UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be
published as HC 478-i
House of COMMONS
MINUTES OF EVIDENCE
TAKEN BEFORE
EDUCATION AND SKILLS committee
SPECIAL EDUCATION NEEDS
Monday 31 October 2005
BARONESS WARNOCK
Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 47
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Oral Evidence
Taken before the Education and Skills Committee
on Monday 31 October 2005
Members present
Mr Barry Sheerman, in the Chair
Dr Roberta Blackman-Woods
Mr David Chaytor
Mrs Nadine Dorries
Jeff Ennis
Tim Farron
Helen Jones
Mr Gordon Marsden
Stephen Williams
Mr Rob Wilson
________________
Witness: Baroness Warnock,
a Member of the House of Lords, examined.
Q1 Chairman:
Baroness Warnock, can I welcome you to our proceedings and say what a pleasure
it is to have you here and to see you again.
We are pretty tight on time today because we have an hour for this part
of the inquiry and we have an hour for something quite different afterwards, so
we are limited for time. That does not
mean to say this will be the only chance we have to talk to you and because of
that I am not going to read any of your CV out, which is illustrious and long,
because I think most people know it. What
they will be particularly concerned about and interested in, of course, is your
report that you wrote. Take us,
Baroness Warnock, through the history. You
were appointed by whom? Was it a Labour
education minister? Who appointed you
to the original inquiry?
Baroness Warnock: Margaret
Thatcher, as a matter of fact. She was
Secretary of State for Education.
Q2 Chairman:
Yes. What date?
Baroness Warnock: That was early
1974, then the Conservative Government fell and the Labour Government took over
the committee which had just been set up.
We had not actually met yet, but we were taken over.
Q3 Chairman:
Yes, I knew there was a political change from your being asked to do the job.
Baroness Warnock: The Labour Government
was still in power when we reported four years later.
Q4 Chairman:
In what year did you report?
Baroness Warnock: 1978.
Q5 Chairman:
You reflected on your report fairly recently and it is one of the reasons we
are all here today. It is not the only
reason because I think I have said in other places that we tend to do reports
on issues that we have neglected for some time, and we had discussed in this
Committee the fact we had not looked at special education under my chairmanship
and it was about time we did. Then,
serendipity, you made your speech, wrote your pamphlet and, of course, that was
very timely for us.
Baroness Warnock: I think it is
one of those occasions when I wrote that pamphlet because there was a lot
buzzing all around anyway. It was not
ground-breaking, it was just part of that general feeling in the air that the
whole thing needed looking at again.
Q6 Chairman:
Can you take us through it. When you
first wrote the report, I take it you were content with your
recommendations. Is it that you have
changed your mind about the recommendations that you made, or is it because you
do not think Governments ever really carried through the recommendations into
policy in quite the way that you anticipated or hoped for?
Baroness Warnock: I think if one
reads the first report, the real report, carefully - and I re-read it again - I
do not think we ever wanted our recommendation about integration to be taken
quite as far as the Government now seems to be taking it with their policy of
inclusion. I think the reason for that
is simply at the time in 1974, the most severely disabled children had only
just come under the Education Department; before that they were the
responsibility of Social Services until 1972. So we wanted to introduce a concept of special educational needs
that would somehow demonstrate that education overall for all school children
was a kind of integrated activity with common aims, and within that integrated
activity different children had different needs. Now that was very widely interpreted as meaning that all children
would be taught at the same school, and there were people, mostly far left
Labour members of my committee, who thought the comprehensive ideal would never
be fully realised unless there was one kind of school for absolutely everybody,
and that was where the beginning of what I regard as the exaggeration of the
possibility of inclusion began from.
Q7 Chairman:
Good, that certainly gives us a part of the history. In fact, a number of administrations have seemed to have followed
this call for integration, have they not?
A large number of secretaries of state have come and gone over the years;
they all seem to have subscribed to inclusion or integration, or whatever you
call it. In trying to look at this in a
non-party way, it seems there has been a kind of fashion for this that is
really outside of the party political or includes all the main political
parties.
Baroness Warnock: I think that
is right. I think one huge step in the
wrong direction, if I can state it plainly, was the 2001 Education Act which,
for the first time, brought together the concept of special educational needs
and disability discrimination because that had never been done before. Now to me - you may be able to enlighten me -
I am absolutely unclear myself, and I think a lot of schools are, about whether
all children who have special needs, let us say from emotional difficulties or
whatever it is, are to be thought of as disabled, in which case if they are
then if the school cannot handle this child and excludes it, it is caught under
the Discrimination Act and is committing a criminal offence. If they are not disabled but are allowed to
have special needs without a disability label, so to speak, then the legal
situation is different. I have not been
able to work that out. As far as I
know, I have never found a clear answer for that.
