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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 478-vii House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE EDUCATION AND SKILLS coMMITTEE
Wednesday 1 March 2006 MS ELIZABETH CLERY, MS CAROL BOYS, MS SIMONE ASPIS, MR MIKE COLLINS, MS SUSAN
TRESMAN, MS VIRGINIA BEARDSHAW Evidence heard in Public Questions 573 - 652
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Education and Skills Committee on Wednesday 1 March 2006 Members present Mr Barry Sheerman, in the Chair Dr Roberta Blackman-Woods Mr David Chaytor Mrs Nadine Dorries Jeff Ennis Mr Douglas Carswell Helen Jones Mr Gordon Marsden Stephen Williams Mr Rob Wilson ________________ Memoranda submitted by RNIB, Down's Syndrome Association, British Council of Disabled People,
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Ms Elizabeth
Clery, RNIB, Ms Carol Boys, Down's
Syndrome Association, Q573 Chairman: May I welcome you all to this session of our inquiry into special educational needs. It is very good to see you all here. Thank you for responding to our invitation. As you know, this is a major inquiry for us. The Committee has not looked at special educational needs for some time. In the light of Baroness Warnock's remarks and because we have been away from this for some time - a combination of those two things - we thought it was time we had a look at that area. It is a fascinating and interesting inquiry. As you know, we are about one-third of the way through, in time, but we are going to give it the time it deserves. Would you like to say very briefly which organisation you represent, so it is all clear on the record. Ms Clery: I represent an organisation called the Alliance for Inclusive Education. It is a national organisation led by disabled people. It is a membership organisation. As well as disabled people, families and many allies, professionals, have joined. We have about 350 families and about 60 organisations which are part of this network. Mr Rieser: My name is Richard Rieser, I am the director of Disability Equality in Education, which is a small charity and NGO, and we do training, mainly focused on the education system. To date, we have trained over 60,000 educational professionals in inclusion and disability equality. My own background is as a teacher and it has been very much designed to shift the way that the profession sees disabled people and how they work to include them. We also produce resources. Again, we are a disability-led organisation. Ms Aspis: I am Simone, parliamentary and campaigns development worker for the British Council of Disabled People, which is an umbrella organisation representing 140 organisations run by disabled people. It is worth noting at this stage that the membership of the British Council of Disabled People has to consist of at least 75 per cent of disabled people, so it is very clearly open for disabled people. We represent disabled people with different impairments; including Asperger's syndrome, autism, people with learning difficulties and emotional behavioural difficulties. We represent disabled people across the board. We started off 30 years ago, set up by the union of people with physical impairments, and have developed since then against segregation. Ms Clery: I am from the Royal National Institute of the Blind (RNIB), which is the largest voluntary organisation for blind and partially sighted people, and I manage children's services. Children with visual impairment is quite a small group amongst children generally with disabilities: it is known as a low-incidence group. Ms Boys: I am chief executive of the Down's Syndrome Association, which is a membership organisation with some 19,000 members or people with Down's syndrome, their families and those with an interest. We provide information and support and we campaign on behalf of people with Down's syndrome. Q574 Chairman: One word to my Committee and also the witnesses. We will get much more out of this and we will get a lot in, if you can, team, make your questions to the point and brief, and could we have similar sorts of answers, and then we will get the most out of the session. I mentioned Warnock in my introductory remarks. Were you surprised, shocked, concerned about what seemed to be rather a change in opinion that Baroness Warnock had about the whole question of inclusion into mainstream education? Mr Rieser: I was not very surprised. I was surprised by the high profile of it because Baroness Warnock had been making such remarks on the record since 1992, so it was not a transformation. For those of us who work professionally in the area of developing inclusion, she has been seen more and more as an irrelevance to it because what she says is totally out of touch with what is going on on the ground. I have to say I was asked to the launch of the paper, to be one of two people, along with Professor Dyson who I think you saw last month, to answer her. It was David Cameron and herself on the other side. We had quite a long debate for three hours at the London University on it. I was surprised, at that point when we pointed out the numerous inaccuracies in her paper, where she agreed that that was probably right and maybe she had got it wrong, so it did not seem to be a very firm idea. What concerns me is there are other forces at work who have taken what she said and are pushing it for their own agendas. I do not think most of what she is saying stands real examination. For instance, she talks as if integration - which is what the original Warnock 1978 Report was about - is the same thing as inclusion, and we are very clear that it is not. Integration is a matter of location. The physically, sensory, mentally disabled child is placed in the mainstream but not necessarily getting what many need in order to thrive and function. They could be there just for social means. We are having quite a lot of co-location now, so you could say that that was locational integration; social integration, where they may be mixed for lunch, assemblies, maybe art; and then functional integration. With all of that and the whole method that was used, the child had to try to fit into what