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Children's Plan

My Lords, I join in expressing gratitude to the noble Baroness, Lady Massey of Darwen, and in congratulating her on calling your Lordships’ attention to the plan for children. It is on the whole an excellent plan, but it must be made to work. An enormous omission in it has been highlighted by my noble friend Lady Young of Hornsey: the absence of any emphasis on creative work with children and young people. That absence is significant, and I hope that the Minister will reassure us that although money is obviously being allocated to all the other areas that are mentioned in the plan, it does not indicate a withdrawal of funds or facilities for the arts, and indeed for sport. I was rather depressed, as I think my noble friend was, by play areas being the only reference to this kind of physical activity, which is so enormously important to children. My noble friend Lord Dearing mentioned the absolute necessity of ensuring that local authorities do not divert the funds that they are given to other activities than the ones for which they were meant. The noble Baroness, Lady Massey, has asked us to consider the implications of the plan for equality of opportunity, which inevitably calls our attention to education as a necessary first step. There are two groups of children for whom equality of opportunity is absolutely crucial. The first are those who are dyslexic. Here I must declare an interest as the president of the British Dyslexia Association, but I must also congratulate the Government on their proposal to allocate money for improving initial teacher training so that young teachers who are beginning will be much more able to identify children who are either plainly dyslexic or at risk of being so identified later. This is excellent, but there is no point in identifying such children unless they have access to specialist help as they go along. The emphasis must be on specialist help, because the usual solution of many schools is to allocate a teaching assistant to those children. Such children may very often be taught almost entirely, or helped along the way, by teaching assistants with no training in the teaching of dyslexic children. These teaching assistants, with the best will in the world, may actually succeed in worsening the condition of the child because the child will not improve without specialist help. That child will find a lack of progress particularly depressing and will lose motivation. It is therefore extremely good news that the Government have now promised a pilot scheme to ensure that every dyslexic child will have access to specialist teachers. I ask the Minister to let us know how soon this pilot may be put into practice and how soon we may hope for a general assumption that children who are dyslexic will have access to its specialist teachers in small groups or one to one. As I said, the news on that front is really very good, and I congratulate the Government on having listened, taken advice and acted on it. The second group that I wish to mention is not so fortunate by any means. These are autistic children, especially autistic children who have high intelligence. We are taught that we must distinguish children with learning difficulties from those with mental illness. I have great difficulty with this, because I have no satisfactory definition of what counts as mental illness except that is consists of conditions held to be the province of psychiatrists and other doctors rather than of teachers or educational psychologists. However, this is a strictly circular definition and of no practical value. Most of the research that is carried out on autism is the work of academic psychologists who do not especially care about the distinction between mental illness and learning difficulties. All they know, and all we have learnt from them, is that intelligent autistic children cannot be cured, but that their talents need not be wasted if, and only if, they are educated in an environment in which they can learn to feel at home, to feel unthreatened by their contemporaries and to be able to experience a degree of stability in their surroundings so that they can pursue their often remarkable interests. They will remain sufferers from autism or Asperger’s all their lives, but many of them will make a huge contribution to society if their education has been properly supervised and properly provided and if they have not suffered too much by being in an inappropriate educational environment. For such children, it makes no sense at all for local authorities to insist that they be taught in the mainstream classroom. This is enormously important. I have the vastest postbags, as I am sure many other Members of your Lordships’ House have, from parents who are in despair about their children who have been diagnosed as suffering from Asperger’s and who simply cannot manage in an ordinary, large, mainstream school. Local authorities are undoubtedly extremely obstinate about such children, because for them it is extremely expensive to send children to small schools that are either non-maintained or even private. For such children, however, small schools are incredibly important. At one time, the Minister spoke of the provision of small schools, at least among mainstream schools. Will he say whether that plan has gone forward and whether small schools or special schools are coming into existence for children who are of high ability but who need the very particular environment that these clever Asperger’s children, who are mostly boys, need? I would like to be reassured that although this is not mentioned in the paper, it is in the mind of government. The Children’s Plan speaks of children who, as they say, ““fall behind””. But these children do not fall behind; they are often far ahead of their contemporaries in some respects, but they are radically different. I hope the Minister can assure the House that whether they are considered to pose a medical or an intellectual problem, they are noticed as needing special consideration in any plan for children. Only then can they possibly approach equality of opportunity in later life.