Q8 Chairman:
All my colleagues are waiting to ask you many questions, but, can I ask you
before we open up the questioning, why do you think so many people seem to
think you have let them down? They
thought you were the great integrationist, you are the person everyone associated
with a particular style. Why do you
think they are quite so strident in their reaction to your more recent change
of opinion?
Baroness Warnock: I think there
are two different answers to that. One
of them stems from the whole concept of disability discrimination and I think
that there is a large group which really thinks that disability is caused by, say,
other non-disabled people's attitudes to disability. If a child is educated in a special school that child is, by that
fact alone, being discriminated against.
He does not get the chance that other children have to go to a mainstream
school and I think that is one stream of what I can only describe as hostility,
that my pamphlet, for example, provoked.
I think the other thing is that people, and particularly parents, do
feel that they are being cheated and therefore their children are being cheated.
I do not think this is a particularly
party political point, but the reason is the White Paper, last week or whenever
it was, which over and over again emphasises parental choice as the great good
which is going to come with educational reform, but I think that produces a
hollow laugh on the part of parents with children with disabilities because
they have no choice. Everything depends
on the assessment that their child gets and it is the local authority which
conducts the assessment and also has to pay the money and naturally the parents
do not believe the assessment is truthful because it is pitched as low as the
local authorities can get away with because of the money. They really have virtually no choice of
schools and no control over wishing for anything else, so I think they feel
cheated for that reason.
Chairman: Thank you very much
for those introductory responses, Baroness Warnock. Nadine, would you like to open the questioning?
Mrs Dorries: Chairman, before I
actually ask my question, could I ask why Baroness Warnock is only at the
Committee for an hour, because that hour has slipped to 45 minutes, and as we
are doing SEN as our inquiry and Baroness Warnock is both the authority and
architect of the SEN, is it not possible to ask her to come back another day?
Chairman: We are already going
to do that.
Mrs Dorries: Fantastic.
Chairman: The answer to your
question is that if we do not see the Adult Learning Inspectorate today, the
time for comment on the consultation on the abolition of ALI will be over.
Q9 Mrs Dorries:
That is fine. I could do 40 minutes on
my own. Baroness Warnock, I do not
think anyone can disagree that many children benefit from inclusion, and parents
with children who want mainstream education should have it as a right. I do not think anyone disagrees with that. You recently stated that inclusion has failed
too many children with special needs and that is a view I share. I would like to ask about children who are
wrongly placed in mainstream education, of which there are a number in my
constituency and many across the country, namely children with conditions such
as Asperger's and autism? Children are
robbed of the ability to socially interact or communicate, who need rigid
discipline, who are terrified of noise and chaos and constantly changing
teachers and who lack the most basic skills and need them to be taught to
them. Some of these children do well in
primary school because they have one teacher and a small intimate environment
and do quite well there. However, when
they move to secondary education, the chaos, the rotating teachers, the noise
and the confusion are terrifying to them, and actually I have seen this at
first hand. They are terrified, and I
have heard teachers say it breaks their heart to see children in that position
sometimes. In this situation, I think
the policy of inclusion is - and I hate to have to say this - sometimes from
what I have seen, a policy of cruelty in some cases and in this environment
children cannot cope. It is borne out
by the fact that 27 per cent of children with autism, a statistic I know you
are aware of, in mainstream education are excluded at any one time. The only lifeline these parents have for
those children is in the statementing process.
That is the only safety net they have, the only legal road they have to
go down is the statementing process, and yet you say that you would like to see
that removed. What would you like to
see put in its place? Do you not think,
as someone of your knowledge, authority and standing in the community and
nationally, that you should perhaps be putting forward some of the things you
said in your pamphlet and some of the views you have in a more robust manner to
the Government?
Baroness Warnock: I think, to
defend myself, I would say that the main thrust of my pamphlet was that it is
time that the whole structure within which we assess children should be changed
and I have no instant solution. You
know as well as I do that a new system is coming in in Scotland in a
fortnight's time and they have given up the expression "SEN" and they have
given up records or whatever they used to call statements, and it is all
structured differently. My gloomy
thought is it is not going to make a bit of difference, but that is nothing to
do with it. I think we need another
look at the whole thing. What I have
against statements, without being able to say what should go in their place, is
that they operate so terribly inequitably.
