UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 478-vi

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

EDUCATION and SKILLS committee

 

 

SPECIAL EDUCATIONAL NEEDS

 

 

Monday 13 February 2006

PROFESSOR ALAN DYSON, PROFESSOR JULIE DOCKRELL and PROFESSOR BRAHM NORWICH

Evidence heard in Public Questions 499 - 572

 

 

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Education & Skills Committee

on Monday 13 February 2006

Members present

Mr Barry Sheerman, in the Chair

Dr Roberta Blackman-Woods

Mr Douglas Carswell

Mr David Chaytor

Mrs Nadine Dorries

Jeff Ennis

Helen Jones

Mr Gordon Marsden

________________

 

Witnesses: Professor Alan Dyson, University of Manchester, Professor Julie Dockrell, Institute of Education, University of London, and Professor Brahm Norwich, University of Exeter, gave evidence.

Q499 Chairman: Can I welcome Professor Alan Dyson, Professor Brahm Norwich and Professor Julie Dockrell to our proceedings and thank them for taking time off at what must be the peak period of term time at the moment. We are very grateful for your attendance. As I was saying outside, barely a month on and we will know so much about special educational needs that we will be quite dangerous in our questioning, but we are getting there. We have heard a lot of evidence and we are getting to know the territory reasonably well. First of all, what we are getting from the evidence we have had so far is that everything seems to flow from Warnock. We know that is not true but one of the reasons we are looking at this is because Baroness Warnock seems to have changed her mind around inclusion. We have had a lot of witnesses here who think that it is high time we looked at this whole area again. The evidence in one sense is that the number of students in special schools remained fairly constant over a long period of time and so, one could argue, what is new? What has happened is that there has been this view that inclusion should be promoted, but how far has that gone? Are we making too much fuss about the problems that Baroness Warnock seemed to find out? The other side is there have been real problems in this whole inclusion and exclusion agenda and there are other problems that have nothing to do with exclusion and inclusion; they are about the quality of education for a whole swathe of students in our schools. How important is Warnock in your view, Professor Dyson?

Professor Dyson: In some senses very important because the Warnock Report set the foundations for the system that we still have and that in itself is an issue because, if you look at the education system in the 1970s when the Warnock Committee was sitting and in the 1980s when the 1981 act was implemented, it was a very different education system from the one that we have now. You have this mismatch of very rapid change in the mainstream education system and this foundation of a Warnock-inspired framework that really has not changed very much at all. It has been tweaked a little, but substantially it is the same framework that we still have and we get some mismatches from that. Inclusion is one issue. It is also important to recognise that that is by no means the only issue in special needs education and very often it is seen as though it is the only issue and it simply is not. If you take something like the relative responsibilities of schools and local education authorities as they were for special needs education, and the control of education in 1978 was quite different from that which we have now, it is not surprising if the system is creaking at the joints a little.

Q500 Chairman: If you look at the figures, there is, more or less, the same number of children in special schools and still a pretty constant 60 per cent of statemented children are in mainstream schools. That is not a difference, is it?

Professor Dyson: It is not a difference in terms of the raw figures. Probably the nature of the populations have changed in that what is often seen as a mass influx of children with special educational needs into mainstream schools is actually a movement or a retention of children with certain sorts of difficulties at the same time as children with other sorts of difficulties. The case that is always quoted is so-called "behaviour" difficulties, a moving out of standard mainstream provision into a whole range of non-standard provision.

Q501 Chairman: Professor Norwich, do you agree with that?

Professor Norwich: I do, but I would question your assumption that the number of children over the years who are retained or placed in special schools has changed. The Ofsted Report in 2004 had a table which showed a flat level of about 1.3 per cent, but if you look at it over the period from 1983, which was the point at which the 1981 act came into operation, there has been quite a sizeable decline in the total population of special schools. That was greatest in the 1980s and flattened out somewhat in the 1990s. The assumption now is that since 2000 it has been fairly flat. If one is looking at it in terms of the earlier report and what we have been through over the last two decades or so, there is something sizeable and, if you make comparisons with other countries - Holland, for example, which has had a very strong special school tradition much more so than this country, has developed policies to try and place children in regular schools - what they found is that the proportions in special schools have not gone down. If one takes a slightly longer view back to the 1978 Report and the principles underlying the 1981 act, there have been some changes. I agree with Professor Dyson's point that it is a question of what areas of special needs and things change within that. There is a problem with monitoring because the figures have only been global. Even now that we have more sub-area categories there are issues around that and about the consistency of the identification of the sub-areas to make global statements. My point would be that one needs to look at it in the longer timeframe.

Q502 Chairman: Professor Dockrell, what should we be about in this country in terms of special education? Should we be tearing up what we have done in the past and starting a much more radical policy, or should we be trimming, shaping and modifying? When the Department spoke to us they were much more of the latter view rather than the former view, but we have had other witnesses who have said that the whole framework is not any good; we have got to look at the Scottish example, look at all children with special needs and having a particular category of children with special needs is counterproductive. What is your view?

Professor Dockrell: What is important is to evaluate what the successes have been of the changes over the last ten or 15 years in terms of special education and also to identify where there have been problems, continue to be problems or where new problems are likely to arise so that one can be strategic about the changes and not tear up what has been done in the past but to look at what has worked and see how those can be systematically developed and planned. If you wanted me to identify what might have been some of the positive outcomes I would highlight the exchange between mainstream and special schools and the exchange of information and skills in both directions. I can point to a special school that I work with quite closely who, until five years ago, did not have any of their young people in secondary sitting GCSEs but with links with mainstream provision now have about half of them doing GCSE exams at 16, but equally some mainstream schools benefiting from the expertise in special schools in supporting their lower attainers in terms of differentiating their curriculum. There is an exchange and that is something one could build on.

Q503 Chairman: Would you agree that we do not need a radical change, Professor Norwich?

Professor Norwich: How radical is radical? I feel there is a need for change. The question of whether radical means we need another committee like some people have recommended is some ways not that important. There is a need for some radical change, yes. One of the things I feel quite strongly about is the need for greater specific information and evidence about what is going on. We have made progress over the last few years towards that. The example that always comes to my mind is the 2003 classification of special needs and the whole way that was introduced and some contention around how those categories were constructed and how they are used and what they mean. There is a need for a lot more systematic evidence and I would say that is a radical move. That is not necessarily radical in the way that Mary Warnock would say we need something radical, we need another committee. In that sense there are a number of fairly radical things that are needed in the system. Whether one need change the framework at its core is another issue and one could say more about that, but of the issues that I consider to be most radical and having the widest ramification I feel that is really quite an important issue.

Q504 Chairman: You mentioned the information, presumably the data. If that is not being collected, who should be collecting it?

Professor Norwich: It is across the system. One of the points that came through the questions was, for example, how does the standards agenda interface with special needs education? For the standards agenda in whatever form it moves forward to include all children with special needs you need to have good assessment data. We have had the development of the P scales and other systems that have been developed. Personally I feel there is a lot more work needed in that area. There is more work needed in how that monitoring information about outcomes, about value added, is to be used and used in league tables or not and how it is going to be incorporated in school developing planning or local education authority planning and so on. The traditions that we have are very much where the general system is marched forward and then we ask questions about special needs education and then various things are done to try and link it up. The perennial issue is whether things designed within the general system are broad enough and flexible enough to interchange with the needs that are within what people call the special sector. I see that as a big issue. Setting up a committee that has got special needs as its remit does not necessarily deal with that. Where I think radical changes are needed is a more pervasive way. It is a longer-term issue, not just something that is done on a particular cycle.

Q505 Chairman: My gut reaction when I first heard of the call for yet another committee of inquiry was that we would be very happy to do an inquiry ourselves and often a select committee inquiry is of more value in my view than having the great and the good setting up a quasi-Royal Commission on these things because we can work faster and come up with some sensible recommendations in a much shorter time. Professor Dockrell, how do you feel about children with special educational needs in this country? Are they getting a reasonably fair deal? We nearly succeeded in getting to Spain and Holland to look at their systems last week but in the end Parliamentary business prevented us going. We were trying to look at good practice elsewhere. Is our system not fit for purpose and their system more fit for purpose?

