Examination of Witnesses (Questions 850-879)
LORD ADONIS
22 MARCH 2006
Q850 Chairman: Can I welcome Lord Adonis
to our deliberations. Some people say that when you get to this
stage of an inquiry we are getting dangerous because we actually
know something about the Bill.
Lord Adonis: I am sure that will
make for a very productive session!
Q851 Chairman: There is no doubt in our
mind that our inquiry is timely, and some of us are cautious when
anything crops up in the educational field and we hear siren voices
calling for an independent inquiry, when some of us believe that
select committee inquiries are independent, rigorous and can do
the job a lot quicker than many of the independent inquiries that
have been ordered in the past. Can I invite you to make an opening
statement?
Lord Adonis: Thank you very much,
Chairman. I have, as you would expect, been paying close attention
to your proceedings on this important inquiry. My department has,
I hope, responded to all your requests for information and I have
sent you a further letter this week enclosing the report we have
just received of the independent audit of low incidence SEN provision
and taking up a number of specific issues raised in your evidence
session. I thought, however, it might be helpful if I made just
three broad opening remarks to set out the Government's approach.
First, as minister for special educational needs for 10 months
now, I would be the last person to claim that all is well in the
system. Almost every day I deal with correspondence from members
of the House about difficult individual cases, including complaints
about both the quality of provision and the action of local authorities
in assessing the needs of individual children. Where serious system-wide
concerns have been raised about the proper implementation of LEA
legal responsibilities, Ruth Kelly and I have not hesitated to
act. On 15 November last year, for example, the head of the department's
SEN and disability division wrote to all chief education officers
advising them in strong terms of their statutory responsibility
to assess each individual case on its individual characteristics
and not to apply blanket policies in respect of assessments and
criteria for additional support. My second point, however, is
to note that there is evidence of improvement in the system and
evidence too that this follows from both legislative and policy
developments of recent years together with the significant additional
investment which the Government has been able to make available.
Spending on special educational needs has risen from 2.8 billion
to 4.1 billion in the last four years, including an 18% increase
in the last two years alone in the resource delegated directly
to mainstream schools to meet additional and special educational
needs. This has helped to make it possible to take forward the
generally well received national SEN strategy Removing Barriers
to Achievement, which is only two years old, and its central
strategies in relation to early identification and intervention,
personalising learning for pupils with SEN and delivering improvements
in partnerships between different types of schools and agencies.
As many of your witnesses have said, it is not the type of school
that matters but the excellence of its provision for the individual
child. I would note that, since Removing Barriers to Achievement,
there have been positive quantifiable signs of improvement. School
achievement for the lowest performing pupils is higher, the number
of pupils with new statements has fallen by 15%, while the number
of appeals to the Special Educational Needs and Disability Tribunal
has also fallen markedly by 9%. The proportion of statements written
within the required 18 weeks now stands at 92%, up from 82% five
years ago, and, contrary to some of the misleading reports on
this subject, this has taken place without any national policy
of closing or discriminating against special schools. The proportion
of pupils in special schools is broadly static over recent years
and average funding for special schools has risen by 6.7% in each
of the last three years. My third point is to conclude that our
policy should be one of sustained, and, I would hope, accelerated,
progress in taking forward Removing Barriers to Achievement
and the Every Child Matters agenda. The audit of low incidence
special educational needs gives particular emphasis to the need
for local reviews of provision, including of multi-agency services.
I would add to this the importance of improvements in teacher
training, the provision of specialist support to mainstream schools,
further education and assistance to students with SEN and their
families in making a success of the crucial transition stages:
transition between different schools, transition from school to
further education and university and transition to work. The FE
White Paper next week will have more to say about these last issues.
As for fundamental structural reforms, the Government is sceptical
that the radical options suggested to you would lead to better
outcomes for children. The case for a wholesale replacement of
the LEA system and statementing does not appear to us to have
been made convincingly, and, indeed, such changes have been robustly
criticised by much of your evidence. The experience of Scotland
is important to study, but their changes are new and only just
being implemented. The task, we believe, is to promote improvement
and best practice in the way local authorities promote support
for SEN across all their schools and their sensitivity and responsiveness
in their handling of individual cases. I have been impressed in
this last respect by the work of the best of the parent partnership
services and an important issue is how good quality, independent
advice and assistance can be provided for parents throughout the
statementing process, not least where they are dissatisfied with
their LEA. Finally, Chairman, I was told sternly by a former Secretary
of State when I took on this job that every discussion of education
policy should begin with a recital of the relevant HMI evidence.
