Examination of Witnesses (Questions 260-275)
MR BRIAN
LAMB, MR
JOHN HAYWARD
AND MS
CLAIRE DORER
11 JANUARY 2006
Q260 Mr Chaytor: Is it either/or?
Earlier, Brian talked about co-location, and you have talked about
strengthening links between special schools and mainstream. What
are the intermediate options?
Ms Dorer: There is a continuum,
I think, as Brian says, ranging from children who are entirely
in mainstream placements, at one end, to children who are exclusively
in a special school placement at the other. In between, as Brian
said, it may well be that you have a special school and a mainstream
school on the same site and children will spend sessions in both
schools; it could be children who are in a special school for
part of a week and also registered with a mainstream school for
the other part of the week. There is a whole range. It could be
about support services going in, or the children coming out for
specific sessions. It is a broad continuum. We would like to see
a whole range of activities that removes the debate for saying
that it is either mainstream or it is a special school.
Q261 Mr Chaytor: Can you quote some
really good examples of schools that you represent that have this
intermediate relationship with mainstream schools but are not
co-located? I am interested in children who are registered in
mainstream but spend half the week or a core part of the week
in a special school. Where are the best examples for us to look
at?
Ms Dorer: There are a number.
Recently I visited a school called Mulberry Bush in Oxfordshire
which caters for children with severe emotional difficulties,
and it is a primary school. As the children reach the age at which
they are likely to be moving to secondary school they spend part
of the week at the local primary school and, also, then going
on to the local secondary school to get a sense of what it is
going to be like, to think about what sorts of things they will
be learning and where they will be learning That is particularly
helpful in making that transition from primary to secondary, less
stressful for the child and less stressful for the school that
is receiving the child. There are numerous examples of that sort
of practice. I have seen other schools where, because maybe one
of our schools has got particularly good sports facilities or
particularly good science facilities, children from the local
mainstream school will come in and use those facilities for a
session a week or several sessions. It is those sorts of activities
that, at the moment, are happening largely due to goodwill between
the two sets of schools that we would like to see strengthened
and funding being made available for that sort of activity.
Q262 Chairman: Can we push you a
little bit more on what you think the barriers are to improving
special education delivery to parents and families? What are the
main issues, Brian? What would you put as your two or three priorities
here? We are taking this inquiry very seriously; we have not done,
under my Chairmanship, an inquiry into special education. What
would we be missing if we did not tackle head on? What are the
three big issues for you?
Mr Lamb: The first would be the
availability of specialist support services. The local management
of schools and delegation of budgets has been around since 1998
but has been gathering pace, and one of the major problems we
see in terms of the ability to make inclusion a success is teachers'
access to specialist support. We have evidence across a whole
number of disability groups that specialist support services are
under pressure or being cut back, partly in relation to the behaviour
issue, that a lot of local authority support services, as they
have been contracted out, and that schools have to buy in the
services, what schools will buy back in are behaviour management
programmes and behaviour management specialisms because that is
one of the major other issues they face in the classroom. What
is being squeezed around all that is specialist support; everything
from language through sensory disability, through autism—all
the specialisms around that—we all have evidence that they
are being squeezed. That is a major barrier then to improving
mainstream provision because you cannot, as was being said earlier,
expect mainstream teachers to be experts in all areas of disability
and all areas of differentiating the curriculum and supporting
children that they will need. As a child moves towards School
Action and School Action Plus, maybe with a statement within the
school, we need to make sure, when those statements specify specialist
support, that that specialist support is available. The more we
have had local management and delegation of budgets, especially
for low-incidence groups where a school may not have anybody,
or only one or two children, with a particular disability in that
school at any one time, the evidence is that the schools will
not contract back in for that specialist support, so it is actually
disappearing at specialist level, where it is not now within the
purview of the LA any more. That would be one area. The second
area would be teacher training, and to make sure that there is
much better teacher training from initial teacher training, where
there have now been some improvements, but it is still a relatively
low amount of input, through to the whole role of then SENCOs
and the position of SENCOs within the school. I was horrified
to hear the evidence earlier because if you look at the code of
practice there it recommends that SENCOs are a member of the senior
management team. So, therefore, the whole role and support for
the role of SENCOs would perhaps be my third big pitch, with teacher
training and specialist support services.
Q263 Chairman: Have you a shopping
list, Claire?