Professor Dockrell: Two things: one is that I would like to support what Professor Norwich said earlier about the issue of evidence and this links to the notion of fit for purpose. One of the issues is to establish an evidence base; that is an evidence base not only on kinds of categories or how we do the planning, but also on what is effective pedagogy for all kinds of children with special educational needs. There are gaps in a number of countries. I am not an expert on a range of countries but I have visited some. There are problems with the current special educational needs provision which needs to be addressed in terms of the flexibility in which it meets individual children's needs. A focus on the individual would be my basic premise.

Professor Dyson: When you ask questions like is the current system fit for purpose it begs another question which is what exactly is the purpose of the current system, because I am blowed if I know. It is not a trivial question; it is what are we trying to achieve through special needs education? A concept like "need", which we have lived with from before Warnock, is very useful in some ways but it obscures what it is we are trying to do because needs are self-evident. We think that somehow we can look at children and will automatically know what it is that they then need. One of the problems right throughout special needs policy through many governments has been a lack of clarity of what precisely we are trying to achieve. To give you two examples: you might say that the dominant purpose of special needs education is to raise the attainments of children identified as having special educational needs to as high a level as possible. If you say that then you can construct a system which will help you to do that. You might say no, I am a fairly purist inclusionist and I think that notions like presence and participation and rights are what should be driving special needs education. That would lead you in a very different direction, but unless and until we actually engage with those more fundamental questions of what we are trying to achieve, it is very difficult to say whether the system does or does not work.

Q506 Chairman: Do other countries have a better sense of what they are trying to achieve with their system than we do?

Professor Dyson: Probably not, but they have a different sense. You go to some countries and there would be much more of a rights-based approach to special needs education. There would be certain entitlements that all children would have. We tend to have avoided that sort of approach. You go to other countries where the separation of a category of special needs from a whole range of other difficulties that children might encounter, both in schooling and indeed in their overall development in social issues, would be taken together. There would not be an attempt to separate these things out. You go to other countries again where what we call special needs would be much more to do with disability and identified disability. It would be more medicalised than it is in this country. It is very dangerous to go to other countries and say what are they doing right that we are doing wrong, or vice versa, because they are probably trying to do different things on a very different conceptual basis.

Q507 Chairman: We spend our life when we do inquiries looking at good practice. We recently looked at prison education and we learnt a lot from going to a couple of the Nordic countries.

Professor Dyson: I agree. I do not think it is a case of nothing can be learned; it is that it is a very dangerous exercise if what we get into is importing one set of practices into this country into really a very different legislative context, a different context of provision and a different cultural context.

Q508 Mr Carswell: When you talk about a more rights-based system is that to say that parents and carers generally have greater entitlement compared to the experts than they would under our system?

Professor Dyson: No, it would probably be the children who would have the rights.

Q509 Mr Carswell: Exercised by parents?

Professor Dyson: Maybe exercised by parents, which tends to be the way that we think of things here, but maybe exercised by the state on behalf of children. I will give you an example, and it is an anecdotal example: I was recently in the Republic of Ireland doing some work on special needs education there. We were talking about rights and entitlements. The Republic of Ireland has a constitution which guarantees the right to education of all children and that right was guaranteed from whenever the constitution was in force (1936, I think) and we did not guarantee that in this country until 1970 because we did not have a constitution in quite that way. It is that sense of rights where the state acts as the guardian of the child's rights.

Q510 Mrs Dorries: On the back of that, and I do not need a response to it, but have we not done that under the Education Act 1998 where does it not state that the rights of the child - I cannot remember the wording - but is it not stipulated in the Education Act that the educational needs of the child should be met by the state? Have we not done that already?

Professor Dyson: Yes. I am not advocating this approach; it is simply an illustration of how it is different. We tend to carve out particular areas where we think we need to make statements like special needs education where we tend to couch the whole thing in terms of meeting needs. That is not quite the same as an entitlement to a particular sort of education; it is a kind of lesser step. That happens to be the way that we have done it in this country. If you go to a more rights-based country then the whole foundation on which provision is based will be different from the foundation here.

Q511 Mr Marsden: I would like to explore with the three of you, if I may, the knotty relationship between special education needs and social/economic factors. Professor Dyson, in the paper that we have had circulated that you published in a book by David Mitchell last year you talk about this and two particular things: you talk about the fact that we have a variety of different ways of dealing with special educational needs children - you mention referral units resource-based in schools - and that means there is a complex system of social segregation which you refer to, and you also say that "educational risk factors tend to become concentrated in particular areas and in particular schools". Could I start off by asking you if you think there is an inevitable connection, as things stand at present, between the concentration of children with special educational needs and the concentration of social and economic disadvantage in terms of geography and parts of the country?

Professor Dyson: The simple answer to that is yes. The reason for that is, and this predates Warnock but since we have started with Warnock, when Warnock extended the concept of special education to include a very large minority of children, most of whom were always going to be placed in mainstream schools, those are not children who would identify themselves or be identified by anybody else as having disabilities. They are children who, for one reason or another, are not doing terribly well in school. What we know about children who do not do terribly well in school is that they disproportionately come from certain social ethnic and indeed gender groups. If you look at the special needs population you come across a really rather bizarre thing which is that if you are young for your year group you are more likely to be identified as having special educational needs than if you are old for your year group. That is nothing to do with disability. We can imagine why that happens but that seems to be the way things go.

Q512 Mr Marsden: Can I play devil's advocate with you on that and say, if we accept that broad convergence, where does that leave us with children who, in other circumstances, would be regarded as gifted, but who nevertheless have special educational needs, and I am thinking particularly perhaps of children with dyslexia, perhaps with children who present at certain aspects of the autism spectrum - Asperger's comes to mind. Has that not slightly skewed that overall picture that you are presenting?

Professor Dyson: There is not a one-to-one correlation between social disadvantage, ethnicity or gender and special educational needs. The problem we have is that we talk about special educational needs as though they are something that are self-evident and as though we know what they are. This is an administrative category and it is a rather ragbag administrative category; it contains children with all sorts of different characteristics, some of which you have listed, but many of those children also experience a range of other disadvantages which is why they do rather badly in school, which is why, in the absence of any really very clear criteria as to who does or does not have special educational needs, they get identified as having special needs.

Q513 Mr Marsden: Can I bring Professor Norwich and Professor Dockrell in here if they wish to comment and particularly if they wish to disagree in any way shape or form with what you have said. In default of that could I ask one of the things in terms of the general media comment insofar as it has focused in the last 12 months on SEN on the apparent extraordinary rise in presentation of children with autism, particularly with ADHD. Certainly from my own experience in my own constituency when parents have come to me with children who they say have these particular things there have been particular associations with socioeconomic disadvantage. I wondered whether in fact the apparent expansion in autism and ADHD is related to a sort of ghettoisation in terms of social and economic disadvantage. What evidence there is of that?

Professor Norwich: Picking up Professor Dyson's point, with which I agree, special educational needs is not the same as what people would call impairment with disability and that was clear in the framework. The framework we have inherited - there might be some disagreement - my understanding of it was that it was always an interactive one. Special needs arise out of an interaction between environmental factors and within child factors. To that extent if environmental factors become more adverse he would expect a rise in special educational needs. A lot of our trouble and why we go round in circles is around the issue of where do we draw the line? In my view there is quite a big difference between children for whom parents go and get a medical diagnostic category and those with, what the Americans call "mild educational disabilities" which is quite a useful term, which is the overlap and would be the majority of children who have statements. The rise in ADHD is a reflection of the issues about children's capabilities to attend and focus themselves in schools and at home, parental capabilities of dealing with that and the rise, as some people would see it, of greater parental assertiveness about wanting something to be done. A parent might come to a school and say my child has been diagnosed through the medical circles and this child has Ritalin and that is how it is being dealt with. On the other hand, if you go back historically about the proportions of children who displayed attentional difficulties, there are surveys that go back to the middle and early 20^th Century which shows that it is 15-30 per cent of children in surveys that were done. A national survey that I did in the late 1990s showed on a well-known measure that almost 20 per cent of children were being identified by parents of children as having problems in concentration.

Q514 Mr Marsden: You are saying that we have always had this with us but we are just giving it a trendy label.

Professor Norwich: Given a trendy label, maybe tolerance levels are different, there are different social circumstances. There are also different diagnostic practices of medical practitioners. Some psychiatrists I have spoken to have said that they have adopted a more liberal approach to the diagnosis of a disorder of attention than they might have ten or 20 years ago. That is in a sense importing the American criteria. All of that is part of the social factors.

