Examination of Witnesses (Questions 499-519)
PROFESSOR ALAN
DYSON, PROFESSOR
JULIE DOCKRELL
AND PROFESSOR
BRAHM NORWICH
13 FEBRUARY 2006
Q499 Chairman: Can I welcome Professor
Alan Dyson, Professor Brahm Norwich and Professor Julie Dockrell
to our proceedings and thank them for taking time off at what
must be the peak period of term time at the moment. We are very
grateful for your attendance. As I was saying outside, barely
a month on and we will know so much about special educational
needs that we will be quite dangerous in our questioning, but
we are getting there. We have heard a lot of evidence and we are
getting to know the territory reasonably well. First of all, what
we are getting from the evidence we have had so far is that everything
seems to flow from Warnock. We know that is not true but one of
the reasons we are looking at this is because Baroness Warnock
seems to have changed her mind around inclusion. We have had a
lot of witnesses here who think that it is high time we looked
at this whole area again. The evidence in one sense is that the
number of students in special schools remained fairly constant
over a long period of time and so, one could argue, what is new?
What has happened is that there has been this view that inclusion
should be promoted, but how far has that gone? Are we making too
much fuss about the problems that Baroness Warnock seemed to find
out? The other side is there have been real problems in this whole
inclusion and exclusion agenda and there are other problems that
have nothing to do with exclusion and inclusion; they are about
the quality of education for a whole swathe of students in our
schools. How important is Warnock in your view, Professor Dyson?
Professor Dyson: In some senses
very important because the Warnock Report set the foundations
for the system that we still have and that in itself is an issue
because, if you look at the education system in the 1970s when
the Warnock Committee was sitting and in the 1980s when the 1981
act was implemented, it was a very different education system
from the one that we have now. You have this mismatch of very
rapid change in the mainstream education system and this foundation
of a Warnock-inspired framework that really has not changed very
much at all. It has been tweaked a little, but substantially it
is the same framework that we still have and we get some mismatches
from that. Inclusion is one issue. It is also important to recognise
that that is by no means the only issue in special needs education
and very often it is seen as though it is the only issue and it
simply is not. If you take something like the relative responsibilities
of schools and local education authorities as they were for special
needs education, and the control of education in 1978 was quite
different from that which we have now, it is not surprising if
the system is creaking at the joints a little.
Q500 Chairman: If you look at the
figures, there is, more or less, the same number of children in
special schools and still a pretty constant 60% of statemented
children are in mainstream schools. That is not a difference,
is it?
Professor Dyson: It is not a difference
in terms of the raw figures. Probably the nature of the populations
have changed in that what is often seen as a mass influx of children
with special educational needs into mainstream schools is actually
a movement or a retention of children with certain sorts of difficulties
at the same time as children with other sorts of difficulties.
The case that is always quoted is so-called "behaviour"
difficulties, a moving out of standard mainstream provision into
a whole range of non-standard provision.
Q501 Chairman: Professor Norwich,
do you agree with that?
Professor Norwich: I do, but I
would question your assumption that the number of children over
the years who are retained or placed in special schools has changed.
The Ofsted Report in 2004 had a table which showed a flat level
of about 1.3%, but if you look at it over the period from 1983,
which was the point at which the 1981 act came into operation,
there has been quite a sizeable decline in the total population
of special schools. That was greatest in the 1980s and flattened
out somewhat in the 1990s. The assumption now is that since 2000
it has been fairly flat. If one is looking at it in terms of the
earlier report and what we have been through over the last two
decades or so, there is something sizeable and, if you make comparisons
with other countries—Holland, for example, which has had
a very strong special school tradition much more so than this
country, has developed policies to try and place children in regular
schools—what they found is that the proportions in special
schools have not gone down. If one takes a slightly longer view
back to the 1978 Report and the principles underlying the 1981
act, there have been some changes. I agree with Professor Dyson's
point that it is a question of what areas of special needs and
things change within that. There is a problem with monitoring
because the figures have only been global. Even now that we have
more sub-area categories there are issues around that and about
the consistency of the identification of the sub-areas to make
global statements. My point would be that one needs to look at
it in the longer timeframe.
Q502 Chairman: Professor Dockrell,
what should we be about in this country in terms of special education?
