Special Educational Needs (Information) Bill (1 February 2008)

Speech by Annette Brooke MP on Thu 31st Jan 2008

Annette Brooke (Mid-Dorset and North Poole) (LD): I congratulate the hon. Member for Gateshead, East and Washington, West (Mrs. Hodgson) on obtaining a high position in the ballot and, more importantly, on her choice of issue-it touches so many people's lives and hearts. I share her passion for wanting to improve the outcomes for children with special needs and the processes involved for parents, carers and children, by which those improved outcomes might be achieved.

The hon. Lady described her experience as a parent. She was fortunate in managing to obtain speech therapy for her son at such an early age, and she highlighted how provision varies across the country. We will all have been approached by parents and carers in our constituencies who desperately want to achieve the best possible education for their children. I am in touch with a parent autism support group based in Poole, and I have listened to the many concerns of individual parents-a frequent cry is, "Why is it a continual battle?" TreeHouse recently organised an event in my constituency to enhance communication between Poole borough council and this group. A lack of belief and confidence in the local authority emerged from the discussion, and more information might help the situation.

The two Select Committee reports on the matter, which were published in 2005-06 and 2006-07, have made an important contribution to the debate on special educational needs. Many of us feel that whatever role we had to play in the educational system, we had neglected this area over many years. Important issues were highlighted in both the reports in terms of parents' confidence and the information available to them. I endorse the recent report's recommendation that publishing provision maps for each area would at least help to inform choice.

Our Government speak a lot about choice for parents and pupils. Parents often feel that they have no choice in the area of special educational needs. It is difficult for parents to make informed choices. When I was Poole borough council's chairman of education, I was delighted that we had a funded position in the parent partnership services to offer parents what was supposed to be independent advice. Sadly, parents do not have confidence in the independence of that advice-I find that increasingly in my work as an MP. I can only feel that information would help. We need more information at individual level. We need to know what is available and how it is used. I agree that we need to review the data held at individual, school, local and national level.

Ofsted's latest annual report, which is important at school level, said:

"Where pupils with learning difficulties or disabilities made good or outstanding progress...Effective planning ensured that resources and support were targeted to meet pupils' particular needs so that their skills and confidence developed at a good pace."

Teaching assistants were seen as important. Conversely, the report said that where there was gross underachievement in pupils with learning difficulties

"the tasks set were too hard or they were not demanding enough to extend pupils' skills and understanding."

In other words, we need the good use of data within the classroom and the school context, and that must be matched up with teacher training, which, as has been said, is important. We must extend that to the training of classroom assistants, who have an incredibly important role to play.

Mr. Sheerman: Does the hon. Lady agree that not only the initial teacher training process, but the continuous professional development is essential? Some of the teachers who are in place need such training. Appropriate training modules are available and they are not as expensive as some Ministers fear.

Annette Brooke: I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, because I agree that that is the case. The Government have committed-I believe in response to the first of the Select Committee's reports-to provide more continuous professional development. I would like some hard information on that. Is it really happening? Is the supply cover being provided in schools to release teachers to receive that training? That training is essential not only because of the postgraduate certificate of education, but because we also have school-centred initial teacher training-SCITT-and even "Teach first", where the very talented graduates go straight into the classroom. I would not think that they would be experts across the whole SEN sphere, so such training is vital.

As the Special Educational Consortium, reinforced by the Royal National Institute for Deaf People, says, having more information has the potential to improve our understanding of what works, to provide a better basis for the sharing of good practice, to improve our understanding of training and professional needs and to provide a more secure basis for the development of national policy. The Ofsted report of 2004 found that under-expectation was a significant factor in the underachievement of children with SEN and that too little is known about the attainment of pupils with SEN. We know that the RNID is flagging up the incredible statistic that only 32.9 per cent. of deaf children across the board achieve five GCSEs at grades A to C, whereas the average for all children is 57.1 per cent. We need to know more about that underperformance.

