Examination of Witnesses (Questions 146-159)
MRS EIRWEN
GRENFELL-ESSAM,
MS PAULA
JEWES, MR
HUGH PAYTON
AND MR
CHRIS GOODEY
11 JANUARY 2006
Q146 Chairman: May I welcome our witnesses
to this session. You will know that this is a major inquiry into
special education. It is a pleasure to have had so many pieces
of written evidence given to the Committee and also to have many
people who are active in and know the sector very well to give
oral evidence. Thank you, again, this morning for coming to join
us. We are hoping to learn a great deal from this session. I know
that all of you represent parents' organisations which have a
very important role in the sector. In a session where we have
four witnesses, and a double session because there is so much
pressure to get as much oral evidence as we can, I am conscious
that we have to be pretty firm on reasonably short questions from
our team and reasonably short answers from your team. There is
a temptation for everybody to give an answer to every question
but we would not get many questions answered that way, so I will
ask you by name to answer on a particular issue. You will not
be called on every answer, but we should get a balance. Perhaps
Paula Jewes (as I happen to be catching her eye) would like to
start. Would you be able to tell us a bit about your organisation
and your concerns. We understand that everything is not tickety-boo,
as they say, in this sector.
Ms Jewes: No. Kids First represent
about 100 parents in Merton. We are a project in Merton Mencap
and we are funded by the Children's Fund in Merton. We would not
say that all children are not educated successfully but too many
of our special needs children are severely let down by the system
as implemented in our borough—and in fact we do not believe
our borough is any different from most of the other boroughs in
the UK. We have a large number of concerns but one of the main
concerns is the statementing process which is thoroughly undermined
by our local authority and others. We believe that all children
with special needs should have a right to have their needs assessed
by a professional who is an expert in the field and who is independent
of budgetary constraints. We also believe that, for many reasons,
special needs children have to have their rights legally enforced.
One is because schools themselves have other pressures, as you
know, for targets of academic excellence and also for meeting
national curriculum standards, but not least because special needs
families are not the best advocates, for lots of reasons, including
the fact that, as you know, a lot of special needs families are
themselves from special educational needs parents but are also
socially disadvantaged. You may not have understood up to now
that there are a lot of families who do not understand their own
children's needs but there are also a lot of parents who are in
denial about their children's needs: there is still a lot of stigma
in society about statementing, disability registers, and having
a child with special needs. A lot of families are not the best
advocates for their own children and much more so than in what
one might call the typical population. If we do not have this
legal right to our children being educated, their needs will be
eroded. This is the only way to make sure that schools are forced
to have the right expertise and the correct provision to educate
these children, instead of just managing them. We also believe
that the current policies of undermining statementing to spread
cost give a very, very poor long-term outcome for society. We
think there is incredible evidence to show that by educating our
children properly we will reduce crime, exclusions from school
and mental health cases, and increase the number of tax-paying
independent adults—which would give an enormous benefit
to society as a whole. We are hoping that the Committee will have
the courage to accept that not all is well and we need to tackle
the issue.
Q147 Helen Jones: I was very interested
in what you have just said. The evidence we have received so far
clearly indicates that parents are often trying to negotiate their
way through some sort of jungle to try to get provision for their
children. We know that all is not well. It was also interesting
to hear you say that parents do not always understand their children's
needs. Although quite often they do; you cannot rely on that.
How would you change the system to get the best education for
children with special needs, but also resolve this dilemma of
it being so complicated and where there are constant clashes between
what the local authority wants and what the parents want, between
what the professionals recommend and what the parents think is
appropriate? How would you simplify it to make it easier for everyone
and to provide the best outcomes?
Ms Jewes: In the end it boils
down to expertise on the ground. First of all, the so-called jungle
and bureaucracy, I have to tell you, is created by the local authorities.
I do not believe that parents really see it as a jungle; the jungle
occurs when the local authorities refuse assessments or do not
meet the targets for responding; when local authorities produce
lies, effectively, to avoid meeting their legal rights; when the
local authorities require you to take them to tribunal to delay
implementing costly statements. It is the local authorities—and
to some extent the DfES supports them in this—which make
the system that is fairly straightforward into a jungle. If, as
opposed to being done by the local authorities, statementing was
brought into schools and was done by experts that were available
at schools—which there should be—then the procedure
would be extremely straightforward and should be extended to all
pupils with special needs. That would guarantee that teachers
had the expertise and SENCOs had the expertise to carry out these
assessments without extreme bureaucracy and cost. I think extending
the system would reduce the complexity and the bureaucracy.