Two children with almost identical disabilities, one of whom would have
a statement and therefore go to special school if that is what the parent
wanted, and the other of whom has a statement obstinately withheld by the local
authority, probably for financial reasons, and their disabilities could be
almost the same. This seems to me to be
very, very inequitable. I want to have
a system that does not have this cut-off point for which nobody knows what the
criteria are. There are not and never
have been any clear criteria to determine whether someone has a statement or
not. Just to refer briefly to what you
say about autistic children - I blame myself partly for this in the report - we
have all got into the way of thinking that special educational needs is a
single category of children and if some children with special needs, by
adapting the school and bringing teachers in, can flourish in a mainstream
school, then all children who have SEN will be the same, but that is particularly
not the case, as you say, about autistic children.
Q10 Mrs Dorries:
You do not have an alternative proposal to the statementing process then?
Baroness Warnock: Not really. I am not an expert. I would like to see another committee ---
Q11 Mrs Dorries:
I think you are an expert, Baroness.
Baroness Warnock: I think the
great thing about committees, as you know well being members of this Committee,
is that you do learn from one another and people have ideas that you would not
have thought of you and you think, "Gosh, I wouldn't have thought of that", and
then you explore it. I am a terrific
believer in - and you may say that I would say that, would I not - of
committees and inquiries because they have time and resources and research. That is what I think is needed.
Q12 Mrs Dorries:
Baroness Warnock, you just made the statement that parents can have the choice
to send their children to a special school or not. Baroness Warnock, parents do not have the choice. They do not have a choice to send them to a
special school. That choice is
frequently denied them, whether it is through the funding or a particular
policy of the LEA, they do not have a choice.
Baroness Warnock: At least they
have a chance if they have a statement to go to a special school if the parents
plead and fight.
Mrs Dorries: Only in many cases
if they go to a tribunal and have £10,000 to spend and are white and middle
class. I am trying to make the point it
is variable.
Q13 Chairman:
Baroness Warnock, do you want to come back on those?
Baroness Warnock: One of the
things that is wrong with the present system - and I know people say it is
wrong and not a good idea, but I would not trust myself to have a good idea -
is the whole business of the tribunals that they have to go through. If a parent has to identify a school, say,
that would suit her child very well, first of all she cannot get a statement
and then what is on the statement does not specify and so on and so on. It wastes months and years of the child's
life.
Q14 Chairman: It is refreshing, Baroness Warnock, to hear
someone say it is important to ask a question of you and you do not always have
to have all the answers, but I want to put your mind at rest. You do not have quite the same Committee system
in the House of Lords as we have here, so let me assure you I will not rest
until this Committee of inquiry on special education does a thorough job,
reflects with all its resources and comes out with what I hope will be a
first-class report which will satisfy even your high standards.
Baroness Warnock: I am not answering directly but if I may say
so, one of the things that I find very puzzling about the situation we are in
now is that on the one hand you have local authorities, you have teachers in
schools, thinking they must interpret all the Education Acts there have been in
such a way children are included in the mainstream and that is necessarily the
best form, while at the same time I think little is known about parents'
wishes. There are these new kinds of
schools, specialist non-maintained schools, which are specifically for children
with statements. They are special
schools, they - probably because they were threatened with closure - applied
for and got specialist school status and I know about two of these schools but
I think there are 30 of them now up and down the country, and the great thing
about them is that they are small, they are about 150 pupils. I think that is big enough for a special
school, especially for those autistic spectrum children who need stability, who
need to know their teachers, who need that kind of nurturing. What I would love to know is to what extent
the rise of these schools really fits in with Government policy. I find it terribly, terribly
mysterious. I was asked to go to one of
these schools and I was incredibly impressed, they are wonderful, and since
then, by poking around in the Department and asking questions of the Special
Schools Trust people I managed to see a list of them and, as I say, there are
30 of them and more coming. How do they
fit in?
Chairman: It is our job to find that out. We will be doing that. We will come back to that in a minute
because there are some interesting leads you have given us there.
Q15 Mr Marsden: Can I very quickly come in on what you have
just said? You mentioned "autistic
spectrum" there and what I would be interested in is, first of all, do you
think that the enormous emphasis there now is in the coverage of SEN on the
autistic spectrum, reflects a wide scale increase in the incidence of autism or
the greater awareness of it ---
Baroness Warnock: Quite so.
Q16 Mr Marsden: Secondly, if it is a spectrum it presumably
goes all the way from very, very severe difficulties to very minor
difficulties. Is it then appropriate we
should be talking about treating all these children within that spectrum in
either inclusive education or special schools?
Baroness Warnock: I think that is a very interesting question
but I think the children with manifest disabilities, whom the severely autistic
group would be among because many of them have no speech and so on, would
already go to special schools. I doubt
if many very severely affected children would be in a mainstream school, except
in an autistic unit which is a separate thing within the school. I think the children who are least disabled
and with less obvious disabilities are in a curious way the children who are
worst done-by. Those are the children
who have the kind of difficulties that make a large comprehensive school
absolute hell. I know of one child for
example who has been refused a statement because he has a high IQ. Autism is not a matter of IQ. This child is in complete misery and only
goes to school when he is drugged with anti-depressants, but the invisibility
of his difficulties makes it so hard for the parent.