Q515 Mr Marsden: Professor Dockrell, do you want to add anything?

Professor Dockrell: I will not talk about ADHD because it is not an area that I am particularly familiar with. While there is a correlation between disadvantage and special educational needs, that correlation varies according to albeit the different kinds of categories of need that one is looking at; it is an interaction. You can take a child who has additional learning needs because of a hearing impairment who in one context will manage in that kind of educational structure and another will not, so there is an interaction, but it is not necessarily the case that hearing problems or central neural hearing losses are associated with particular kinds of disadvantage. You can do the same kind of thing with language which is what I know best. You can look at pre-school settings and see children who have had, for a variety of reasons, disadvantage which impedes their progress in oral language, yet there are other children who will continue irrespective of their socioeconomic background to experience significant challenges with language and communications, so it is not quite that straightforward.

Q516 Mr Marsden: Professor Dyson, what are the practical implications of this in public policy terms? I want to take you back to your comment in the paper where you talked about the variety of situations. You talked about PRUs and you talked about the extent to which they may be being used as a subset for children with social inclusion difficulties. My own experience of PRUs in my own area, which I think do a very good job, but nevertheless it is the case that they do seem to be taking in more and more children who undoubtedly have behavioural difficulties, but who in other categories in the past in a very vulgar term would have been described as "bad lads" or "bad girls" or whatever. Is this what is happening? If so, is it an appropriate way for PRUs to be used? How does that fit in with this whole context of mainstream education?

Professor Dyson: Professor Dockrell is absolutely right, there are all sorts of variations and subtleties in this that we have to be aware of, but I will speak in fairly broad terms and in broad terms that is what is happening. The issue is naming the problem. If you have some child or young person who is proving difficult to teach in a mainstream school what exactly is the problem and then what is it that would be the most appropriate thing to do about it? The special needs system as we know and love it says the problem is located within that individual child and the things about the interactive definition of special educational needs is absolutely right - that is what the Warnock Report was about - but we kind of forgot the half of it that was to do with the nature of provision and we have concentrated on what is wrong with this child. Then you put in a whole series of measures for responding to that individual. If you cannot find some way of putting that individual right then you place them somewhere else, for instance in a PRU, and while you are doing that you do not pay the same sort of attention to the factors that there may be in the classroom, in the school, and then certainly not in the wider social context that might have produced those difficult behaviours in the first place. It is not surprising that it is much easier to try and fix the individual child than it is to look at the context.

Q517 Mr Marsden: Are you saying that there are circumstances in which children with behavioural needs who are currently being put into a PRU would not have gone into a PRU if they had been at a school in an area of greater socioeconomic advantage?

Professor Dyson: No, I would not put it like that, but I would say there are some children who find their ways into special provision such as PRUs from one school who would not find their way into that provision in another school that was differently organised and differently managed.

Q518 Mrs Dorries: My questions were written down on the train this morning so I will just read them. I have a couple of questions to ask of Professor Dyson and a couple for Professor Dockrell. Professor Dyson: having read your submissions to the Committee you have actually answered one of my questions. The term "inclusion" embraces both children with learning difficulties, physical difficulties and those with socially-disadvantaged backgrounds. Do you not think that we are overusing the terminology "inclusion" and that if we took those three categories of children and focused on those three categories that we might see more movement in terms of socially-disadvantaged children being included? You are very much pro-inclusionist, are you not, that these children with these specific learning difficulties and physical difficulties would receive both the appropriate education and the attention that they required rather than being put into one pot which is being measured together?

Professor Dyson: Certainly the notion of inclusion, if it has not outlived its usefulness, is beginning to outlive its usefulness just because it has been stretched and pulled every which way so that it means really very little. When you say I am pro-inclusionist, I have no idea whether I am or not unless you can tell me.

Q519 Mrs Dorries: I think you said you were a moment ago when you came in.

Professor Dyson: I do not recall doing that. Given certain definitions, yes, I am, and on other definitions, no, I would not regard myself in that camp. We have to be careful about categorising and saying different treatments for different categories because of the history that we have got in this field where rigid categorisation does not work. I certainly think there are large swathes of what we currently call the special needs population where the framework that we have that focuses on individuals, individual difficulties and individual provision is not the right framework and where we should be looking at much broader strategies to do with different types of pedagogy, different types of school organisation and different types of social intervention.

Q520 Mrs Dorries: Do you think that the current process of statementing excludes many families from the lower socioeconomic groups from accessing the statement process, given that we have been given information here about cost. Do you think they are actually excluded from the process?

Professor Dyson: No, not totally excluded, but I think the process is skewed. It can be very straightforward and simple and it can offer high levels of protection, not only to vulnerable children but to vulnerable families, so there is a baby and bathwater issue when we look at statementing. There is no doubt about it that it leads into situations of conflict and in situations of conflict the better resourced, and I do not simply mean financially-resourced, but the better resourced you are in all senses the more likely you are to get whatever it is that you want. Families therefore that are less well-resourced in all sectors are less likely to get the sort of provision that they might ideally want.

Q521 Mrs Dorries: Professor Dockrell, can you tell me if emotional and psychological harm is caused to children with SEN if they do not receive the appropriate education or support within the mainstream classroom which is appropriate to their needs and do those children realise that they are failing? If they do, how does that manifest itself both in the classroom and at home?

Professor Dockrell: That is a very complex question and it assumes that you have got a homogenous group of children with special educational needs which we clearly do not. I would not make a general answer to that. I will try and comment on the basis of some evidence we were collecting about young people of 17 who we have been following up since they were in year two, particularly in mainstream schools, and talk about how they feel about the situation. They have quite a lot of insight into what they felt was good for them at school and what supported them. The majority of these young people were in mainstream settings and the two most salient things they have identified as positive and supporting them was their learning support assistant in primary school and the special concessions that had been arranged so that they were allowed to sit examinations and to give across the information that they knew in a satisfactory way. It is probably fair to say for most of these young people their educational needs were not met in secondary school and they tend not to speak positively about secondary school.

Q522 Mrs Dorries: They were positive about primary but not about secondary. That is interesting.

Professor Norwich: I agree with what Professor Dockrell has said. Children have quite complex views about that. For example, the slightly different population work I have done shows that when asked how they feel about being a member of a special school community some of them are very positive about it, particularly if they have experienced hardships or felt that their needs have not been met in a regular school - I am thinking particularly of children with what we call moderate learning difficulties - but on the other hand there are some children, and partly it is an age and a gender issue where older boys are very sensitive to negotiating their identities outside the special school and feel that their identities are very vulnerable so they will conceal where they go to school, but yet they might, when they are in the school, feel very pleased and accepted. There is great complexity in the way children respond. I am sure there are many examples one can illustrate.

Q523 Mrs Dorries: Professor Dockrell, you do independent assessments for Moor House School, is that right?

Professor Dockrell: No, I am a consultant psychologist for Moor House School.

Q524 Mrs Dorries: I have some constituents' children, one of whom has recently gone to Moor House School with very good reports. You will recognise where this question comes from now. How concerned are you that many children in our education system who have underlying average cognitive ability are being failed by inclusion and with the reduction of statements which we know are taking place at the moment - I think they are at a five-year low - I am thinking particularly of Asperger's children, some of whom are at Moor House School, and those with language impairment or auditory processing disorders. The reason I am asking this is because we are aware that children there have high IQs and yet their academic achievement is scored below the tenth percentile. Under the criteria of statutory assessment set by the LEAs these children will not receive the statement or the support that they need within the classroom. Does this cause you any particular concern?

Professor Dockrell: I should say something about Moor House School and the facilities it offers because I think that puts it in context. Moor House School is a specialist residential, primarily secondary school (although there are some Key Stage 2 children there) for children who have speech and language and communication difficulties. The resource that Moor House School has on site, which is not typical in mainstream school, is speech and language therapy and there is also some occupational therapy. The speech and language therapists are working with teachers in the classrooms. Over the years it is fair to say that children with more complex needs have been coming to Moor House School because those whose needs are with specific speech and language difficulties have been met to a certain extent in mainstream settings. The question about attainment and IQ is not a simple one. There is no simple correlation between IQ and attainment. You can change the levels of assessment you get depending on the types of test that you use. That is not a simple question to address. Many of the children's needs who come to Moor House have not been met in mainstream secondary schools. This is not that they could not have been met in some cases and this is the interaction that Professor Dyson pointed out between the particular school, that particular child and the context of support and in this case the fact that speech and language therapy is simply not provided in this country at secondary school.

