Memorandum submitted by Wiltshire Dyslexia
Association (WDA)
The WDA is a registered charity formed 21 years
ago. The association assists parents of children with Special
Educational Needs for all types of difficulties and degree of
difficulty. This support is provided on a purely voluntary basis
by parents who themselves have engaged with the system.
OVERVIEW
Since the Warnock Report there has been a significant
change in Special Educational Needs. The results today for the
child with SEN are very mixed.
The legal framework and subsequent versions
of the Code of Practice have resulted, across the country, in
a more uniform definition of Special Educational Needs and the
different categories of difficulties. Many more children are rightly
recognised to have SEN.
While the Code of Practice leaves too much latitude
or scope for individual interpretation, the quality principles
are sound.
THE ISSUES:
— The whole system is resource led
and not needs led.
— The whole system has developed mechanisms
and a prevention culture that results in the system failing to
deliver against the Code of Practice and frequently the legal
framework.
— While more children are recognised
to have SEN, and today many benefit whereas previously they would
not have done so, the whole system is still systematically failing
a very large number of SEN children. It is an environment of conflict
between parents and the professionals with whom they engage when
seeking to get the necessary help for their child. It is extremely
difficult for the small minority of informed, articulate and determined
parents to secure appropriate and effective provision for their
SEN child. This is not an acceptable position! For the majority
of children the system is failing them.
1. Provision for SEN pupils in "mainstream"
schools: availability of resources and expertise; different models
of provision
What is going wrong:
— Provision varies greatly between
authorities. There is not equality of opportunity for children.
Broadly this reflects the variance in resources made available
to authorities. This is compounded overtime because those authorities
with lower resources are less able to fund changes and improve
availability of skilled resources. Thus the difference between
areas increases. This postal code variation is by central government
design as it is the result of the systems funding policies.
— The Code of Practice promotes the
quality principle of an incremental approach to provision. Frequently
and increasingly, this is capped by a resource led policy where
the provision available is a one fit all. Often this is set at
a mild or moderate level with no facilities available when the
provision has proven to be ineffective.
— There are inadequate skilled resources
available at all levels to meet the demand.
— Too often the system relies upon
resources that have limited skills.
— Expectations set by professionals
in schools and the authorities are set at an exceptionally low
level based upon the outcomes of ineffective, inappropriate or
inadequate resources
— The system systematically fails to
respect the individual needs of the child. Setting criteria based
upon averages is a policy that is specifically failing to function
on an individual basis which by design is disregarding the individual
pupils abilities and potential.
— Many mainstream schools cannot provide
adequate or purposeful education for children with a mild level
of difficulty, although others can.
— There is huge variation of the ability
of mainstream schools to provide adequately for children with
a moderate level of difficulty.
— Rarely does the mainstream environment
prove to be suitable for those children with the greatest level
of need.
— Ineffective provision results in
a far too high incident level of children with emotional and behaviour
difficulty. There is the obvious cohort who are disruptive but
there is another hidden cohort of damaged children who suffer
high levels of anxiety and depression. The combined cohort is
a national scandal.
2. Provision for SEN pupils in Special Schools
— This response is made on the basis
considering the cohort of children with the greatest degree of
difficulty. Typically for these children the mainstream schools
rarely provide adequately at all.
— Generally, the provision is far more
tailored to the specific needs of the child.
— The availability of skilled resource
is far higher in this type of learning environment.
— The adult to child ratio is far higher.
— The provision generally is significantly
more effective and purposeful to the individual child's needs.
— Generally this educational environment
results in the child being more prepared for adult life than could
be achieved within the mainstream.
— Generally the system requires the
child to continually fail through the trend of children receiving
inadequate and ineffective provision over a large number of years
in mainstream. This results in the need for a special school not
just for educational purposes but increasingly to recover from
the results of the long term stressful setting of the mainstream
class and school environment.
3. Raising standards of achievement for SEN
pupils
— The National curriculum is an 11-year
busy agenda for every child. Arguably an SEN child will require
more time but that is not how the system works. Early identification
and effective intervention is key to raising standards.
— The whole process by design currently
takes so long that the SEN child generally is hugely disadvantaged
as they do not have the opportunity for 11 years of effective
education.
Thus this requires:
— Significant increase in the resources
delivered to the SEN services.
— Significant increase in the skills
for SEN delivery at all levels from the classroom, SENCO's specialist
teachers, Educational Physiologists.
— A child still at P scales in year-two
must be entitled to a teacher assistant funded from central funds.