Q17 Mr Marsden: I am perhaps being a bit dumb but I am not
quite following through the logic of what you are saying. If you are saying children in this position
in the spectrum should not be in mainstream education, is it then also
appropriate there are children with Asperger's, for example, who do have
significant challenges but probably many experts might say the last thing you
should do with a child with Asperger's is put them in a special school.
Baroness Warnock: I am not sure that is true. What we perhaps do not do enough of is to
follow the child, let us say, a Down Syndrome child, from the age of 9 or 10
very carefully to see how, if at all, that child will manage to survive in a
secondary school. I think the
transition from primary to secondary is, as has been said, traumatic for most
of them but it is particularly traumatic for various kinds of disabilities
including Asperger's, including Down Syndrome, and the reason is partly that
adolescent children have different emotional and friendship and group needs
from children at primary school. I
think there are quite a lot of Down Syndrome children who suddenly feel
themselves completely left out. They
have had lots of friends at primary school but because they do not do all the
things - some of them do but there are others who cannot manage - they become
very miserable and then very angry if they suddenly find themselves excluded
from all their previous friends. So
there needs to be a much more careful monitoring system for a child who has been
pin-pointed so to speak in the primary sector as having learning difficulties
of various kinds to see how they are going to manage in the first year of
secondary school, and then at that stage the decision should be made about
whether a special school or let us say a small school would be more
appropriate.
Q18 Mr Marsden: You think size is an issue here?
Baroness Warnock: The smallness of the school makes a huge
difference to the success of the child.
Q19 Helen Jones: I think perhaps, Baroness, my colleagues have
hit on a point we need to clarify here because we are talking about children
with a wide spectrum of different needs.
Can I ask you first of all what is your definition of a special
educational need and what definition should this Committee be working to?
Baroness Warnock: What a terrible question!
Q20 Helen Jones: It is fairly important if we are designing
the system.
Baroness Warnock: I know.
The definition, as you probably know, which comes in the 1981 Education
Act is the purest vicious circle you will ever know. A special need is defined as "any need that the school needs to
take special measures to meet". Well,
that is not much of a definition but it is the only definition there is. I think it is that vagueness actually which
has led to what I have referred before, which is the very bad habit of talking
of SEN children as a class, a category, of children, all of whom would be
expected to flourish in the same sort of environment.
Q21 Helen Jones: That is really the problem, is it not, in
dealing with this? If we are to come up
with a definition that is worthwhile, that we can work to, bearing in mind we
are dealing with young people with a whole range of different needs, is it your
view we should be narrowing that definition down, or is it your view that we
should be expanding it and looking at all children as individuals? Just thinking of my own experience, I have
seen children with special needs flourishing in mainstream schools but I have
seen in my constituency very good special schools.
Baroness Warnock: Absolutely.
Q22 Helen Jones: Should we be focusing in this Committee on
how we meet the needs of the individual child rather than talking about
institutions? If so, how can we in your
view produce a system which does that, bearing in mind the whole complex range
of issues we are trying to deal with here?
Baroness Warnock: I think what is suggested would be very good,
namely it would bring to an end this careless way of treating SEN as a unified
category of children. I think very much
what you said would appeal to the Scots because that is exactly what they have
been trying to do and they have now given up, as I say, the expression "SEN"
and what they now have is "assisted learning support, ALS" and they bring in
under the concept of ALS any child who, for whatever reason - social, whatever
- is not doing very well at school. So
it is I think a practical negative definition.
You look at all the children in your class and say, "He is not doing
very well, could we do anything for him?
He is not getting on very well."
In a way, it is not very different from the futile circular definition
in the 1981 Act but it is very consciously doing what you suggested, namely
seeing an individual child and what they really want to make them
flourish. I have to say that was really
at the back of our minds on my committee all those years ago, when we were
trying to invent ways of talking about these children. We were trying to get away from the medical
model and that there was something wrong with them, and we invented this
concept of seeing what they needed to make them get further along the same road
they were treading with all the other children being educated. So it is not a very different idea from that
but we know that did not work and it hardened itself into this concept of SEN
and it has tried to improve it.
Q23 Helen Jones: If we went down that road, could you give the
Committee your view of whether there is enough expertise in most of our schools
to make those identifications? Some children are identified as having a special
need very early, even before they go into full-time education, but others are
identified later because their needs become apparent later. Is there enough expertise to identify those
needs? Is that where the system breaks
down? If not, what should we be putting
in place to make sure that expertise is there so if a child is not making
progress we can identify it?