Q525 Mrs Dorries: Just two small questions: one, for the purpose of the Committee, you actually need a letter from the Pope to get a child into Moor House School; it is almost impossible; I know that from eight months of trying for one particular child in my constituency. The other point is that in terms of statementing lots of parents have problems because, and as we have had evidence from people that has backed this up, a lot of the educational psychologists who are assisting the statementing and reporting are actually employed by the LEA and the financial implications of the LEA is very much on their shoulders. Do you think that the process of the EPs should be completely outside of the LEA in terms of the statementing process for children?

Professor Dockrell: I know it can be a problem for educational psychologists and it can be a problem in particular LEAs but that is anecdotal and I do not have anything more than anecdote to go on that. Something that I find professionally helpful in my role at Moor House is to give advice. I am not tied to anybody in particular; it is not something I want for children to come there necessarily, but it allows me to stand back and look at the situation in a slightly different way. From a personal point of view that has certain benefits, yes.

Mrs Dorries: Chairman, could we put Moor House down on the list?

Chairman: We can put Moor House down on the list.

Q526 Jeff Ennis: Looking at the current relationship between the children who have been identified with special educational needs and the formal statementing process, I was talking to a head teacher of a primary school recently in quite a challenging school - 40 per cent of the children have been identified as having special needs, 48 per cent on free school meals - and she was trying to get over to me the difficulties that she faced and the challenges that the staff faced in being addressed with a cohort of children like that. She drew a comparison with her nephew who lived in another part of the country - quite a well-heeled part of the country - and his record of academic achievement was fairly average but he had dyslexia and he had been statemented by his authority through his dyslexia. She more or less implied that there would not be a cat-in-hell's chance of a child in her school being statemented because of dyslexia. Is there such a variation in what quantifies a child needing a statement of special educational needs and how important is the setting and the challenging situation that we have in mainstream schools in determining whether that particular individual child's needs are met?

Professor Norwich: There is variability and it is part of how the system is constructed where what comes from the centre is in fairly general terms which is meant to be translated into particular policies and practices in local authorities. If you took the definition of dyslexia within the 2003 classification, although it is supposed to be used for monitoring purposes I have no doubt that it is also used for other purposes too, maybe informally, but nonetheless there are differing views. If you did a survey of local authorities as to how they interpret what constitutes this condition, this sub-area or whatever, there will be a lot of difference and I have some evidence for that in some areas. It seems to me that that is an issue that is partly to do with specificity of the system. I am somebody who generally thinks that if one wants to be radical that is an area we need to be radical about. We need greater specificity. I know there are almost philosophical reasons some people have against specificity but I think we need greater specificity and we need some flexibility within how that specificity is dealt with. I would say that is a very big issue. The other factor is that Government policy is moving towards trying to reduce the number of children with statements and whether a local authority takes on the commitment to have a low statementing set of practices varies. Some authorities are more that way than others and you can see from the figures that some authorities have reduced the proportion of statements and persuaded parents to accept additional provision at school action plus, for example. Local government practice is really very important in this sense. There is a need for greater national coordination. Part of the issue is taking on the professionals in the sense that you can go to one educational psychologist and they will operate with one definition of dyslexia and you go to another educational psychologist and they will operate with another concept of dyslexia. It might well be that in that one LEA that is not resolved or it is not quite clear, or it might be that they will set a central set of cut-offs which might be a fairly crude set of cut-offs. The importance of specificity in a sophisticated model of whatever the condition or the area of special needs has not really been resolved. That is an area where quite a lot of work could be done with professional groups. Dyslexia is a case in point.

Q527 Chairman: We have had people give evidence to us who say we have devised a test where if you give this to children we know what the problems are. There is specificity in one test.

Professor Norwich: Yes, the test will tell you.

Q528 Chairman: Then you can deal with it. Others say it is impossible to do that; that is the real danger. What you have to do is to take all these things into consideration and, as Professor Dyson and yourself were saying, the social context in which the child operates, not just the product of a test. Between you academics that is still quite a raging discussion, is it not?

Professor Norwich: Yes.

Q529 Chairman: Do you all come down on Professor Norwich's side?

Professor Dyson: I always agree with Professor Norwich on principle. We are probably at a point where we need more specificity in the system; that the thing is just so open-ended but it has now become such a fragmented and contested system that leaving it open-ended probably is not the right way to go. Where I might disagree with Professor Norwich, and I would need to talk to him in more detail about this, is what it is that you make specific. If you specify a condition and you have diagnostic criteria for the condition - I am not certain that is what Professor Norwich was saying - then you are still in this problem of locating the difficulty and therefore all of your action in the child. You could be more specific about what counts as good quality provision? What counts as acceptable outcomes? We inch towards that sort of thing. You look at some of the things in the code of practice, you look at some of the things that Ofsted do and they are beginning to inch towards that, but we certainly have not bitten that particular bullet. I would want to explore that notion of specificity rather than the diagnostic notion.

Q530 Chairman: There is another wing, is there not? I have met in my own constituency with heads and SENCOs. What they were saying is they get fed up. They are professionals, they know their children, they are trained and they think they are pretty good at identifying the problem in the broader context that the child faces and too often people are trying to take that child off to some expert to assess rather than to people that really work with the children and know them thoroughly being given the more important role. Were they talking out of the back of their heads or was that good Huddersfield commonsense?

Professor Norwich: Many people have held that view over many years about how can an outside professional come in and spend an hour and tell you whereas somebody who has worked with a child for years cannot. That is too black and white in my view. The statutory assessment, if carried out to the letter of the code of practice, would collect a whole lot of views together, there would be parental views, ideally also the child or the young person's views, as well as psychologists and others and the local authority panel would integrate those into something that made some sense.

Q531 Chairman: Professor Dockrell, you are one of the experts.

Professor Dockrell: I do not disagree with what Professor Norwich is saying at all. It is a parody to have a professional take a child away for an hour and think they have made some magical decision that the other people cannot inform. One of the things that happen at Moor House is that an assessment is not seeing somebody for a test for half-an-hour or 50 minutes; it is looking at a child's ability to function and learn within a particular context. If you are doing that in mainstream school what sometimes a good professional can do is work alongside a teacher or a SENCO to look at the contexts which support and encourage learning and perhaps help in the next step for that child. I would not favour taking the child away, testing them and coming back with an answer.

Chairman: We will move on to the next section which is SEN in the context of a post-welfare approach to education.

Q532 Helen Jones: Do you think that our views about what education is about have changed; that we have moved from talking about education as a development of the individual to talking about outcomes, about economic necessity and so on? If you think that is the case, has it affected the way we deal with special needs? Is there, for example, much more emphasis on trying to put a label on a child in certain contexts when we would not have done that before? I am particularly thinking of things like the autistic spectrum disorders: ADHD, dyslexia and so on. Has that affected the way the system operates in your view? Is there any evidence for that?

Professor Dyson: Our views of education change all the time. We can only understand what goes on in special needs education, and indeed where we might take special needs education, in the context of seeing what is going on in the mainstream education system. Too often those of us who have worked in special needs education have seen it as a kind of detached world that we can just change in isolation and sometimes we thought it would actually change mainstream education which it never does. It is important to look at the changes that there have been and how we think about education. There has been, in very broad terms, a change from a kind of welfarist notion of education where the responsibility of the state is to do the best that it can for each of its citizens and if some of those citizens have particular difficulties and are vulnerable then to put extra resources into those citizens. Although the Warnock Report is quite complex in its ideologies, some of what it was doing was very definitely located in that tradition. There has also been a move that you could see starting with the Black papers. It went on through Callaghan's Ruskin College speech, the Education Reform Act and all the things that have happened since 1997. I think they are in a fairly strong tradition of their own which says that we are not into welfare as we used to understand it. We are not into what Callaghan at one point called the "flowering of the personality". I do not see much of that these days in educational discourse. However, we are into equipping young people so that they can take their place in a highly competitive labour market with very high levels of skills. That then has implications for what we think the special needs system is doing. Is it there to look after vulnerable children or is it there to get hold of as many of them as we can manage and shake them up and get them into the attainment game in the same way as everybody else is? Because we have never quite made that clear we get lots of the mixed messages that come out from policy.

Q533 Helen Jones: Do the rest of our witnesses agree with that?

