Examination of Witnesses (Questions 180-199)
MRS EIRWEN
GRENFELL-ESSAM,
MS PAULA
JEWES, MR
HUGH PAYTON
AND MR
CHRIS GOODEY
11 JANUARY 2006
Q180 Mrs Dorries: Going back to the
tribunal situation again and the choice for parents, we have heard
evidence in this Committee that it costs between, I think, £2,000
to £10,000 to take a child to the tribunal. Chris, I suppose
this question is again for you in Newham. Is it not a barrier
to parents in Newham? I have just thought that it goes one step
further, does it not, in that parents in Newham do not have the
special schools to send their children to? If they wanted to access
the system and access their choice as in law to send their children
to a special school, they would have to go to a tribunal possibly—and
that would cost between £2,000 and £10,000, and Newham
parents do not have that. Are Newham in fact not just denying
parents any choice in their children's special needs?
Mr Goodey: I think there might
be an element of truth in the idea that parents who want separate
special school provision have been hard done-by over the last
few years because there has been a rationalisation of special
schools. There are less of them, and so they might have to send
their children further away. On the other hand, parents who want
mainstream know that in the last resort the court can legally
enforce the separation of their child, which we see as discriminatory.
Replying to your question about the tribunal, the number of cases
going to tribunal from Newham is no greater than in any other
borough, and they are usually concerned not at the levels of provision,
which is where you would possibly require paying an independent
educational psychologist or something like that, but the issue
of one mainstream school as against another which does not require—
Q181 Chairman: What we are not getting
from this is what other people think of a borough where there
is no special school provision. We know, for example, that Scotland
is getting rid of statementing. We know that in one particular
borough there are no special schools.
Ms Jewes: It fills me with horror.
Mrs Grenfell-Essam: We have a
helpline and we receive lots of calls from Newham, from the parents
who are trying to find out: What can we do? Who can we ask? Where
can we go to?
Q182 Chairman: You would not like
to see a situation where there were no special schools?
Mrs Grenfell-Essam: Definitely
not.
Ms Jewes: I can give you a number
of case studies, and send them into you, if you wish, of children,
especially on the autistic spectrum, who are very anxious—it
is part of their condition to be anxious, and, once they are anxious,
to retain the anxiety at a level that the anxiety started at is
part of their condition. There are so many cases of autistic spectrum
pupils who start in mainstream, or even in units attached to mainstream,
who cannot cope and become depressed, suicidal, anorexic, who
are necessarily going to fail from the day they go into the mainstream
school because of the nature of their condition, because they
need protection.
Mr Payton: I would say it is an
ideology that is seriously flawed. It is as simple as that. All
special educational needs have a spectrum of needs. As my compatriot
has said, there are children who will not fit in a busy mainstream
environment, so it is seriously flawed.
Mr Goodey: Personally, I am not
against choice in principle, but the fact is that the legal situation
is that parents who want special school have a choice that can
be fulfilled; parents who want an inclusive placement, can be
denied it.
Q183 Helen Jones: Could I ask Chris,
bearing in mind what has been said, how does Newham train its
teachers to cope with the vast range of special needs they must
encounter? It is extremely difficult, as we have heard, to deal
with children who have autistic spectrum, who have a whole range
of behavioural disorders in a classroom when you have a lot of
other children. It takes highly skilled teaching. What training
has been put in for the teachers in your borough to deal with
all this?
Mr Goodey: There is a historical
aspect to this question, which is that, when the special schools
were closed, the specialist staff were transferred from those
schools into mainstream, so that created a culture where it was
expected that there would be specialist expertise in mainstream
schools. That has continued. This is not always a question of
the child going to its local school. There are certain mainstream
schools which are specially resourced for children with severe
autism: they do not exist in a separate unit in the school but
they do spend some time being withdrawn from mainstream classes,
but they spend quite a lot of time in mainstream classes as well,
and they are on the roll of a mainstream school. It is not necessarily
the child's local school because there are, I think, two primary
schools and one secondary school which take a substantial number
of those children so that the expertise can be concentrated. The
same is true of deaf children.
Q184 Helen Jones: I am just trying
to clarify. Even though you have former teachers in special schools
in mainstream schools, there must still be a number of teachers
having to deal with children with a whole range of difficulties—it
may be severe physical difficulties in their classes. How are
they trained to deal with that?
Mr Goodey: There are various forms
of in-service training in the borough. It is a culture change,
as I have said before. Teachers arriving from previous jobs outside
the borough are sometimes surprised, but, generally speaking,
a culture has been in place over the last 15 years where it is
expected that you will have the whole spectrum of humanity in
the classroom.
Q185 Chairman: I want to go on to
provision now, but, Chris, you said in your earlier answers to
Nadine and others that you think Newham is average in terms of
the number of children who are applying for and getting a statement.
Mr Goodey: Yes.
Q186 Chairman: In another question
you have answered, you have suggested that, because of the social
characteristics of your borough, there will be a higher level
of children with special educational needs than in a more affluent
borough like Richmond. Is that right?
Mr Goodey: No.
Helen Jones: Chairman, it is actually
lower. The number of children requiring statements in Newham is
lower than in Richmond.
Q187 Chairman: We would like to get
the details of how many there are, but what is not coming through
from what people have been saying is, in a particular borough,
if they do not have special schools, are they being parasitic?
Is the system coping, or, in the London context, are they just
living parasitically and are they going to special schools in
surrounding boroughs or some distance across London? Is that happening?
