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Ms Estelle Morris: Both the hon. Gentleman and the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Mrs. Browning) have referred to that paragraph. I do not wish to repeat this too many times, but their interpretation is not correct. I am grateful for the opportunity to state this now, rather than leave it for another couple of hours. We have no intention of introducing quotas. Paragraph 19 says:
- "They would therefore not operate as strict quotas".
Mr. Foster: I am grateful to the Minister for taking the opportunity to make that clear. She said, rightly, that there are real concerns about the differences in the number and timing of statements in different local education authorities. If what we have heard is a clear assurance that the intention of that section of the Green Paper is to "get behind the figures"--as she put it--and to gain a better understanding of what is going on so we learn from best practice, many people will be heartened.
Is the Minister aware that many people still have some suspicion that the Government intend to remove many of the legal rights and entitlements to special educational needs provision? She may be aware of a letter received in the past couple of days by the Secretary of State from a child of nearly 15 years who is a pupil at a Plymouth school. In his letter, Ryan Gross says:
Finally, I wish to comment on spin-doctoring. I am grateful that the Minister has announced today a near trebling of the budget, but let us not be too carried away by her announcement. She has said that £11 million will be made available per annum. I have done a quick back-of-the-cigarette-packet calculation. I know, for example, that if a mainstream school introduces a lift to provide access for disabled children, it must be separately powered due to fire regulations. The cost, therefore, will be at least £50,000--and that may be an underestimate. On that basis, the entire sum announced today will provide 200 lifts for 24,000 schools. It will not go very far in helping to ensure that all disabled children's needs are met.
Ms Morris:
It is better than nothing.
Mr. Foster:
The Minister says from a sedentary position that it is better than nothing, and she is right. As she said, the move towards inclusion--with all the back-up, teacher training and resource support that will be needed--will cost a considerable amount. I am glad that the Government recognise that, but I hope to hear from them a real commitment to making those resources available. The children of this country deserve to have their needs met--those with special educational needs particularly deserve to have them met--but we also need resources.
Mr. Keith Hill (Streatham):
I warmly welcome the Green Paper on special educational needs, which is the first comprehensive review of special needs for 20 years. With special needs education now costing £2.5 billion a year--12.5 per cent. of schools' budgets--it seems sensible to look closely at how this large sum can be spent and whether it is being spent in a way that will bring greater benefits to children in need.
In particular, it seems appropriate to consider in detail the operation of the statementing system. The number of statements nationwide has risen by 40 per cent. in the past five years. Nearly 3 per cent. of children now have
statements, compared with the 2 per cent. envisaged in the Warnock report which led to the introduction of statements in 1981.
Although improved in recent years, there are still problems with the statementing system. As hon. Members will know from their constituency casework, the process is complex, bureaucratic and prone to lengthy delays which are harmful to children. As schools and parents demand ever more statements, the cost of statementing--together with the legal costs of dealing with tribunal cases--is putting a major strain on local education authority budgets, not least in London, part of which I represent.
Nobody--certainly not the Government in the Green Paper--is challenging the principle of statementing. Nobody--certainly not the Government, as the publication of the Green Paper proves--is disputing the need for special education provision. In 1981, Warnock estimated that one in five children would require some such form of provision at some stage in their school careers. That figure is borne out by the current estimate that 18 per cent. of the school population has special educational needs.
The question is whether the current levels of statementing represent the most appropriate and cost-effective form of intervention. That reasonable question is addressed in the Green Paper, and my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for School Standards has made it clear today that if savings can be made by reducing the number of statements the money saved will continue to be earmarked for special educational needs teaching. I welcome that vital assurance.
I also welcome the Green Paper's emphasis on early intervention in special needs. The Government are surely right to place the emphasis on preventative, rather than remedial action. Indeed, such intervention cannot come too early. That is why it is good to see in the Green Paper--and in more detail in the Department's draft guidance on behaviour support plans--the proposal that from April next year all LEAs should have in place early years development plans, focusing initially on four-year-olds and ultimately extending to all children from birth to eight years.
Language is vital for the development of literacy and other skills. Chapter 7 of the Green Paper rightly emphasises the need for improvements in speech therapy. I am pleased that the Government recognise the need to resolve the lack of clarity over funding for speech therapy between local education authorities and health authorities, and their willingness to consider changes in the law to ensure that children receive the services that they require.
Currently, the relatively small number of speech therapists face exceptionally heavy case loads, with children sometimes experiencing long waits--even for initial assessment. I hope that my hon. Friend can offer the assurance that an increase in the number of speech therapists, with appropriate salary levels and conditions of work to attract them, will be an early call on resources.
