Examination of Witnesses (Questions 806-819)
MR KEVIN
ROWLAND, MS
JEAN SALT,
MS SHIRLEY
CRAMER AND
MS KATE
GRIGGS
15 MARCH 2006
Q806 Chairman: Good morning. Could I
welcome Kevin Rowland, Jean Salt, Shirley Cramer and Kate Griggs
to our deliberations and say that we are very, very pleased that
you could all come and give evidence to us. I have explained already
that we are rather tight on the timetable so we need to get absolutely
the best value we can out of you. We are always conscious of the
high quality we get from our witnesses. We are getting towards
halfway through the SEN inquiry, we are enjoying it, and some
of us went to look at two special schools on Monday, which we
found very interesting indeed. We are getting to that stage where
knowledge is making us almost dangerous in the area because we
know a little bit about it and we are improving all the time!
However, we want to get on. Is it alright if we go straight into
questioning rather than asking all of you to open up? We all know
that there has been a debate raging in the SEN sector over inclusivity
and the right of a child and a parent to have an inclusive education
or have a special education in a different setting, so it is about,
is it not, the sort of special schools direction and it is also
about inclusion in the mainstream? Kevin, where do you put yourself
in terms of that? Do you take the 20/20 Campaign group's position
that we should get rid of all special schools and everyone should
be in mainstream?
Mr Rowland: I think we have to
make sure we maintain specialist provision and see it as part
of a continuum of needs. I would also put it in the context that
we are on a journey within our society, from 1760 with a provision
for blind children and a provision for deaf children. So I think
we must maintain specialist provision, but what we have to introduce
is much greater flexibility and break down some of the barriers
that exist between the specialist provision and mainstream schools.
Q807 Chairman: Jean, where do you
stand on this?
Ms Salt: NASEN has members both
within mainstream schools and special schools and we would still
see the need for good training, good resourcing and a welcoming
ethos in mainstream schools because some placements can be really
successful within mainstream schools. However, we still see the
need for the role of special schools. Specialisms need to be developed
so that they can provide an outreach service which can be used
by mainstream schools all over.
Q808 Chairman: Thank you for that.
Ms Cramer: We know that the majority
of dyslexic children are supported in the mainstream environment,
and that is where we would expect to see most dyslexic students,
but we certainly believe that there is a place for special schools
on the continuum. There are some children with very severe dyslexia
whom we think need to be in a very specialist environment who
then can move back into the mainstream once they have had intensive
support. I would also draw attention to the fact that 90% of class
teachers and head teachers, according to a recent survey, did
believe that children with specific learning difficulties should
be supported in the mainstream, although they certainly thought
there were not the resources to deal with them in the mainstream.
Q809 Chairman: Kate?
Ms Griggs: I would agree with
that. I think that providing the provision is there within the
teaching workforce, children with specific learning difficulties
should be in mainstream schools. Currently that is not the case,
which is why I think if children fall very dramatically behind
they may need a period of time in a specialist support environment
to catch up, but if the training is in place they should be able
to be in mainstream schools, absolutely.
Q810 Chairman: But there has not
been much difference in terms of the number of children. I was
rather shocked when shown by one of our special advisers the figures
for the number of children in a special school setting, which
really has not changed for a considerable number of years. It
is around the same level. Is that to be welcomed? There was a
feeling at one stage, with some of the publicity, that special
schools were being closed all over the country, and it obviously
is not the case. There have been round about the same number of
children for the last 10 years. Are you happy with that or is
that a problem for you? Kevin?
Mr Rowland: I think what has happened
is that the population within special schools has changed and
the profile within special schools has changed, and that is to
do with the capacity building of mainstream schools and the development
of mainstream schools. It is a societal-wide issue and increasingly
we have difficulties with managing children who might be aggressive
within mainstream schools, so we have seen a change in population.
Some years ago we may have seen children who were perhaps "more
delicate", was the phrase that was used, for those children
within special schools and they were there to protect them from
some of the robust encounters they may have had in mainstream
schools. Mainstream schools are very much geared up now for providing
for those children's needs. So we are seeing a change in population
in special schools and that population reflects children with
social and communication difficulties and children with emotional
and behavioural difficulties. I think also that early years provision
is much more geared up now to meeting the needs of children so
we have children with learning difficulties being embraced within
mainstream settings more and more. Again, for children with emotional
and behavioural difficulties, and where that translates into aggressive
behaviour, mainstream schools are definitely struggling to cope
with those children.
Chairman: I am the warm-up act, I get
you going and now I will hand you over to the real interrogators.
Helen?
Q811 Helen Jones: We have received
a lot of evidence about the difficulties that many parents experience
in getting teachers to recognise what a child's problem may be
and calling in the appropriate support. All this seems to come
back to training. Do you think that there is enough emphasis in
initial teacher training on special needs education and, in particular,
what would you recommend for post-graduate training where the
course is much shorter and a lot of the time is spent in schools.
How do we tackle that?