Baroness Warnock: That is a terribly important point and the
first place one ought to look for that is teacher training and also some of the
trainers of teachers ought to come from these trail-blazer schools, of which
there are 12 and they are very much scattered about the country. The point of the trail-blazer schools, as
you know, is that they are special schools but they are staffed by very expert
people who are going out to teach in mainstream schools. That is the point of the schools. I think those trail-blazer teachers should
be given a very important role in teacher training and that would mean the
caucus of expert people would grow eventually.
Q24 Helen Jones: Who in your view should finally make the
decision about where a child or young person should be placed? Let us say we have gone down the road of
deciding a child has particular needs, but we are always faced with the problem
of where those needs are best met and all the participants in the child's life
will not always agree on where they are best met. Who in your view should make that decision at the end of the day?
Baroness Warnock: I do not really know I have a view about
that, when you think of teachers in mainstream schools and what many of them
are up against with children who simply behave extremely badly. Do you have to treat a child as having a
special educational need because he is not learning something and preventing
others learning? That is a very
difficult judgment to make because the teacher will always blame herself - "If
I was better at it, this person would settle down and learn. I haven't got the knack." It is terrible. I do not know what the answer is.
Q25 Helen Jones: That is the key though, is it not?
Baroness Warnock: Yes.
Q26 Stephen Williams: Perhaps I could change tack. Earlier you mentioned in one of your
responses the medical model of looking at children and we have mentioned
children on the autistic spectrum and people with mental and physical
disabilities. I understand your initial
inquiry in the 1970s did not look at the social background of children?
Baroness Warnock: We were forbidden. There were two things we were forbidden to do and these came
direct from Margaret Thatcher so how could we disobey. One of the things we were forbidden to
mention was dyslexia because that was thought to be a middle class invention. The other we were forbidden to mention was
social disadvantage because we were told this would be offensive. But we did sneak in a reference to social
disadvantage because we were very much conscious of, or some of us were, the
absolute absurdity of pretending this did not exist. If you remember, in the 1981 Act the other bit of this futile
definition of special needs was nothing could count as a special need which
either comes from social disability or from not having English as your first
language. I think with both those together
the Department was trying to protect itself against a charge of discrimination
on grounds of race or wealth or whatever.
Q27 Stephen Williams: My constituency, Bristol West, is supposedly
the archetypal middle class seat and I have the most intellectual constituents
in the country with more PhDs and professional qualifications than anybody
else, and that is undoubtedly true, but I also have the city centre of Bristol
including St Paul's. As I visit primary
schools in different parts of my constituency I am struck by the differences,
with primary schools in most of my constituency very well supported by the
social environment and some of the top primary schools in the country, and then
I visit schools in the city centre and the teachers tell me that children
cannot concentrate in school because their mother is out doing unsavoury things
at night, their dad, if there is a dad at all, has weapons in the house, the
child has very little sleep, there are no books in the house. Do you think there needs to be a new
definition of the educational needs of a child, not only because of the medical
background but their social environment as well?
Baroness Warnock: Fortunately, the new category of special
need, emotional and behavioural difficulties, now includes social as well, so
that is a great step forward. There is,
among many other good movements privately funded, a movement called the
Nurturing Group, and that is spreading all over primary schools and it takes
children of the kind you have described, whose vocabulary when they come to
school consists of five words most of them expletives, and the Nurturing Groups
take these children in groups of six and keep them for as long as a year or two
years until they learn, and I think that is a wonderful thing and that is the
kind of solution we need because it has to be done quite early. It really is the case of catching them
before they are seven, or five say. I
think there is hope in the extension of nursery provision too because that is
somewhere where you can pick up what is going to turn into an educational need
when really first they are nothing but a total failure of communication.
Q28 Stephen Williams: Do you think the statementing process itself
needs to be revised to include these children, because often there will not be
parental pressure to put the child forward for statementing, whereas in a
middle class area there will be pressure to make sure the child is
statemented. In the sort of background
I am describing there will be no pressure to get their child the extra support
needed.
Baroness Warnock: None at all, and the school has a huge
responsibility but it has to start as soon as the child starts pre-school,
nursery, and go on from there. That is
another thing, if I were running a new Royal Commission, I would press for.
Q29 Chairman: We are not all that keen on Royal Commissions
in this Committee, Baroness Warnock. We
actually said all those things in our inquiry into early years three years ago.
Baroness Warnock: That was very good.
Chairman: That was really only an advertisement for the
Committee.