Above all, I welcome the Government's fundamental thrust in the Green Paper towards inclusion in their approach to special education. I welcome that approach because, as the representative of an inner-city constituency, I recognise all too clearly the penalties for individual children and young people--and to the wider society--of exclusion from the school system.
Between 1991-95, school exclusions in the United Kingdom rose by 400 per cent. Exclusions are rising most dramatically in the primary sector. Dr. Carl Parsons, author of the Canterbury Christ Church college report on exclusion, estimates that education authorities are now dealing with up to 20,000 permanently excluded children a year, at a direct cost to the country of £60 million.
Last week's White Paper on youth crime identified truancy and exclusion as a key factor relating to youth criminality. In its report on young people and crime, published just over a year ago, the Audit Commission found that 65 per cent. of school-age offenders were not attending lessons regularly. The majority--42 per cent.--had been excluded, while the other 23 per cent. were playing truant a significant amount of the time. It also estimated that around £1 billion is spent every year in dealing with the effects of juvenile delinquency. These are among the social costs to which exclusion contributes in significant measure.
The personal costs are to be found in the tremendous strain on the families caring for these children and young people, and the under-achievement, alienation and loss of worthwhile prospects for the individuals themselves.
Representing as I do the Lambeth area, I have a special cause for concern in the disproportionate level of exclusions among black pupils. Higher rates of exclusion among, in particular, Caribbean boys and youths is a well attested phenomenon, even if the estimates of over-representation vary somewhat. The Commission for Racial Equality's analysis of the DfEE's latest figures suggest that Caribbean pupils are about seven times more likely than white pupils to be excluded.
It is perfectly clear that the increasing number of black exclusions follows the general pattern of rising exclusions. There are many and varied explanations and possible solutions for this, some of which I shall touch on later. However, even where schools have successfully cut their exclusion rates, they have still not been able to address the over-representation of certain ethnic groups. In other words, we need to put in place strategies to tackle the specific needs of such groups. These should include developing partnerships with ethnic minority and other community organisations, developing mentoring programmes, teaching pupils how to respond to racial harassment, and discussing racism and inequality within the curriculum.
I am pleased that my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State with responsibility for school standards has personally endorsed the CRE's good practice guide. The guide contains a number of proposals to reduce exclusions in general, but I draw her attention again to three specific recommendations aimed at dealing with potential racism and racial stereotyping in schools: first, the inclusion of racial equality as a management issue in head teacher training; secondly, addressing racial equality issues within training programmes for existing teachers, particularly those concerning behaviour management and curriculum leadership; thirdly, ensuring that equal opportunities issues are central concerns within initial teacher training, alongside literacy and numeracy.
I come next to the issue of emotional and behavioural difficulties as a source of exclusion from schools, although I do not wish to link this directly with the issue of black exclusions. I say that because, interestingly, the 1996 Office for Standards in Education report on exclusion from secondary schools found that excluded Caribbean children tended to be relatively successful at school and that
In their 1995 study of primary school exclusions, Hayden and Lawrence found that, among the LEAs that they examined, nearly half of excluded children had statements of special needs or were in the process of being assessed, mainly for EBD.
There is certainly evidence that exclusion is often linked with poor acquisition of basic skills, particularly literacy. Poor language skills can result in frustration, which is reflected in behavioural difficulties, and prevent the development of literacy skills. That is why I drew attention earlier to the importance of speech therapy as a means of diagnosing such problems at an early stage.
Equally, EBD can also prevent learning. That is why the Government are right to acknowledge in the Green Paper that early identification and intervention can be particularly successful in tackling EBD.
I welcome the support for nurture groups and for school behaviour policies designed to create the calm atmosphere for learning that children with EBD problems especially require. However, we should not overlook the fact that getting children to behave in the classroom may not deal with the underlying causes of bad behaviour. Conformity in the classroom does not solve the problem if children still take their anger away with them out of school. I hope, therefore, that my hon. Friend the Minister will look at methods such as those employed by educational therapists, some of which can be acquired by classroom teachers through initial or in-service training.
For some children, of course, only therapy will meet their needs, and they will not make progress without it. Nor, might I add, are all EBD children disruptive. There are quiet and withdrawn children who may well, for whatever reason--perhaps abuse--suffer from an emotional problem that prevents learning and for whom extra literacy support will not work unless the emotional issue is dealt with. However, where a child is disruptive, exclusion may be unavoidable, but it really must be as a last resort.
It is not just that exclusion is so expensive. Home tuition or placement in a pupil referral unit costs more than twice as much as teaching a child at school. More important, permanent exclusion can have a devastating effect on the educational chances of the individuals concerned. Only one in three pupils excluded from
primary schools ever returs to mainstream education, and for secondary pupils it is less than one in five. For most excluded children, exclusion is a sentence for life.
