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Children and Young Persons Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 16: 16: After Clause 10, insert the following new Clause— ““Provision of communication aids for looked after children in the review of their care plan In section 26 of the 1989 Act (review of cases and inquiries into representations), in subsection (2), after paragraph (d) insert— ““(da) requiring the authority, when seeking the views of the child, to make such arrangements as they consider necessary for the provision of alternative and augmentative communication support, communication aids and speech and language support services to a child with a communication impairment;””.”” The noble Baroness said: I shall speak also to Amendment No. 17 which is grouped with Amendment No. 16. Both amendments concern alternative and augmentative communications support. Amendment No. 16 seeks to enable children to make their views known during the review of their care plan if they have a need for such aids and Amendment No. 17 seeks to enable them to make their views known when any significant decision is to be made in relation to their care plan. However, I emphasise that such aids should be available all the time to any child in public care who has a need for them, and not only when there is a statutory duty to take his or her wishes and feelings into account. These amendments are identical to those that we brought forward in Grand Committee because I want to respond to what the Minister said on that occasion and probe him a little further. On 16 January he laid great weight at the door of the IRO in respect of the provision of augmented and alternative communication aids. That is quite a mouthful so I shall call them ““AAC aids””. He said: "““We will ensure through statutory guidance that children with communication difficulties or complex needs are supported either by an IRO with the skills necessary to facilitate care planning and to elicit the views of children with communication difficulties or complex needs, or through an IRO who has access to specialist input from someone who has these skills””." What is going to be done about training IROs in this specialist area? Another aspect is that things move on in this field all the time. New communication aids are constantly becoming available; someone told me recently that a communication aid user had told her that getting to grips with a new piece of kit was like learning a new language. It takes considerable effort to keep up to speed with these very useful communication aids. In the same column, the Minister went on to say: "““Where a communication aid is specified in … a statement of special educational needs, the local authority is obliged in law to provide it or to ensure its provision””.—[Official Report, 16/1/08; col. 530.]" My response to that is that there are many cases where such communication aids are provided at school, but the child really needs these pieces of equipment out of school as well. Often, unfortunately, they cannot take them home with them at the end of the day or during holiday time. So we are giving the child a voice during school time but not when it goes home or to whichever place it regards as home. That is a real problem, and I would like some reassurance that something will be done about that. I am pleased that the Minister recognised that provision is not always well managed, but some sort of guidance or directive could say that such communication aids should be provided to the child all the time, not just at these specific points when some statutory obligation or other makes it necessary. That is essential. The child will not have facility with using these aids unless he or she has them available all the time. Just to have them at times when the statute says the child must have them in order to express his or her views will not really be adequate. The child needs to have facility and familiarity with the equipment by having it all the time. The problem is that there is a relatively low local incidence of any children who can benefit from AAC and an even smaller incidence of looked-after children who can benefit from it. That means there is very little local awareness. Most speech and language therapists have very little training in AAC. They have plenty of training in speech and language therapy, but when a child does not have speech and language the therapists just do not know about such equipment and these difficulties. Teachers, social workers and doctors often have no training at all. That means there is a real problem identifying those children who could benefit in the first place. It would be interesting to know how much training in AAC that, specifically, an IRO would receive, given the Minister’s dependence on the role of the IRO in responding to my amendments in Grand Committee. There are no specific indicators relating to AAC, which means that spending tends to get directed elsewhere that will meet targets. The level of support available is often dependent on whether the area has a particular champion, someone who really knows, cares and does something about it. That is why we have patchy provision. It could well be that we need regional centres of excellence, because there is no critical mass in any one local authority. The Minister might like to think about that idea. In order to ensure that the child’s statutory rights to express his or her wishes and feelings in these specific situations can be fulfilled, there is a need to ensure that the child has such a communication aid all the time and that the IROs and the professionals around them have the necessary awareness, and that the IROs have training—ongoing training, at that—because this is a technical field that is moving on very rapidly. I beg to move.