This will save significant costs to the system and the child than
the current practice of waiting for the child to fail within local
authority guidelines in year-six.
— SENCO's should be a teacher with
a specialist qualification.
— During teacher training all teachers
should receive several modules of training on the identification
of special education needs and the delivery of teaching to children
with SEN. A target of 30% of teacher training should be for SEN,
reflecting the percentage of children with SEN.
— Teachers should receive regular in
service update training for SEN.
— Significant increase in the availability
of speech and language provision.
— Significant increase in the availability
of Occupational Therapy.
— Establish a regime for setting expectations
based upon the child rather than shameful expectations resulting
from grossly ineffective and inadequate provision.
— Establish national standards to determine
appropriate expectations for children based upon appropriate provision
that benefits the child rather than the resource led inadequate
provisions. This is a very complex area but essential!
— Require professionals to clearly
specify the prescription of provision for a child. Make it a breach
of law for an authority or organisation to prevent professionals
undertaking their duty of care to the child. This should be for
education and health professionals.
— Closely and purposefully monitor
every education authority on an annual basis for systematic contempt
of the law, and take action.
— Respond purposely to parents when
they raise issues, establish an independent body to gather information
from parents for all authorities on an annual basis.
— Parent Partnership services are sound
principle but they are extremely variable and most are operated
by the authority themselves and therefore an extension of it.
As such their purpose is constrained. Other authorities have contracts
that limit the scope and independence of a PPS.
— Establish the funding of Parent Partnership
Services to be from a central agency and wholly independent of
the authority within which they operate.
— Schools and authorities should have
targets for Value added specifically for SEN children.
— Schools should not be able to refuse
admittance to Excluded Children. Generally the system does not
look at the root causes for the child who is excluded.
— All children adopted post abuse must
be automatically entitled to "CatchPoint Counselling".
This would circumvent many subsequent issues requiring significant
later intervention.
4. The system of statements of need for SEN
pupils ("the statementing process")
— The framework is fine, the delivery
by authorities is systematically abusing the framework.
— It is proven time and time again
to be resource led and not needs led.
— Statements are generally written
for both needs and provision based upon resources and not the
needs of the child.
— Professionals are inhibited from
undertaking their duty of care and frequently prevented from specifying
the provision necessary for the child.
— Statements systematically fall far
short of the legal requirement.
— Authorities pay lip service to taking
responsibility for the child, in fact it is as if they do not
understand their duty.
— Authorities do not specify the provision
and therefore fail to undertake their duty to make arrangements
at a school suitable for the child. They systematically determine
a school based on resources and fail to specify the necessary
provisions leaving the school to determine the provisions, as
best they can. Significant numbers of children are systematically
damaged.
— Annual Reviews rarely monitor effectively
if the child is progressing at a rate that is appropriate and
purposeful for the individual child. The expectations are scandalously
low. A high proportion of children make grossly inadequate progress
and continue to do so through a systematic regime of monitoring
that does not undertake the qualitative purpose. The resources
applied to these procedures are costly but not effective.
— Each child with SEN should have a
named person at their school who is responsible for that child's
outcomes.
— Far too many cases result in a tribunal.
Of those parents that go to tribunal a far higher proportion fall
by the way disillusioned and overwhelmed by the whole experience
of engaging with the education system. Maybe a ratio of 1-100
is realistic. It reflects an under-resourced SEN environment.
— Generally through the whole system
there is a lack of accountability.
— Because of all the above systematic
failings statements generally fail to be of appropriate value
to the already disadvantaged child.
5. The role of parents in decisions about
their children's education
— Yes, an interesting concept rarely
happening in practice.
— There is a significant difference
between the formalities of requesting a parent views and having
due regard for them.
— The system is resource constrained.
As a result the facilities available at the point of delivery
are inadequate to meet the needs.
— Parents generally recognise that
their SEN child is having difficulties, but are unhappy with the
situation of their child not receiving effective provision due
to the frequently quoted reason of "lack of resources".
— Parent Partnership services may in
some case enable a parent to articulate more clearly and purposefully
their concerns and wishes. Where a parents expectations are different
from a school or authority then this exacerbates an all ready
difficult situation.
— The experience of parents engaging
with the system is very variable between schools. In some schools
the experience is routinely good. But for many others it is routinely
poor. The issues are the ability of teachers to converse with
parents in an empathetic way in a resource constrained system.
Clearly if there was not a pressure on the system for resources
then parents would be able to engage more effectively with schools
and more often parents would have a positive input.
