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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