Examination of Witnesses (Questions 660-679)
MS MIRIAM
ROSEN, MS
EILEEN VISSER,
MR DAVID
CURTIS, MS
JOAN BAXTER
AND MR
RALPH TABBERER
8 MARCH 2006
Q660 Chairman: How soon will we see
that?
Ms Rosen: We are hoping to produce
this at the end of the summer. The inspection is still going on.
We are still visiting schools for this particular inspection.
We feel that the debate over provision has for too long focused
on an unhelpful interpretation of inclusion as a place (that is,
special or mainstream) rather than on what the pupils achieve,
and we consider it helpful to view inclusion as a process where
the continuum of provision is complementary, where all types of
schools work effectively in partnership to provide best for the
child and the child's family. We also feel that the recent developments
with the Every Child Matters agenda have focused on different
services working together better, and there is some good practice
apparent in relation to children and young people with special
needs, but more needs to be done. We continue to feel, and our
evidence informs us, that one of the biggest barriers to inclusion—and
equally important to targeting resources quickly and effectively
at the point of need—is the statementing process. The process
discriminates against parents who do not have the capacity to
work through very complex, difficult process. It is resource intensive,
bureaucratic and causes conflict.
Q661 Chairman: Thank you for that.
We will hold the questioning back until we have asked Ralph to
say something. A lot of the evidence we have had so far—and
we will come back to it in later questions—does point to
how effective we are in training teachers to cope with SEN and
the different methods of training teachers and whether they are
prepared for the crucial role. Is it the training of our teachers
that is at the heart of the problem?
Mr Tabberer: Yes.
Q662 Chairman: Do not answer that.
Make your statement and then answer it.
Mr Tabberer: I am delighted from
the start of this that Miriam has given attention to the issue
of diagnosis, the identification of needs. For me that is even
more clearly the education issue here, underneath statementing,
as well as getting the provision right in ordinary classrooms
and children with a whole spectrum of needs. Diagnosis, in my
view, has been the Achilles heel of the profession for a long
time. In fact, it is always interesting to compare notes with
people who work in health training, and doctors, to find out that
there is a similar perception in that sphere. Frankly, we can
never do enough to make sure that people have very strong diagnostic
skills, so they can target appropriate provision at individuals.
The second thing I would say is that I think it is extremely important
that we think about where we want the locus of responsibility
for children to be. I think it will always be important to think
about the school as the key locus. I say that because I want to
emphasise that the teacher is part of the contribution, but there
is a wider workforce now which is also part of the solution and
there is a wider group outside school who are part of the solution.
If we try to create all the solutions in the skills, expertise
and experience of every individual, then we will not be targeting
our resources as effectively as we should.
Q663 Chairman: When this Committee
looked at Early Years, for example, and then when we looked
at Every Child Matters, time and time again the joined-up
nature of the assessment came up and early assessment. The health
visitor should be picking up on the possibility of special educational
needs really early in the child's life. We recommended that that
be joined up. When we delivered Every Child Matters, we
thought that was going to happen much faster. Is there any evidence
out there that what has happened over these recent years is producing
a more joined-up client service?
Mr Tabberer: I think we can be
optimistic about the direction of travel. Miriam has referred
to an improving position here, but it has equally been stark about
things we can do better I could do the same with teacher training
and talk about Ofsted's finding that we have the best qualified
teachers ever. I think schools are doing an even better job than
they have been over this before. Part of the good side of the
introduction of Every Child Matters is that it is raising
our aspirations as well, so we are setting ourselves tougher targets
to do even more. When one recognises that this whole realm is
about early assessment, early intervention, good structure around
kids who need that structure most, regimes to help those with
specific difficulties over long periods of time, you realise this
is going to be with us for years and it is always going to feel
like we may have come so far but there is plenty more to do.
Q664 Chairman: What do you say to
the people we had in front of the Committee who want to close
all special schools by 2020? They believe that any kind of excluded
education, separate education for people with special educational
needs, is unacceptable and there should be no special schools
after quite a short time. Do you have sympathy with that view?
Are you a total inclusionist or exclusionist?
Mr Tabberer: No, I am neither.
I am empirical: I am driven by what research and inspection evidence
tells us about what works. I do not think at the moment we have
sufficient evidence to tell us that a blanket solution of one
type or the other is the right answer. It may be for other reasons
and aspirations over 20 years, but the education evidence is not
there for it yet. I do think that we ought to allow local provision
to take its own shape and we ought to test that very carefully
for the way it delivers and really meets the risks that are involved
in both approaches.
