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Special Educational Needs and Disability (Support) Bill

I entirely agree, and I shall outline in a little more detail some proposals that we would like, to put more teeth into provision—to go much further than my hon. Friend's reasonable Bill. We all face the problem of joined-up action. Responsibilities for various aspects of SEN are vested in schools, children's centres, primary care trusts and local authority departments, but parents and teachers report that too often children's needs are not met because of inadequate liaison among those bodies. The teaching staff in too many schools have little or no expertise in recognising that speech and language intervention, for example, is needed. Too often, after a child has been assessed as requiring help by a speech and language therapist, usually employed by a primary care trust, the local authority can take months to reassess the case for funding purposes. Even then, it will not always make resources available via a statement or through additional School Action Plus funding. I have just had an appalling case of a child who was clearly in need of a specialist statement of support. The articulate, middle-class parents clearly knew what their child required and worked closely with the school, which had clearly acknowledged the problem, but they could not get a proper statement. It was delayed again and again. The local authority prevaricated and tried to make out that the need was substantially less than the experts said it was. The parents had to commission their own assessment, at no little expense. They then commissioned and paid for their own speech and language therapy specialist to work in the school, with the acquiescence of the school. At long last, after the intervention of myself and others, we have finally got an admission that the parents and the school had been right all along. We have now achieved the publication of a statement showing the extremity of that child's problems and what needs to be done about them. Actually, to give it its due, the local authority has now agreed to refund the money that the parents had to spend on employing their own therapist in the school. How much better would it have been if that could all have been agreed at the outset, and if the parents had not had to go through that constant battle, that war of attrition. Many parents are unable to see such battles through to the end, simply because they do not have the resources, the nous or the strength of character to pursue them on behalf of their children.