I received an interesting representation from a teacher, and as we are all acknowledging that teachers are so important, I should like to go through it. The teacher stated:

"As a teacher with over 20 years' experience in special education, I know how current legislation inadvertently hinders the development of inclusive provision for all learners. There is currently insufficient information available on the extent of diversity of learners in schools; this means that there is not enough information on pupils identified as having special educational needs and, as a result, provision cannot be effectively planned or monitored. Current statistics available do not even sufficiently record the number of pupils said to have special educational needs...This will have a direct bearing on strategic planning for effective provision".

The statistics will also obviously inform how the range of teacher training that we have mentioned needs to take place and the development of best practice.

It is pretty obvious that good information is needed to underpin strategy at local and national level. We need to address the individual school, local authority and national levels. The Ofsted report of 2004 said that only a quarter of local education authorities had strong strategic management of SEN and the majority had weak evaluation systems. It is a long time to wait for 2009 and the next big Ofsted report. It is therefore important that this Bill is being introduced today, so that we can start digging in to some of these important issues.

John Bercow (Buckingham) (Con): I wonder if I may put to the hon. Lady something that only the other day illustrated to me the failure to understand the significance of the issues with which we are dealing. A well meaning, but relatively ill informed councillor, in a part of the country that I will not identify, said to me that he thought that I was, in taking an interest in speech, language and communication needs, championing a noble cause. However, he said, he thought that I should understand that it was already a huge challenge for local education authorities to preserve front-line services, and that provision for SEN had to be considered in that context. Oh, how sad it is when someone is so ignorant.

Annette Brooke: I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention and he sums up the feeling in the House that not enough attention has been given to special educational needs. Inevitably, there has been a focus on raising standards and achieving the five A-C grades. If a school is making a decision on how to allocate its resources, it can be target driven and may not direct them to where the need is greatest.

Collecting information on school action is especially important. Much funding for special educational needs is delegated to schools, and parents do not have confidence that that money is necessarily spent on special educational needs or the needs of their offspring. Clearer information would help schools to demonstrate that they are indeed allocating funds to the area for which they are designated. We all have a part to play in moving forward the debate on special educational needs, and that is why it is so important that we have excellent champions of the issue on both sides of the House to raise its profile.

The Bill contains two basic proposals that would place a duty on the Secretary of State to collect and publish information on children with special educational needs. Both relate to England. Both duties are focused on information that could help to improve the wellbeing of children with SEN, and such information would have to be published each year. It is important that the information should go beyond educational achievement, and the reference to the five outcomes from Every Child Matters-stay safe, be healthy, enjoy and achieve, make a positive contribution, and achieve economic wellbeing-is very important.

There are so many issues facing children with special educational needs and their families. The bullying and exclusion rates are well documented, so we know that we must address the whole child, not just the educational results. As the hon. Lady said, TreeHouse has just completed research into parliamentary answers on autism over the past 10 years. It was not surprising that the Government were unable or have chosen not to answer many of those questions, because-TreeHouse found-no estimate is made of the information requested or it is not collected; there are no plans to collect the information requested or it is not possible to provide it; records are not kept; data are not readily available; no information is available on the question; or the information requested is not held centrally. That sums up the huge gaps in our knowledge.

It is important that the Bill addresses all types of special needs. I am very interested in the causes of dyslexia and autism, but those are perhaps high profile special educational needs that, as amateurs, we know a fair bit about, and there are many different types of special needs. The more we learn, the more we find that particular types need a particular approach in the classroom.

I have received a representation from the Joint Epilepsy Council, and epilepsy is a condition that we have not discussed much in our debates on special educational needs. The JEC points out that children and young people with epilepsy routinely experience potential health, learning, behavioural and emotional needs as a direct or indirect result of their epilepsy. One has only to visit a special educational needs school to become aware of that. The JEC believes that the Bill could help the situation for children with epilepsy. If the Government were to collect more data on the population of children and young people with epilepsy, it could improve outcomes and education for those with the condition. It is important, therefore, that we ensure that we are covering the widest range of special educational needs possible.

