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Special Educational Needs and Disability (Support) Bill

May I say what a pleasure it is to speak after the hon. Member for Buckingham (John Bercow) on this incredibly important subject? If I may, I will take the House on the journey from childhood to adulthood of children with special educational needs, and say why I think the Bill is so incredibly important. While listening to the hon. Gentleman present his Bill, I was interested to hear things that I did not know about our Government's policy. Obviously, I have not followed such issues as closely as he has. I am concerned about the target to reduce statements of special educational needs, which is perhaps a mistaken policy, for the following reasons. Twenty years ago, premature babies born at 24, 26 and 28 weeks would not have survived the first six weeks of their lives. With improvements in medical technology, such children are now increasingly making it through the early years and into adulthood, and in many cases leading long and happy lives. However, we also know that many of those children will have single or multiple physical or learning disabilities. At a time when we are seeing an increase in the number of children born with such disabilities—children who in the past would not have made it from babyhood to childhood, let alone adulthood—the Government seem to be going against the trend, mistakenly in my view. It is also the case that more older women are giving birth, more births are taking place by caesarean section, and more births involve the use of instruments. All those factors present a risk to the child. I do not think that people fully understand what happens when a child is born in difficult circumstances. It often does not become clear until much later in the child's life. We are only at the beginning of finding out about the impact of bad treatment of children in the earliest stages of their lives on the way in which their neurological systems do or do not develop, and on the networks that are created in their brains. We are seeing an increase in binge drinking not just among young people generally but, in particular, among young women. Another group of at-risk mothers are those who do not realise that they are pregnant, turn up at the hospital believing that they have appendicitis, and then discover that they are having a baby. I have met one such mother. These women do not alter their social behaviour as women tend to when they know that a baby is on the way, and are not able to take care of the child while it is in the womb. We are seeing an increase in the number of cases of foetal alcohol syndrome, which, in extreme cases, damages children's facial characteristics. It may also be very difficult to spot that a child is carrying a learning disability alongside the physical damage that it suffered in utero.