Chairman: Could we bring Eirwen in.
Q148 Helen Jones: I was going to
ask Eirwen, because she is shaking her head, and she may have
picked up on something I wanted to pick up on. Is it possible
within a school to have expertise on the whole range of special
needs? What you are asking for seems to me to require a range
of expertise within one school which it is not possible to have
in one school.
Mrs Grenfell-Essam: I work in
a school: I am a SENCO in a school. No, it is not possible to
have all the expertise. I have some expertise—I have been
doing it for 11 years—but, no, not across the whole range.
But schools themselves choose not to pick up children with special
educational needs and move them forward for assessment. I have
had dealings with several parents recently where the schools have
themselves refused to admit this child has a need at all, even
though they are putting in extra hours for this child.
Q149 Mrs Dorries: What are the reasons
for that? What would you do to improve that?
Ms Jewes: I am presuming it is
the head teacher, who does not want special needs children in
their school or the stigma that is attached to that. I do not
think there is personally, but some heads do believe that, and
they move children on who are unsuitable for their criteria.
Q150 Helen Jones: What about those
parents who have children with a whole complex range of needs,
not just educational needs but health needs as well? Talking to
some of the parents in my area, they find difficulty in getting
one point of contact which can lead them to all the different
services that they need to access. Do you have any experience
of that? Do you have any suggestions to put to the Committee which
would help resolve that dilemma?
Mrs Grenfell-Essam: Under Every
Child Matters there is supposed to be now one point of contact
for all the agencies. It does not seem to be working in my area—or
across the country, as I see it.
Q151 Helen Jones: I do not think
it is working in mine.
Mrs Grenfell-Essam: Health do
their own thing, the medical profession do their own thing, Child
and Family Consultation Services/Child Guidance do their own thing,
and they all talk amongst themselves but not to education necessarily.
We often see the child every day, all day; they see them for half
an hour once a month maybe.
Ms Jewes: There are initiatives
in lots of areas to try to tackle it. One we have heard about
in Surrey is called something like Team Around the Child,
where the case worker is entitled to call all the expertise together
in one room about the child. But that is only a pilot, and it
is only for early years. It is only for severely complex children.
In our area it was agreed that we would have a specialist health
visitor for special needs who would have a similar role—but
all these things are constrained by budget and are never rolled
out and are never consistently applied—even though there
is a moratorium on employing new health visitors in our area per
se now, so we cannot have that expert special needs health
visitor at the moment. There is a lot of talk, but at the moment
it is still quite diverse, I think.
Q152 Helen Jones: How do you resolve
this dilemma which quite often occurs, to which I referred earlier,
where what the parent thinks is the appropriate provision for
their child and what the professionals think is the appropriate
provision are not the same. The parents may be right or wrong,
but there is still a dilemma there that has to be resolved, and
it needs to be resolved simply and effectively, it seems to us.
Do you have any suggestions for dealing with those kinds of situation?
Ms Jewes: What do you mean by
professional? Do you mean a local authority officer or doctor?
Q153 Helen Jones: I mean teachers.
I mean health workers.
Ms Jewes: A lot of the problem
arises from budgetary constraints. Although it is difficult to
believe, it is true that educational psychologists, employed,
for example, by local authorities, will under-diagnose and under-recommend
because they know there are pressures on them from their employers
to do so. At the moment, the only independent people who have
a view on their children's needs are the parents; the others are
not really independent. If we had more, what I would call, independent
experts around . . . For example, if SENCOs were full-time special
needs employees and experts, and not part-time teachers or part-time
assistants or bureaucrats, they might, if it was part of their
targets, part of their job description to further the needs of
the special needs children in their schools, be able to operate
as an independent person, but at the moment there is no independent
expert. As parents we have to go and find doctors, who appear
to be the only ones who will offer a medical diagnosis. Everybody
else who is employed by the local authority appears not to be
independent.
Q154 Helen Jones: What evidence can
you give the Committee of what you said of educational psychologists
deliberately under-diagnosing and under-recommending (if we could
put it in shorthand terms)?
Ms Jewes: It is not that they
do it in a kind of illegal fashion; it is just that the pressures
are on them because they know of the incredible lengths to which
the local authorities will go to reduce statementing and reduce
the level of statutory assistance. You would have to be not human
not to feel those pressures from your employer. It may be subconscious.
Mrs Grenfell-Essam: I know of
guidance that has been given to educational psychologists that
they must not diagnose people. They have been given targets for
it—such as no more than 10 in one year.
Helen Jones: Could you perhaps pass that
to the Committee? It would be very interesting to look at that.
