. I started primary education in 1946. [Hon. Members: ““Never.””] Hon. Members flatter me, but that is the truth. I went through school not being chastised, but I remember lots of my school chums being frequently chastised in a fairly brutal way—rulers were used on the back of knuckles; that was commonplace in those days, but I am glad to say that it now illegal. Looking back, it is clear that several of my friends had special educational needs—behavioural problems, dyslexia and learning difficulties—for which they were being punished. Later in life, I read the Victorian satirical novel ““Erehwon”” by Samuel Butler. He portrays a world in which the fortunate are rewarded and the unfortunate are punished, and that is precisely what happened in my primary school. Some hon. Members may say that I have difficulties, but I did not have behavioural difficulties and I did quite well at school—I only started to misbehave when I came to this Chamber, as the Whips will confirm. There is no question but that what happened at my school was cruel. There was no recognition of what were obviously special educational needs. I move on to the iniquities of the 11-plus. I was fortunate enough to pass it, but several of my friends, who were very bright, actually failed it. Later in life they did very well, and they discovered that they failed it simply because they were dyslexic and could not spell. My closest friend is a highly intelligent man—he is a lecturer in social sciences and a fine man in every way—but he is dyslexic. Believe it or not, he used to win the English prize when he was at school, despite his dyslexia. He used to write an essay in his own dyslexic language and then spend hours going through it word-by-word with a dictionary to ensure that he spelt everything correctly. Sometimes he could not spell a word even then because he could not work out what the second letter was—one needs to be able to do that when one is looking at a dictionary. He struggled but he got through. The hon. Member for South-West Norfolk (Mr. Fraser) alluded to his own dyslexia and the fact that his sons are dyslexic. There used to be an assumption that we were all born with equal abilities and that what happened after that was purely environmental—if one’s child could not spell it was somehow to do with parenting, teaching and so on. We now know that there are inherited characteristics in some of these matters. There is certainly strong evidence to show that a degree of inheritance is not uncommonly involved in dyslexia—as he says, his sons are dyslexic too. These factors are starting to be recognised, but there are still those in local education authorities who do not recognise that some disabilities need to be treated individually, sensitively and properly. Even today, special educational needs are still prone to a range of presumptions and prejudices that we must set to one side. I taught A-levels in St. Albans—as one can imagine, not too many people doing A-levels there have special educational needs—but my wife was a primary school teacher in a much more deprived area. She was a special needs co-ordinator in her school before she retired. She used to identify children as having problems early on, and she would tell the local authority that certain children needed to be statemented. She was not making prejudicial decisions to exclude children—she saw that they needed support and that they needed statementing. The LEA would take months, if not years, to do the job because it meant extra cost and because some people did not really believe in special educational needs. Let me discuss one experience that my wife had. I can speak safely about this now because it took place in her previous education authority, before it became a unitary authority—we were in Bedfordshire. The special needs adviser from the county came down one day to look at a particular child. He said to my wife, ““Well, Mrs. Hopkins, it is quite simple. You have to give him one-to-one teaching.”” She said, ““I have a class of 34 children, how can I do that? I can’t do one-to-one because there is no resource.”” This was before the increase in classroom support.