Examination of Witnesses (Questions 480-498)
MR MARK
ROGERS, MR
TIM WARIN
AND MS
JANET SPARROW
1 FEBRUARY 2006
Q480 Chairman: Do the non-maintained
people turn up and participate in these regional structures?
Mr Warin: Yes, they do. What they
probably do not have access to is the kind of range of networks
that a local authority will have in that kind of mainstream special
development. They will not have that kind of access, but they
do turn up and participate.
Q481 Mr Chaytor: One of the features
of the last few years, over the period of time in which these
SEN regional partnerships have been established, is this huge
increase in the costs of sending children out of their district
to the non-maintained schools. From an outsider's point of view
there will be a logic in beefing up the regional partnerships
as a means of reducing those dramatically increasing costs to
individual local authorities, will there not?
Mr Warin: Yes, I think so.
Q482 Mr Chaytor: What is restraining
them?
Mr Warin: They do not have any
statutory powers at all.
Q483 Mr Chaytor: What is restraining
the individual local authorities who are part of the partnership
from getting their act together and moving forward on this?
Ms Sparrow: The South Central
Regional Partnership established an organisation a couple of years
ago to look at the provision and the fees of schools in the independent
non-maintained sector. We have begun a programme which is starting
its third year now looking at all of the independent non-maintained
schools which are used by the partner local authorities. We are
assessing them in terms of quality of provision, both educational
and care, and also working together to ensure that each year the
level of fee increase is agreed based upon teachers' pay rise
usually. That has been very successful over the last two years
in reducing the levels of fee increase. Last year it was down
to about 5% from a high of anywhere between 16% to 30% in previous
years. This year the level is being set at 2.95% and we already
have a number of our non-maintained special schools signing up
to that.
Q484 Mr Chaytor: The increase in
the out of district costs which have occurred over the last few
years is not just above the inflation fee increases of the non-maintained
schools, is it? It is the general drift away from local authority
special schools into non-maintained special schools, or not?
Mr Rogers: It will be different
in each local area, I have to say. My experience in Stockport
is that we have not seen a net growth in our external placement,
we have seen that growth in the expenditure associated with them.
There are other areas that have definitely seen significant growth
in numbers as well as costs and just one or two areas—which
I think has prompted some of the Government's leaning on us last
year—that have significantly reduced and one or two cases
where one or two local authorities had none. If I picked up your
issue rightly about the regional SEN partnerships here, this has
been within their brief to see whether they can create better
collaboration both between local authorities and then the maintained
and non-maintained provision which sits within those local authorities.
They have made some progress, I suppose, on what you might call
the benchmarking side of things, the work which Janet was referring
to. In terms of establishing how many children we have got out
there, what sorts of placements they are in and what the different
costs associated with those placements are, a number of the regions,
in parallel but not together necessarily, are now working towards
either trying to manage fees collaboratively through their partnerships,
definitely trying to manage quality assurance issues because that
has been one of our greatest concerns—not only do we send
a lot of money out of the borough, we are not always sure of the
outcomes of that money—and, crucially trying to improve
the contractual arrangements. I certainly work in an area where
a lot of time and energy is being invested in ensuring that we
have contracts that are used across the Greater Manchester region
which are then used with all those providers that we purchase
places from. Again, that is part of standardisation and quality
control. The next stage we have to move to—and I do not
know if the partnerships are the right place because they are
voluntary groupings—is that regional commissioning and sub-regional
commissioning approach with the voluntary, independent and non-maintained
sectors as partners in that commissioning process. Historically
if you asked me the question five years ago "What do you
think of the non-maintained and independent sector", I would
have said, "It is a major drain on my resources", and
been probably quite negative about them. Since they have come
more and more into play, willingly, and we have also been more
and more willing to bring them into collaborative arrangements,
say around training, the more I think we understand we both need
each other. The greatest move that will move it forward might
be around children's trusts and their commissioning arrangements,
in fact, and whether we get to do some joint commissioning between
trusts for this low incidence high consequence provision that
we need. That is where I think the impetus will come from.
