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Special Educational Needs and Disability (Support) Bill

I am grateful for that intervention, in which the hon. Gentleman raised some excellent points. I think that he used the word "symbiotic" earlier to describe the relationship between our separate contributions, which must be very worrying to the Whips on both sides of the House. Other Members wish to speak, so I shall move on to make a couple of further points. Since before I entered Parliament, I have been concerned about pre-school identification. If the Bill goes into Committee, I would like to see it amended to incorporate some provisions about that problem. I am aware of the "Son-Rise" programme, through which pre-school children on the autistic spectrum can really benefit from receiving help long before they get into the school system. Clause 1 deals with schools, and an important issue is the definition of such beyond just primary and secondary schools. For nursery and early-years provision, the requirement to have staff who know and understand what to look for across the whole range of SEN and other forms of disability—including deafness, for example, which my hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield talked about—is crucial. There is a profound need to ensure that young people are identified and assessed at the earliest possible opportunity and then given all the support they need and deserve. It would be helpful if we could widen the Bill to include nursery provision and, ideally, provision at an even earlier age. Perhaps the Minister could speak to her opposite numbers in the Department of Health in order to discuss how a much more widespread and wide-ranging programme of early identification could be brought about. We could perhaps work towards a position where statements were issued long before a child reached primary school. Let me move on to the other end of the problem, so to speak, by which I mean adults who may have gone right through their education without ever being assessed or given appropriate support and the opportunities it could have provided. I have a couple of quick points. First, I urge the Government to undertake some form of audit of people who were never assessed and never given support in order to establish whether any common pattern can be discerned in respect of where they lived, who their local GP was, which primary and secondary schools they went to and so forth. In other words, we need to work back to discover the opportunities missed for getting these people assessed, statemented and provided with the support they needed. I urge the Minister to discuss with her ministerial colleagues the possibility of providing such a reverse audit—not to lay blame, but to ensure that we correct the problem in the future. Until recently, my constituency was home to the Hamilton centre for adults with special educational needs. Sadly, the centre has now closed, with the service re-provided in Shelton in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent, Central (Mark Fisher). I support and help carers of a group of adults who believe that the services provided by the Hamilton centre were the most appropriate for them. Although Stoke-on-Trent city council has been good at explaining its decision on the alternative provision, with the best will in the world, it has missed the point because, as the hon. Member for Buckingham said, a range of services is needed, and for some people the Hamilton centre offers the right service. It might not be the right service in the view of social workers or some eminent professionals, but it is in the opinion of individuals and their carers. Therefore, we need to ensure that it is provided as part of a suite of services. I agree with the extremely good argument that SENCOs should be senior members of staff. At the highest levels of governance of a school, a SENCO should be saying, "Come on, folks, this service needs to be improved," or, "We should be celebrating what we are doing. This is really good provision." Unless SENCOs are at the highest level of governance, they will not have the necessary clout to make changes when appropriate. I have a few concerns—perhaps this is where the symbiotic relationship will fall down—about the need for SENCOs to be qualified teachers. Up and down the country, there are SENCOs who have done a superb job at the highest level without having a formal teaching qualification. I will avoid the obvious metaphor, but we are in danger of losing the skills and ability of some very good SENCOs who, for whatever reason, are not able or willing to go through the qualification process to become teachers. I urge my hon. Friend the Minister, with whom I have discussed the issue recently, to examine the case of those SENCOs who do a superb job but are not in a position to qualify as a teacher either because of age or personal circumstances. In an intervention, I expressed concern about other duties. Given how important it is that SENCOs do their job to the fullest of their ability, that their training is constantly updated, and that their continuing professional development is maintained to the highest standards, stretching them in myriad other directions and challenging and questioning how every hour of their time is spent is a problem. I urge my hon. Friend the Minister to consider how schools use their SENCOs, and what other duties those schools impose on those staff. Proposed new section 14B(5) states:""Any regulations made under subsection (4) must in particular specify a requirement for every member of staff appointed as Special Educational Needs Co-ordinator to have training in special educational needs and disability, including autism."" Later, in the interpretation clause, the meaning of "autism" is clarified, but, on a minor point, I wonder whether the proposed new section should include a more explicit reference to autistic spectrum disorder. I do not know whether I am alone in this view, but I think that perhaps Ofsted inspections should take place without notice. I know that changes have been made to the arrangements, but I think that rather than a school's being given a week or a month's notice of an inspection, it might be better for an inspector to turn up at lunchtime on a wet Wednesday and to say "Hello there—I am your Ofsted inspector and I have come to carry out an inspection." There are a number of problems with Ofsted, but one of them is the flurry of activity that takes place before an inspection to ensure that staff understand what the policy requires and are present to discuss it. I think that we may be creating a false idea of what happens during an Ofsted inspection. I must choose my words carefully here, but in years gone by it was said that members of the royal family believed that coal was white because it was always whitewashed. We are encouraging school staff to run around like mad things preparing themselves for an inspection, when it would be better to have a shapshot of what really happens at lunchtime on that wet Wednesday when the inspector calls unannounced. We should also bear in mind the huge stress to which we subject staff in the run-up to an Ofsted inspection. It would be much better for them to know that the inspector will see them warts and all than to feel that they must be on their best behaviour as he or she observes them giving a lesson. We should take a bit of the pressure off them, so that they need not spend a month in a heightened state of frenzy. I urge my hon. Friend the Minister to consider introducing SEN inspections. Specialist Ofsted inspectors would visit schools around the country simply looking at SEN provision and at pupils. They would have been trained to be able to identify pupils who had not been statemented but should have been, and the school staff could use that as a resource. If they expressed concern about, say, three or four children who had not been statemented, the inspector, or inspection team, might respond supportively by expressing surprise that the authority had not granted statements. Inspectors would be able to bring specialist knowledge to bear and to say "Best practice at the moment is to do something slightly different", or, alternatively, "What you are doing here is best practice, and we will ensure that it is spread when we carry out further specialist inspections." The issue of exclusions concerns me greatly, for several reasons. We routinely exclude young people from schools when their only crime has been to have a special educational need which may manifest itself in violent behaviour in the classroom or in disobedience. That is not the problem, however. The problem is the underlying one of a special educational need that may never have been picked up. At a certain point after primary school and the early years of secondary education, frustration or one of a host of other possible triggers may cause young people with special educational needs to demonstrate behaviour that is more exaggerated. They may have managed to lose themselves in the big school until that point, but something then happens that causes them to stand out. That may lead to exclusion, although the only crime that such young people have committed is having a need that has not been recognised or met. I should like to see a review—rather like a backwards audit—of people who have passed through the entire education system without having ever been statemented. I should also like to see an audit of exclusions to establish how many involve young people who have never been statemented but should have been. Such problems ought to be picked up early, although some young people may not demonstrate the behaviour that draws them to the attention of the school authorities and leads to an exclusion until the last year of their schooling. By that time, in some senses it is too late, but it should not be. As has been said, there is a void and an abyss: a child reaches school-leaving age and is abandoned. We need to make sure that we identify the problems as soon as possible. I am also concerned about informal exclusions, when, for example, a parent might be told: "The Ofsted inspectors are due in on Monday. You've been talking about taking your young one for a few days away; doing that next week would be a really good idea." Alternatively, a parent might receive a telephone call in the morning to be told: "We think it would be a good idea if you took your child home for lunch and then they come back in tomorrow." Although they are illegal, such informal exclusions happen time and again.