Mr Goodey: I have already partly
answered that question. Unfortunately, I cannot give you the exact
figures.
Q188 Chairman: What do you think?
Are lots of parents opting for special schools outside the borough?
Mr Goodey: No. Absolutely not.
Ms Jewes: What I would like to
know about their borough is: Are all the special needs children
being successfully diagnosed and are they being educated or are
they being contained? The statistics are difficult, because there
are so many special needs children who, if you just leave it,
for example, to local authorities to do, would not be diagnosed
with special needs, who will go apparently successfully through
primary and when they get to secondary will fail or become excluded
or become depressed and so on. I doubt whether we can get those
figures for a specific borough at this stage, but that is what
I would like to do.
Chairman: We will come back to some of
these issues, but, Stephen, you have been very patient.
Q189 Stephen Williams: Yes. I want
to ask some more questions about provision and choice. Some of
the issues have been touched on already, so maybe we will be going
over familiar ground. First of all, we have a range of authorities
here. We have heard quite a bit about Newham but we also have
the completely different borough of Merton, and Wiltshire and
Essex are quite different counties as well. Do you think there
is consistency as between the authorities as to the provision
for special needs or are there wide variations in between different
LEAs, depending on where you are in different parts of the country?
Mrs Grenfell-Essam: We work nationally,
and, yes, there is a wide provision. Some countries, a bit like
Newham, do not do any statementing at all, like Nottingham.
Q190 Stephen Williams: How common
is that? How typical is the Newham "no special schools at
all" experience? How many LEAs would follow that?
Mrs Grenfell-Essam: I think there
are five in the country.
Q191 Stephen Williams: A small minority
really.
Mrs Grenfell-Essam: Very small
who have done away with them completely. Essex are lowering theirs
as quickly as they can into none but have decided at the end,
"Well, perhaps we ought to have some." But they have
substantially reduced them. Specialist provision—for people
like the deaf, the hearing impaired and the visually impaired—is
becoming less and less and less for specific needs, autism being
one of them.
Q192 Stephen Williams: I think Paula,
in answer to an earlier question, also alluded to the fact that
heads might not be keen to admit that a child has special educational
needs, so is there also a danger within an LEA that, despite what
their policy might be, there is variation between different schools
within the LEA?
Mrs Grenfell-Essam: Yes.
Q193 Stephen Williams: Which is down
to the whim of the governing body or the heads.
Mrs Grenfell-Essam: Widely.
Mr Goodey: There is only one answer
to that, and that is yes.
Q194 Stephen Williams: That is quite
a significant point, I think. On the question of funding, the
Department promoted delegated funding to schools for SEN. They
think that promotes early intervention to detect SEN needs without
the need later on to go to a formal statement. Do you think delegated
funding has actually been successful in that aspiration?
Ms Jewes: In our borough it is
only just being implemented now. I doubt whether it will be successful
because the Government advice was that you should do an audit
of need first, meet that need with your extra resources first,
build up parental confidence, and then the delegated funding may
work and may result, as an end result, in less requests for statements
because the children's needs were being met. Our authority, like
many, has just interpreted this as a green light to remove statements
first and delegate the funding, not giving really much consideration
to whether the needs will be met. It makes them happy because
their budgets are now predictable. They have passed off all the
parental complaints basically to the schools. So the jury is out
but I very much doubt whether this will work.
Mrs Grenfell-Essam: There is no
ring-fencing of funding in any shape or form. In my particular
school, we have over 60% on the SEN register and there is no ring-fencing
of that money whatsoever from county. It could be spent on watering
the garden or building a new tarmac playground. There is nothing
to say where it has to go and there is nobody who comes to check.
Ofsted do not check; nobody checks.
Q195 Stephen Williams: The fact that
there is no ring-fencing of the funding that is delegated, you
have evidence that that means schools are choosing to spend the
money on other things.
Mrs Grenfell-Essam: Yes.
Ms Jewes: There is nobody in school
whose job depends on making this work. There are people with part-time
responsibilities. There is nobody, including the head, whose job
it is to make the children's outcomes better.
Q196 Chairman: Are you talking about
all the schools in Essex?
Mrs Grenfell-Essam: Across the
country.
Q197 Chairman: What is the basis
of your evidence?
Mrs Grenfell-Essam: All schools
I have dealt with—and I have dealt with quite a few across
the country. There is no ring-fencing of funding and the head
can spend it anyway he likes.
Q198 Chairman: This is very important
to this Committee. Are you saying that there are no good examples
of local authorities doing this job excellently that you would
like everyone to share with and to emulate?
Mrs Grenfell-Essam: I would have
to say there are very few who get very close to being excellent.
There are some who try very hard to make the provision for every
child the best they can, but, because it is delegated down—
Q199 Chairman: There is poor performance
right across the board. There are no exemplars?
Mr Payton: I would counter that
a bit, because I think it is a bit too hard. There are some schools
that do far, far better than the majority of schools with the
same resources. I would suggest that is not so much to do with
budget management, but that is to do with the skills and the motivations
within the schools that are doing better. It is very much to do
with having a leader in special educational needs within a school.
There are improvements that could be achieved with the same amount
of money, by improvement of knowledge and understanding within
skills within schools. I think there is clear evidence that they
could do a lot more with what is already available, but there
is not enough funding and resources available at that time.
Mrs Grenfell-Essam: There is no
audit of any sort of SEN amounts.
Mr Payton: That is true as well.
Schools can use the money however they wish, and there are examples
of where they use it in the wrong way.
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