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Special Educational Needs (Information) Bill

My Lords, it is very satisfactory to welcome such a sensible Bill. I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Pitkeathley, on bringing it forward to the House and on explaining its contents so clearly and what it implies. The idea behind it is simple, as the noble Baroness said. I am sure that we shall sometimes hear from local authorities that its execution is not simple and there may be objections regarding the bureaucracy that might be involved in keeping, publishing and monitoring the information that we need; but it is essential that the Bill should be executed and should become part of the framework within which local authorities make their provision for special needs. I cannot think why the amendments to the 1996 Act in the Bill have not been brought in previously, nor can I think of why they were not part of the original 1981 Act, because the need for the knowledge that the Bill will provide is pretty obvious. It is necessary partly because endless claims are made and much heat is generated on the question of what does or will work and what does not work, as the noble Lord, Lord Addington, said. Those claims are made—and I confess to frequently having made such claims—but they have never been based on proper evidence, because it was not available. The Bill, if enacted, will go a long way towards making possible proper evidence-based assessments of how things are going and what will do and what will not do for individual children. Until now most of the claims of what is best for children with special educational needs have been based either on theory or anecdote. Many noble Lords will have shared my experience of receiving a flood of correspondence from dissatisfied parents who are desperately seeking to do the best that they possibly can for their children’s education, but who find, as we have heard, that it is almost impossible to fight their way through the difficulties because they have no evidence on which they can base what they are going to argue if they have to face a tribunal. I hope that if this Bill is passed it will enormously help those unhappy parents and those of us who have been more theoretical in our claims regarding different forms of special educational needs. The concept of what works for a child, however limited the progress is, must relate to the progress that the child makes. In educational progress I of course include, as does the Bill, progress in interacting with other people, joining in shared activities and all the things that were included in Every Child Matters. Provided that the methods of recording a child’s progress and that the methods of monitoring it are properly and professionally devised, and strictly carried out, now at last we shall be in a position to know what works and how it works. Publication of these results will greatly aid the sharing of best practice, wherever it is found. Touching on the concept of the Bill as a building block, I hope that the new knowledge that we can obtain will lead us in the first place to a much greater and a much more honest communication between schools and parents, which, in turn, might help to generate a more co-operative and less adversarial relationship than is often the case at present. That is one of the horrors for parents, who come to regard their local authority as an enemy to be overcome by every possible strategy that they can think of. I hope that if local authorities see from the records that a child is not making educational progress in this wide sense they may be willing with the parents to explore alternative placements, especially for those children who are difficult to place, or whose parents are deeply dissatisfied with what is being offered. I hope that local authorities will not adopt the attitude that they sometimes adopt, which is, ““We are doing our very best and it is working, whatever you may think””. I hope, too, that the evidence that we shall now have will show how different from one another children are and how differently their disabilities affect them. I hope that local authorities may cease to lump all SEN children together and all support for them together as if they were all one and the same and as if that support were a kind of substance like milk which everyone should have but what it is and how it differs is totally disregarded. Above all, I hope that the new duty to be laid on local authorities may make them more open, especially with parents. I believe that most parents would prefer to deal with the local authority if, instead of being told sometimes that the extra help offered to their child is working perfectly well for his good, they were told that more could not be afforded. It should come out in the open that the provision for children with special educational needs is very expensive. Local authorities would win the support of parents if they were more honest and said, ““We will would do what we possibly can to meet the child’s needs, but we cannot afford everything”” Only then can we go back to a situation that obtained many years ago when parents of children with special educational needs trusted local authorities that they really did have the best interests of their children at heart and that they really did have an interest in their widely interpreted educational progress. Finally, I congratulate the Government on the spirit that lies behind Every Child Matters and the broad understanding of what education is, which has sometimes been lacking and was certainly lacking back in the 1970s when I first became interested in this subject. I congratulate the Government warmly and very much hope that the Bill will go forward smoothly.