Select Committee on Education and Skills Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 720-739)

MS MIRIAM ROSEN, MS EILEEN VISSER, MR DAVID CURTIS, MS JOAN BAXTER AND MR RALPH TABBERER

8 MARCH 2006

  Q720  Jeff Ennis: But it is not part of the league table process, Miriam, is it?

  Ms Rosen: The league table process, as I understand it, takes straight value added rather than contextual value added. It could be that contextual value added would be helpful. Could I just add a word of warning though, and that is there are no national criteria for the identification of pupils with special educational needs so when you look at the numbers in one school in comparison with the numbers in another school and how well they are doing you cannot be certain that you are looking at comparable populations. I think that would have to be sorted out before you could use that measure therefore in league tables.

  Q721 Jeff Ennis: If that problem was sorted out, do you think it would be a useful indicator for parents in deciding where to send their children as an added value measure?

  Ms Rosen: I think you have to balance simplicity against getting a large amount of information because when the value added information was included last year some people complained that they now had too much information and it was not clear and straightforward, so you would have to take that into account too.

  Q722  Jeff Ennis: I would just to like to tease out from David in particular the Audit Commission's remarks with regards to the unacceptable variation in provision between different LEAs that you pointed to in your 2002 report. Does that indicate that a postcode lottery exists still for special educational needs, in your opinion?

  Mr Curtis: What I think we do not know is what is the compensating provision within those local authorities. I talked, for instance, earlier on about Nottinghamshire and I know that they have a particular approach to the way in which they tackle special educational needs and there are some pooling arrangements as far as school budgets are concerned, so I do not know what is there in terms of compensation but the facts speak for themselves. In some parts of the country your ability to get a statement would appear to be a lot better than in other parts of the country. That is just a fact. Whether you say that is a postcode lottery I really do not know, but, as I say, what we do not know is whether parents chase statements in a particular part of the country because of the nature of the provision or because of the level of funding within those schools. It is an area which is worthy of further investigation.

  Q723  Jeff Ennis: In your second report of course, in 2004, you indicated the massive increase in the number of independent special school places went up by 43% from 2002-04. What are the reasons for that?

  Mr Curtis: I think what you are referring to is our current report and what we have called third party payments of the expenditure by local authorities on out-of-borough placements, and I tried to cover this earlier on. We are not talking about many more children. We are talking about the costs there and I think there are issues around commissioning, for instance joint commissioning, there is progress in the regional partnerships here where local authorities are recognising that they need to work together in terms of commissioning those places.

  Q724  Jeff Ennis: I guess the antidote to this type of situation is for LEAs to provide more collaborative working and more in-house places, shall we say?

  Mr Curtis: I certainly think there is merit in doing more joint commissioning and in having a regional/sub-regional view about what are the needs for local authorities to work collaboratively together.

  Q725  Jeff Ennis: Is there any evidence to show that LEAs are actually doing that?

  Mr Curtis: Yes.

  Mr Baxter: Yes.

  Q726  Mr Chaytor: What is the Ofsted evidence on the quality of the teaching and the quality of the professional development for teachers in SEN?

  Ms Rosen: From the report that we published in 2004, we said that about half of lessons had some weaknesses for the specific teaching of the pupils with special educational needs, and in some cases the other children in the class were being taught well but the particular children with special educational needs were suffering so that would indicate that there is a considerable way for us to go.

  Mr Chaytor: And in terms of the relative significance of teacher training and professional development in improving the overall SEN provision, how does that question rate against flexibility of the curriculum or quality of management or relationships between mainstream schools and special schools? Where does it figure in the hierarchy of important issues that have to be tackled?

  Q727  Chairman: Miriam is grinning at that one. Why are you so amused?

  Ms Rosen: What I was thinking is I would hand it over to our special needs expert!

  Ms Visser: I think there are a number of issues which you raised there. One is that training for newly qualified teachers in the range of special educational needs that they can expect to find in a classroom and actually manage themselves does require some attention, as Ralph indicated earlier this morning.

  Q728  Mr Chaytor: Is it the number one? Is it the most important issue?

  Ms Visser: No, what is really important is to look at professional development across the piece, at school level, local authority level, in terms of ensuring that teaching and learning with curriculum flexibility meets better the needs of a wider group of learners, so it is all part and parcel of a big picture.

  Q729  Mr Chaytor: So in terms of the attention it needs what is the TDA doing about it?

  Mr Tabberer: We are dealing with it in three different areas: in initial teacher training; in CPD; and now because of our wider remit in the Wider Workforce area as well. In initial teacher education, we already have standards which are really designed to make sure that every new teacher is prepared to operate effectively within a school which addresses the individual needs of all its children. There is not a big emphasis in initial teacher education on special needs in all its diversity. You will always encounter people who think there could be more and there should be more. Indeed, the newly qualified teachers that we ask at the end of their courses where would you like to have spent more time, this would be one of the areas that they often identify.

  Q730  Mr Chaytor: Are you proposing to respond to those concerns?