Professor Norwich: I feel that it is a bit of a mixture of both in the sense that special needs is a very wide spectrum and there are some children who have lifelong care needs. They might be a very small proportion of children and in that sense one could make a reasonable argument for a welfarist approach. The issue of whether you are looking at outcomes that are to do with upskilling the economy is a very limited criterion and I think this Government's policies illustrate the interest now in emotional literacy, the interest in personalising, the interest in all sorts of self-review processes; I think there is a broadening of the concept. As Alan was saying, things vary over time but even within the period of the life of this Government we have seen quite a broadening of the concept. All of that will influence the spectrum of what is appropriate for different areas and severities of special educational needs, so I think it is very different. If you have a child who has a specific co-ordination problem or a specific language or reading problem but who intellectually is considered to be well above average, in that sense you might say it really is about attainments and you are into these sorts of issues and providing opportunities that in the past one would not get. There are still other children who have care needs, children with quite serious health and medical care needs, children with quite severe mental health needs and so on. I talked earlier about the importance of specificity. The other thing is to see how diverse the spectrum is and that therefore different responses are needed in that spectrum. I always feel that a lot of the arguments about inclusion are really false arguments because we are not arguing about the same thing.

Q534 Helen Jones: How valuable then is the statementing process in all of this? Does it simply get in the way of meeting children's needs? Is it using up far too much of our resources or do you believe there needs to be a process akin to that in order to make sure that children's needs are properly met? Is it a help or a hindrance?

Professor Dockrell: It depends on the complexity of need - we can follow that up from Brahm's situation - and it depends on what other mechanisms you have in place. If you take the broadest definition of one in five children having a need at some point in time, the majority of these children will be in mainstream schools. A statementing procedure for all of them is a nonsense financially and timewise but you need some mechanism to ensure that the child's educational, social and contextual development is monitored in some way and that appropriate resources are provided. The reason some of the children end up in places like Moor House is that that kind of procedure has not happened and many of them have gone through primary school without any additional support or resources because there has been no mechanism in place for them and the only way was a statement procedure.

Professor Norwich: My view about statementing is that the problem is that there are several aspects to it and some elements of it one might judge as being more favourable than others. The point that Julie made earlier, that the emphasis is on individual need, was always behind the original intention for a statement, that it would be a very intensive, multi-disciplinary assessment to try and get a much more detailed view about the child in context. There are other elements of the statement which are that it is also about individual planning, it is about personalisation and, of course, there are degrees of personalisation. In one sense the statement in its best form and its best practice is a very intensified form of personalisation. I would have thought that no-one would want to give up personalisation or individualisation in some assessment of individual need. The critical thing about statementing is the legal apparatus, the statutory element, the contract, the parents' right to go to tribunal and maybe go to court and so on, this contract that can in a sense be pursued. I know that some of the people who have given you evidence, David Reubain, for example, argue very strongly for that protection, and I think Alan is perhaps indicating that as well. I think the Government and local authorities are still trying to find a way round that by trying to give additional provision without the statutory assessment and I think as a principle that is a good thing. If one could reduce the statutory element I think that would reduce bureaucracy considerably, but all of that depends on building up structure and capacity in local authorities, in the schools, better training and so on. This is partly to do with where the specialist knowledge and knowhow reside and I think the SENCOs, or the learning co-ordinators, whatever one wants to call them, the people who are at the school level, are critical. Reducing the statutory element is good but whether politically one can put the cat back in the bag, so to speak, I do not know, because in other EU countries parents would not have the legal rights. They might have them in some ways under the general legal system but they would not have them under a specific educational system and I think that would be difficult to do. What is happening with the low statementing strategy that has been run through the department and is part of the five-year strategy is probably in the right direction, but without the proper resources, without all the infrastructure, there will be a lot of casualties and I think there will be a lot of resistance, and that is quite an important issue for you.

Q535 Helen Jones: That is very interesting and I do not disagree with what you say but if we were to try to move back to a rights based system, a right for children to receive education appropriate to their needs, how could we move to ensure that that applied to all children if we were to move away from the statementing procedure, at least in some cases, and that it was not simply the preserve of those with the most articulate parents, the ones who were willing to take on the system? Bearing in mind that we now have a difficulty with much of the responsibility for these things and that SENCOs have devolved to schools, how can you make sure there is equity within the system?

Professor Dyson: In many ways we come at this from the wrong end of the beast. We have this mainstream system, and Brahm said this earlier, and then there are these few odd kids who do not fit in. "What sort of system do we need for them?" "Oh, let us have statements. It has got a few problems. Let us see about modifying the statementing process", and so on. I kind of turn the question round and say how do we guarantee entitlement for the vast majority of children? What are the systems that we have in place? How adequate would they be for many at least, possibly all, of the children in the special needs system and how would we set about extending those? We guarantee entitlement through systems and monitoring and inspection and accountability. We do not guarantee entitlement by putting each child through a legal process which results in a statement. I would be looking to say how do we strengthen and extend those more universal processes - and we may find there are limits to them so that we have to retain something that looks pretty much like the statementing - rather than starting this by saying how do we modify the statementing process?

Q536 Chairman: So you would get rid of statementing process, would you?

Professor Dyson: I do not know. As I understand the way trends are moving, we have moved some significant way towards reducing the proportion of statements, despite the occasional horror stories which, of course, will impact on you and local authorities significantly, without necessarily the roof falling in, but I guess the problem currently is that we rely too heavily for my liking on the goodwill, the commitment and the capacity of particular headteachers, special needs co-ordinators and schools. There really is not a very reliable system to make sure that provision is always good.

Q537 Chairman: What about the rest of you? Professor Dockrell, do you think statementing gets in the way or do you just want it watered down?

Professor Dockrell: No. I would agree with Alan: there needs to be something that guarantees support and guarantees children access to the specialist resources they might need at particular points in education and unless there is something that is structured, either through audits or quality assurance or some mechanism like that, then I think goodwill is not going to go far enough.

Q538 Helen Jones: It does not guarantee access to the resources you need now, does it, because if it did we would not have the differences that Jeff was pointing up earlier and you agreed with, that we receive a statement for a particular problem in one area of the country but not another?

Professor Dockrell: Indeed, and children change. You have developmental changes so what your specific needs were when you were in year five are going to be quite different when you are in year ten, those kinds of statementing issues, but you do need a system that addresses that.

Helen Jones: We agree. We are trying to find out what it is.

Q539 Chairman: Professor Norwich, do you want to come in quickly on that question of whether we ought to get rid of the statementing process or not?

Professor Norwich: I think the Scots have come up with quite a neat move, which is not to get rid of the statementing process but to redefine it in a more limited remit, a more limited area, and it is tied in with whether children are getting additional services outside education. Mary Warnock has suggested that it is tied to going to a special school. When it was introduced, because the move was towards more inclusion and more integration, the idea was that it was going to be child-focused and not relate to the institution you go to, and that you would predict the additional provision in the regular school. I think one does need some fallback legal protection, but one really has to build up the systemic protections and one has to have layers of protection that are in a sense integral to the normal accountability systems for the general system. I think statementing is unique in children's services for having this legal protection. There are not that many countries that have it. America has it; in fact, I think it was imported from the United States originally, but there are other countries that do not. There are arguments for having it in the sense that it gives you those protections, so I would not scrap the statementing altogether. I think one has to look at its elements and the different functions of those elements and say what serves what purpose under what sort of situation? I agree with Alan: we need a much better integrated system of assurance, I think is the term some people use, so that parents can get assurance, and it does not always have to come through a statement. I think the effect could be to reduce bureaucracy.

Q540 Mr Marsden: Are you saying then that you are not against the concept of the statement but you do not want it to be the be-all and end-all of how a child is judged in terms of its special educational needs? Would that be a fair summary of what you are saying?

Professor Norwich: I would go further than that. I would say that it would be a fallback assurance.

Q541 Mr Marsden: So a minimum guarantee?

Professor Norwich: A minimum guarantee that parents could access but it should not be the normal system of getting assurances. We need to have fewer bureaucratic systems of assurance and more responsiveness to parents' and children's sense of need. I do not see that as an easy thing to do because it involves quite a lot of systems change but I think that is the direction it should take.

Q542 Chairman: You are saying that the Government is moving in that direction anyway.

Professor Norwich: I think it is.