Mr. Sheerman: We all know that many schools deliberately exclude children with special educational needs. Many parents support those schools. They may believe passionately that SEN is an important educational challenge, but they may also support schools that do not want SEN children in their midst. It is a real problem that schools today can still exclude poor children, children with special educational needs and looked-after children-and get away with it.

Annette Brooke: I am in danger of taking part in debates on several issues this morning as I care about so many of them. The hon. Gentleman's point is right, and parents can have justifiable concerns if behaviour in the classroom makes the situation difficult for all pupils. The answer is not exclusion, but proper provision and support for the children with special educational needs. Exclusion is the quick-fix option.

Mr. Sheerman: The hon. Lady has misunderstood my point. The intake of so many schools in the independent sector, or of grammar schools and even faith schools, manages by some mechanism to include almost no SEN children.

Annette Brooke: That is true. There are great variations in intake and that is then reflected in the results of the school. We now have admissions policies, in which children with special educational needs should be given a fairly high priority, and I hope that the Government will take that into account when ensuring that the admissions policies are followed.

I recently tabled a written question to the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families that asked

"how many children aged (a) 1 year, (b) 2 years, (c) 3 years, (d) 4 years and (e) 5 years were identified as having a special educational need in each year since 2001, broken down by local authority."

The answer read:

"The information requested can only be provided at disproportionate cost."-[ Official Report, 28 January 2008; Vol. 471, c. 176W.]

I have two concerns about that. The first is the mention of disproportionate cost, because it is claimed that this Bill will not require any extra resources. We should be wary of that claim, because it might have cost implications. I would not want us to pass a Bill and raise expectations if resources were not available to match them. But my greatest concern was that I was trying to obtain information on early years, on the basis that early identification, matched with appropriate support or treatment, is crucial.

It is really important for us to know how many children have been identified at age three or age four and all the way through, because we could then track how effective we are at making early identification. We could track how good our early years provision is and the training of early years workers, which is just as important as the other training that has been mentioned. Some special educational needs will be identified only when the child is slightly older but there are nevertheless a number of conditions, some of which the hon. Member for Buckingham (John Bercow) is involved with, that would benefit from specialist early intervention.

We should see any costs in the SEN sector as an investment. If we identified special needs at an early age and intervened appropriately, there would be large savings over years in money spent in the school system and perhaps even in the prison system.

It is important that we see the measure as a way of raising expectations, by improving information about children's progress and helping to establish the right infrastructure. We must be wary, however, of raising false expectations. Will data collection bring utopia? I am not at all sure that on its own it could possibly do so. Implementation and teacher training across all courses is all-important.

The special educational needs co-ordinator is important. One of the recommendations of the earlier Select Committee report was that the SENCO should be a member of the senior management team. That is absolutely vital. There can be no working SEN leadership in schools unless the SENCO has status in the school. That person will of course be selected for their leadership qualities. We need a whole-school approach.

Educational psychologists have been mentioned briefly. I have spoken about them quite a lot in Parliament. From my contacts I understand that there is still uncertainty about who will fund training for educational psychologists and how it will be funded. The Government have responded to the concerns that arose due to the change in qualifications for educational psychologists and in the training process, but we face the prospect of at least a year when there will be few new educational psychologists coming through the system. There is a sense of insecurity; people have told me that they do not want to go in for that career because they are not sure how their training will be financed. That is serious.

We need to address much more than just data. We must make sure that we are not simply collecting data for data's sake. We do not want bureaucracy for bureaucracy's sake. We do not want league tables to emerge from the process, but evidence-driven policy sounds like a pretty good idea-a good thing-if we can use the evidence at individual school, local and national level to improve outcomes for all our children with special educational needs.

I give the Bill my support, but I look forward to the Committee, because there is a lot of detail to be teased out to make sure that we have information that is monitored and used so that it leads to better outcomes.