Q155 Mr Marsden: I would like, if
I may, to put this series of questions to Chris and Hugh, again
drawing on your own personal experiences of the sector and via
your groups. I would like to explore some of these questions which
have already been raised around statementing and the obstacles
that parents subsequently have. In my capacity as a constituency
MP, when parents come to see me about a problem with special educational
needs, statementing is almost the first thing that comes to mind,
but one of the things I have observed—and I would be interested
in your comments on this—is that statementing does not always
help. Is statementing a gesture for all concerned that: once you
have your statement, that is it, you know where you are going?
Or is it a recipe which then enables the school, the parents and
the child to navigate the system and get the sort of bespoke help
that they need?
Mr Goodey: I find it quite difficult
to respond to that question, because, as you can see from my memorandum,
I am coming from somewhere slightly different. I am coming from
a borough which has closed its special schools. Virtually all
special needs education goes on in mainstream schools. I will
answer your question directly, but I have some things to say about
the human rights aspect of inclusion, which we support and are
totally in favour of. To answer your question directly about statementing,
we find that in a borough where there is a more or less fully
inclusive system, schools are funded to be fully inclusive schools.
There is then no battle between the mainstream budget and a separate
special school budget over where the resources are going to go.
For us, statements are less important. We do get parents who insist
on statements—and we support them, that is our job—but
from our perspective in our particular local authority there is
no real advantage to the child of a statement.
Q156 Mr Marsden: That assumes, of
course, that you and your colleagues—and I simply do not
know the situation in your borough, so I am not making a particular
comment on your borough but you have mentioned that there is the
funding there for full inclusion—are satisfied that that
the money, even if it is not in a formal way but in some informal
way, is ring-fenced to provide the sorts of facilities across
the various schools. Paula Jewes has already talked about pressures
within the system, and whether they are pressures on special schools
or whether they are pressures across a system that is entirely
inclusive, are there not necessarily financial pressures that
bear down on provision for children with special educational needs?
Mr Goodey: These pressures are
not evident at the level of local authority organisation. They
are sometimes evident within schools. In other words, schools
having received a budget to be an inclusive school, hypothetically,
could buy a grand piano instead of supplying support to a particular
child. In fact, in our local authority area the whole culture
has changed. Because there are children with very severe and complex
disabilities, as well as children with less severe disabilities
in mainstream schools, there is a culture in which, on the whole,
that does not happen—and, when it does happen, of course,
we negotiate it, we fight it, et cetera, et cetera.
Q157 Mr Marsden: Hugh, could I ask
you for your perspective.
Mr Payton: Your question was:
Is getting a statement a panacea to special educational needs
for those in greatest difficulty. The answer, from my point of
view, is that it should be but unfortunately it is often not the
case. I would put it into two profiles. If a child through the
statement is going to a specialist facility (very often an independent
specialist facility) then very often that statement is very worthwhile.
Unfortunately, for children with the greatest level of difficulty,
if that does not happen and at the right time, then the statement
is not really worth a great deal. I think that is the crux of
the matter. The underlying bit of that is "providing the
right facilities for a child at the right time". The statement
may be a mechanism for that or it may not, but if you do not get
that at the end of the day then the statement is not worth the
paper it is written on.
Q158 Mr Marsden: What about the situation
where there is a conflict—as Paula Jewes has commented on
already—between local authorities and parents as to the
need or the value or extensiveness of the statement? Ultimately
that conflict has to be resolved. It is either resolved informally
or it is resolved formally by some form of tribunal. Do parents
get enough assistance in those early stages, before they might
decide, "I'm fed up with the local authority; I am going
to try to take this to a tribunal"?
Mr Payton: Could I take that on
two levels? I agree with people that the openness of the nature
of the diagnostic information provided by professionals is wanting.
Often the appropriate direction is not given for the child's needs
and a provision. That is the starting point. That causes conflict
within the structure and parents are therefore looking for alternative
information from which to find the information to support their
child. The second point is: Is a tribunal mechanism a suitable
way of proceeding? It is a heavy-handed way, it is a bureaucratic
way, and it is extremely stressful on parents.
Q159 Mr Marsden: And expensive.
Mr Payton: I would imagine it
would be an expensive process, yes, indeed. Is it effective? For
the majority of parents who go to tribunal, I think the records
show that it is successful: based upon the fact that the majority
come out with a decision that is in their favour, therefore that
process is effective in a majority of cases. Is it the best way
of doing it? I would go back to the fact that we should have openness
in terms of diagnostic information and sorting it out at a base
level.
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