Q543 Chairman: It was very remiss of me, Professor Norwich, not to mention this when you first came into the room because I wanted to express the regret of all of us in this Committee about the premature death of Ted Wragg, your colleague at Exeter. We had great evidence and help from Ted Wragg in the past and I wanted to put it on record.

Professor Norwich: Thank you.

Q544 Chairman: I am sure you knew him well, as everyone else in the educational sector seemed to.

Professor Norwich: Yes.

Q545 Chairman: One thing I want to say to you, Professor Dyson, before we get off this section is that you made it look as though it was something entirely new. Here was a Government or a series of Governments that thought that they were prioritising making students fit to do a job out there in the marketplace. I have read a bit of Victorian history and certainly early 20^th century history and it is redolent with these kids who come into school and yes, they have got to have reading, writing and arithmetic because they are going to be good fodder for the factories. I am not a Marxist but Marx and Engels' The Condition of the Working Class in 1844 is full of that too, is it not?

Professor Dyson: I think the phrase is, what goes around comes around.

Chairman: Okay. I just wanted it on record that it is not a new phenomenon.

Q546 Mr Chaytor: Just coming back to the question of the changes in emphasis in the purpose of the education system, what effect do you think the greater dominance given to league tables has had on the whole question of SEN?

Professor Dyson: I think the answer is mixed, but largely disastrous. On the mix part of it I think there has been an important change which has been in many ways a positive change in that many schools have begun to say, "Although we have children who historically have not achieved very highly, we can no longer simply accept that as a natural condition and we really ought to be looking at what we do about that". It seems to me that that is positive and that that notion, whatever else happens, ought to be retained. I guess it is when you get beyond that that it gets very negative, when you talk about the narrowness with which, certainly up until 2003, achievement was defined with the notion of having target levels and benchmark levels and the traffic light system of the green, amber and red and the focusing around the traffic light system, the undesirability of children who would make the school look bad in performance tables. All of those things have been very negative.

Professor Norwich: I agree with that. I remember at the time of all this coming into operation that this was anticipated and has been borne out by the evidence I have seen and the more experiential and anecdotal evidence of headteachers who can tell you that if they accepted this child what effect it would have on their grade point average scores and so on. In a sense schools that are strong, that have good internal support systems and have commitments and so on can accommodate, and in that sense will welcome, those children but I think the welcome is always conditional. You can see it in the language. A teacher will say, "This child has a severe learning difficulty", but that is within their own system in terms of the local authority. In national terms that is not a severe learning difficulty. I think there is a relativity about what mainstream schools deal with. Many people still do not know what the range is because many children with profound multiple learning difficulties are not in regular settings. They are few and far between. In that sense I would agree with that. There are schools, and some of Alan's research and case studies illustrate them, that seemingly show good value added and seem to be more welcoming. The question is always what is the degree of welcoming, as is the issue of what degree of inclusion we are talking about.

Q547 Chairman: Professor Dockrell, do you want to come in on this?

Professor Dockrell: In general I would agree and I think that comes in in terms of access to assessment and access to education and schooling and being absent on particular days that exams take place, but I suppose I would want to highlight one other positive side of this that I would not want to lose sight of. In some ways, with the drive for greater academic achievement for schools at particular points and flexibility in Key Stage 4, that has opened doors for some young people with special educational needs and in the past when they might not have been given access to some form of qualification at that point they now are.

Mr Chaytor: Is there a particular way in which the league table system should be modified or developed to deal with the criticisms you have identified and make it less likely that headteachers would be reluctant to accept pupils or eager to get them out of the way on certain days of the year? Is there a consensus about what needs to be done? We have the value added schools in place now and a new value added school will come in this next year, I think. What else needs to be done in terms of the presentation of these performance tables properly to recognise the achievements of children with SEN?

Q548 Chairman: Professor Dyson, have you got anything to say about that or should we get in a different set of professors?

Professor Dyson: Whichever set you get in will tell you something different. It seems to me that there is a tension at the heart of policy. It seems to me that there have been moves to make the league tables less of a blunt instrument than they initially were and in general terms I welcome that. The moves, however, have been rather timid moves. The direction is right, which is that if you take a measure of children's attainment like SATs or GCSEs it only makes sense if you embed it in a really rich context of what is going on, who the children are, what the trajectories of children are and so on. Then it can be useful as part of a dialogue, but the tension is that if what you are trying to do is give to the consumers of education, who are in current policy interpreted as being families looking to place their children in particular schools, rather simple information on which to judge schools then you are always going to have to simplify what those league tables look like. It is another one of those cases where you have to look at the broader context. I would be looking at how you have a system which takes into account where we have got to in "choice" but also at how it makes it less a choice between this school and that school and how it looks at moving towards more guarantees of provision across the board, looking at groups of schools and so on, but that is a big issue that gets well beyond special needs education but that is what has to be addressed to get at the perverse consequences of league tables.

Q549 Mr Chaytor: Is it possible to construct value-added methodologies that will reflect adequately achievement of all children with SEN within mainstream schools, or is this just not possible?

Professor Norwich: This is the issue of, are the assessment methods adapted to the needs of the children who are being assessed for monitoring purposes? Are the levels in the P-level system for those children who are performing at that level also? There are moves within the five-year strategy to deal with some of these and so I think there is a recognition that this is an important area. Part of the problem is the very nature of league tables. They are summaries. They do not give a rich contextual picture and, of course, there is a big difference between how parents evaluate a school in terms of, "Is it suitable for my child?", in the general system and league tables. I think that in some respects a sort of informed parental user perspective and trying in a sense to cultivate more sophisticated means of judging, "Is this school a good school for my child?", and, if they are going to mix with children who have behaviour problems or autistic spectrum disorders, "What impact is that going to have on us and my child?", are some of the anxieties that are around amongst some parents, I guess. I think they need to be allayed, they need to be dealt with, and that is not within the league table system. That is more to do with how does one engender a more enlightened parental perspective in the general system? I think league tables are a fairly small part of it.

Q550 Mr Chaytor: Given the difficulties caused by competition between schools and accountability and educational information, is there still a value in its own right of inclusion or should it be argued purely on the grounds that it helps to improve attainment? If it were the case that it did not help to improve attainment, and that is what some headteachers seem to be implying by the way they deal with some of their SEN children, is there still an argument to be made that in its own right inclusion is the right policy?

Professor Dockrell: Are you making the premise that inclusion has a negative impact on attainments in schools generally?

Q551 Mr Chaytor: I am saying that, if it were the case, or if it were the case that simply allocating a child with a particular kind of SEN to a mainstream school on the grounds that the general drift is towards inclusion was not going to benefit that child in terms of their progress, ie, that their progress was zero, is it still the case that inclusion should be argued for its own sake and for the wider social benefit even though the specific attainment advantage was non-existent?

Professor Dockrell: I suppose I take a broader view of education than just attainment and so I would be looking at a child's or young person's development socially and personally as well as their educational attainment and it is that wider package that I would want to consider.

Q552 Mr Chaytor: Earlier in answer to one question you referred to the fact that the educational psychologists cannot even agree on a definition of dyslexia and it occurred to me that if we have problems over defining particular conditions perhaps the very concept of SEN itself is now out of date, the idea of a certain group of children being categorised in this way, or do we need a more all-embracing approach? Do we need to be looking at all children having particular learning needs, some of which will be more severe than others? Is SEN still a valid concept?

Professor Norwich: I think that tension was inherent in the Warnock Report and in the legislation that followed. There is an element of the Warnock system which says exactly that: it is individual needs and there is a continuum and on top of that a category system which is in a sense justified in terms of additional resource allocation. In a sense that is a continuing tension around identification and I think in a sense one lives with that and the first step is to be aware of it. I think that the move towards personalisation is an example now of recognising some of the elements of individualisation, individual planning, and flexibilities. In that sense one can dispense with some of the coverage for which this umbrella term was used. There is a view that from the word go the Warnock approach was not that categoric. There was a very general category but really it was individual need that counted. What has happened over the years is that it has replaced "handicap" or "disability" as being a general category that supposedly can clearly apply to a distinct group of children. I do not think that is true and I do not think anyone in the early 1980s believed that. It is about what happens to categories when people do not understand the continuum of diversity.

Q553 Mr Chaytor: But will the emphasis in the recent White Paper on personalisation in the curriculum start to challenge the idea of a fixed number of children with SEN?

Professor Norwich: I think so, yes.

