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Special Educational Needs and Disability (Support) Bill

I certainly agree. We know that all too often provision for SEN children tails off towards the end of primary school and descends into the dark abyss of nothingness at the start of secondary school. That does not always happen, and the Government are attempting to improve matters. As the Minister knows, my conclusion about speech and language was that resource was being front-loaded in the early years. I did not cavil at that, because it makes sense to intervene early, but I argued that that should not be to the exclusion or detriment of a necessary devotion of resource to children as they go through the later years of primary school and into secondary school. The reality with which we must currently contend, however, is that there are large numbers of children getting to the end of primary school and going into secondary school whose need has still not been identified. That need, unaddressed, will cause a child to be anxious, stressed, depressed, unable to communicate, incapable of performing, disinclined to engage, and often inclined only to express his or her unspeakable frustration at what is judged to be bad behaviour and conduct that is undoubtedly, however inadvertent and blameless, disruptive. In the field of special educational needs and disability, when talking about the behaviour agenda it is important not to conflate and confuse disability and disobedience, as I have regularly impressed on Ministers. I find it infuriating almost beyond endurance when some of the most low-grade, sub-standard, downmarket apologies for tabloid newspapers in this country, with their shrill, intolerant, bigoted political agendas, lambast people for behaving badly, and cruelly pick on children who might have done so but whose behaviour is occasioned and explained by either an undetected or unaddressed special educational need or disability. We must not get the two things confused. I feel that the duty I propose is reasonable, but if the Minister does not like it, may I make another proposal? At the very least, the Government—who recognise in the national strategies that permanent exclusions are too high, and who want to reduce them—should challenge high-excluding authorities to explain why they are high-excluding, and to set out plans for reducing the incidence of those exclusions. My other humble request of the Minister is that we get the guidance right. The guidance on exclusions has been revised a couple of times over the past two years, so a precedent has been set, and there is no earthly reason why we cannot tweak it again if necessary. I urge the Minister to comment today, and to follow up with further work, on strengthening the guidance on exclusions, so that it is manifestly clear and incapable of incomprehension. Schools must know what their duties are. I have said nothing about fixed-term, unofficial or internal exclusions. However, those unofficial and internal exclusions that are taking place can almost certainly be regarded as illegal. When a school simply says to a pupil, "It would be better if you went home today in order to calm down," it is shoving the issue away, abdicating responsibility and breaking the law in the process. Although there is not a completely comprehensive evidence base on the matter, the National Autistic Society, TreeHouse, the Special Educational Consortium and a number of organisations with which I deal almost daily, have large numbers of examples of such cases. We must move away from the idea of a permanent exclusion as a regular weapon and re-establish the proper notion that it is a mechanism of last resort to be applied if, and only if, all other potential and preferable avenues have been fully explored. As the Minister will understand, my motivation in bringing forward the Bill is not an obsessive determination to see passed on to the statute book the Bercow Act. I entirely understand why right hon. and hon. Members who have never served as Ministers, and perhaps entertain no hope or prospect of doing so, might think it a satisfactory consolation prize to wave in front of their grandchildren in their dotage a statute which their efforts have managed to achieve. I could not give a flying flamingo about having a piece of legislation to my name on the statute book. My sole but passionate concern is to bring about an improvement in the quality of life for some of society's most vulnerable, marginalised and excluded children, who can succeed with support but cannot without it. The proposals I recommend in my three-clause Bill are right on three fronts. They are right in the name of decency and fairness to vulnerable, marginalised and potentially excluded children. They are right for the generality of children in the education system, with whom SEN children can interact to good effect if adequate provision is made for them, so they can be right in the name of educational and social togetherness. Above all, the measures I commend are right for the effective pursuit of the national interest of UK plc in an age in which a job for life is a relic of the past and the premium placed on knowledge, skills, qualifications and the ability to communicate is greater than it has ever been. My Bill is relevant to the educational qualifications agenda, the acquisition of skills agenda, the fight against antisocial behaviour agenda, the public health agenda and the agenda of minimising the costs to our criminal justice system caused by people who languish on the scrapheap because a serious educational need or disability was not addressed, and they went off the rails, felt abandoned by society and took a damaging course as a consequence. We want to avoid all those undesirable consequences. We want to cater to everybody's needs, maximise potential, tackle social exclusion, and facilitate the extension of opportunity that is right for both social justice and the economic efficiency of the country. On that basis, I commend my Bill to the House, and look forward with eager anticipation to the contributions that might be made by other right hon. and hon. Members, and above all, to the Minister's reply on behalf of the Government.