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Bercow Review

The right hon. Gentleman could not have put it more powerfully if he had tried. That early intervention is incredibly important. Yes, it involves the child, but it is important to ensure that we have the benefit of the services of multidisciplinary teams. Precisely which representative will be relevant in a particular case will vary from one situation to another, but we need to have speech and language therapists, teachers, classroom assistants and special educational needs co-ordinators as part of the mix. Indeed, health visitors might be needed in certain circumstances, too. Some flexibility in that process is important. Reference has already been made to the continuum of services, and I want to underline that we need to ensure that, through effective joint commissioning between education and health services, we commission services that are across the piece. They should be universal services that can be of benefit to all children and young people who need to have their capacity to communicate taught, honed and nurtured. We need targeted services for those who require a little additional help—sometimes only for a short period and sometimes for longer—and specialist services, which are often tailored for the benefit of those with acute and ongoing needs, who will realistically require extensive and specialist provision, including therapy, sometimes for long periods. I simply say, in all courtesy, to the Government that I have made recommendations in respect of augmentative and assistive communication—that is to say, for those who require communication aids—and in respect of the requirements of young offenders, about which there is still some anxiety and scepticism. My message to the Government is that in taking this process forward and securing what I hope will be the advantageous implementation of the report's recommendations, we must be sure that we do more than just the easy stuff. We must cater more widely than just for those with relatively minor difficulties and those who need low-dosage intervention, of whom there are large numbers. They are incredibly important, and the Ministers are right to highlight those cases. However, we also have a duty to do more—to do all that is necessary—to bring benefit to those whose needs are the most acute. A child or young person who requires an expensive piece of technological kit in order to have a voice is deeply needy. They might be non-verbal, and in such situations we must stop at nothing to ensure that the appropriate help is provided. We must not fight shy of knowing the scale and incidence of the challenge with which we are confronted. In taking forward the pathfinders, we will learn a great deal. There will be five areas involved, and I am grateful to the Government for the fact that they will be funded by the Department for Children, Schools and Families or the Department of Health—they can fight about that between themselves—and have a responsibility to assess need, to devise services, to secure the appropriate skilled work force, to put the processes into effect, to monitor the outcomes and to report the results. That means having a work force, to boot, which is why we have recommended that speech, language and communication must be at the heart of all the qualifications leading to the integrated qualifications framework. Qualified teacher status must demand a greater knowledge of, and—to a degree—expertise in, speech, language and communication. It is also right that speech, language and communication should be a core requirement and an elective module of the new master's degree in teaching and learning, on whose introduction I congratulate the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families. Joint working must be to the fore, but I am sorry to say that at the moment, that principle is honoured more often in the breach than in the observance, especially at the level of strategic planning and priority setting. That is why I have said that we should let each children's trust designate an appointed person to drive forward the pursuit of improved speech, language and communication outcomes. I speak possibly as the voice of cynical experience when I say that I have a sense that if something is everybody's responsibility, ultimately it is no one's responsibility. If we name an individual and give him or her a task, set the benchmark, require the assessment and demand the performance, at least there will be a likelihood of a catalyst for improvement. Certainly, the public would have someone to whom they could properly direct their complaints or representations if success were not achieved. Tackling postcode variations is critical. Local variation, local initiation, local social entrepreneurship, and local variety depending on the make-up of one area relative to another are of course valid and necessary. However, we need to make some sort of core offer to children and young people that they can depend upon. They need a certain level and type of service, irrespective of the part of the country in which they happen to live. In that regard, I perhaps risk upsetting the Opposition Front-Bench spokesman, my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), but I say that there is a compelling case for the continuation of early-years targets beyond 2011, and for working towards the development of a national indicator on speech, language and communication as the prelude to a public service agreement target post-2011. Mr. Deputy Speaker, I have to say that engagement in this review has been the single most stimulating and rewarding endeavour of my 11-year parliamentary life. It is about two things. It is about helping needy, marginalised, vulnerable and sometimes frightened young people, because that is the right and decent thing to do. I have a child who is so affected, and I make no apology for trying to do my best to ensure that other children get the sort of excellent help that my son Oliver is receiving. However, this issue is not just or even mainly about compassion or niceness or being decent; it is also about the authentic self-interest of Britain plc, because tackling these problems is relevant to the educational attainment agenda. It is relevant to the greater qualifications agenda, to the acquisition of vocational skills agenda, to the fight against antisocial behaviour agenda, to the improvement of public health agenda, and to the pursuit of the commercial advantage of UK plc in an age in which a job for life is a relic of the past and the premium placed on speech, language and communication in today's knowledge economy is greater than ever. If in my small way, with the assistance of a fantastic advisory group and the support and engagement of parliamentarians throughout the House, I can broker an improvement in services for, and the life chances of, these vulnerable children and young people, I can say that I shall die a happier man—although not, I hope, just yet.