Should we be tearing up what we have done in the past and starting
a much more radical policy, or should we be trimming, shaping
and modifying? When the Department spoke to us they were much
more of the latter view rather than the former view, but we have
had other witnesses who have said that the whole framework is
not any good; we have got to look at the Scottish example, look
at all children with special needs and having a particular category
of children with special needs is counterproductive. What is your
view?
Professor Dockrell: What is important
is to evaluate what the successes have been of the changes over
the last 10 or 15 years in terms of special education and also
to identify where there have been problems, continue to be problems
or where new problems are likely to arise so that one can be strategic
about the changes and not tear up what has been done in the past
but to look at what has worked and see how those can be systematically
developed and planned. If you wanted me to identify what might
have been some of the positive outcomes I would highlight the
exchange between mainstream and special schools and the exchange
of information and skills in both directions. I can point to a
special school that I work with quite closely who, until five
years ago, did not have any of their young people in secondary
sitting GCSEs but with links with mainstream provision now have
about half of them doing GCSE exams at 16, but equally some mainstream
schools benefiting from the expertise in special schools in supporting
their lower attainers in terms of differentiating their curriculum.
There is an exchange and that is something one could build on.
Q503 Chairman: Would you agree that
we do not need a radical change, Professor Norwich?
Professor Norwich: How radical
is radical? I feel there is a need for change. The question of
whether radical means we need another committee like some people
have recommended is some ways not that important. There is a need
for some radical change, yes. One of the things I feel quite strongly
about is the need for greater specific information and evidence
about what is going on. We have made progress over the last few
years towards that. The example that always comes to my mind is
the 2003 classification of special needs and the whole way that
was introduced and some contention around how those categories
were constructed and how they are used and what they mean. There
is a need for a lot more systematic evidence and I would say that
is a radical move. That is not necessarily radical in the way
that Mary Warnock would say we need something radical, we need
another committee. In that sense there are a number of fairly
radical things that are needed in the system. Whether one need
change the framework at its core is another issue and one could
say more about that, but of the issues that I consider to be most
radical and having the widest ramification I feel that is really
quite an important issue.
Q504 Chairman: You mentioned the
information, presumably the data. If that is not being collected,
who should be collecting it?
Professor Norwich: It is across
the system. One of the points that came through the questions
was, for example, how does the standards agenda interface with
special needs education? For the standards agenda in whatever
form it moves forward to include all children with special needs
you need to have good assessment data. We have had the development
of the P scales and other systems that have been developed. Personally
I feel there is a lot more work needed in that area. There is
more work needed in how that monitoring information about outcomes,
about value added, is to be used and used in league tables or
not and how it is going to be incorporated in school developing
planning or local education authority planning and so on. The
traditions that we have are very much where the general system
is marched forward and then we ask questions about special needs
education and then various things are done to try and link it
up. The perennial issue is whether things designed within the
general system are broad enough and flexible enough to interchange
with the needs that are within what people call the special sector.
I see that as a big issue. Setting up a committee that has got
special needs as its remit does not necessarily deal with that.
Where I think radical changes are needed is a more pervasive way.
It is a longer-term issue, not just something that is done on
a particular cycle.
Q505 Chairman: My gut reaction when
I first heard of the call for yet another committee of inquiry
was that we would be very happy to do an inquiry ourselves and
often a select committee inquiry is of more value in my view than
having the great and the good setting up a quasi-Royal Commission
on these things because we can work faster and come up with some
sensible recommendations in a much shorter time. Professor Dockrell,
how do you feel about children with special educational needs
in this country? Are they getting a reasonably fair deal? We nearly
succeeded in getting to Spain and Holland to look at their systems
last week but in the end Parliamentary business prevented us going.
We were trying to look at good practice elsewhere. Is our system
not fit for purpose and their system more fit for purpose?
Professor Dockrell: Two things:
one is that I would like to support what Professor Norwich said
earlier about the issue of evidence and this links to the notion
of fit for purpose. One of the issues is to establish an evidence
base; that is an evidence base not only on kinds of categories
or how we do the planning, but also on what is effective pedagogy
for all kinds of children with special educational needs. There
are gaps in a number of countries. I am not an expert on a range
of countries but I have visited some. There are problems with
the current special educational needs provision which needs to
be addressed in terms of the flexibility in which it meets individual
children's needs. A focus on the individual would be my basic
premise.
