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Special Educational Needs and Disability (Support) Bill

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. It is worse than intolerable; it is absolutely disgraceful—even diabolical. To return to the point about Nadia and her flurry of "bonjours", it adds to a school if children with special educational needs are at the very heart of what it does, because that shows the quality of its care. When I visit schools, it is often the little things—I hesitate to use that phrase as it might be misunderstood—that say so much. How a school helps and supports the most vulnerable members of our society speaks volumes about the quality of the school itself. An issue connected with speech and language was brought to my attention by some dedicated health workers in my constituency. It is to do with soothers—dummies as they were called in my day. [Interruption.] I am guided by my hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh) that "soothers" is an American term, but it is the term that was used when the matter was raised with me. I gather that the cheapest—and therefore probably the most widely available, and the most accessible to parents on low incomes—dummies or soothers harm the early development of speech in young children, compared with the most expensive ones, which do not cause that harm. The huge raft of ongoing work on that needs to be driven forward.