Examination of Witnesses (Questions 560-572)
PROFESSOR ALAN
DYSON, PROFESSOR
JULIE DOCKRELL
AND PROFESSOR
BRAHM NORWICH
13 FEBRUARY 2006
Q560 Mr Carswell: Setting that aside
though, setting aside an amount of money in the LA kitty?
Professor Dyson: I would love
to set my taxes aside.
Q561 Mr Carswell: I said it for specific
reasons. If you were to set aside the question of how much money
was in the LA kitty as a way of carving up what was in the LA
kitty, do you think it would be a feasible solution?
Professor Dyson: I would want
to look at it in more detail. I think there would be some difficulties
about children in the system with pots of money attached to them
negotiating their way around the system, if I understand correctly
what you are proposing. Provision in schools tends not to be made
on an individual basis. It tends to be made on the resourcing
of the school as a whole and resourcing group provision so I think
there would be some difficulties in that highly individualised
system.
Q562 Chairman: Professor Dockrell,
do you want to come in on those questions?
Professor Dockrell: No, I think
not.
Q563 Chairman: What is interesting
though is that the question was being posed on whether things
are centrally determined rather than locally. As I understand
it, this is still an area that largely, putting resources to one
side, is determined locally, is it not? This is what Jeff's point
was, that it is very local what happens to a child who is assessed
to have special educational needs. That is still the case, is
it not?
Professor Dyson: Yes. Something
we have not touched on other than very briefly is the split between
who provides the resources and has the responsibility for ensuring
the child is educated and who receives the resources and makes
the provision. We have to remember that the Warnock system was
set up when local authorities owned and managed schools and that
is no longer the state of play.
Chairman: Roberta, would you like to
come back? I rather cut you off earlier.
Q564 Dr Blackman-Woods: What I was
trying to explore was the extent to which different messages coming
from academics and professionals in the field were making things
difficult for policy-makers, and if you are going to go down a
largely inclusion agenda route then you have to shift resources,
you have to shift mindsets and it is very difficult, once you
are down that road, then to pull back. Some of the evidence we
have had seems to be suggesting that maybe we ought to be pulling
back from the overall inclusion agenda and once again looking
at whether special needs schools are the most appropriate, particularly
for a large number of special educational needs children. I think
I have had mixed messages from this Committee and that is why
we are taking evidence but I just wonder where you are with that
dilemma. We can get out of it, I know, by saying, "Oh, let
us have schools co-located", and that is probably the best
way forward, but is it really, because you will still get parents
insisting one way or the other that they want mainstream or they
want special? I would prefer that we did not have that distinction.
Professor Norwich: That goes back
to the point I was making earlier about looking at what parents
need when they evaluate a school and they consider what their
child's needs are and what is on offer. We really need to get
away from the notion of special school versus regular school.
There has been some criticism of the notion of continuing provision
which has been around for years, but it still has some currency.
I think the issue of what are the stages and the continuum and
where people are on that continuum is where there might be differences.
Certainly I think that a lot more work could go into supporting
parents in an understanding of some of the detail because I think
sometimes parents and children themselves respond in what would
be seen as social terms, reputation terms: "What does it
mean for my child to be collected by a bus to go to this school
rather than walk down the road to go to that school?". These
are some of the issues partly around the identity of the family
and so on that are really quite important. I think there is more
that could be done there.
Q565 Dr Blackman-Woods: Professor
Dockrell, do you want to come in?
Professor Dockrell: I wanted to
make two points about that. The first thing is that whilst some
special schools are very good they are not a panacea and it would
be wrong to see them in that way. The other thing to think about
is in terms of specialist resources rather than special schools
and these resources are not necessarily financial. They can be
skills-based. The money is part of it but it is only part.
Q566 Mr Chaytor: Coming back to the
issue of inclusion and attainment, what is the priority that should
be given to employability, particularly in the last two years
of secondary school? Have we done enough on this? Should it be
a stronger focus within the education of children with SEN in
the last two years? Are there parallels to be drawn maybe with
the way in which we deal with children with SEN in secondary schools
and the new policy of incapacity benefit for 25-year-olds?
Professor Dyson: It depends how
you define employability and putting an emphasis on that.
Q567 Mr Chaytor: You always answer
your questions, "It depends how you define it". Are
you going to tell us what you would answer?
Professor Dyson: I do not think
you should have answers necessarily! I think that is an issue
because there is a history in this country of vocational training
in schools, much of it, I have to say, done in special schools,
some of it done by myself in special schools, which had its merits
but was also rather unambitious and narrow and did not lead anywhere.
We also have to be very careful in that the chances of many young
people finding employment when they leave school at 16 or even
19 are remote, so they are probably going to go on to some sort
of vocational training after that. Something which says that it
is not the academic curriculum as we had it from 1988 onwards
but it is something which is a bit more locked into broader personal
development which then links on to questions of employability
I think makes sense, but then that makes sense for every child
in the system, not just for those with special needs.