Q665 Chairman: Could I ask Ofsted:
What do you think of these people? It was a very passionate performance
from some of the people who gave evidence last week, that you
could not have a full education, an education that befitted you
to be a full member of society, if you had this separate education.
They felt so passionately about it—and of course they were
people who had experienced it in many cases. What do you say to
that passionate argument?
Ms Rosen: We see special schools
as not isolated schools but as part of a continuum working together
with mainstream schools and with other services. The child does
not necessarily spend all its time in the special school or in
the mainstream school but would benefit from services being provided
by both. So we would not see is as an isolated instance.
Q666 Chairman: You do not go to any
special schools that are in old Victorian buildings, miles away
from any schools. They have all gone, have they? Is that a thing
of the past?
Ms Visser: If we were to fast-forward
ourselves into the end of this decade, we would be looking hopefully
at a different picture. Our view is that what is important is
whether or not the school is good. That should really be leading
the debate. I think, as Miriam alluded to in the beginning, the
debate should be much more about how different parts of the education
service can support different young people at different times.
If we all focused on that, in terms of the overall human rights
issue, which has an inclusive focus—we have all signed up
to the Salamanca Agreement, and that has to lead, I think, our
dimension somewhere—that is something for the future. I
think a healthier debate is to say: How can we all work for the
best interests of the all children, irrespective of the place?
We ought to be saying: Take the best out of mainstream for some
children at some time, take the best out of other settings (whatever
we want to call them) and let us start working together for all
children to have their needs met through their career, at any
particular given point in time.
Q667 Chairman: What do you say to
the person who was sitting in your seat last week who said that
it does not matter if the special school is excellent, really
provides everything, is marvellous, at 16 that child has to go
out into the real world and live in a very different environment.
Special education, according to that person in your seat, might
have been a good experience, it might have been quite a positive
experience even, but at 16 there is a real society, a real world,
the world of work, and maybe there is a disjunction or a tension
there. The experience may be of a very good education under 16,
but does it befit them to be citizens of the wider society?
Ms Visser: I would say they would
be referring to a special school, many of which I do not see any
more. Special schools are changing their role, albeit too slowly
perhaps for some of us, but at the very best you would not get
that situation arising. You certainly would have done 10 years
ago; you may well do today in some areas of the country; but overall
the most forward thinking special schools do look at themselves
as outward-looking. They ensure that their children can have as
much experience of local community life and local community work-related
experience as they can, given accurate identification of their
needs at particular times. That would be my response practically
to that. Philosophically and conceptually there might be other
answers, but that is perhaps not for this Committee.
Q668 Chairman: Is there any comment
from the Audit Commission?
Ms Baxter: The group of children
with special educational needs is of course a very, very wide
and diverse group of young people. It is important to say that
some of the young people who are leaving school at 16 are still
very vulnerable, they continue to be very vulnerable, and will
need continuing care plans whether that is through social care
services or through health services. It is slightly misleading
to suggest that special schools fail to prepare pupils for the
wider world; indeed, there are young people who will not be able
to function as fully independent members of society post-16 in
any case.
Q669 Chairman: It is interesting.
What came out of the evidence session last week very clearly was
the difference between the children you are talking about, who
really will need a continuing package of support after 16, right
the way through, and others. This is a very wide range of need,
is it not, that we are talking about? One of the criticisms we
have had is that when you are looking at dyslexia and a whole
range of other difficulties there just is not the training. We
have had people from the dyslexia associations saying, "Look,
there are very short ways of bringing teachers up to speed in
understanding and diagnosing. This is not rocket science; it can
be done quite quickly." There are some very good people out
there who can provide the training, why is it not happening?
Mr Tabberer: I am hearing the
same messages. There are a number of places now where we can look
at boosting—if you do not mind me calling it this—the
technology of teaching the 20%. We have almost, for the last eight
or nine years, been developing a technology for teaching 80% of
our children in classrooms extremely effectively—improving
the whole-class teaching, the individual work, the group work
around the national strategies model. I do think that one of the
opportunities this inquiry gives, as well as evidence that is
starting to come out from inspection and research, is that there
is a greater pool of understanding about teaching strategies which
would apply across a range of specific learning difficulties and
moderate learning difficulties. We are looking at this with some
of the groups concerned and with the Department and it is one
area in which we will be very keen to see your findings. I think
there is momentum up now to have a bit of a push in this realm,
so we do accept the challenge.