Q485 Helen Jones: We have had parents
telling us that it is not accurate to say that parents of children
with special needs have a choice because all mainstream schools
do not have the right provision. Is that true in your view? Secondly,
is that what we should be aiming at? Should we be aiming at choice
in every school or, bearing in mind the training needs and so
on, should we be aiming at concentrating on specialisms for dealing
with a child with a certain kind of need in particular schools?
What is your view on that, Tim?
Mr Warin: That question very much
depends on the complexity of need, does is not? At a low level
of need you want to encourage choice because you want all schools
to be able to accommodate children with special needs. It is just
in the very complex special needs you have to—
Q486 Helen Jones: I am sorry, the
teachers who have the expertise in dealing with, shall we say,
autistic spectrum disorders, with children who have hearing difficulties,
children who are blind, whatever, you can make the whole list,
is it realistic, bearing in mind the training needed, that you
can get the right support for children with all those kinds of
special needs in one school or should schools be developing specialisms
in the way they do with subjects and say, "We are going to
specialise in dealing with children with autistic spectrum disorders
and we will train for that" or whatever?
Mr Warin: I will come back to
the same answer, I think it is complexity of needs. At a lower
level of needs teachers do have those skills. As the needs become
increasingly complex then you need to specialise your resource.
We have a specialist mainstream resource for children with autism
and we also have a special school for children with autism. We
will have children with autism at one end of the spectrum in mainstream
supported, we will have children with autism who are more complex,
who will be in resource of specialised provision in one mainstream
school and then we have very complex children with high needs
who are in our special school for autism.
Q487 Helen Jones: Mark, do you have
a view on that? I can see you writing things down.
Mr Rogers: I am trying to organise
my thoughts again. Yes, as you probably expect, I do have a view.
No, I do not think we should promote specialisms around SEN in
either special schools or mainstream schools. I will tell you
why firstly in special schools because it might have the tendency,
unhelpfully, to reduce the scope of their admissions in the future
by confining their expertise and specialism too much; secondly,
in mainstream—I go back to where I come from all the time
with these questions—it is about inclusion. Therefore, you
do need to be able to cater for most needs most of the time in
mainstream schools. There is a wide spectrum of those needs and
we need to be equipping staff to meet them. What we should be
doing, as my colleagues have said earlier, is bringing the special
and the mainstream sectors together into these collaborations.
We should be ensuring that the more specialised forms of provision
have the means for reaching out, so that it is not just those
that can come together physically in a geographical collaboration
but also special schools should be able to impact on all the schools
across the borough through having sufficient outreach capacity
to do so. To answer your first question, there will be some children
some of the time who cannot attend a mainstream school, that is
absolutely the case, and they will need a specialised form of
provision. I would not want to see mainstream schools develop
a specialism in behaviour; first of all, I suspect they will be
inordinately reluctant to do so, and what they will all specialise
in will be the trendy stuff that everybody likes and middle class
parents want, bluntly, but equally that argument applies to the
special schools. I think it is back to the collaboration question
of sharing expertise across sectors, not expecting every sector
to do everything.
Q488 Helen Jones: I understand what
you are saying and I agree with you about inclusion, but if we
are going to make inclusion a fact rather than an aspiration,
can we come back to what you said earlier about the training needs
that are required to do that. I can think of discussing with my
own local authority provision for children with Asperger's. They
said, "Well, we can lay on training, but we can't make schools
send their SENCOS to it". That is absolutely true, is it
not? How do you solve those problems both in initial teacher training,
particularly during the first year of teaching which I think is
crucial, and going on from that afterwards? What system would
you want to put in place to make sure that becomes a reality?
Teachers can deal with this wide spectrum of need but a lot of
the evidence currently in some cases is they are struggling to
do that.
Ms Sparrow: I am not sure that
a system in place is necessarily what we need, although what we
do need is the ability for schools to participate and teachers
and other staff in schools to participate in training. As Mark
was saying earlier, schools have five days a year for INSET.
Q489 Helen Jones: Eight days at some
schools.
