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Special Educational Needs (Information) Bill

The hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs. Miller) asked me on several occasions to respond to the debate, but it would a gross impertinence for a Government spokesperson to respond to a debate on a private Member’s Bill. That honour lies with my hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead, East and Washington, West (Mrs. Hodgson), who introduced the Bill, but I will do my best to cover many of the points made in the debate. No doubt, there will be an opportunity in Committee for the detail of those matters to be discussed further. May I add my congratulations to those offered by everyone who has spoken—and possibly Members who have not spoken—to my hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead, East and Washington, West on introducing the Bill? She has done a huge amount to champion the cause of children with special educational needs, and my Department supports the sentiments that she expressed when introducing the Bill. She gave a moving and personal account of her interest in, and commitment to, the subject, and spoke about the story of her son Joseph and the way in which that has informed her approach. The warmth and passion that she brings to the subject is no doubt responsible for the unanimous response to her Bill across the House. We have had a wide-ranging and interesting debate. It is not my job to respond to it, but it is my job to set out the Government’s position, and I will attempt to refer to the contributions from hon. Members. Hon. Members brought a huge amount of expertise to the debate. Several of them suggested that this was the House at its best, although ironically at its least observed by the fourth estate—but that is something over which we have little or no control. The hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke), like others, was unhappy with the quality of some parliamentary answers. That is not a new problem. As the hon. Lady will know, a former leader of her party or a previous incarnation of it, David Lloyd George, is said to have got lost in north Wales and stopped to ask a local farmer for directions. When he asked, ““Where am I?””, he was told, ““You’re in your car.”” Lloyd George described that as an example of the civil servant’s dream answer to a parliamentary question: it was short, it was accurate, and it told him absolutely nothing that he did not already know. I give the hon. Lady an undertaking to look carefully at any parliamentary questions tabled on these subjects, and to make every effort to establish whether information is actually unavailable because of disproportionate cost or because it is not collected centrally. I hope that the Bill will make answers of that kind rarer in future through its commitment to the collection of better data which are available centrally and, perhaps, not at disproportionate cost. We have considered the Education and Skills Committee’s 2007 report—the Committee’s Chairman, my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield (Mr. Sheerman), was present earlier. The Government’s response will be published on Monday. It would be wrong for me to pre-empt that, but we share the concern expressed by a number of Members about parental confidence in SEN provision, and our response will address some of the points that they raised. My hon. Friend the Member for Worsley (Barbara Keeley) spoke passionately as always, in this instance about deaf children. She mentioned the wonderful work done by her constituent Eileen Hosie, who teaches deaf pupils. We share the concern expressed by the RNID and the NDCS about the attainment of deaf children, and the Department is working closely with those organisations to try to understand the issues and establish how data can be used to focus on improving provision. The hon. Member for South-West Norfolk (Mr. Fraser) —who wrote me a note explaining that he had to leave early because of a constituency engagement—spoke of his personal experience, and of the need for relevant data and teacher training. I shall say more about that later. My hon. Friend the Member for South Swindon (Anne Snelgrove) rightly drew attention to the lack of a media presence in the Chamber. She also made a plea for her own Bill to be taken up by a Minister. I can only say that I am sure her plea has been heard, and—through you, Mr. Deputy Speaker—““Not me, guv.”” My hon. Friend mentioned the importance of teaching assistants. The Training and Development Agency for Schools has been piloting specialist initial teacher-training modules on SEN which we want to extend to all graduate teacher-training courses. We have asked the agency to look into how we can apply it to the one-year PGCE course that my hon. Friend mentioned. She also raised the question of identifying children with disabilities. The Department has commissioned research on how schools can do that, and we shall probably be able to publish it in the next few months. I think of the hon. Member for Buckingham (John Bercow) as my honourable friend, because we go back a few years in this place and have had various jousts, as he always puts it. We also worked together on issues that feature in the Bill when we were both on the Back Benches. May I say, as a humble specimen, as he referred to me in his speech, that he spoke with his customary fluency on an issue about which he has a great deal of knowledge? On this occasion, he also included powerful, personal experience in his remarks. I thank him for the work that he is doing in his review, not just on behalf of the Government and the House but on behalf of the country. Clearly, he raised many detailed and important points, which I am sure we will explore much further as the Bill progresses, and when his interim review is published in March and his full review later in the summer. He called for a greater public debate on the subject, echoing the call by Jim Callaghan in the 1970s. That was a significant and important remark. He described one approach as a ““low-dosage, high-volume intervention””. That probably categorises his contributions in the House—they are often low dosage but