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Special Educational Needs (Information) Bill

I will certainly undertake to consider that suggestion in conjunction with my colleague, Lord Adonis, who has direct responsibility for such matters—I speak on them in the House of Commons—and I certainly undertake to write to the hon. Gentleman and the hon. Member for Basingstoke in relation to the sanctions that are available and any further measures that could be taken. Amendment No. 2, which was tabled by the hon. Member for Basingstoke, would place requirements on the Secretary of State to collect specific information on the training received by members of the school work force. Again, I do not apologise for saying that any new data requirements—I am sure that the hon. Lady's friends in local government would agree, as would mine—must be considered carefully in the light of the burdens placed on schools, local authorities and other data providers to comply. Although I agree that our principal concern is the burden placed on parents and young people, we must ensure that we do not divert resources from meeting those needs. Careful thought also needs to be given to whether the information collected is likely to be of the right quality and meaningful in a way that could bring benefit to those people who are trying to help. I am not immediately convinced that collecting the data proposed would, in itself, lead to improvements in the ability of the school work force to support and help children with special educational needs and disabilities and to improve outcomes—obviously, that is at the bottom of all this—for those children and young people, which is what all hon. Members want, or that that would necessarily influence the prioritisation of professional development in SEN and disabilities at school or local level. I believe instead that improvements will come through the work that we are already taking forward with the Training and Development Agency for Schools—the TDA—our national strategies and others both to improve initial teacher training and to provide resources to support the continuing professional development of those staff who are already in post. Again, we share that objective across the House. I should like to say something about that before I return to the specifics of the data collection. The TDA has been developing new specialist units for trainee teachers that are designed to improve their skills in identifying, assessing and supporting the needs of pupils with SEN and disabilities. Those units, which were developed for primary undergraduate initial teacher training courses, have been successfully piloted and will be rolled out to all course providers this September. That is the right way to do things. We are being urged to move more quickly and I understand people's concerns, but it is right that those initiatives should be properly piloted and tested before they are rolled out universally. Work is also under way to develop similar materials for secondary undergraduate courses and for postgraduate certification in education courses, and that will be rolled out in September 2009. Ofsted has also been undertaking a thematic review of the journey taken by trainee teachers in acquiring SEN and disability knowledge and skills during their initial training and induction. The results of that review are expected shortly, and they will help us to understand where further improvements can be made—again, based on the evidence. For those who are already in post, our inclusion development programme, which was launched in October 2007—the hon. Member for Basingstoke made some observations about that, and I shall refer to them in a moment—will help to boost the confidence of teachers and other staff in a number of SEN areas. The opening round of the inclusion development programme has focused on training in relation to the communication difficulties experienced by children. Of course, that includes dyslexia, which has been mentioned during the debate. New specially produced training material is being distributed to schools via their local authorities. In subsequent rounds, the IDP will focus on the autistic spectrum disorders, ASD, and behavioural, emotional and social difficulties, BESD. The hon. Member for Basingstoke is critical of the IDP because she feels that it does not have support beyond the Government's walls and that, out in the country, there is an upswell of opposition to it. The IDP was developed in conjunction with I-CAN and Dyslexia Action, and it is endorsed by a wide range of voluntary organisations involved in communications and dyslexia. I fear that we may never be able to please all the various organisations—whether teaching unions or others—who write to us at the House and send their briefings to Front and Back Benchers, but we do not introduce such programmes without seeking input from stakeholders. They have a very extensive input into the IDP, which is widely endorsed. So I should like to paint a more complete picture of it, rather than the partial pictured painted by the hon. Lady. The Department also already plans to introduce a school work force census from 2010—again, that has been referred to during the debate—and it will provide the Department with individual-level information that relates to all teachers and support staff. I accept that the census is not intended to cover the detail of SEN-related training that is sought in amendment No. 2, but any data collection exercise on that scale requires a long lead-in time. Some data providers are already calling on us to reduce the existing scope of the planned census. It is a continual tension in government that hon. Members call on us to reduce burdens, bureaucracy, red tape and so on and that, sometimes almost before they have reached the full stop in the same sentence, they then ask us to impose more data collection and more activities on local government and schools. We must try to make a judgment on these matters, and any data collection exercise on a big scale must be considered very carefully and not undertaken without extremely good evidence that it will produce results on the front line. It is important to strike the right balance between collecting useful data and minimising the burden on service providers. You, Madam Deputy Speaker, will be aware of the old Welsh proverb, ““You don't make the goose any fatter by weighing it all the time.”” We must ensure that the activities that we undertake will result in real delivery on the front line. The census may prove to be a suitable vehicle for collecting such information, but it is a complex undertaking. We are piloting it in 2008-09 so that we can ensure that the burdens placed on schools are in fact manageable. If the pilots are successful, the census will be extended nationally in 2010. After that, we would be prepared to enter a dialogue with the interested partners about how the scope and coverage of the census might be expanded in future years. Perhaps information about the training and qualifications of teachers and support staff could be collected with effect from 2012 as an additional data item, but that would be contingent on several factors, including burdens on schools. I am not going to apologise for that, because it affects burdens for pupils at the front line, including burdens on schools and other candidates imposed by extra data items, of which there are likely to be many, because there is a long list of data collections that people would like to be undertaken but which have to be weighed carefully in relation to the burdens that they can create. We must be careful not to place unreasonable and undue burdens on schools and local authorities, and in the light of that, I invite hon. Members to withdraw amendment No. 2. The hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke) referred to services for deaf children. I have reminded the House of the all-party parliamentary group announcement by Lord Adonis about British sign language, and I can provide more details. The tender has been published, and we look forward to organisations coming forward to run the project, which will allow families with deaf children to make informed choices about whether their children should use British sign language. That has been welcomed by a wide range of organisations representing deaf children, and we are working closely with the Royal National Institute for Deaf People and the National Deaf Children's Society to address the gap in attainment between deaf and hearing-impaired children and their peers, so I hope that that information is useful for the hon. Lady. Part of the inclusion and development programme is the Removing Barriers to Achievement initiative, which is based on what is known about effective teaching for SEN children. It is a national programme, and we have just published a DVD on meeting the needs of children with dyslexia and speech, language and communication disorders. We are now developing materials for teaching children with autism, which will be followed by material on social, behavioural and emotional difficulties. I hope that that information is useful to the House, given the points that have been made. Finally, amendment No. 1 would oblige the Secretary of State to publish a report on how special educational needs information may assist him or other persons to improve the well-being of children in England with special educational needs. I am sure that it is intended to develop the purpose of the Bill and improve the provision of SEN information, but it is unnecessarily prescriptive. It will limit the way in which the Secretary of State can publish information to assist him or others in improving the well-being of children with SEN in England. The amendment would mean that that information would have to be published in the form of a report, which would not be helpful. The Bill as drafted does not preclude the possibility of a report being published, but it allows information to be published in any way or form that the Secretary of State considers helpful in promoting the well-being of children with SEN. A report is not the only way—and it may not be the best one—of achieving that end. As ever, I want to be helpful, because I understand the point that has been made by hon. Members and the sincere intention behind the amendment. The Department publishes an SEN statistical bulletin every year. Following the passage of the Bill, I undertake to look at how we can expand that bulletin to include more information—for example, information on attainment—to highlight which children with different types of SEN are not making as much progress as we would like, and to point the way towards action to address underperformance. The problem with the amendment is that it appears to force the Secretary of State to abandon that approach in the bulletin and instead publish a discursive report on SEN information. Publishing only a report would not be the best way of achieving the ends that we share across the House and that we all want to achieve.