Professor Dockrell: I would like
to make two points on that and they follow on from what you were
saying. It depends on the group of children with special needs
that you are talking about. I am talking about a particular group
now who have longstanding special needs throughout primary and
secondary school and whose move at 16 was predominantly on to
some kind of further education, often doing NVQ training of one
kind or another, and had typically sat GCSEs because that was
what was on offer, so it is a longer term process, as it is for
most other young people. The second interesting issue about that
is that the children who were finding it hardest to adjust to
the FE situation were those children who were coming from special
provision because it was a different kind of context and they
were typical large FE kinds of colleges.
Q568 Mr Chaytor: Do you conclude
from that that those within special provision are beyond training
for employability?
Professor Dockrell: No, not at
all.
Q569 Mr Chaytor: What conclusions
do you draw from that? From your experience is that just another
argument for greater inclusion?
Professor Dockrell: It was an
issue about, when you think about what you are doing if you are
building up a special provision, you have to think of where young
people are going to go post-16 and what kinds of services need
to be put in place to support them. Academically there were no
differences between the kids.
Q570 Chairman: Are you suggesting
that employers might be more resistant to taking on a child who
has come through the special school route?
Professor Norwich: The figures
on employment of young adults with disabilities show there are
differentials; I am not arguing with that. The special school
issue about the impact of special schools really depends on whether
the special school has planned and built in links. Some special
schools build in links when giving vocational employment opportunities,
having part-time links either with a local school or employment
or whatever. The issues are that wherever you are on the continuum
there have to be very good flexible links between all the various
elements and I think that has a clear bearing on the issue of
employability. The days of special schools being isolated, detached,
distant, countrified are gone. Special schools have a more active
place in linking and connecting in with the system and in that
sense there is a case for them.
Q571 Mr Marsden: I just want to take
you back to the discussion we had right at the beginning about
the link between social and economic factors? We are trying to
look forward to policy and so I would like to ask you this question.
Do you think that if we had a sustained period of earlier (and
I mean in age range) concentration and intervention on socially
disadvantaged children, such as, for example, the Government is
trying to do via Sure Start and Every Child Matters,
and that ultimately if—and I accept it is a big "if"—that
was successful over a five or ten year period, we would have a
reduced number of children with special educational needs or indeed
with statements?
Professor Dyson: There are two
parts to the answer. One is that special needs, as I said, is
an administrative category and statementing is a kind of micro-political
contest that goes on. Who knows? You could end up with more because
other circumstances change. In terms of should there be more children
who do better in schools, the answer is yes, and therefore if
you kept the benchmarks as they are now you probably would not
need to identify as many.
Professor Dockrell: I would agree
with that.
Professor Norwich: I agree with
that but it is a question of degree. People can hold up quite
unrealistic hopes about the impact of early intervention. It goes
back to the point, what is the purpose of special provision? Special
provision is not always in a sense to recover levels of attainment
that would be seen as normal. That is really quite an important
issue. It might in some cases; it might not in others. That is
an important element within the spectrum of special needs that
one needs to be aware of.
Q572 Chairman: We have had a very
good session. We are very grateful that three distinguished professors
have been with us and answered fully and frankly the questions
that we have asked. Is there anything you want to tell us that
we have not covered? We have asked a lot of questions. You probably
think we are rather muddled about where we are at the present
moment, halfway through our inquiry. Are there any questions we
have not asked you that we should have asked you?
Professor Dyson: Not in terms
of questions, but I think there is a turning point, a decision
point, that we are at. One decision is to keep on doing what we
have done for many years now, which is to muddle through with
the current system. The other one is to take a long, hard look
at it—and it will be a long, hard look; there are no quick
fixes in this area—and actually say maybe it is time to
move in a very different direction.
Professor Norwich: I feel that
the system needs to build better capacity. That was what I was
saying earlier on. It needs to build better professional capacity,
better research-based capacity, more dispersal of knowledge and
so on, and I see that as a long term issue. That to me is really
the priority. There are lots of issues and difficult challenges
and hard choices to be made all the way along the line but I feel
that one can see elements of progress, although I must say there
is a bit of muddling through, I feel, in special needs which in
some ways is not good enough and I think that partly reflects
what I see as the separate status of special needs.
Professor Dockrell: Someone earlier
said that children's needs were self-evident. I think I would
challenge that assumption and say that children with special educational
needs, however we define them, often have complex learning challenges
that require a sophisticated and intelligent set-up to address
them and I would not want us to go away and think that it is self-evident
what kind of problems they might be.
Chairman: Thank you very much for your
evidence today. If, on the way home, on the bus or in the car
or whatever way you are going, you think, "I wish I had told
that darn Committee something", please email us, be in contact
with us. We want to make this inquiry and the report that we make
out of it as good as we possibly can.
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