Ms Dorer: I would endorse Brian's
shopping list. I think, for our sector, although there are some
very good working relationships between local authorities and
our schools there are still cases where because most local authorities'
dealings with our schools have been where they have had to stump
up what they would feel is a large amount of money to place a
child there, there is still a certain amount of tension and hostility
between local authorities and independent, non-maintained schools,
which makes it difficult to have a foundation for working more
closely together and for the expertise that is in our sector to
be shared with mainstream schools, like most of our schools would
want to be doing very actively. So attitudes and historical disputes,
really, do get in the way of the sectors working together.
Q264 Chairman: John, have you got
a shopping list for me? What would you like to see changed in
the whole area of special education provision?
Mr Hayward: The whole provision
of special education, to my ignorant view, is totally swamped
with bureaucratic processes and departmental, or whatever, infighting,
and the needs of the child are right at the bottom of the pile.
I expect this is a very simplistic example. If your child had
a broken leg and you took it to casualty, you would expect it
to be attended to, you would not expect a ten-month wait, a tribunal,
another row and a few other things, you would want it fixed. Special
needs children have disabilities that need fixing, help, whatever
it is. Somehow, I could not tell you how to do it, the whole bureaucracy
has got to be cut through so that the interests of the child and,
of course, the parents because they have to cope with the child,
are helped.
Chairman: Are there any more questions
from my side?
Q265 Mr Chaytor: Can I pick up the
last point there. My observation and experience from my constituency
work is that there is still a significant number of children whose
special needs are, I do not say ignored but not accurately identified
until several years into their school career. I am interested
in the whole question of assessment. It is picking up John's point,
why is it so difficult to assess certain well understood conditions
at an earlier age? Is there not a simpler process we should go
through for assessment?
Mr Lamb: I would totally agree.
I think one of the areas the sector would most like to see more
work done on—I could easily add it to my shopping list of
three, as you would imagine—which was in the government
document Removing Barriers, is early assessment. We have
been very involved in the Early Support Programme which was looking
at how you can bring together education, health and social services
in the very early years and get a very early assessment of the
child's needs, very early intervention. All the evidence is that
the earlier the intervention is the more successful we are going
to be able to meet the child's needs and the more co-ordinated
way that is met, the better the outcomes are going to be for the
child. For less, we would be getting into the whole bureaucratic
process of trying to assess later. To that extent I absolutely
agree with what is behind your question, that the more we have
early assessment, early intervention and early provision, the
more we are going to improve educational outcomes for disabled
children within the system.
Q266 Mr Chaytor: Can I ask one other
thing on a completely different point. This picks up on a comment
from the previous set of witnesses, in fact it was the final comment
from Chris Goodey, not about SEN in schools, but about
what happens to young people with SEN once they leave school and
their integration into adult life and the provision of further
training opportunities. How high in your priorities does that
issue figure, ie the post-16 or post-19 question? Is this something
we should be giving more attention to rather than simply focusing
on what happens in schools?
Ms Dorer: I think it is hugely
important, particularly for our sector, if you are thinking about
what are the outcomes for children who have attended an independent
or non-maintained special school. If you are thinking about all
of the input, the specialist service a child has received up until
the age of 16 or 19, and you then look at what happens at transition
into adult services and if there is a void for that young person
to move into, which unfortunately there often is, is all that
good work undone, so transitions are a big concern for us. We
have had a lot of research which tells us all of the things that
should be happening at transition. I do not think it is a case
of people not knowing what needs to happen, but it is not happening
in various places and it is certainly not happening at the level
at which it needs to. I think there are still a lot of problems
in what happens after education.
Q267 Jeff Ennis: Briefly, to return
to the issue of better training methods and getting the staff
prepared. Last year I think The Times carried out the inclusion
study which involved several hundred teachers. I think 40-odd%
of the teachers had either had no training, one days' training
or two days' training in the whole of their initial teacher training
period. Obviously we need to beef up the initial teacher training
period, but also in terms of CPD. Going back to what you said
earlier, Claire, in terms of the level of resistance that you
sometimes find with local authorities because of the placement
costs in independent specialist schools in particular, do we need
to have more linkages in terms of training opportunity from a
CPD, not just between mainstream schools and independent specialist
schools, but also between independent specialist schools and local
authority maintained specialist schools, to try and break down
this lack of training, shall we say?
Ms Dorer: There are some examples
of good practice. There are certainly some local authorities who
do invite our schools to their training and come on our schools'
training. A number of the SEN regional partnerships are making
big strides in developing training brokerage services, which are
looking at who has got the expertise across all sectors and making
sure that everyone can access that, so there is some good practice.