Ofsted has been critical of the SEN in the past, but I note that
in her evidence to you Eileen Visser from HMI said, "If we
had a big review at this time", and by that I think she was
implying a review over and above your own review, Chairman, "the
danger is that it would diversify work, resources and developments
in such a way that it could send us back to the point of the slow
progress that we were having prior to 2004 and Removing Barriers
to Achievement. We know the challenges, we know what works,
we know the conditions that make things work and we know what
does not work. Ofsted's view would be: `Let us focus on those
things and change them.'"
Q852 Chairman: Minister, thank you
for that opening statement. That was very useful. There have been
some concerns and worries expressed to the Committee that the
changes in the new Education and Inspections Bill will impact
in a negative way on special educational needs. Do you understand
that concern and worry? Can you articulate your views on that?
Lord Adonis: I have seen the concerns
expressed, but we do not believe that they are well founded. The
responsibilities of local authorities and schools in respect of
SEN will be the same before as after—there will be no change
in that respect—and we believe actually that a number of
the proposals in the White Paper and the Bill taken together will
improve provision for students with SEN. The great emphasis which
the White Paper gives to personalised learning and very significant
investments for schools to personalise learning better will, of
course, help students with SEN. The much better provisions for
dealing with students who are excluded from schools, including
in the Bill a requirement that that provision should be full-time,
that there should be provision beyond the fifth day of exclusion
in the case of temporary exclusions, as opposed to the current
policy, which is 15 days, and the requirement for the integration
interviews will, we believe, ensure a much better regime for excluded
pupils, who, of course, include a disproportionate number of pupils
with special educational needs. The planning role of local authorities,
which has been raised, is still central to the commissioning role
described in the White Paper and the Bill, and in some ways it
is easier for local authorities to carry out that role because
they will be the local decision-maker in respect of reorganisation
plans, including plans concerning special education provision,
whereas at the moment that role lies with the school organisation
committee. We do not believe that the proposals will harm SEN,
and we believe that a number of the proposals will significantly
improve the quality of provision for students with SEN.
Q853 Chairman: How active will you
be if you were to see, in some months' time, that there was still
a marked reluctance on the part of many schools to take students
with special educational needs? I am talking here of state schools
that should be open to a broad range of students and where you,
yet again, find that they have very few, if any, SEN pupils being
taken in.
Lord Adonis: We will be very active
in seeing that they fulfil their statutory responsibilities, Chairman.
Q854 Chairman: How would you do that?
Lord Adonis: In the same way that
we do at the moment. If complaints are made to us and they are
well founded, we take those up directly with the local authorities.
Of course, the prime responsibility for seeing that schools
observe their SEN responsibilities lies with the local authorities.
It is the local authorities that conduct the statementing process,
it is the local authorities that determine support for School
Action and School Action Plus; so we would see the prime responsibility
continuing to lie with local authorities to see that schools fulfil
their obligations, and the powers of local authorities in this
regard are as strong after these reforms as before and, in some
respects, stronger. The capacity of local authorities to intervene
in schools that are weak or failing or giving cause for concern,
as the Bill describes it, will be significantly enhanced by the
Bill. They will be able to move faster in issuing warning notices
and other types of intervention than they have been able to in
the past. I would hope that the regime of ensuring that statutory
responsibilities are observed will be better after these reforms
than it was before.
Q855 Chairman: What is your preferred
model? What would you hope to see in terms of the impact of the
changes? Do you take on the Sutton Trust's view that what we really
want is to see a local school, a community school, in terms of
social mix, including social educational students, reflecting
the local population? What is your ambition?
Lord Adonis: I would like to see
schools properly reflecting the application to them. Of course,
we have different types of schools, and some schools, like faith
schools, will not necessarily have an entirely local intake. I
do not believe, with the diversity of schools that we have in
our system, that you should lay it down as an invariable rule
that schools must be reflective of their immediate locality, but,
obviously, I would like to see schools which are properly reflective
of their application.