Q670 Mr Wilson: I would like to build
on some of the things you have said already and the Chairman has
asked you. In these two reports that came out in 2002 from the
Audit Commission and 2004 from Ofsted, there are an awful lot
of negatives: too many children waiting too long for their needs
to be met; parents lacking confidence in the system; inclusion
being a significant problem for a lot of schools—all those
sorts of issues—and it seems to me that ministers have used
those reports to start a large-scale review of SEN. Do you think
that is justified?
Ms Rosen: We identified problems
but at the same time we identified schools where it was working
well. So we would say there is still quite a lot of work to do
and we can learn from the schools which are doing it well. It
is certainly worthwhile thinking about how we best move forward
from here and that this debate is part of that.
Ms Visser: Two years ago, although
we were talking about the Every Child Matters agenda we
did not have the ramifications of that quite so clearly as we
have now: the potential of joint service working at local level,
with rigorous inspection arrangements to ensure that systems and
provision at local level will help all children. I think that
in our report of 2004—and as Miriam said we will be publishing
later this year—we will see a slightly different picture.
We are at the point of collating all our findings at the moment
and things have clearly moved on. In terms of your question about
a review, because of all the changes that have been happening
over the last two years quite quickly—in fact, more quickly
than in the previous two years prior to this report—we would
say that if we had a royal commission or a big review at this
time, the danger is that it would diversify work and resources
and developments in such a way that it could send us back to the
point of slow progress that we were having prior to 2004. Our
evidence is suggesting that things are moving now in a quicker
way, with standards for a range of groups of learners with different
types of need all improving slowly, and we know what particular
problems are. It is not rocket science: we know the challenges,
we know what works, we know the conditions that make things work
and we know what does not work, and our view would be: "Let's
focus in on those things and change them."
Q671 Mr Wilson: Can I just be clear:
you are asking for a tweaking of the system rather than a large
scale review of the system.
Ms Visser: Tweaking might be a
little gentle. Some aspects of the structural provision need more
than a tweak. They do need us to sit down together, across the
political dimension, the inspection dimension and the professional
field, and say, "What is it that we need to do?" Other
bits need tweaking, but a whole, big review could endanger the
speed of developments and would send us back too far, in our view.
Q672 Mr Wilson: A lot of the debate
around this area seems to be exclusion versus inclusion or mainstream
against specialist schools. In your opening remarks, Miriam, you
said that schools find it difficult to provide for a diverse range
of needs. Do you think what has happened in recent years is that
things have gone too far in an attempt to get inclusion into mainstream
school, and that one of the problems is that the balance just
has not been quite struck at the right level?
Ms Rosen: At the
start of the process, it is true that some mainstream schools
have struggled. I think we are saying that we can see ahead to
more cooperation between different types of schools becoming more
the norm, so that children can be provided for in the mainstream
because of outreach support from the special schools, for example,
and that this would alleviate the situation.
Q673 Mr Wilson: Does the Audit Commission
have any view on that question?
Mr Curtis: Could I answer the
previous question, because to some extent we are guilty of asking
for something which was quite revolutionary after a high level
review of SEN statementing in the 2002 report. I have to say that
most of the folk who wrote the report have now left and many have
joined the DfES, so I am confident that there was, in a sense,
a momentum that they brought to the DfES in introducing some reforms
which we recommended at the time. I am more of the view of evolution
rather than revolution, as far as the system is concerned, because
there is so much investment, particularly on the statementing
side, from a large number of parents and children at the moment
to do something more radical. We have seen, I think, as far as
the Audit Commission is concerned, improvements to the control
of budgets, for instance, since 2002. I think there are still
problems around knowing about impact, if you like—a point
I made in my introductory remarks. We know where the money is
being spent, but we do not know whether or not that money is having
the impact that one would hope. I think it is the joining up of
the measures of performance with the resource that is going into
the system. Before one votes for a radical intervention or change
in the system, I think it would be helpful to know more about
that. As I said earlier, we have not revisited that ourselves
since 2002 and that is something that might be worthy of further
investigation. The guidelines, for instance, that have been produced
by the DfES for local authorities in 2004—very helpful guidelines
about the way in which they should delegate resources and the
way in which there should be benchmarking and the way in which
there should be partnerships in terms of clinicians and so forth.