Professor Dyson: When you ask
questions like is the current system fit for purpose it begs another
question which is what exactly is the purpose of the current system,
because I am blowed if I know. It is not a trivial question; it
is what are we trying to achieve through special needs education?
A concept like "need", which we have lived with from
before Warnock, is very useful in some ways but it obscures what
it is we are trying to do because needs are self-evident. We think
that somehow we can look at children and will automatically know
what it is that they then need. One of the problems right throughout
special needs policy through many governments has been a lack
of clarity of what precisely we are trying to achieve. To give
you two examples: you might say that the dominant purpose of special
needs education is to raise the attainments of children identified
as having special educational needs to as high a level as possible.
If you say that then you can construct a system which will help
you to do that. You might say no, I am a fairly purist inclusionist
and I think that notions like presence and participation and rights
are what should be driving special needs education. That would
lead you in a very different direction, but unless and until we
actually engage with those more fundamental questions of what
we are trying to achieve, it is very difficult to say whether
the system does or does not work.
Q506 Chairman: Do other countries
have a better sense of what they are trying to achieve with their
system than we do?
Professor Dyson: Probably not,
but they have a different sense. You go to some countries and
there would be much more of a rights-based approach to special
needs education. There would be certain entitlements that all
children would have. We tend to have avoided that sort of approach.
You go to other countries where the separation of a category of
special needs from a whole range of other difficulties that children
might encounter, both in schooling and indeed in their overall
development in social issues, would be taken together. There would
not be an attempt to separate these things out. You go to other
countries again where what we call special needs would be much
more to do with disability and identified disability. It would
be more medicalised than it is in this country. It is very dangerous
to go to other countries and say what are they doing right that
we are doing wrong, or vice versa, because they are probably trying
to do different things on a very different conceptual basis.
Q507 Chairman: We spend our life
when we do inquiries looking at good practice. We recently looked
at prison education and we learnt a lot from going to a couple
of the Nordic countries.
Professor Dyson: I agree. I do
not think it is a case of nothing can be learned; it is that it
is a very dangerous exercise if what we get into is importing
one set of practices into this country into really a very different
legislative context, a different context of provision and a different
cultural context.
Q508 Mr Carswell: When you talk about
a more rights-based system is that to say that parents and carers
generally have greater entitlement compared to the experts than
they would under our system?
Professor Dyson: No, it would
probably be the children who would have the rights.
Q509 Mr Carswell: Exercised by parents?
Professor Dyson: Maybe exercised
by parents, which tends to be the way that we think of things
here, but maybe exercised by the state on behalf of children.
I will give you an example, and it is an anecdotal example: I
was recently in the Republic of Ireland doing some work on special
needs education there. We were talking about rights and entitlements.
The Republic of Ireland has a constitution which guarantees the
right to education of all children and that right was guaranteed
from whenever the constitution was in force (1936, I think) and
we did not guarantee that in this country until 1970 because we
did not have a constitution in quite that way. It is that sense
of rights where the state acts as the guardian of the child's
rights.
Q510 Mrs Dorries: On the back of
that, and I do not need a response to it, but have we not done
that under the Education Act 1998 where does it not state that
the rights of the child—I cannot remember the wording—but
is it not stipulated in the Education Act that the educational
needs of the child should be met by the state? Have we not done
that already?
Professor Dyson: Yes. I am not
advocating this approach; it is simply an illustration of how
it is different. We tend to carve out particular areas where we
think we need to make statements like special needs education
where we tend to couch the whole thing in terms of meeting needs.
That is not quite the same as an entitlement to a particular sort
of education; it is a kind of lesser step. That happens to be
the way that we have done it in this country. If you go to a more
rights-based country then the whole foundation on which provision
is based will be different from the foundation here.
Q511 Mr Marsden: I would like to
explore with the three of you, if I may, the knotty relationship
between special education needs and social/economic factors. Professor
Dyson, in the paper that we have had circulated that you published
in a book by David Mitchell last year you talk about this and
two particular things: you talk about the fact that we have a
variety of different ways of dealing with special educational
needs children—you mention referral units resource-based
in schools—and that means there is a complex system of social
segregation which you refer to, and you also say that "educational
risk factors tend to become concentrated in particular areas and
in particular schools". Could I start off by asking you if
you think there is an inevitable connection, as things stand at
present, between the concentration of children with special educational
needs and the concentration of social and economic disadvantage
in terms of geography and parts of the country?