  Mr Tabberer: Yes, what we do is on all the areas that the NQTs themselves identify as relatively weak or Ofsted identify as relatively weak, we drive those priorities into our support programmes for the sector. On this side, we have agreed with the Department seven elements to new initiatives which we are taking with the sector to strengthen it on special needs training. They include new modules we are developing on SEN and disabilities, the implementation of extended placements in special schools as an experiment, a pilot, and we are producing new guidance materials, we have got electronic portal web site resources for SEN tutors, and that is a pretty classic response for us seizing this as a priority: we can do better, let us raise our game.

  Q731  Mr Chaytor: Will the new modules be incorporated into initial teacher education?

  Mr Tabberer: Yes, these new modules are designed to be incorporated into initial teacher education but I have to make clear that the modules are not compulsory, they are things we are developing with the sector in order to show them how to meet our standards for special needs which are compulsory. We do not mandate teacher educators to use particular modules.

  Q732  Mr Chaytor: So a new trainee teacher has got to conform to certain standards as far as their initial training but they are not required to follow the modules that are designed to achieve those standards?

Mr Tabberer: That is right.

  Q733  Mr Chaytor: How are they going to meet the standards if they do not know the modules?

Mr Tabberer: In our system we do not mandate the actual teaching modules. The state does not say, "This is the course, the curriculum, the content; do it this way." It says, "These are the outcomes", and it holds providers' feet to the fire on whether people who leave their courses have those outcomes. But the weakness of this approach that you are almost alluding to is sometimes the sector does not know how to attack the problem better, so we develop modules as best practice ways of doing things. "If you are not doing it properly adopt this or adapt it to something that is better."

  Ms Visser: That would apply to the PGCE as well?

  Mr Tabberer: They will be available. They will be more used on the under-graduate courses than on the PGCE because of the time involved and the three to four-year course relative to the one year. As I have pointed out to the Committee before, a lot of the experience of the course is in schools. On a PGCE, if you are a secondary teacher, you are doing two-thirds of the course in school and you do not have a lot of time to do external modules. We are looking for people to pick up these skills within the experience of encountering children and working with experienced colleagues alongside. The initial teacher education side is certainly in a position where we accept it could be better and we have agreed a series of steps which will be taken.

  Q734  Chairman: Ralph, come on, you have seen the earlier report we have done on teaching children to read. This seems to be really peripheral to many teachers' training, and so does teaching children to read, and we made very strong recommendations on what a teacher needs in order to teach in what we call a standard school, a regular school, and here we have teaching children to read and real problems with the quality of teaching and now we find that you are admitting that this part of the curriculum in special educational needs is pretty peripheral to teachers' training.

Mr Tabberer: There are several things to challenge in your response. On the teaching of reading there have been marked improvements in the initial teacher education preparation for teaching of reading. If you look at the Ofsted report in June 2003—

  Q735  Chairman: But look at the evidence given to our Committee; that told a different story.

  Mr Tabberer: We have been discussing this with the Rose Review as well as looking at the Ofsted evidence. There have been marked improvements in the teaching of reading in initial teacher education and in many ways what we have been doing over the last few years is to take the national strategies—the primary strategies and the Key Stage 3 strategies—and we have been trying to make sure that teacher education is much more faithfully representing those in its preparation of teachers. I do not think you could win an argument that we have been slow about this. The quality of teachers that are now coming out—

  Q736  Chairman: From what I have been listening, you are saying that the TDA is a bit complacent about this, it is a bit of an option here and a bit of an option there, and we are getting evidence from people that teachers are not being trained well enough to deal with the range of need.

Mr Tabberer: The empirical evidence from inspection and research is that our training of teachers is now the "best ever", if I am going to quote precisely the words of the former—

  Q737  Chairman: In special educational needs?

Mr Tabberer: In special educational needs I am sure that people are better trained and prepared now than they have ever been. I do not start this being defensive. I start this stating facts but always recognising that we can do better. In the last few years the thing that I accept is that we have put a lot of focus into making sure that teachers are ready to hit the ground running, to be able to work in challenging schools, and deliver the expectations of raising standards across the board. The opportunity that is now available to us is to put even more attention on special needs. I just want to make sure we grant the opportunity. In this we are absolutely in accord. I am certainly never complacent about the level of the challenge.

  Q738  Mr Chaytor: Finally, do you think we are using the expertise that exists in special schools to improve the quality of the work done in mainstream schools?

  Mr Tabberer: That is a broader question. Again, never enough and I accept the challenge.

  Q739  Mr Chaytor: Is there anything in the TDA's development plan that will encourage that process?

  Mr Tabberer: Something the Ofsted report highlighted was a weakness in using that existing expertise.

  Mr Curtis: There are two of the seven elements that we are discussing in initial teacher training that address this directly, and I have given a note to the Committee on this. One of them relates to the development of extended placements in special schools which we think will get some of our initial teacher educators working more between special and mainstream schools. The last element in our list is explicitly about us contributing to strengthening links between mainstream and special schools in targeted LEAs. So we have again taken the evidence and decided to pick this up. Do you want me to address CPD as well? I have talked about initial teaching training so far.


 
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