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Special Educational Needs (Information) Bill

In an earlier intervention, I suggested that funding for children with serious special needs should be provided centrally, so that expense would not influence the decision of the local authority officers. To finish my anecdote, the special needs adviser for the county visited the school to speak to my wife. My wife had said that she could not provide one-to-one teaching, much as she would love to do so, with a class full of kids, so the adviser said to her, ““Oh well, Mrs. Hopkins, I’ll have a word with him and try to do a bit with him myself.”” Half an hour later, he came back and said, ““Mrs. Hopkins, I can do nothing with him.”” That was the special needs adviser from the county authority. My wife asked whether the child needed statementing, and a year later he was statemented and went to a special school. The resistance of the education authority on the grounds of cost, and sometimes prejudice, was clearly evident. In my early days as a Member of Parliament, I had a tense relationship with the senior education officers in the new unitary authority. Fortunately, they have now moved on so I can speak a little more freely about them. We had a difference of view. Schools in privileged areas want to exclude all children with difficulties because they like nice, bright, university-bound children to teach, and do not want to worry about the rest. On the other hand, some people, for the best of motives, want blanket inclusion, although that may not be the right course. I had three cases in which the authority refused point blank to contemplate giving a place in a special school to children with serious behavioural problems who clearly needed that place. It took a long time, involving the media, before the authority relented. I know that some of those children are now doing very well in special school provision. I supported the hon. Member for Mid-Bedfordshire (Mrs. Dorries), who has a strong view about the need for special school provision, and I spoke in her debate a year or so ago on the issue. We have campaigned together on it. I do not suggest that all children need to be excluded, but neither do I suggest that all children can be left in mainstream schools without proper support. Children have a range of needs, and the hon. Member for Buckingham (John Bercow) made that point very powerfully. One has to look carefully at the specific needs of every child. Some of them are simple, and some are complex, but all relate to that particular child. Provision needs to be made for those specific difficulties, sometimes through special schools.