Ms Salt: I would like to start
with that. NASEN is involved in doing some training for teachers
both within mainstream and special schools, and we would agree
with you in our written submission that training is a big issue
if every teacher is going to be a teacher of children with special
educational needs. I am pleased to report that I am currently
a member of a TDA steering group on special education and they
are looking at developing a pilot for the three to four-year training
course. They are also looking at extending placements within special
schools, which has not happened on a great scale before now. However,
there is still the issue of the PGCE course because most of the
training is devolved into the school placement and it very much
depends on the effectiveness of the SENCO and the senior management
team within schools as to how much training the PGCE students
are going to get. Some institutions do do more in the core curriculum
for their PGCE students and there is some interesting research
going on in Leeds University into the SEN knowledge of PGCE students.
Q812 Helen Jones: What would you
recommend then, particularly for post-graduate teacher training,
because another of the problems that we come across quite frequently
is that children with special needs can be supported and encouraged
in primary schools but the transition to secondary education is
very difficult? Of course, there are more teachers in secondary
education that have been through the post-graduate training system.
Do you think that that is part of the problem and what can we
do to solve it? If we want to support children in mainstream school
we are going to have to support them right the way through, are
we not?
Ms Cramer: To answer the first
question is there enough emphasis in initial teacher training
on special educational needs, I would say the answer is absolutely
there is not, and the modules that the TDA are currently looking
at and developing are, in my understanding, going to be voluntary,
and I do have some concerns that if they are voluntary how do
we know if we are developing standard good practice for children,
and that a certain area will have no teachers, for example, if
people have not chosen to take up that training. In terms of post-graduate
training, I think there is a huge lack of emphasis on the numbers
of specialist teachers who are trained to support children with
specific difficulties. I can speak mostly about specific learning
difficulties and we have asked very specifically that there should
be an audit of the specialist training, who is out there, how
are they trained, what are their qualifications. We need to make
sure that all children have support that is equal to the best
and for that we believe there needs to be a structured what we
have called "tiered support" of services so that all
teachers in mainstream schools have an awareness and a foundation
understanding of special educational needs. On the next level,
in each primary school there needs to be at least a practitioner
at level three in dyslexia and literacy and at least one specialist
post-graduate trained teacher per every five primary schools.
We think that is probably the minimum.
Q813 Chairman: This is the triangle
you are talking about?
Ms Cramer: This is the triangle
position.
Chairman: We are getting drilled down
into the triangle a little later. Roberta cannot contain herself
on that but she will have to be restrained for a while.
Q814 Helen Jones: What about in-service
training, though, because I remember coming across a problem in
my own constituency—and again it is reflected in the evidence
given to us—where the local authority quite rightly said,
"Look, we can put courses on; what we can't do is force teachers
to release their SENCOs or any other teachers to come on these
courses." How can we solve that problem? How can we make
sure that there is an incentive built into the system so that
the in-service training takes place when people need it, because
otherwise however well you train people initially it is all going
to break down, is it not?
Ms Cramer: One of the concerns
that we have come across for continual professional development
is the cost of supply, and perhaps an incentive could be the funding
of supply teaching to allow people to go on continuing professional
development courses. It seems to me that is one of the single
biggest barriers. We also need to bring in a timetable of planning
and looking at what we might call a "gap analysis",
what it is you need in your school to bring the school standards
up, what are the training needs, and matching those by offering
training and incentives to local education authorities and to
schools.
Mr Rowland: I think one of the
ways forward is to work more collaboratively with head teachers.
A specific example that we are working on as a collaborative now
is providing courses for newly qualified teachers as they enter
their first year. That is primarily to look at managing behaviour,
low level, frequently occurring disruption, and also what steps
to take with serious incidents. The head teachers are very keen
on that so therefore they have released the staff. We are also
looking at a second phase of training for teachers in their second
year of teaching "Success with Diversity" so we are
looking across the whole field of managing the curriculum and
managing the classroom environment to embrace greater diversity
within classrooms. It is very difficult sometimes because if we
take a child with low incidence needs, who might be in a secondary
mainstream school, there might be only one or two a year, so it
is possible for a teacher never to have taught a child with a
visual impairment. Therefore we need to have targeted provision
as well and targeted support within the classroom to support them.
So we need to look at different ways of thinking about continuing
professional development and I think a greater emphasis on networking
across schools and schools working collaboratively. I think we
are moving away from the days when we might have had experts giving
courses to schools and then schools maybe choosing or not choosing
to send people. We must be much more sensitive to the needs of
schools and the capacity of schools to release staff. A primary
head teacher made the point to me a couple of weeks ago that it
is quite difficult to keep releasing staff because it destabilises
the school environment, so we have to look at different models
of working with teachers to build their knowledge base and schools
to change cultures because ultimately when we are looking at inclusion,
we are looking at a culture change, and once we have achieved
those cultural changes within organisations and institutions,
then I think a lot of things will follow on from that, with support.
Q815 Jeff Ennis: On this theme of
CPD, it has been suggested by some witnesses that we ought to
try and provide some sort of on-the-job training, as it were,
and I am thinking primarily in the primary sector field now, whereby
if a teacher gets someone in their class suffering from a specific
learning disability that ought to be matched by a training package
so that both the child and the teacher can learn together. I guess
that would have more meaning to the teacher. Is that a relevant
initiative that could be pursued?