I do not know what the impact of all that is, because I think
local authorities focus on other issues. I would not want to go
back to where we were in 2002 and say there should be a high level
review with a view to revolution, if you like, but I do think
there needs to be some sort of robust challenge to the way in
which the system is working.
Q674 Mr Wilson: Have you formed any
view on the balance being struck between the use of special schools
against the use of mainstream schools for including pupils with
special needs?
Mr Curtis: I do not think we would
have a view on that as the Audit Commission.
Q675 Mr Wilson: Is that because the
2002 report did not lead you to any conclusions on that or because
you simply did not look at it?
Mr Curtis: Our second 2002 report
was entitled A Mainstreaming Issue. We were concerned at
the time that the SEN should be looked at as a mainstream issue
rather than seeking to mainstream all children who were in special
schools. I think it was interpreted in some circles as saying,
"Let's close a lot of special schools and get children into
mainstream schools." That is not what we were recommending
at the time; we were saying that children should have access and
the opportunity if their needs dictated it, but we were not looking
at a radical change in the balance of special provision and, if
you like, mainstream provision.
Q676 Mr Wilson: In that report you
did say that the statementing process was costly and bureaucratic.
What was your evidence based on for that?
Mr Curtis: It was the fieldwork
at the time, in a sense. We were looking at between £80 million
and £100 million annually on maintaining the statementing
process—and I can get you the detailed figures. We draw
that down from Section 52 statements and there is an issue of
how you interpret that, but we are talking of about £80 million
annually to maintain the system of statementing. We were reporting
at the time on the fact that there was an 18-week expectation
of the completion of statements. At the time, in about 70% of
cases the 18-week target was being met, but in 30% it was not,
so it was taking a long time for statementing to be completed.
The evidence was also from parents who were frustrated with the
system. If you were ever to go to the special needs office of
the local authority, it looked a bit like the filing system of
Jarndyce v Jarndyce: lots of paper and paper chases. The
involvement of a number of agencies meant that it did become a
very bureaucratic, paper-chasing process. In terms of the statementing
process, I have to say that since 2002 the vast majority of local
authorities are achieving statementing within 18 weeks, so the
improvement of performance of the process is quite apparent. Whether
or not, however, that process is doing the right thing, I think
is the fundamental issue.
Q677 Mr Wilson: When I asked Baroness
Warnock about the costs of the statementing process, she said
that the whole thing was a waste of money. Would you agree with
her on that?
Mr Curtis: We are an evidence-based
organisation and I would want to get beneath that. It is very
costly. As I mentioned earlier on, there is a cost in delivering
something which is a parental right, and the statementing process
is there and local authorities and others are appropriately investing
a lot of time into delivering what is the parental right and the
expectation. If you take the position of educational psychologists—and
Joan may want to talk about this, as a former educational psychologist—their
time is then being invested in the statementing process, so that
the ability of that resource to be available, if you like, for
early intervention, the whole school issue, is reduced because
of its involvement in the statementing process. There is both
a direct cost of the process—and I think local authorities
are getting better at that, as I explained earlier on—and
an opportunity cost of the process. The professional time, and,
indeed, the parents' time that is tied up in that is quite considerable.
I think that needs to be unpacked before you reach a conclusion
about it being a total waste of time but I think that is a hypothesis
which would be worth testing.
Q678 Mr Wilson: You seem to be suggesting
in your answer that LEAs are getting much better in delivering
on their statutory duty. A lot of complaints that we get in our
constituencies are exactly the opposite to that. Do you have any
view on that?
Mr Curtis: In terms of the facts,
if you take the best value performance indicator from the figures
I have in front of me—and I can let you have the figures—in
2000, 82% of local authorities were meeting the 18-week deadline;
in 2004-05, 92% were meeting the 18-week deadline. If you look
in the exceptions cases, where you involve other agencies, the
performance is worse, but it is an improvement in performance.
So the position is improving, but clearly it has not improved
for everybody. The other issue, of course, is that once the statement
is arrived at, is finalised, it is not necessarily giving a statement
which parents are going to accept and so there is an element of
contesting it. So it does not surprise me at all that you have
had issues raised with you in your constituency, but, if you look
at the question: Are local authorities performing against the
standard better? yes, they are.
Q679 Mr Wilson: It is not the local
authority authorities which are making the system costly and bureaucratic,
from what you say.
Mr Curtis: The local authorities
are doing what is expected of them to deliver the standards.
|
