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Special Educational Needs (Information) Bill

Thank you for clarifying that, Madam Deputy Speaker. I am keen to discuss the Bill, because it will give practical help to people in my constituency and in every constituency throughout the country. My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch spoke in support of amendment No. 1, on which I shall briefly comment. The bulk of my comments will be on amendment No. 2 and training. On amendment No. 1, my hon. Friend discussed the importance of making data available and I commend the hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke) for tabling the amendment, which builds on an amendment that I tabled in Committee. The collection of data is not an end in itself; it has to be made available in a form that parents will be able to use. Some of the amendments that we debated in Committee were thought to be too complex, so I commend the hon. Lady for bringing simplicity with her amendment, which tries, in a much simpler way, to get relevant information published in a way that would be useful to parents. I hope that the amendment will therefore be more acceptable to the hon. Member for Gateshead, East and Washington, West, and that she might consider it, perhaps to be included at a later stage. My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch said that the Government cannot be allowed to control information, and I agree that it often feels that way. As I said in an earlier intervention, the Government said, in their 2004 document, that they were looking at effective teaching approaches for special educational needs, but four years on we are still getting announcements of pilots to identify ways of more adequately supporting children with dyslexia. As the hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole said, a host of organisations have done work and obtained information in that area, and we should perhaps pay more heed to them. Let me address amendment No. 2, which has become an important issue that needs to be clarified within the Bill. I am pleased that my amendment has been selected for debate, and I am sure that there is no need to remind the House of the evidence on teacher training that we discussed in Committee. Hon. Members will know of specific examples in their constituencies of good support for children with special educational needs. In Basingstoke, I am fortunate to have a number of specialist schools, including Limington House, Dove House and Maple Ridge, which do a splendid job in supporting many children and their families who have particular special needs. I should not forget the Loddon school, which specialises in dealing with autism. We are also fortunate to have a specialist unit for hearing-impaired children at Park View junior and infant school, as well as Aldworth science college. I am therefore well placed, in my constituency, to help to support constituents who have children with those particular needs. However, that is not the general situation. We have heard throughout this debate that there are particular concerns about the level of expertise and professional development available to teachers in meeting the needs of SEN children. I am sure that there is no need to remind the House how teachers are left to cope, with little specialist knowledge on how to support such children. The situation certainly has not been helped by the closure of 158 special schools in recent years. That and the Government's approach to inclusion have significantly changed the challenges faced by children, but that has not been reflected in the training that teachers receive. It is little wonder that we see such a high number of teachers deciding to leave the profession within a short period after qualifying. SEN includes a wide range of learning disabilities—physical, sensory, developmental, and invisible disabilities such as autism and dyslexia. Some of these children will have high IQs and others lower levels, and some will have multiple disabilities. Yet we are leaving our professional teaching staff feeling ill-equipped to cope with this issue. One in five children are now included on the SEN register, so this is not a peripheral issue but a mainstream one that teachers are dealing with daily, and which has grown significantly in the past decade. At a recent surgery, I was reminded by a teacher who has worked with children with autism in my constituency that it is still impossible to get SEN training at undergraduate level. We should consider the idea of having a specialism in SEN at that level. Interestingly, her school said that that situation was putting a particular burden on special schools, which had to take on graduates and train them from scratch in the needs of children with particularly acute SEN. Research by the National Union of Teachers suggests that training for teachers simply has not kept pace with what is going on in the classroom: just 16 per cent. of teachers have specific SEN qualifications. The work done by the NUT helps to enlighten us all regarding the gap between what is said by the Government and in this place, and what is actually delivered for teachers in the classroom. I want to draw the House's attention to the NUT report issued in 2006. A primary assistant head who took part in the related research referred to the demoralising of teachers"““because of an apparent almost total lack of training in teaching of””" SEN children"““in a mainstream class, and a lack of support to adequately do this in the classroom…The disruption of astronomically large numbers of children's education through the presence of such children because of the lack of the same two elements mentioned above””" concerning training in SEN. That highlights the fact that, although the Government may have some good intentions in their desire to help and support teachers, the reality on the ground is that such help may not be filtering through in the way that the Minister would like to suggest. In Committee, I listened closely to what the hon. Member for Gateshead, East and Washington, West and the Minister had to say about their concerns in highlighting the need to publish information on teacher training levels. The amendment that I have tabled today is much simpler than the one we tabled then, which was something of a probing amendment. I hope that the hon. Lady can indicate a level of support for it today. It might be useful to recap the concerns expressed by the Minister in Committee about the amendment tabled there. He was worried that those involved might view it as a ““burden””. Indeed, in response to the amendment tabled by the hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole, he felt that it would be a ““burden”” on those providing the training. The response to the amendment that I tabled on this issue was that it would be a ““burden placed on schools””. My concern was that there should be more room to consider the burden placed by the current situation on children, their parents and teachers, hence my tabling a further amendment for consideration on Report. The Minister has outlined the great number of initiatives that the Government have put in place in the past decade to address the problem of teacher training. The objective of my amendment is to ensure that such initiatives are really making a difference on the ground in our classrooms. The list of initiatives is far too long to go through—in fact, I may well have gone through it on Second Reading. I am sure that the Minister will remind us of one of the promises that he made in Committee: that he was just about to make an announcement that would help us all. That announcement—on the Rose review, which was to look at teacher training in particular—was very welcome. The recommendation concerning dyslexia is very specific. As I said earlier, I am somewhat concerned that we are going through yet another piloting process on how to deal with dyslexia. There is a lot of evidence and information used by schools today that the Minister could look at to edify himself in this area. However, it is welcome that there is some acknowledgment that room remains for improvement. That said, this is still simply more looking and piloting, and perhaps not enough action. I want to press the idea of amending the Bill, so that we can examine on the ground in a practical way how the many measures for training teachers are progressing, and whether they are yielding results in the classroom. The Government have looked at teacher training in this area, as the Minister said in an intervention, but as the hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole said, the focus has been on the three-year undergraduate course. As the Minister will be aware, only some one in five teachers come through that route; 80 per cent. will take a one-year postgraduate course, and there are still no proposals in place to support teachers in the SEN area. We need to move forward on this issue. The Minister has clearly taken on board some of the comments that have been made, but we need to monitor the situation more closely to ensure real action on the ground. The Minister referred in Committee to the work done for the census, which he felt might in some way help us to get the information we require. He will doubtless have had a chance to read the note that the NUT issued in advance of this debate. It made it clear that the census will be able to help in only a very small way in identifying the professional development needs of teachers. The inclusion of more specific information on teacher training would be a particularly welcome addition. The NUT certainly feels that such an amendment would strengthen the approach that the Government are taking to ensure that they take into account the views of teachers and support staff on training needs. I hope that the hon. Member for Gateshead, East and Washington, West will be able to support the amendment in the light of this helpful commentary from the NUT. I need not remind the House today of the very real consequences for children. The Royal National Institute for Deaf People reminded us in its briefing that only 32.9 per cent. of deaf children achieve five GCSEs at grades A to C, compared with a figure of 57.1 per cent. for all children. That 24 per cent. attainment gap is unacceptable, yet three quarters of teachers felt that the lack of training meant that they faced a barrier in teaching children with hearing impairment. That training needs to be in place, and we need to see whether the Government's focus on that area is achieving the breakthrough that classroom teachers and children need.