Professor Dyson: The simple answer
to that is yes. The reason for that is, and this predates Warnock
but since we have started with Warnock, when Warnock extended
the concept of special education to include a very large minority
of children, most of whom were always going to be placed in mainstream
schools, those are not children who would identify themselves
or be identified by anybody else as having disabilities. They
are children who, for one reason or another, are not doing terribly
well in school. What we know about children who do not do terribly
well in school is that they disproportionately come from certain
social ethnic and indeed gender groups. If you look at the special
needs population you come across a really rather bizarre thing
which is that if you are young for your year group you are more
likely to be identified as having special educational needs than
if you are old for your year group. That is nothing to do with
disability. We can imagine why that happens but that seems to
be the way things go.
Q512 Mr Marsden: Can I play devil's
advocate with you on that and say, if we accept that broad convergence,
where does that leave us with children who, in other circumstances,
would be regarded as gifted, but who nevertheless have special
educational needs, and I am thinking particularly perhaps of children
with dyslexia, perhaps with children who present at certain aspects
of the autism spectrum—Asperger's comes to mind. Has that
not slightly skewed that overall picture that you are presenting?
Professor Dyson: There is not
a one-to-one correlation between social disadvantage, ethnicity
or gender and special educational needs. The problem we have is
that we talk about special educational needs as though they are
something that are self-evident and as though we know what they
are. This is an administrative category and it is a rather ragbag
administrative category; it contains children with all sorts of
different characteristics, some of which you have listed, but
many of those children also experience a range of other disadvantages
which is why they do rather badly in school, which is why, in
the absence of any really very clear criteria as to who does or
does not have special educational needs, they get identified as
having special needs.
Q513 Mr Marsden: Can I bring Professor
Norwich and Professor Dockrell in here if they wish to comment
and particularly if they wish to disagree in any way shape or
form with what you have said. In default of that could I ask one
of the things in terms of the general media comment insofar as
it has focused in the last 12 months on SEN on the apparent
extraordinary rise in presentation of children with autism, particularly
with ADHD. Certainly from my own experience in my own constituency
when parents have come to me with children who they say have these
particular things there have been particular associations with
socioeconomic disadvantage. I wondered whether in fact the apparent
expansion in autism and ADHD is related to a sort of ghettoisation
in terms of social and economic disadvantage. What evidence is
there of that?
Professor Norwich: Picking up
Professor Dyson's point, with which I agree, special educational
needs is not the same as what people would call impairment or
disability and that was clear in the framework. The framework
we have inherited—there might be some disagreement—my
understanding of it was that it was always an interactive one.
Special needs arise out of an interaction between environmental
factors and within child factors. To that extent if environmental
factors become more adverse we would expect a rise in special
educational needs. A lot of our trouble and why we go round in
circles is around the issue of where do we draw the line? In my
view there is quite a big difference between children for whom
parents go and get a medical diagnostic category and those with,
what the Americans call "mild educational disabilities"
which is quite a useful term, which is the overlap and would be
the majority of children who have statements. The rise in ADHD
is a reflection of the issues about children's capabilities to
attend and focus themselves in schools and at home, parental capabilities
of dealing with that and the rise, as some people would see it,
of greater parental assertiveness about wanting something to be
done. A parent might come to a school and say my child has been
diagnosed through the medical circles and this child has Ritalin
and that is how it is being dealt with. On the other hand, if
you go back historically about the proportions of children who
displayed attentional difficulties, there are surveys that go
back to the middle and early 20th Century which shows that it
is 15-30% of children in surveys that were done. A national survey
that I did in the late 1990s showed on a well-known measure that
almost 20% of children were being identified by parents of children
as having problems in concentration.
Q514 Mr Marsden: You are saying that
we have always had this with us but we are just giving it a trendy
label.
Professor Norwich: Given a trendy
label, maybe tolerance levels are different, there are different
social circumstances. There are also different diagnostic practices
of medical practitioners. Some psychiatrists I have spoken to
have said that they have adopted a more liberal approach to the
diagnosis of a disorder of attention than they might have ten
or 20 years ago. That is in a sense importing the American criteria.
All of that is part of the social factors.
Q515 Mr Marsden: Professor Dockrell,
do you want to add anything?