Professor Dyson: It seems to me that the notion of special educational needs is a flogged horse and it is about time it went, but only if there is some clarity as to where we are going rather than down that particular route so that somebody throwing things out without an alternative does not happen.

Q554 Dr Blackman-Woods: It is quite important to raise that question though, is it not, and to raise it in a very unemotional way because often when we get into these discussions it does become very emotional very quickly about whether you need to have a separate category. I wonder if you would like to make a comment on that before I go on and ask my questions. Is it possible for us to look at personalised learning as the route to not having this category of special educational needs?

Professor Norwich: My short answer to that is that you can reduce the number of children identified as having additional needs that are in some way associated with disability; let me put it that way. I prefer a term like "educational disability". You can reduce that quite considerably through that route but only with all the assurances and the systems development and flexibilities that would be required. I think the political fact is that having set up the system it is going to be difficult with all the political pressures that come from parents and voluntary organisations and so on to withdraw the protection that is so individualised as something that has a slightly separate legal status, but I think you can reduce it considerably. That would be my view. I still think you need a concept of additional educational need and I think that is what the Scots have done.

Q555 Dr Blackman-Woods: I want to return if I may to the issue of the post-welfare education system. My experience of what has happened to education, particularly SEN, over the last two decades is that mainstream schools more and more have had to look at the issue of special educational needs. I really want to ask you what the evidence is that we have put a category into special schools and said, "They are never going to work so we do not want anything to do with them and education is not really about that". I know I am paraphrasing what you have said enormously, but I am really quite concerned about that argument. I have been a school governor for about 20 years and in the last ten years particularly we have had to think about how children with difficulties are going to be accommodated in the school, how we were going to meet their needs. The discussions that we had were about the whole quality of life. There was never a discussion in the governing body that I was at that said to the SENCO, "Please do not bring this child in because they are going to wreck our league tables". I just cannot imagine that we were that unusual. I am raising this because it is coming back to David's point: surely there are things to be gained from the inclusion agenda that may be more than just related to that specific child and its needs. Although you think the child's needs have to be met through the inclusion agenda there are additional things in terms of educating the wider population and increasing tolerance that it seems to me are very important and that we are in danger of losing if we go down the route of too many specialist schools. I want your comments on that.

Professor Norwich: I think the development of co-located special schools is a very interesting one, and if you are going on any visits can I suggest that you go and visit some co-located specialist schools. There are some very interesting examples of the physical proximity allowing things to happen that are very difficult to do when you are dealing with special schools that are at a distance, and I think that creates great opportunities. There are varying views about that, I agree, and I am doing some work currently on teachers' experiences of how that works, but it is clear that the social education in having a wider group is valued, and I think that is true from regular children's perspectives in schools. I think there are phase issues between primary and secondary, but I think that is what Julie was saying before. Most people would say that the grounds for inclusion go well beyond narrow educational attainment. They are to do with social inclusion in the widest sense as a sort of political ideology and the importance of tolerance and so on.

Chairman: But was Roberta not really challenging something you said, Professor Dyson, that there is no room for this, everyone is out for the targets, they do not want special educational needs students? She is saying that her experience was that that is not the real world; that is an academic view.

Q556 Dr Blackman-Woods: I was asking for evidence of change on the ground.

Professor Dyson: I think the evidence is very mixed. I hope I did not say it in what I wrote in quite such a black and white manner. First of all, there are many children placed in special schools who do very well and get as good an education there as they are going to get anywhere, I would say. There are many mainstream schools which work with children with a range of difficulties, including quite significant difficulties, and do so in a very committed way and very well. However, what we also know is that there are schools which are less committed than that and that even in the committed schools there is a tension between what we might like to do in terms of educating children with difficulties and having to keep a weather eye on who we have in the school and how that is affecting our league table performance, so you get a very complex mixture. I think the reason we get this complex mixture is that the messages that we have had from a range of Governments in terms of policy have been extremely mixed, so people out there in the system are not absolutely sure what it is that they are trying to achieve. Are they simply about raising attainment? Are they about this broader notion of achievement which has got all sorts of social wellbeing and function built into it? Are they implementing some sort of notion of rights and entitlement? What is it precisely that they are supposed to be doing? In policy terms we keep avoiding being clear on that because it is easier not to be clear.

Q557 Mr Carswell: I have a couple of questions on the post-welfarist approach to SEN education. Warnock has admitted that the policy of enforced inclusion is not in her view always right. Why has it taken so long to come to this? Why was it not swept away ages ago? Why have we had this centrally imposed policy lasting for so long?

Professor Norwich: I do not interpret that that is where we have come from and where we are. I think parents have always had a say. It is in the legislation and the regulations. The examples she gave you and rights and pamphlets and so on are individual cases where we do not know the context at all and it might just be that the local authority has moved to such an extent with its inclusive practice that it no longer offers a maintained special setting for particular children and therefore points the parents in that direction. I do not think that is at the level of regulation and within the legislative framework. I think it is the way the local authorities have played that and I think budgetary and resource factors come into it. I can think of a specific example - I occasionally do advice for parents when they are in conflict - where exactly in that situation, around autistic spectrum disorder, the parent wanted to go to a very expensive independent school and the local authority said, "We have a special additionally resourced secondary school which is quite adequate". The parent was not happy with it, for all sorts of reasons about social interaction in the playground and whatever, and was trying to find professional advice to go to a tribunal to secure a place in quite an expensive special school. The fact that the parent could go to tribunal shows that the option was there. It is just that with this particular local authority they had a very strong tradition of not having their own maintained special schools. That would be how I would see that.

Q558 Mr Carswell: Just putting that to one side, if one wanted to be really radical, rather than setting up another commission à la Warnock surely the point is to do away with having a centrally appointed group of experts imposing a blanket policy nationally? Do you have any sympathy with the idea that we should be letting the balance between inclusion version non-inclusion be decided locally, perhaps in the context of each particular child, and have parents and carers, not experts in the pay of the LEAs, choosing if a child should go to a local mainstream or inclusion school? You have admitted, Professor Dyson, that you are pro-inclusionist. Professor Norwich, looking at your memo here, you talk about the need to re-commit to inclusion. Those are your views and they are wonderful but surely under any new system we need to take into account the extent to which the parents are pro-inclusionist and not, with great respect, ministerial advisers. Do you have any sympathy with that?

Professor Dyson: I keep saying: if I did say that I will always modify it by saying, "What do you mean by inclusion and then I will tell you whether I am pro-inclusion". I do not recall having said that. Maybe I did do. It seems to me there is a fundamental dilemma here which is that if you say, "Let us leave this up to the market to decide", how is the market going to be resourced because, if it turns out that different parents want different things in the same area, is the state in one way or another going to fund a full range of provision or is there going to be some sort of a private market system that does this? It seems to me that that is the only way that you could have a market solution to this one. That is one problem that I see in that. The other one is that you get down to really quite fundamental ideologies in this about whether the interests of the child can in each and every case be determined by the views of the parent. We simply do not do that for any other children in this country. We do not say to parents, "Whether you fancy educating your child or not is entirely up to you". The state says, "You must educate your child. You are in trouble if you do not". There are very different ideological positions to be taken on this but it would be an unusual one to say that it is entirely decided by parents.

Q559 Mr Carswell: If one were to decide, and not everyone is not in favour of it, to move to this rights based system, could you reform the statementing process so that it would perhaps be more specific? Section three could perhaps even have some form of financial entitlement and you could have some sort of legal framework possibly to allow judicial fiat to give people a legal right to request and receive their share of LEA funding for statemented children. That would empower parents and carers, possibly at the expense of the experts. Do you think that is a feasible idea?

Professor Dyson: It is the same issue, is it not, which is that you can have statements formulated independently of the resourcing body, currently the local authority, provided somebody somewhere makes the resources available? I do not know what would happen to taxation under those circumstances.

Q560 Mr Carswell: Setting that aside though, setting aside an amount of money in the LEA kitty?

Professor Dyson: I would love to set my taxes aside.

Q561 Mr Carswell: I said it for specific reasons. If you were to set aside the question of how much money was in the LEA kitty as a way of carving up what was in the LEA kitty, do you think it would be a feasible solution?

Professor Dyson: I would want to look at it in more detail. I think there would be some difficulties about children in the system with pots of money attached to them negotiating their way around the system, if I understand correctly what you are proposing. Provision in schools tends not to be made on an individual basis. It tends to be made on the resourcing of the school as a whole and resourcing group provision so I think there would be some difficulties in that highly individualised system.