was going on in the mainstream class. For us, who are arguing about inclusion - and there is a fair amount of agreement around the world about this now - that is not inclusion. Inclusion is where the mainstream school transforms itself by removing barriers and providing support so that all children can be successful, both socially and academically. There are schools like that. I have recently carried out a project with DfES, visiting schools all over the country, which is being published on 29 March. Your Committee may be interested in looking at that because we filmed, in 40 schools, good practice of inclusion taking place and it is very clear to me that it is not about the type or degree of impairment, it is about the ethos and attitudes of the school, and of course it is true, as Ofsted pointed out in their September 2004 report, that this is very patchy. But it is not about resources, it is not really about the type of children; it is about the attitude and the practice within the school and that depends very much on the leadership of the school and whether there is a welcoming ethos. Where inclusion is happening, for the sorts of children that Baroness Warnock identified as she thought needed to be in separate schools (such as those on the autistic spectrum, those with challenging behaviour and those with moderate learning difficulties - which overall come to 380,000 children who are currently in the system), she was arguing we should set up a new range of special schools. That would cost, as you would appreciate, somewhere near £20 billion per year to do that, and it does not seem feasible, nor is it advisable, because there is much evidence that those children thrive in mainstream schools socially and academically. There is also some evidence that they fail where schools are still operating an integration model rather than an inclusion model. My take on what you are saying is that we need more training for staff, more orientation of the large resources which are in the system but which are not necessarily being pointed in the right direction within the schools, so that that inclusive model can be developed in more and more schools. Ms Clery: It is difficult to know where to start really. Going back to 1978, I shall always feel that Baroness Warnock at least put this whole notion of children with special educational needs on the map. Whatever we think of her, at least there was a lot of discussion around that time. I think that the Act that followed her 1978 report actually did move things forward. We looked at the policy paper that she recently produced that Richard has been talking about and she was focusing, it seemed to us, on a particular group of children with a particular group of needs. She talked a lot about children on the autistic continuum. She seemed to be making rather sweeping statements about "It doesn't work for this group of children." Obviously there is a whole range of children with special educational needs, there is a whole range of children with disabilities. There is some very successful inclusive practice going on around the country, but for RNIB there is still a worrying amount of variation in the quality those children get. We call it the postcode lottery: it depends on where you live as to what you get. That is very worrying for us. She was not particularly saying that, she was going more down the route of "Let's create some more specialist schools." This is a position RNIB does not support. We support good, properly supported inclusion in the mainstream sector for the vast majority of children who are blind and partially sighted, but we would want to see increasing capacity of schools to meet a wider range of needs. As Richard touched on, some schools are not very welcoming. Some schools have an ethos which does not encourage parents to feel very confident about what they can expect if their child goes to that school. Certainly from the point of view of children with low-incidence impairment, such as those children who are blind and partially sighted, which we think brings about a specific set of problems, for schools to be well supported and for inclusive practice provision really to work you need very, very good specialist support services, to support schools to increase their capacity to make parents feel confident that their children's needs will be met. That is really where we would come from. Chairman: I have not been able to ask all five of you to answer that question, but I assure you everyone will get a fair share of questions. If you feel you are being left out - and I know how articulate you all are - just shout. Q575 Helen Jones: I would like to try to explore the idea of inclusion with you. From looking at the evidence, Elizabeth and Carol have a slightly different view from some of our other witnesses. Am I correct to sum it up by saying that you would like the vast majority of children to be in mainstream schools but you would accept that there is a need for some special school provision? I am summarising - and I know the picture is a bit more nuanced than that. Ms Clery: Yes. Q576 Helen Jones: If so, where should the line should be drawn? How do you feel we should decide? Who should decide, most importantly, because there are often very different views held between parents and professionals, and there is also the view that the children themselves are often left out of this whole debate. Could you try to enlighten the Committee on that. Ms Boys: For children with Down's syndrome, you have to remember, there is a huge spectrum of abilities. Q577 Helen Jones: As with many disabilities. Ms Boys: Absolutely. There are some who achieve GCSE standard and then some at the other end of the spectrum who may have a dual diagnosis: Down's syndrome/autism or Down's syndrome/cerebral palsy. Parents now increasingly are looking for a mainstream place for their child with Down's syndrome. Without a shadow of a doubt, all of the families coming forward, with few exceptions, are looking for a mainstream school. Through the primary school, if the right level of support for teachers, learning support assistants is there, the right levels of training, then the placement will survive