always high volume, and always effective, I should add. We recognise the challenge of implementing the inclusion development programme at a local level in authorities and schools. That is why we are making that a priority for the national strategy’s new regional hubs of good practice. Those will bring together all authorities in a region to share practice on how best to increase the uptake of the training. My hon. Friend the Member for Stourbridge (Lynda Waltho) reminded us of the old days, teaching 38 children in a primary school class. It was a timely reminder that perhaps things have improved to some degree in teaching. Those were the days when there were no teaching assistants in the classroom. It was important to remind us that that was one of the reasons so many of her colleagues perhaps burned out at an early stage of their teaching careers, back in those bad old days. The hon. Member for Forest of Dean (Mr. Harper) spoke, importantly, about the need for cross-government working. That is something that our new Department is keen to develop and is developing with the Ministry of Justice and other Departments, including the Department of Health, which is important in respect of the subject that we are discussing today. My hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham (Dr. Blackman-Woods) talked about the education village in her constituency and about the importance of good data and early intervention. That is why we are going to have children centres for every community by 2010, and why we are promoting the roll-out of the excellent early support programme in all local authorities. My hon. Friend the Member for Luton, North (Kelvin Hopkins) spoke about his educational experiences in school and the rap of the ruler on the knuckles. That was how I was taught to remember poetry when I was in primary school. I can still recite some at will. I will not bore the House with it now—on another occasion perhaps. I think that I developed my lifelong love of poetry from being rapped over the knuckles, but I do not recommend it as an approach these days. He is right to point out how attitudes have changed over the years. The fact that we have cross-party consensus here today about the importance of the Bill is testament to the way in which attitudes have changed from those bad old days, when my hon. Friend and his friends were in school experiencing that kind of treatment. The hon. Member for Basingstoke spoke of the tremendous commitment of Secretaries of State to this subject. She went on to make many suggestions, which are matters best picked up in Committee. I should now turn to the Bill and to the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead, East and Washington, West in the time that we have available. The proposal that children with special educational needs should be specifically taken into account as the Secretary of State exercises his powers in relation to gathering data is sensible. It is our Department's highest priority that all barriers to education should be removed for all children, whether those barriers arise from physical, financial or family circumstances. It is even more imperative for those who are already set at a disadvantage against their peers: the 570,000 children living with a disability, the 2.8 million children living in poverty, and the 1.6 million children with special educational needs. We have come a long way—hon. Members acknowledged this—from the days of crumbling buildings and failing schools that we inherited 10 years ago. In 1997, it was not only school buildings that were dilapidated; so, too, was the infrastructure of children’s services as a whole. The Every Child Matters agenda has led to a transformation in how professionals work together to meet children’s individual needs better. Information has been at the heart of that process, which is why the Bill is so timely and welcome. The children’s plan, which we published last month, will build on those foundations to help us to achieve our ambition to make this country the best place in the world for children to grow up. Any effective organisation must evaluate its performance just to remain effective, let alone to improve. Every child has unique talents and strengths—and weaknesses—and some need more support than others. What works for one child might not be appropriate for another. The variety and complexity of special needs has been pointed out in this debate—for example, by the hon. Member for Buckingham— and children often do not present with one simple, solvable problem. Professionals need good quality information so they can share what works, put right what does not work and ensure that each child receives the right type of support. As my hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead, East and Washington, West will know, my Department already gathers data on children with SEN from a number of sources, including the school census and the SEN2 survey. Those data are published annually and provide useful information from individual pupil to local authority level. I am committed to looking at anything that will help children further—over and above what we are already doing—and formalising the Secretary of State’s consideration of children with SEN when gathering data is a sensible suggestion. For that reason, I am happy to tell the House that the Government will support the Bill. The Government have already taken steps to improve the quality and use of data we collect on children with SEN. We have incorporated new indicators into the national indicator set for local government to measure the gap between children with SEN and their peers. We have incorporated into the national curriculum attainment scales for children with SEN who are falling below national curriculum level 1, and from summer 2008 schools will be required to provide information, at the end of each key stage, on teacher assessments for those pupils still falling below level 1. We have also committed to research how parents of children with SEN feel about the way their school and local authority assesses and provides for their child’s needs, to see what further improvements we can make to the system. Those commitments are already in place.