Q30 Jeff Ennis: Baroness Warnock, there are very many critics
of the current SEN system in this country - some of whom are on this Committee
incidentally - and they say the current system is too cumbersome, litigious, et
cetera, and that lack of resources and poor heads on many occasions are put
before the needs of the child. Given
that scenario, and I am assuming to some extent you may partially or wholly
agree with that, and given the fact the Government has already concluded that
wholesale change to the present system of statementing would not produce
improved outcomes for children with SEN, how do you respond to that, what would
seem to be a very placatory response from the Government; very wishy-washy?
Baroness Warnock: With despair really. We know there is a shortage of resources in
all kinds of fields of education and if you asked me it was more important to
put resources into schools or universities or teachers' salaries, I would be
hard put to answer, but I think the solution cannot be just in terms of more
resources. I think before huge amounts
of money are spent, my view is that there ought to be a structured examination
based on evidence of the method of distributing resources rather than the
quantity of the resources. I think what
we have got wrong is probably the distribution. I think that is in a way a wide ranging answer to your question
but I do not think, without a wide over-arching reform of the concepts under
which resources are distributed, we shall get much further.
Q31 Jeff Ennis: Following on that from particular point, is
there any conflict under the existing system between, say, the LEA who is the
purse-holder at the present time and the Department of Health, for
example? You have medical clinicians on
many occasions, depending what the condition is, making remarks about what the
package should be for that particular child in educational terms, but they have
one eye on the fact that in many respects finance is the final arbiter and they
put in a sort of open-ended statement saying, "We need to continue the review
of that particular child's needs" rather than being specific.
Baroness Warnock: There is an amazing coming-together from
different angles in some of these things.
On the one hand, we have always lived in a time of scarcity of
resources, so there is the argument you cannot pick out every individual child,
it is just too expensive to do that, and give him the education he needs, which
is one argument. Then, on the other
hand, that argument is reinforced I think by the ideology of not treating
children with disabilities as though they were different from everybody
else. Therefore you have an argument
for the resources in that on the one hand it is very expensive to give
everybody exactly what they need but secondly, which is a terribly ideological
one, that everybody must muck in together because we are all the same
really. So in a way the two arguments
reinforce each other. I think both
these types of arguments need to be unpicked to see what we could do between
everybody to ensure fewer people fall through the floorboards. It is a negative approach to me really;
rescue the children, do not say they will cope because coping is not enough.
Q32 Jeff Ennis: Can I push on a bit further on the point that
Helen was making about who should decide the placement of the child, in an
integrated school or a special school, and give you an example? With children suffering from Down Syndrome
you get a number of parents who swear that their child ought to go to a special
school, but on the other hand - and I have met both these categories in my own
constituency - other parents say, "My child needs to go into a mainstream
school and be integrated." Which parent
is right, or wrong, and how key is the parental choice in the placement of the
child?
Baroness Warnock: I think maybe both parents are right. It may well be two children and the two
different sets of parents are actually both right because their children may be
very different from one another. Down
Syndrome covers a huge spectrum. What
we know is that a lot of Down Syndrome children who are not terribly badly
affected do extremely well in a mainstream school and there is no doubt about
that at all but there are other Down Syndrome children who actually have as
well as Down Syndrome a lot of behavioural problems and it is terribly
difficult even in primary school to get them in the school.
Q33 Jeff Ennis: You seem to be indicating to me, Baroness
Warnock, that parental choice is very important in this process.
Baroness Warnock: I think it is particularly with these
children. Actually, secretly, I do not
think much of parental choice in the main body of schooling because my view is
that schools are as good as the teachers and children in them, but when parents
know the limitations and strengths of their own child then I think parental
choice is important. I think what was
said ages ago, and nobody probably denies it now, was if a parent wants a child
to go into mainstream school and if it can be shown the mainstream school has
the resources to spend on that child, then the child has the right to go
there. But there is a second proviso
which is very important because not all mainstream schools can have all the
expertise and equipment. It would be a
very expensive way of going about it if they should all have that.
Q34 Mr Wilson: Baroness Warnock, you have described
inclusion as a disastrous legacy in your previous report.
Baroness Warnock: I thought this would be flagged up!
Q35 Mr Wilson: You said also that children are physically
included but emotionally excluded. I
would like to know whether you really believe it is that bad and, if it is,
what is your evidence?