Q856 Chairman: Would you be worried
if you saw faith schools that just happened to have very few people
from that faith with special educational needs in the school?
Lord Adonis: In terms of their
statutory responsibilities, of course I would expect them to fulfil
them absolutely. In terms of their application, of course, we
are at one with Peter Lampl in wanting to see schools that are
highly successful and currently have, for example, low proportions
of pupils eligible for free schools meals engaging much more systematically
in Outreach than they sometimes do at the present time, which
is why the proposal for choice advisers, we think, is a well-founded
one, because it will promote a wider pool of applicants to such
schools. We are working with Peter Lampl on devising a pilot for
choice advisers in London at the moment. We hope that that will
lead to a broader pattern of applications to some of those more
successful schools which have in the past been seen as more exclusive.
Q857 Chairman: If, as we do, you
meet a lot of heads, they say, "There is enormous pressure
on my school to achieve, to have high standards, to reach those
standards in GSCEs and A levels and so on, there is enormous pressure
coming from the Government to achieve in terms of those targets,
and, if I take more difficult children to teach, I am obviously
going to fall down in terms of what I can achieve with those students."
Is not there a pressure in terms of (and I hate to use this phrase)
your direction of travel, that you are all the time squeezing
the more difficult to teach children who might have special educational
needs?
Lord Adonis: There is not good
evidence for that in the system, I would say, Chairman. In fact,
if you take, for example, the academies, which I have been closely
engaged in, they take more than their share of pupils eligible
for free school meals in comparison both with national averages
and with the schools that they replaced. If you get the incentive
structure right, schools will respond. In my experience of dealing
with head teachers, the money does tend to drive the system as
well. It is not simply raw results. Everyone knows that if you
simply want to get high raw results, you have a selective intake.
That does not actually much impress anyone if it is clear that
it is only being done on the basis of the intake. In my experience
with heads, they do have a very strong sense of duty to their
localities in any event, as do their governors, but, over and
above that, if the financial incentives are there, they will respond.
I am very struck by the development, for example, in the area
of your inquiry, of resourced provision for special educational
needs attached to mainstream schools. Where these resources are
available, in my experience, heads are very keen to see their
provision extended and are very keen to embrace those additional
resources, and, of course, they fully recognise that a school
that performs well will not necessarily be lowering its attainment
by taking more pupils from either less privileged backgrounds
or those with special educational needs. The figures I gave you
in my opening remarks, which I can expand upon, have seen a very
significant increase in the delegation of resources from local
authorities to schools in respect of special educational needs.
There has been a step-change in the course of the last five years.
That gives head teachers and their governors big incentives to
see that their provision in the school takes full advantage of
those resources and an opportunity to acquire more resources where
they are making specialised provision which meets the needs of
their localities.
Q858 Chairman: You mentioned academies.
I was going to bring up academies with you. Some of the evidence
that has been given to this Committee might suggest the reverse
of what you have said. Some academies have taken fewer students
with special educational needs. There is one particular group
that has: Bristol and Walsall.
Lord Adonis: If you look at the
annex that is attached to the letter that I sent to you, Chairman,
you will see that the average figures are very clear. The total
number of students with SEN, with and without statements, is higher
in the academies than the schools that they replaced, and the
average they have is also a higher percentage than the schools
that they replaced. In many academies it is very substantially
higher. Of course, I do not come before you to account for each
individual school and its policy, I am sure that there are good
reasons in those individual ones of why that may have happened,
but if you look at the average, which is what should concern us,
the average is very clear. The numbers are higher and the proportions
are higher.
Q859 Chairman: Minister, if that
is the case, why should there be a difference of legal base for
entry into academies than for other schools?
Lord Adonis: Because the whole
basis for the regulation of academies is different. That is why
they are academies. If it was not different, they would simply
be maintained schools according to the law at the moment. Their
admissions are governed by a funding agreement with the Secretary
of State for Education which sets out their admissions criteria.
Their funding is agreed by the same funding agreement with the
Secretary of State. Their obligations in respect of the curriculum
and in respect of special educational needs are governed in the
same way. So it is not that they are treated differently
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