Ms Salt: I think that if the school
is planning for the pupils that it is admitting they would have
seen the pupil coming into the school and they would have planned
and done some training prior to the pupil arriving in school.
I think one of the things that NASEN would like to see is more
emphasis on the statutory inclusion statement within the National
Curriculum 2000 where it talks about teachers setting suitable
learning challenges, responding to pupils' diverse learning needs,
and overcoming barriers to learning and assessment for individuals
and groups of pupils. We would like to see within training much
more emphasis put on that. That would go some way to resolving
the difficulties in the PGCE programmes if the students were aware
of that statement. The other thing that as an organisation we
know is that in Scotland teachers have to do 35 hours of compulsory
professional development per year. I know it is on the much smaller
scale in Scotland and I am not sure if that would ever fit into
the English system.
Ms Griggs: Can I just say something.
I have been sitting through the evidence and listening to what
the teachers' unions have been saying as well as what the TDA
have been saying. The teachers' unions were very much saying that
they do not have enough emphasis on CPD so obviously that is an
issue to start off with. But also in terms of this whole area
of training teachers to support children with specific learning
difficulties, the one thing that I think it is very important
to get across is that those teaching methods help across the board.
It is not just children with SEN, it is literacy, and it is right
across the board. I think what does need to happen here is the
Department and the training organisations and primary national
strategies all need to have a joined-up approach to accept the
fact that if they get it right from the start they will be getting
it right across the board. I think that will then have an impact
on what schools and heads actually spend their teaching budget
on. We were listening last week to the fact that they are very
keen to put training in place for anything that is going to make
their results look better, and we have heard very many instances
where children with specific learning difficulties have been told
not to come into school for Sats. The emphasis has to change slightly.
I think it is great that the TDA is saying, "We accept the
challenge and we have got it right for 80%, now it is 20%",
but we need to start putting the money where the mouth is and
really focus on this and getting it right.
Q816 Jeff Ennis: We have obviously
focused initially on the training of teachers being one of the
prime concerns, if not the biggest concern in SEN provision in
this country. Is it the prime concern and are there any other
issues within SEN that we need to be ranking in terms of biggest
concern areas?
Ms Cramer: One of the things that
I would like to mention is the standards and what parents perceive
as a postcode lottery of provision. You could be getting one style
of support in one area and you could be classed in one area but
not in another area. I think the Audit Commission and Ofsted in
their reports have brought this up time and time again so good
standards across the piece, I think, would be very helpful for
parents. At the Dyslexia Institute we have certainly heard a lot
of parent' concerns around this area, that the standards are just
not there.
Q817 Jeff Ennis: Has anybody got
any other major concerns?
Ms Salt: Just that we would see
150 local authorities with 150 different ways of working so I
would agree with the Dyslexia Institute.
Mr Rowland: I think the parents
have a huge role to play. With the development of parent partnerships
and schools developing much closer relationships with parents,
I think that will start to bring a number of things together.
The greatest success for many children is when the parents are
involved in part of the development work in the classrooms that
you alluded to earlier, but that also brings into focus issues
around accountability, transparency and monitoring aspects, where
we are working collaboratively to look at the development of children.
Where the family and the schools systems become more fragmented
and we do not have the transparency and the partnership, we then
see more challenges in terms of making sure that we have got good
outcomes for children.
Q818 Jeff Ennis: A final question,
I guess it is for Shirley, and it is about the Dyslexia Institute's
claim that the cost of failing children with dyslexia is in the
hundreds of millions of pounds. What evidence do you have to back
that up?
Ms Cramer: I am glad you brought
that up actually. What we tried to do was look at Government figures
through the Prison Service, through the Probation Service, through
Jobcentre Plus, through the long-term unemployed, through school
exclusion, and we looked at the numbers of what I call the over-representation
of people with specific learning difficulties in those categories.
Last year we did a very specific piece of research in the Prison
Service which showed that 52% of prisoners have literacy difficulties
and 20% have hidden difficulties, and the assessments used were
very robust, so we took the extra 10% that we would not have expected
to see over and above the international standards on numbers of
people who are dyslexic, and we looked at the figures of how much
does it cost to keep somebody in prison, and we just timesed them
up. We had £186 million in the Prison Service, £80 million
in Probation, £50 million in school exclusions, so just in
those three categories alone £300 million a year, and then
I began to look at what does it take to train a specialist children
in every primary school in the UK, those sort of figures, and
we began to see that an investment in training would really make
a very big difference in the long term to some of these other
figures. That is not to say also in terms of poor skills. The
fact is if you cannot get a job because you do not have the skills
you are not productive.
Q819 Jeff Ennis: Do we have any international
comparisons that confirm what you are saying, Shirley?
Ms Cramer: I have not seen in
specific learning difficulties anything similar although I have
been sharing my what I call very simple analysis with organisations
in other countries just for them to have a look at that too.
Chairman: That is very interesting. We
are going to move on to specialist support staff as a category
and I am going to ask Gordon to start.
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