As with all things SEN it seems, unfortunately, there is still
a lot of geographical variation.
Q268 Jeff Ennis: Do we need to have
a certain amount of SEN training contained within the ITT part
of the teacher's development as well as that being topped up by
CPD or should it be one or the other?
Ms Dorer: Brian referred earlier
to the Special Schools Working Group, which I was also a member
of, and it was one of the group's concerns that there should be
more time in initial teacher training for SEN issues. We hit a
brick wall with that one, but certainly it was something that
as a group we wanted to see happen and we still want to see happen.
Mr Lamb: I think the situation
has improved and there is going to be a more specific amount of
training from next year, but it still would not be enough from
our point of view. In that sense, the more initial training and
then training within the job we would see as absolutely essential.
Q269 Mr Marsden: It is just a quick
supplementary, Brian, to your response to David Chaytor's question
when you said you thought that early assessment would be particularly
helpful. I want to ask you whether you feel that historically
the problems of accurate early assessment have been compounded
by a lack of links at local authority level between assessments
done in the education and social service areas and what improvements,
if any, you are expecting to see in this from Every Child Matters
in the establishment of children's trusts.
Mr Lamb: I would absolutely agree
with that. There have simply been mountains of evidence over the
last 20 years that one of the major problems for disabled children,
either within education or in terms of their general development,
has been the total lack of co-ordinated assessment in the early
years and the complicated arrangements which exist between education,
health and social services. Our hope and aim is that through the
work which has been done by the Early Support Programme, which
has been looking at joint standards for assessment across different
ranges of disability, joint working between authorities, the whole
notion of a key worker as a central point of reference for those
families, the aim through Every Child Matters and government
strategy to roll that out within children's centres, should substantially
address this issue. Having said that, there have to be concerns
with any programme, when it goes from ring-fenced funding into
generalist funding, that there truly is the assessment and focus
on that. I would be concerned that if there is not some central
resource within the Department to monitor, how that is going to
work on the ground once the Early Support Programme is finished
and has been rolled out. In principle, I think we have the right
strategy to address it, it is how it is going to work as we start
to roll it out.
Q270 Chairman: Early assessment:
why do people not use a simple and, I understand, relatively cheap
method like the one developed by the University of Hull, Lucid?
Are there lots of those kind of assessment materials or is Lucid
just one of them that most people use or could use?
Mr Lamb: I am not particularly
familiar with that assessment method. I think one of the complications
is, depending on which disability group you are looking at, there
are going to be specific elements to that framework. For example,
for hearing impairment there is a very specific one and for autism
there is another specific one. One of the things the Early Support
Programme is doing is developing common standards around some
of those assessment programmes. I agree with you in principle
that there ought to be at least a number of common frameworks—that
is what we are working towards—which will allow much more
simple assessment in the early years.
Q271 Chairman: You are not familiar
with this particular Lucid programme?
Mr Lamb: No, not personally.
Q272 Chairman: Claire, are you?
Ms Dorer: No, I am not familiar
with that.
Q273 Chairman: John, are you?
Mr Hayward: Yes, we are.
Q274 Chairman: Do you use it?
Mr Hayward: Yes, we do. We found
two major problems. Firstly, a lot of children seem to go right
through school without their particular specific learning difficulties
ever being detected. We have married people coming to us and saying:
"I have realised I had a problem and no one found it".
The second problem we found—again, I am sorry, this is heresy—was
we could not find anyone who could provide for us with a decent
working definition what dyslexia is and what attention deficit
disorder is. There are that many definitions that we gave up counting.
No two experts ever seem to agree and we thought we had had it.
Then we came across the Lucid laptop SEN assessment package, which
can be administered by any school, almost any person, because
the kids know how to work it, and it gives you a very good pointer
as to whether you have got learning difficulties. We do not use
it as an absolute determinant, but we screen the children out
and if they show up badly on that assessment, then we take the
whole thing further. It is very cheap, very effective and even
we can work it.
Chairman: John, that is a very good choice
of words.
Mr Marsden: Perhaps the Select Committee
should be given that.
Q275 Chairman: Like the new hearing
test that we can all now have through the Royal National Institute
for the Deaf. We can all phone up and get it, so it is a good
commercial for the RNID's hearing test. I do not know the number.
Brian, do you know the number?
Mr Lamb: Yes, 0845 600 5555.
Chairman: I think all my team need that
because they do not always hear me when I say, "It is your
last question", but that was the last question. Thank you
very much for your attendance, we have got a lot out of it. Keep
in touch with us.
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