Baroness Warnock: To take your last point, one of the things I
said in that pamphlet is that one person's hunch is not enough and actually
what you need is a body of evidence properly collected to find out about
children with specific disabilities and then I was talking about these autistic
children. I think we need to find a way
of collecting evidence to show how different disabilities affect different
children. As far as my personal
evidence goes, of course it is anecdotal because I have not carried out enough
research, but I do know for example of one child with Asperger's who cannot
make sensible social connections either with grown-ups or children unless he is
very, very carefully taken through and people are told, "You have to look him
in the face, you have to smile, pretend you find it funny". He cannot find anything funny, he takes everything
literally, but the trouble is he has a very high IQ, he is very good at maths
and therefore the local authority will not give him a statement because he has
a high IQ but he is so miserable at school that he cannot be got to go to
school, he lies at home saying, "I wish I were dead" and he is on
anti-depressant drugs and that is the only way he can be got to school, and
even then he has to be taken out of school one day every fortnight to have a
rest and then he cries all day. It is a
terrible thing and he is a clever little boy.
I think that there could be evidence, which I do not have, that would
demonstrate that he is not unique, that there are other children who are in a
mainstream school and though they are under the same roof as everybody else
they are completely isolated and shrivel up with misery. That is my evidence.
Q36 Mr Wilson: So you are saying it is a hunch and anecdotal
evidence is all you have at the moment.
You are not aware of any research or any university which is going to
carry out research?
Baroness Warnock: I am sure the Autistic Society does collect a
lot of research and therefore if there is research which is being done it would
not be starting from an absolutely blank sheet by any manner of means. There is lots of research on autism. I think the agreed diagnosis of autism comes
specifically from this inability to have normal relations with other people,
grown-ups or children, without being taught to have them. I think a lot of people learnt about this
from that book called ---- something about the dog in the night.
Q37 Mrs Dorries: "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the
Night-Time."
Baroness Warnock: That is right.
Q38 Mr Wilson: There is some research which Ofsted are
doing, are you aware of that research?
Baroness Warnock: Yes.
Q39 Mr Wilson: They make a number of criticisms about how
challenging it is for schools and how often ill-defined needs are pitched to a
lot of the children. There is a whole
series of things. Would you make any comment
on that?
Baroness Warnock: No.
Ofsted reports have been, as far as I know, extremely fair because they
were very critical of a lot of inclusion and I think they have on the whole,
again for children with special needs, told it like they found it. One of the things which makes mainstream
schools very hazardous I think for children with disabilities of one kind or
another is that - I forget which but I think it was the 1993 Education Act -
laid down the regulation that every school should have a special educational
needs co-ordinator, or SENCO, and it was supposed at the time this SENCO would
be a member of the senior management team in the school and would have
considerable input into the general ethos of the school and the way these
disabled children were being accepted by teachers and so on. They were at the beginning senior teachers,
but I learned only the day before yesterday that there is now a very large
number of schools where the SENCO is actually a teaching assistant and not a
teacher at all, with no experience and they are no longer a member of the
senior management team but someone with peripheral duties to see how many
children there are in that school who are getting this, that and the
other. That is nothing to do with this
policy review but that is a way in which things have got worse now from how
they were in the early days of integration.
Q40 Mr Wilson: A couple of very short questions, slightly
switching focus. Is inclusion in
mainstream schools being pursued at the expense of special schools, in your
view? In particular, a number of
special schools have been closing down, as you are probably aware.
Baroness Warnock: Yes.
I think it was but I think quite a lot of local authorities are
reversing their policy. For example,
Newham, was tremendously in favour of integration and closed all their special
schools except one which was on its last legs and now they are refurbishing it
and supporting it again. These other schools which no one knows about, the
special non-maintained schools, these are the special schools and they are
being encouraged and, as I say, the ones I know are marvellous. They are small and very specialised and I
keep coming back to them. I think there
may be a trickle of special schools, perhaps under another name, coming back
again and, if so, I would be all for it.
But there is a contradiction in the presentation of Government
policy. I have never heard any minister
speak up in favour of these schools but they do exist.
Q41 Mr Wilson: Currently, do you think that spending
somewhere between £70 and £90 million on statementing process is good value for
money for the taxpayer?
Baroness Warnock: No, is the
short answer. It is absolutely awful
value for money when I think what that money could do.
Q42 Chairman: Let us get this clear, Baroness Warnock,
since your report and implementation have things got steadily worse or have
they gone up and down? Are all governments a picture of decline of the
provision of special education? Is it a
Domesday scernario?
Baroness Warnock: It is not for
me to say. I think we were the least
boastful about our report. We did make
a huge difference and a lot of people said it has made a difference to the way
mentally disabled children were thought of it.
Suddenly, it became possible to think of them as not a race apart but
like everybody else. There was a kind
of great feeling of optimism in the late 1970s and the Education Bill of 1981,
though it had the absolutely huge defect that it said that no extra money was
going to be allowed to be implemented, nevertheless that was a very optimistic
act. Then that was just the moment when
the educational cuts were beginning to bite and the next thing was called the
great Educational Reform Bill 1988, Baker's Bill, which instituted all of the
competition, league tables, the National Curriculum, all of those things we
take for granted which really, before the 1981 Act, were not possible. Those who were going to be in education in
school were not going to help the league tables or help the school get more
points on the other schools, and so, quite suddenly, things got far worse from
1988 onwards, that is when I can remember things were very bad.