Professor Dockrell: I will not
talk about ADHD because it is not an area that I am particularly
familiar with. While there is a correlation between disadvantage
and special educational needs, that correlation varies according
to albeit the different kinds of categories of need that one is
looking at; it is an interaction. You can take a child who has
additional learning needs because of a hearing impairment who
in one context will manage in that kind of educational structure
and another will not, so there is an interaction, but it is not
necessarily the case that hearing problems or central neural hearing
losses are associated with particular kinds of disadvantage. You
can do the same kind of thing with language which is what I know
best. You can look at pre-school settings and see children who
have had, for a variety of reasons, disadvantage which impedes
their progress in oral language, yet there are other children
who will continue irrespective of their socioeconomic background
to experience significant challenges with language and communications,
so it is not quite that straightforward.
Q516 Mr Marsden: Professor Dyson,
what are the practical implications of this in public policy terms?
I want to take you back to your comment in the paper where you
talked about the variety of situations. You talked about PRUs
and you talked about the extent to which they may be being used
as a subset for children with social inclusion difficulties. My
own experience of PRUs in my own area, which I think do a very
good job, but nevertheless it is the case that they do seem to
be taking in more and more children who undoubtedly have behavioural
difficulties, but who in other categories in the past in a very
vulgar term would have been described as "bad lads"
or "bad girls" or whatever. Is this what is happening?
If so, is it an appropriate way for PRUs to be used? How does
that fit in with this whole context of mainstream education?
Professor Dyson: Professor Dockrell
is absolutely right, there are all sorts of variations and subtleties
in this that we have to be aware of, but I will speak in fairly
broad terms and in broad terms that is what is happening. The
issue is naming the problem. If you have some child or young person
who is proving difficult to teach in a mainstream school what
exactly is the problem and then what is it that would be the most
appropriate thing to do about it? The special needs system as
we know and love it says the problem is located within that individual
child and the things about the interactive definition of special
educational needs is absolutely right—that is what the Warnock
Report was about—but we kind of forgot the half of it that
was to do with the nature of provision and we have concentrated
on what is wrong with this child. Then you put in a whole series
of measures for responding to that individual. If you cannot find
some way of putting that individual right then you place them
somewhere else, for instance in a PRU, and while you are doing
that you do not pay the same sort of attention to the factors
that there may be in the classroom, in the school, and then certainly
not in the wider social context that might have produced those
difficult behaviours in the first place. It is not surprising
that it is much easier to try and fix the individual child than
it is to look at the context.
Q517 Mr Marsden: Are you saying that
there are circumstances in which children with behavioural needs
who are currently being put into a PRU would not have gone into
a PRU if they had been at a school in an area of greater socioeconomic
advantage?
Professor Dyson: No, I would not
put it like that, but I would say there are some children who
find their ways into special provision such as PRUs from one school
who would not find their way into that provision in another school
that was differently organised and differently managed.
Q518 Mrs Dorries: My questions were
written down on the train this morning so I will just read them.
I have a couple of questions to ask of Professor Dyson and a couple
for Professor Dockrell. Professor Dyson: having read your submissions
to the Committee you have actually answered one of my questions.
The term "inclusion" embraces both children with learning
difficulties, physical difficulties and those with socially-disadvantaged
backgrounds. Do you not think that we are overusing the terminology
"inclusion" and that if we took those three categories
of children and focused on those three categories that we might
see more movement in terms of socially-disadvantaged children
being included? You are very much pro-inclusionist, are you not,
that these children with these specific learning difficulties
and physical difficulties would receive both the appropriate education
and the attention that they required rather than being put into
one pot which is being measured together?
Professor Dyson: Certainly the
notion of inclusion, if it has not outlived its usefulness, is
beginning to outlive its usefulness just because it has been stretched
and pulled every which way so that it means really very little.
When you say I am pro-inclusionist, I have no idea whether I am
or not unless you can tell me.
Q519 Mrs Dorries: I think you said
you were a moment ago when you came in.
Professor Dyson: I do not recall
doing that. Given certain definitions, yes, I am, and on other
definitions, no, I would not regard myself in that camp. We have
to be careful about categorising and saying different treatments
for different categories because of the history that we have got
in this field where rigid categorisation does not work. I certainly
think there are large swathes of what we currently call the special
needs population where the framework that we have that focuses
on individuals, individual difficulties and individual provision
is not the right framework and where we should be looking at much
broader strategies to do with different types of pedagogy, different
types of school organisation and different types of social intervention.
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