Ms Sparrow: Anything in addition
to that has to be taken out of the teaching time. Therefore the
cost for a school to send a teacher on a course, for example,
not only includes the cost of that course but also backfilling
for that teacher. There is a cost element here that I think needs
to be addressed perhaps more holistically and organisation-wide
rather than school-by-school. I do feel again that the way forward
is certainly, as I said earlier, through developing cluster arrangements
through sharing of expertise within local areas. Perhaps this
goes to the previous question, but what we are trying to do in
Buckinghamshire is to remove those specialist barriers from our
special schools in terms of the new primary school that will be
opening in less than a year now which covers a range of needs.
It is getting away from not only labelling schools but labelling
children, and trying to ensure that we are able to cover that
range of needs and using that facility as a centre of expertise
and excellence to reach out into the local community. It is going
to take time though.
Mr Warin: You do need specialism
and one thing recently that Ofsted has talked about is the importance
of LEAs retaining specialist support, that they can provide support.
It is more than just training; training can often be very generic,
you can have a big training event with lots of staff, but what
is often needed, because of the individual children, is specialist
support. For example, one of our special schools which provides
quite a lot of specialist support in mainstream where they think
they have a very complex child, then we have someone who will
come in and observe in a lesson another practitioner. That is
different from training, that is very practical support. You do
need that range of specialism to support mainstream schools.
Q490 Helen Jones: If we are all agreed
that in mainstream schools we should have an inclusive policy,
that is what we seem to be, we all accept that there are some
children who will always need provision in a special school, should
that not also apply across the range of schools? For instance,
Janet, you talked about the grammar schools in Buckinghamshire,
this educational nirvana that is Buckinghamshire. What percentage
of your children overall are in grammar schools, and what percentage
of your children who have special needs but do not have a cognitive
impairment are in grammar schools?
Ms Sparrow: I have not got those
figures.
Q491 Helen Jones: Do you not think
that is something you ought to know, whether or not your system
is working fairly? Do you not think your authority ought to know
that?
Ms Sparrow: First of all, I believe
the authority does know it and we do have those figures. I would
not consider it essential information for me in terms of ensuring
that our children with Special Educational Needs are having their
needs met.
Q492 Helen Jones: If children with
special needs should have the same right to attend any sort of
school right across the spectrum, surely it is an issue if you
have a selective system that you need to look at whether or not
that selective system is inadvertently or otherwise discriminating
against those children? You would only know that if you had the
figures, would you not? You would need to look at the percentages
in grammar schools and the percentages of your children with special
needs but with no cognitive impairment who are also getting through
to grammar schools.
Mr Rogers: Yes, but I think we
also need other data, Chairman. For example, we know from the
Sutton Trust's ongoing findings, and one or two other places besides,
that the most successful community schools, particularly community
high schools, have an unrepresentative distribution of children
with special needs and offering free school meals.
Q493 Helen Jones: The Committee has
drawn attention to that. Just before I move on, I wonder if Janet
could supply the Committee with that information, if she does
have it, because that would be very interesting to look at. Can
I ask you all about academies. The current situation is that a
parent can make representations to an academy if they have a child
with a special need who wants to go there, but because of the
different admission arrangements that academies have, academies
are under no obligation to accept that child. Do you believe that
that ought to be changed?
Mr Warin: We have a proposal in
Newcastle and we are assured by the sponsor and everyone involved
with it that it would play very much a part of the Newcastle community
of schools, so it will take part in the hard-to-place protocols
and the admission of children with Special Educational Needs.
I cannot see any way that it would be fair and equitable for that
not to be the case. I cannot see how you can have one school in
a local authority with different admission arrangements. That
is my own personal point of view because all of our schools work
together on hard-to-place children and on Special Educational
Needs. To have one major player in a relatively small LEA that
will not be part of that process, I just cannot see that. We are
assured that this new academy will be part of our community of
schools.
Q494 Helen Jones: If we move to a
system of schools which were independent, for want of a better
word, and each acting as its own admissions authority, do you
believe that would make life easier or more difficult in finding
places for children with special needs?