Chairman: We have got time for just another two or
three questions. Tim has been very
patient.
Q43 Tim Farron: I have a question about the Government White
Paper released last week. I am sure you have had plenty of time to go through
the entries but this is a fairly general question. I wonder how you think the White Paper will contribute to the
fair treatment of those children with special educational needs who are in the
mainstream school system given that the paper proposes to remove admissions
control from LEAs to independent schools in certain circumstances. Typically what do you say about SEM being a
social disadvantage?
Baroness Warnock: I think it is
very difficult. There was not one tiny paragraph, unless I missed it, which
mentioned children with special needs in the recent White Paper. I think you have picked on the very bit of
the White Paper which really alarms me because by far the largest numbers of
children now with difficulties or special education needs are children with
behaviour or social problems. They cannot learn, they obviously have learning
problems as well because they cannot learn due to the way they react to
school. They are not used to being
maladjusted, they are not adapted to be taught, nor schools to them. With those children I guess that even more
of them will end up in referral units, even more than they do now, and the
numbers in the referral units are going up all the time. I do not think the schools have got it right
when they include those kinds of children, understandably, because they would
be a lot better in a special school, at least for part of their education.
Q44 Tim Farron: You have set me up quite nicely for my
second question. It is just to read out something from the White Paper which
states the Government does not believe that a major review of policy on SEM
would be appropriate at present and what is needed now is change on the
ground. Do you think they are
right?
Baroness Warnock: No, I do not; I think what is needed is
change up here really.
Q45 Mr Chaytor: In your original report you predicted about
two per cent of children would be eligible for statementing and the figure
turned out to be 20 per cent. My
recollection of your original report was that you also suggested about 25 per
cent of children would be deemed to have special needs at some stage in their
school career. Do you think you
underestimated that figure as well?
Baroness Warnock: I do not know
the answer to that question at all. Of
course, the figures that we so confidently quote in our 9-13s Report were
presented to us by the Department. We
had no reason to doubt nor did we have any way to set up any other research to
see whether they were true or not. That has become a bit of my soul, whether it
bears any relation, I have no idea.
This has just been the sort of figure that everybody has accepted. It comes into the 1989 Act, it comes into
all the acts. I do not know the answer
at all whether the numbers have risen or fallen.
Q46 Mr Chaytor: The paper you published the other week
argues for a much wider definition of special needs, does it not? Can I ask you specifically about this
question of social disadvantage we touched on earlier, because you refer
specifically to children in care, looked after children, and I just want to ask
you about the practical consequences of your belief that small schools must
play a major role in dealing with children suffering from social disadvantage
and your emphasis on looked after children as a disadvantaged group. Are you really saying that looked after
children should be educated separately in small schools?
Baroness Warnock: I find that
very difficult. It seems immediately
one's response is most certainly looked after children must be segregated from
other children. They all need a proper, descent social life, but I do think
that each one of those looked after children is different from each of the
other ones and what we have got are these terrible figures of how badly they performed
academically. It may well be that a lot
of them, for the short-term perhaps, would be taught in small classes with
people they could emotionally attach themselves to. I think this must be one of
the difficulties for them going out, let us say, from local authority homes or
even foster parents, where they do not get on terribly well, into a huge
school. They really do need something
small to attach themselves to like a teacher or a couple of teachers, someone who
knows them and wants to help. Everybody,
even the most advantaged people educationally, I certainly know, who have often
been persuaded by someone to think they are better off at university, thinks
"Nobody here cares whether I live or die, I could die and nobody would know for
months", and those are the people who must feel a desperate need for someone
who does care for them, which is a function I think again of a small
school. Maybe they ought to be one of
these people, who even for part of that, go to one of these brilliant small
schools that will teach them drama or whatever it is and really be
appreciated.
Q47 Chairman: Baroness Warnock, I think that is a very
good note to finish this first session on.
You have given us a wonderful start into our inquiry. We are most
grateful for not only your direct answers to all the questions but also the
wisdom that you have sparkled right throughout so thank you. Can you, please, remain in conversation with
the Committee and if you go away and think "Why didn't those terrible people in
the lower House ask me this?", come back and say "Why didn't you". I would like to put your mind at rest, this
is going to be a very thorough inquiry. I am absolutely determined to make it
up to the Warnock standard.
Baroness Warnock: Thank you very
much.
