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Special Educational Needs (Information) Bill

I thank the Minister for his intervention. He may be aware that my constituency has a number of councils—every type of council—within it. As I said earlier, it has two children's services authorities so I could not put my hand on my heart and say from which authority I have had the most such representations. However, I should like to confirm that I am saying that there is a perception that the partnerships are not independent. As long as parents do not have confidence, there will be the issue of their seeking advice. I also tell the Minister, and my local authorities, that when the parent of a child with special educational needs comes to my surgery, the first thing that I say to them is, ““Have you been to the pupil-parent partnership?”” As I said, I was so excited when they were set up, and that was always my first question. Perhaps that is why I have had the responses. However, I ask the question not to elicit a response of no confidence but to make sure that the parents are accessing every piece of information available locally. I take this opportunity to make it absolutely clear that I am not undermining the specific work of pupil-parent partnerships, which are incredibly important. However, there is an issue about parents not having confidence. A lot of what we are talking about today, and have talked about in previous debates on the Bill, it to do with building up parents' confidence. I understand that the Government themselves have commissioned Brian Lamb to consider ways of building up parental confidence. I feel that we are all like-minded on the issue, and I am happy to point out that what I hear from constituents and others is that they are not convinced that the partnerships are independent. One therefore needs to consider how to improve the situation. To backtrack on to my new clause, I should say that I want to enforce the motivation behind new clause 1—that is, genuinely to make available as much objective information as possible, to say what is there and to provide a full audit of what is available in a particular area. I return to amendment No. 1, which is about the need for a report. I end my comments on it by saying that I had a great deal of sympathy with the idea of having an annual report that drew things together. I recall suggesting that if we had such a report, the Children, Schools and Families Committee could consider it as part of its remit, for example. The Minister was most encouraging and said that he would consider that idea. In due course, I hope to hear what consideration he has given to that point. Finally, I turn to amendment No. 2, which requires information on teacher training to be supplied. I want to emphasise how much I support the principle of checking exactly what progress we are making on teacher training for special educational needs. That, of course, means a whole school approach. My hon. Friend the Member for Ceredigion and I tabled an amendment in Committee and felt that we had had a good discussion of the issue, so I thought that on Report we would probably just go through the details. This is a core issue—it is all about the quality of the teaching in the school setting. We are aware that, very belatedly, action is being taken to put more special educational needs content into the four-year undergraduate courses for teacher training, but 80 per cent. of teachers still come through on a post-graduate certificate course. I am not sure whether that involves special educational needs training. There is also a course with training that takes place within schools—school-centred initial teacher training, or SCIIT—as well as Teach First. Teachers come through via many different routes. Although it is welcome that at long last there are movements to work with the Training and Development Agency for Schools, it is a question of timing. The Government have moved to a policy of inclusion, rapidly at times, from 1997 onwards, but here we are in 2008 talking about the deficiency in teacher training. That must be tackled as soon as possible. The NUT study, ““Costs of Inclusion””, suggests that fewer than 14 per cent. of teachers are confident that they can recognise dyslexia and shows that teachers lack confidence across the board. It found that only 18 per cent. of teachers were confident in teaching children with severe learning difficulties, and the vast majority—86 per cent.—had not received specific professional development in that respect. A majority— 55 per cent.—felt confident in teaching children with moderate learning difficulties, but 76 per cent. had not received special professional development in the past 12 months. So it goes on. Much remains to be done on teacher training, as well as on postgraduate qualifications and on continuous professional development. A few weeks ago, a written statement on dyslexia announced the set up of some pilot schemes. That is welcome, but I agree with Xtraordinary People—we need action now. While it sounds like a good idea to have pilots, are we not just pushing the solutions into the future? There is a lot of evidence to show that when there is a specialist dyslexia teacher in a school, the outcomes are very good. Xtraordinary People tells me that the vast majority of independent schools have that provision. The Government aspire to equality across the spectrum of education provision, so, given the importance of such specialist teaching, should we not be moving faster than piloting?