Mr Warin: For me, it would make
life very difficult. When we talk about special needs, perhaps
one group we really have not talked about is children with behavioural
difficulties, they do not have the same prominence.
Q495 Helen Jones: Yes, not the same
social cachet.
Mr Warin: They are probably the
most disadvantaged of any group of children with Special Educational
Needs. The LSC says 40% fail when they go into post-16 and we
do not really talk about that. That group is going to be very
hard to place with that kind of independent admission arrangements.
The high-profile special needs bring enormous benefits to mainstream
schools. I have to say, where you have sensory-impaired children
in mainstream schools, the whole ethos of the school is tremendous
often as a result of that inclusion, both for mainstream pupils
and children with special needs, but it is the hard-to-place children
that I would be very worried about, particularly in inner city
schools.
Q496 Helen Jones: I would agree with
that. It is true from my experience in teaching that children
with special needs are often great at being good to other children
in the school. One last thing before we wrap up, we have talked
a lot about tribunals. There will always need to be a means for
resolving disputes because we do not have finite resources, no
one does, each of us as parents wants to get whatever we can get
for our child. What is your view then about how these disputes
should be resolved? We all accept the tribunal process is cumbersome;
it is probably too legalistic, it works in favour of those who
can afford to pay for a barrister to represent them and so on,
but we have got to have a system. In your view, what should the
system of resolving disputes be?
Mr Rogers: Can I express yet another
view on the matter. I think if we took the opportunity that the
Child Care Bill gives us to boost our Children's Information Service
to include an inclusive advocacy and disagreement resolution function
would be a major start. We have a Disagreement Resolution Service
already for Special Educational Needs, but we do not have it more
broadly and I think, certainly from my experience in local authority
at least, we too often go from zero to 60. In other words, one
minute we are trying to do it on the phone and things seem sorted,
the next minute we are off the scale with it. I would like to
see the introduction of a generic advocacy and disagreement
resolution service that had within it the specialisms that you
need for particular areas of disagreements. The Disagreement Resolution
Service for special needs is compulsory at the moment. I would
just broaden its scope and allow it to deal with the range of
issues that parents and children bring when they are in disagreement
with the local authority or a school about their provision. That
is the way I would address it and, similarly in terms of escalating
upwards, if you cannot deal with it through those routes then,
yes, you are going to need some kind of independent system. I
do not see why we cannot build on some of the ones we have got.
I do not have a particular problem with our independent appeals
system, for example; I do not have a problem around our exclusion
appeals system either. I think that there are ways and means of
putting in place universal systems for all children and families
and not the specialised ones and have the specialisms within it.
Q497 Mrs Dorries: Do you not think
Parent Partnerships have stepped in and stopped it from going
to from zero to 60? Are they not working? Are they doing a good
job?
Mr Rogers: Parent Partnerships
are doing a fantastic job. My understanding is the majority of
them are there to give information, advice and support to parents,
but when it gets to the point that a disagreement is being formalised,
they will certainly step back from tribunal, for example. I think
we need to be really careful about those services that are advocating
and trying to mediate and negotiate from those that then go on
to try to arbitrate and arrive at a decision. I think you compromise
the Parent Partnership service in the eyes of the parents, particularly,
if you put it in the position where it may find itself having
to take sides in a non-helpful way. I do not want to get rid of
Parent Partnerships, I would put them in the Children's Information
Service as well.
Q498 Chairman: Is there anything
you would like to say to the Committee and have not had a chance
to? We have had a pretty extensive question and answer session.
Mr Warin: The EBD is the disaffected,
the vulnerable, the truant, that group of children who really
are the least attended to when you talk about Special Educational
Needs. They are the group no-one really wants to get to grips
with and the ones losing out in the whole system. It is not the
high-profile cases or the tribunals, it is the vulnerable children
and children with emotional behavioural difficulties who are the
ones who truant, who are excluded—no-one has ever been excluded
from any of our special schools, we never expect anyone to be—but
it is the ones who are excluded from mainstream and the ones with
behavioural difficulties. It is that group who is very different.
Chairman: Thank you very much for your
attendance. We have enjoyed it and learned a lot.
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