Q562 Chairman: Professor Dockrell, do you want to come in on those questions?

Professor Dockrell: No, I think not.

Q563 Chairman: What is interesting though is that the question was being posed on whether things are centrally determined rather than locally. As I understand it, this is still an area that largely, putting resources to one side, is determined locally, is it not? This is what Jeff's point was, that it is very local what happens to a child who is assessed to have special educational needs. That is still the case, is it not?

Professor Dyson: Yes. Something we have not touched on other than very briefly is the split between who provides the resources and has the responsibility for ensuring the child is educated and who receives the resources and makes the provision. We have to remember that the Warnock system was set up when local authorities owned and managed schools and that is no longer the state of play.

Chairman: Roberta, would you like to come back? I rather cut you off earlier.

Q564 Dr Blackman-Woods: What I was trying to explore was the extent to which different messages coming from academics and professionals in the field were making things difficult for policy-makers, and if you are going to go down a largely inclusion agenda route then you have to shift resources, you have to shift mindsets and it is very difficult, once you are down that road, then to pull back. Some of the evidence we have had seems to be suggesting that maybe we ought to be pulling back from the overall inclusion agenda and once again looking at whether special needs schools are the most appropriate, particularly for a large number of special educational needs children. I think I have had mixed messages from this Committee and that is why we are taking evidence but I just wonder where you are with that dilemma. We can get out of it, I know, by saying, "Oh, let us have schools co-located", and that is probably the best way forward, but is it really, because you will still get parents insisting one way or the other that they want mainstream or they want special? I would prefer that we did not have that distinction.

Professor Norwich: That goes back to the point I was making earlier about looking at what parents need when they evaluate a school and they consider what their child's needs are and what is on offer. We really need to get away from the notion of special school versus regular school. There has been some criticism of the notion of continuing provision which has been around for years, but it still has some currency. I think the issue of what are the stages and the continuum and where people are on that continuum is where there might be differences. Certainly I think that a lot more work could go into supporting parents in an understanding of some of the detail because I think sometimes parents and children themselves respond in what would be seen as social terms, reputation terms: "What does it mean for my child to be collected by a bus to go to this school rather than walk down the road to go to that school?". These are some of the issues partly around the identity of the family and so on that are really quite important. I think there is more that could be done there.

Q565 Dr Blackman-Woods: Professor Dockrell, do you want to come in?

Professor Dockrell: I wanted to make two points about that. The first thing is that whilst some special schools are very good they are not a panacea and it would be wrong to see them in that way. The other thing to think about is in terms of specialist resources rather than special schools and these resources are not necessarily financial. They can be skills based. The money is part of it but it is only part.

Q566 Mr Chaytor: Coming back to the issue of inclusion and attainment, what is the priority that should be given to employability, particularly in the last two years of secondary school? Have we done enough on this? Should it be a stronger focus within the education of children with SEN in the last two years? Are there parallels to be drawn maybe with the way in which we deal with children with SEN in secondary schools and the new policy of incapacity benefit for 25-year olds?

Professor Dyson: It depends how you define employability and putting an emphasis on that.

Q567 Mr Chaytor: You always answer your questions, "It depends how you define it". Are you going to tell us what you would answer?

Professor Dyson: I do not think you should have answers necessarily! I think that is an issue because there is a history in this country of vocational training in schools, much of it, I have to say, done in special schools, some of it done by myself in special schools, which had its merits but was also rather unambitious and narrow and did not lead anywhere. We also have to be very careful in that the chances of many young people finding employment when they leave school at 16 or even 19 are remote, so they are probably going to go on to some sort of vocational training after that. Something which says that it is not the academic curriculum as we had it from 1988 onwards but it is something which is a bit more locked into broader personal development which then links on to questions of employability I think makes sense, but then that makes sense for every child in the system, not just for those with special needs.

Professor Dockrell: I would like to make two points on that and they follow on from what you were saying. It depends on the group of children with special needs that you are talking about. I am talking about a particular group now who have longstanding special needs throughout primary and secondary school and whose move at 16 was predominantly on to some kind of further education, often doing NVQ training of one kind or another, and had typically sat GCSEs because that was what was on offer, so it is a longer term process, as it is for most other young people. The second interesting issue about that is that the children who were finding it hardest to adjust to the FE situation were those children who were coming from special provision because it was a different kind of context and they were typical large FE kinds of colleges.

Q568 Mr Chaytor: Do you conclude from that that those within special provision are beyond training for employability?

Professor Dockrell: No, not at all.

Q569 Mr Chaytor: What conclusions do you draw from that? From your experience is that just another argument for greater inclusion?

Professor Dockrell: It was an issue about, when you think about what you are doing if you are building up a special provision, you have to think of where young people are going to go post-16 and what kinds of services need to be put in place to support them. Academically there were no differences between the kids.

Q570 Chairman: Are you suggesting that employers might be more resistant to taking on a child who has come through the special school route?

Professor Norwich: The figures on employment of young adults with disabilities show there are differentials; I am not arguing with that. The special school issue about the impact of special schools really depends on whether the special school has planned and built in links. Some special schools build in links when giving vocational employment opportunities, having part-time links either with a local school or employment or whatever. The issues are that wherever you are on the continuum there have to be very good flexible links between all the various elements and I think that has a clear bearing on the issue of employability. The days of special schools being isolated, detached, distant, countrified are gone. Special schools have a more active place in linking and connecting in with the system and in that sense there is a case for them.

Q571 Mr Marsden: I just want to take you back to the discussion we had right at the beginning about the link between social and economic factors? We are trying to look forward to policy and so I would like to ask you this question. Do you think that if we had a sustained period of earlier (and I mean in age range) concentration and intervention on socially disadvantaged children, such as, for example, the Government is trying to do via Sure Start and Every Child Matters, and that ultimately if - and I accept it is a big "if" - that was successful over a five or ten year period, we would have a reduced number of children with special educational needs or indeed with statements?

Professor Dyson: There are two parts to the answer. One is that special needs, as I said, is an administrative category and statementing is a kind of micro-political contest that goes on. Who knows? You could end up with more because other circumstances change. In terms of should there be more children who do better in schools, the answer is yes, and therefore if you kept the benchmarks as they are now you probably would not need to identify as many.

Professor Dockrell: I would agree with that.

Professor Norwich: I agree with that but it is a question of degree. People can hold up quite unrealistic hopes about the impact of early intervention. It goes back to the point, what is the purpose of special provision? Special provision is not always in a sense to recover levels of attainment that would be seen as normal. That is really quite an important issue. It might in some cases; it might not in others. That is an important element within the spectrum of special needs that one needs to be aware of.

Q572 Chairman: We have had a very good session. We are very grateful that three distinguished professors have been with us and answered fully and frankly the questions that we have asked. Is there anything you want to tell us that we have not covered? We have asked a lot of questions. You probably think we are rather muddled about where we are at the present moment, halfway through our inquiry. Are there any questions we have not asked you that we should have asked you?

Professor Dyson: Not in terms of questions, but I think there is a turning point, a decision point, that we are at. One decision is to keep on doing what we have done for many years now, which is to muddle through with the current system. The other one is to take a long, hard look at it - and it will be a long, hard look; there are no quick fixes in this area - and actually say maybe it is time to move in a very different direction.

Professor Norwich: I feel that the system needs to build better capacity. That was what I was saying earlier on. It needs to build better professional capacity, better research-based capacity, more dispersal of knowledge and so on, and I see that as a long term issue. That to me is really the priority. There are lots of issues and difficult challenges and hard choices to be made all the way along the line but I feel that one can see elements of progress, although I must say there is a bit of muddling through, I feel, in special needs which in some ways is not good enough and I think that partly reflects what I see as the separate status of special needs.

Professor Dockrell: Someone earlier said that children's needs were self-evident. I think I would challenge that assumption and say that children with special educational needs, however we define them, often have complex learning challenges that require a sophisticated and intelligent set-up to address them and I would not want us to go away and think that it is self-evident what kind of problems they might be.

Chairman: Thank you very much for your evidence today. If, on the way home, on the bus or in the car or whatever way you are going, you think, "I wish I had told that darn Committee something", please email us, be in contact with us. We want to make this inquiry and the report that we make out of it as good as we possibly can.