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Special Educational Needs and Disability (Support) Bill

That is a very fair point; I absolutely endorse it. More legislation and regulation is not always the answer. We require the right legislation and regulation, and for it to be appropriate and effective. I fear that a lot of what this Government have done over recent years has been about piling regulation on regulation, which has completely queered the pitch in this case. The benchmark of whether it is right or not must be the quality of the outcomes for the children whom it is meant to help and support, and whom it too often does not. The other point from Brian Lamb, which endorses clause 2, is about inspections, which""frequently ignore the experiences of children with SEN, so any problems remain unheard and unrecognised. As a result, children with autism often struggle to reach their potential."" There are also concerns that a survey found that a third of secondary schools in England are not ready for the new regulations on provision for SEN pupils that are due to come into effect from September of this year, whereby all SENCOs will need a formal teaching qualification and to receive additional training. I certainly support those measures, but the Association of School and College Leaders and other teaching groups have warned that many schools are not ready or already run alternative arrangements, which work well and will have to be dismantled. We need a degree of flexibility where there are already examples of best practice. That links to clause 1 of my hon. Friend's Bill. The Times Educational Supplement reported last month that thousands of SEN teachers are at risk of having their pay cut under proposals to overhaul allowances. Teachers who work predominately with SEN pupils qualify for an extra payment of more than £1,900 per annum, but the minimum allowance could be cut to £1,000 if the Government approve new recommendations. All these new regulations, all this new guidance and all the new legislation will not have an effect if we do not have the people in place at the sharp end who can deliver the services and support that we all agree these children need. We must make sure that the professional teaching staff are there, are on side and are signed up to the changes that we all want to see. I want to finish by discussing some of the proposals that my party produced, with the help of Sir Robert Balchin, in the second report of the Commission on Special Needs in Education back in 2007. They are relevant to the Bill and, in fact, go further than it. In that report, we proposed root-and-branch reform of the system, from the assessment of children to the provision of services. That returns me to the point on which my hon. Friend just challenged me. At the moment, local authorities are the assessors of a child's need and are responsible for arranging provision for that need and for funding it. That treble responsibility has led local authorities gradually to reduce the number of statements issued, clearly so as to save money. Over the past 10 years, the number of children for whom a statement of SEN was made has changed. Back in 1997, the figure was 35,650, yet in 2006 the figure had reduced substantially—by a third—to some 22,600. The number of tribunals over that period went up sharply, by some 40 per cent., with a large number of parents winning their appeals to tribunals. The problem has not gone away. There are fewer statements, but there is clearly still a big problem. Parents are less satisfied with the support that they receive and therefore have to go to a tribunal to try to get a better deal for their children. As a result, the number of statements issued over the past 10 years has fallen by a third and there is greater dissatisfaction about whether children are getting the appropriate support that they need. We think that there is a case for separating the powers of the local authority and handing the responsibility for assessment to independent professionals. One of our commission's key recommendations was that statements should be replaced by special needs profiles drawn up by profile assessors, who will be educational psychologists and other such professionals. The profiles would be cumulative and subject to regular review, ensuring that continued assessment and provision could be as dynamic as the child's needs, because, of course, situations change. A child does not have a static special educational need that requires the same support, or the same level of support, all the way through that child's school career. In recognising that early intervention is crucial, the commission also urged that special needs profiles should be created as early in a child's life as possible. The profiles would allocate the child to one of a number of support categories, as is the case in the United States, Canada and much of Europe. Each level of support would then legally attract a certain amount of funding, which the pupil would carry to a mainstream or special school. Parents would be able to negotiate with any mainstream or special school for a place, irrespective of the local authority area in which they lived. To avoid the stress of tribunals, which I have already mentioned, we also want to see a special needs mediation scheme to try to establish the best approach for a child by agreement rather than by conflict, adversarialism and brinkmanship. Another proposal was that special schools, under a rolling programme, should be given special academy status, providing considerable greater freedoms to develop as their professional requirements suggest and to expand pupil numbers. That follows on from the recent announcements on the inclusion of primary schools in the academy programme. The whole new system that we have proposed will lead to inclusion where parents want it. In some areas, some types of inclusion have long proved a great success. Many children with sight and hearing impediments, for example, benefit enormously from integration, as we have already mentioned, as do children with physical disabilities. We should not skirt over the enormous social benefits to all children who have been taught alongside them. That is the sort of common-sense premise from which inclusion was first born. The reasonable assumption is that those capable of participating in mainstream education should be able to do so, regardless of their disability. However, that moderate and sensible belief was hijacked in the late 1990s and skewed into a rather hard-line ideology. Baroness Warnock, whose 1978 report on special educational needs caused the enshrining of the policy of inclusion in the Education Act 1981, has herself recently denounced inclusion as having gone too far. She has recognised that it has condemned many children with highly complex and sensitive needs to an all too restrictive mainstream schooling. We should also know that, across the board, parents' confidence in mainstream education has wavered since 1997. As is well known, since then the number of children attending independent schools has risen by more than 11 per cent.—that was certainly the case before the recent effects of the recession. More and more parents have scrimped and saved to be able to afford school fees and to opt out of the state system. What is less well known is that 83 per cent. of that new intake have had special educational needs. That damning indictment shows how parents feel about SEN provision in too many maintained schools. We need to restore confidence in the system, and that means making it more precise and fairer, and honing it to the needs of parents and children.