— With respect to Local Education Authorities—it
is not at all obvious that there exists a culture for parents
to have a role in decision making, unless it so happens to coincide
with the decisions of the authority. Yes, formally the authority
request the views from parents but there is little evidence to
show that the authority actually takes active regard.
6. How special needs are defined
— This is clear in the legal framework.
— The Code of Practice from 1993-94
was far clearly defined and therefore of value to the child than
its current counterpart. Most individuals involved with supporting
parents believed at the time and continue to believe that the
current Code of Practice is a devalued framework for providing
and protecting the needs of the child. It supports and encourages
the resource led environment.
— The criteria set out by authorities
is one of extremely low expectations.
— It should be national based upon
the interest of the individual child.
— The argument that an authority may
have local factors is not an acceptable argument. There may be
some very localised situations but these should be exceptions
rather than the norm.
— The basis of a child being five years
behind their chronological age before additional resources are
engaged is disgraceful—simply shameful. The law is clear—each
child is an individual. The delivery of the system should be to
the spirit and letter of the law.
7. Provision for different types and levels
of SEN, including emotional, behavioural and social difficulties
(EBSD)
— Extremely variable between areas
and sometimes between schools within the same authority.
— There is a general trend towards
a one size provision fits all—where the one size is based
on exceptionally low expectations and barely suitable for mild
levels of difficulty.
— For children with disruptive EBD
some schools are beginning to have withdrawal facilities and sometimes
a teacher with skills in anger management.
— There appears little development
to address the causes rather the outcomes.
— ASD spectrum—Asperger and Autism
is very poorly provided for in mainstream settings.
— SPLD—dyslexia is poorly catered
for in mainstream with scant understanding of the ways of supporting
a child within a classroom. Frequently this includes schools with
an SPLD unit where they have yet to understand the needs within
the majority of the school timetable of a conventional class.
In some areas the policy is resulting in a demonstrable lowering
of the standards of provision.
— Speech and Language is good in a
very few areas but in most areas the provision is grossly inadequate.
Frequently delivered by somebody who is unqualified and received
just minimal guidance. Frequently, the monitoring is non-existent
and reports are rarely written in a way that informs the parent
of the impact to their child.
— Occupational Therapy—is the
same as Speech and Language.
STRATEGIES FOR
VISUAL IMPAIRMENT
AND SPEECH
TO TEXT
— Visual Impairment: recent research
examining children aged seven-11 in two primary schools has found
that 50% of children reported improvements in the perception of
text when using colour overlays. It is known as "Meares.Irlen
Syndrome" or visual stress. (www.essex.ac.uk/psychology/overlays/reading).
It is also been called visual dyslexia, Scoptic Sensitivity Syndrome
and Asfedia. Other research suggests that 20% of the population
can improve their reading significantly by the use of colour.
A percentage of these will be dyslexic. The circumvention is simple
and very low cost. The cost to benefit the likely 20% of children
is minimal (if any) by the use of colour paper instead of white.
Alternatively colour overlays are at a cost of less than £1
per sheet.
— Text to speech: computer suites should
make reasonable adjustments for those pupils that need text to
be presented in an auditable form. Given that the Code of Practice
requires providers to be pre-emptive then it is reasonable to
expect each computer suite of 30 to have at least one work station
with text to speech facilities. Obviously a computer facility
specifically for SEN can be expected to have such capability on
every workstation.
STRATEGIES FOR
READING DEVELOPMENT
— There is abundant research on the
phonetic approaches to learning to read and need to be deployed
in the system at an early age to be effective for all children
— The better the strategy in the early
years results in fewer children requiring intervention or remedial
support in later years. This is a benefit to the children as well
as enabling the resources to be focused upon the lower number
of children with delayed development.
8. The legislative framework for SEN provision
and the effects of the Disability Act 2001, which extended the
Disability Discrimination Act to education
— Generally the legislative framework
is of a good standard and positioned to act in the interests of
the child.
— Overwhelmingly the law is systematically
ignored throughout the education environment.
— At every point the system introduces
various mechanisms to inhibit the legal framework from being delivered.
— The managers are accountable for
budgets and not the actual child that they make decisions for.
— Accountability is principally non-existent.
— The legislative framework requires
a commensurate level of resource to enable a quality delivery
of SEN that one can expect for the fourth economy in the world.
— The legal framework is not effectively
enforced.
— The system exploits the vagueness
of the Code of Practice, the lack of knowledge of parents, the
lack of abilities in some parents and most of all the lack of
accountability.
January 2006
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