From next April, all local education authorities will be required to prepare behaviour support plans, setting out their arrangements for the education of children with behavioural difficulties, including those with special educational needs. Under the SEN code of practice, of course, schools are required to tackle behaviour problems, but as I understand it local education authorities will only be required to set out their expectations of schools in identifying the cause of behaviour problems and the procedures to be adopted before calling on support services.
It has been suggested to me and I now suggest to my hon. Friend the Minister that there is a problem with the linkage between the LEA and schools under the local management of schools and grant-maintained arrangements. In my borough of Lambeth, only half the primary schools buy in specialist support from the learning support service's primary pupil referral unit and only one of the seven secondary schools, five of which are grant-maintained, buy into the secondary referral unit. The remainder of the schools make their own arrangements for the non-statutory SEN stages. In other words, we are relying on schools to act wisely in this matter, but we have no guarantees.
If the Green Paper's object of reducing the number of statements is achieved, we shall be putting extra resources back into schools, but we shall not know or have any guarantees about how the resources are being used or even if they are being used for SEN purposes. That in turn relates to the general question of the future role of learning support services. Although the Green Paper discusses the changed role of educational psychologists and the use of special school staff to support mainstream schools, I imagine that my hon. Friend the Minister would agree that the preventive work carried out traditionally by learning support services is a cornerstone of SEN policy.
However, the consequence of the greater delegation of school budgets has been a move away from an LEA core-funded service towards systems such as service level agreements. In effect, learning support services have had to turn themselves into marketing agencies under pressure to sell their services to schools and to comply with schools' work specifications--not necessarily the most effective way to use the specialist skills of the support services.
In addition, those new market forces have created a trend towards short-term contracts for learning support staff. That raises the question how services can retain highly trained staff and expect them to undergo further training when there is no certainty of a job from one year to the next. Those are both serious problems, and I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will reflect on them.
I began by welcoming the Green Paper's emphasis on inclusion in its approach towards special educational needs. I have focused on the need to minimise the damaging consequences of pupil exclusion. I have no doubts about the immense demands that we are making on schools and teachers in asking them to embrace that inclusive approach. Faced with a violent and abusive year nine or 10 pupil, a teacher will certainly want rather more than warm words to be persuaded that such a pupil should not be kicked out on his ear. The teacher must be able to rely on a practical mechanism to deal with such a pupil.
The answer has to be a clear behaviour plan with teeth. In other words, behaviour support teams must be available to take the pupil out of the classroom, work with him and turn him around so that he can be reintegrated into the classroom. That is the support mechanism that teachers have the right to expect, and it needs to be available in the form of a specialist behaviour support unit in the school. If the school will not fund it, LEAs must have the resources to supply it.
If schools are to accept the inclusive approach, they will also need various forms of assurance. Like teachers, schools will have to be confident that there will be practical support mechanisms on hand to deal with disruptive pupils. If they cannot, or will not, provide those support services, there is a strong case for every LEA to have a support unit.
We all know of the pressures on schools to perform well, both from parents and the Government, and both are right to require the highest standards of excellence. We also know that it only needs one disruptive pupil to create an atmosphere of chaos in a classroom and in the school at large, with disastrous consequences for the performance of other pupils. The temptation to solve the problem by exclusion is obvious. It is surely no coincidence that the recent surge in exclusions seems to date from the publication of the league tables.
"Dear Mr. Blunkett,
I believe from my understanding of the Green Paper that the Minister will be able to give an absolute guarantee that those rights will not be taken away. I hope very much that she will.
I am nearly 15 years old and I have cerebral palsy. I go to Lipson Community College in Plymouth, a mainstream school. In September my mum spoke to you about the Green Paper and you gave her your guarantee that your government would not diminish or remove the rights of disabled children to their legal entitlement to help that their needs call for. Now, my mum and I have read your Green Paper and we are very worried that you will break your promise . . .
Mr. Blunkett, I am asking you to keep your promise to my mum and not take away my right or the right of any other child to be protected by having a Statement of Need and the guaranteed provision that the statement gives us."
10.45 am
"their disruptive behaviour did not usually date from early in their school career, nor was it obviously associated with deep-seated trauma as with many of the white children."
Nevertheless, the Green Paper recognises that the number of children perceived to fall into the grouping of those with emotional and behavioural difficulties is growing, that exclusion is sometimes the only recourse for such pupils, and that even when they are not formally excluded many of these children effectively remove themselves from the education process.
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