to the end of primary school. We know that; we have evidence of that; we have some good examples of good inclusion - and, again, it differs around the country: the old postcode lottery comes into play. It starts to break down when the child moves into secondary school: the child goes to a comprehensive; a different member of staff for different lessons; having to move around the school. We also have evidence that social isolation starts to cut in at secondary schools as well. There is some quite significant research on that. We do not know at what point you need to make a decision whether that placement is right. I think it is an evolving thing. We do know that there are some excellent examples of outreach, where the child has gone into a secondary school, the placement has started to break down and there have been examples of the local special school supporting the mainstream school and vice versa. Supported units within the campus of the mainstream school have also been very successful. Some children manage to survive to the end of the secondary school, but it is generally speaking the children who are in the top two per cent of abilities. Q578 Helen Jones: It is interesting to me that you used the word "survive". I think we would all hope that children do more than survive: that they thrive. Ms Boys: I think for some it is survive. Q579 Helen Jones: Exactly. That is an interesting point that I would like to pick up on with you. I am sure some of our other witnesses have a very different view. Ms Aspis: The British Council believe it is a civil rights issue, that all disabled children belong to the community and have the right to be included in their schools. As soon as you start drawing the line in terms of who is in and who is out, you go back to the emphasis on integration as opposed to inclusion, because you start considering whether this child will fit into a school that is not adapted for their needs and thereafter you start employing a very arbitrary legal system which puts lots of families in distress and asks the question who is in and who is out of our society. Therefore, we believe that all children should be included. It is a civil and human rights issue. If we start from that point, then we start from the point that all children ought to be included and that is where it starts. We have evidence to support that children who go to special schools do have a very segregated life thereafter. They go to day centres, they go to residential care centres, and do not have the same opportunities as non-disabled people take for granted. Therefore, there is an issue about what the alternative has to offer. Q580 Helen Jones: That is interesting. Perhaps you could let us have that evidence if you have not already. Ms Aspis: The evidence has been provided by the 2020 campaign, and the evidence is also in BCODP and DE's written evidence well. Ms Mason: I have been listening to this argument all my life - but, certainly, since I have been running the Alliance for Inclusive Education, for at least the last 15 years. This question - this red herring, really - of which child/which impairment/how serious/at what level should we then move them out of mainstream into a special, separate environment? While you still think like that, you are never going to understand what this issue is really all about. From our point of view, inclusion, as Simone and Richard were saying, is really about the deinstitutionalising of a group of people who have been put in separate homes, schools, work centres, sheltered workshops - you name it, it has been done to us. It has never been done with our will. Disabled adults have never chosen to live a separate life, and, as far as we know, no disabled child would either. I think it was very extraordinary to us that there was no differentiation between the voice of those of us who have lived through this experience of segregation and are coming to it with hindsight, with the knowledge of both the harm that segregation can do as well as the possibilities of inclusive education, and inclusion in general. The fact that our voice is not really considered to be an important voice in this picture seems to me to be the absolute result of segregation. People are taught to think as if we do not really exist, that our lives, our futures, are dependent on our parents and professionals and our own experience is neither here nor there. Until it is really understood that the drive for inclusion has come from people who were segregated, who are passionate about their right to be in even a badly resourced mainstream - even in a messy world, which the world is: it is not a perfect world, but we can get in there and help change it - it will not change. That is what we have learned, that it does not change until we are present, there. You cannot prepare mainstream for us in advance. It does not work like that Q581 Helen Jones: Thank you. That is very interesting. I would like to take that view and go back to what Carol said. We want children to thrive. Richard said earlier - or someone said, I may have attributed it to the wrong person - that the quality of education in mainstream schools for children who have disabilities is very variable. Sometimes it is very good. Some of you have said. "We want all children in mainstream schools" and some have said, "We want more children there." If we are going to do either of those, how do we raise the quality of education for those children? The last thing that anyone wants is children in mainstream schools who are simply falling through the net because the right provision is not there for them. How do we do that? How do we spread good practice? What does it need? Mr Rieser: I think we have got to get the education world, the teaching profession, in particular, and those who work in schools - of which there are many more people now, particularly from special needs, 140,000 teaching assistants and so on - to see that this is not about adapting the child to fit what is going on. It is a human rights issue and they need to be given the perspectives and the tools to be able to work with that child. For instance, socialisation is a big issue, but we have the tools to deal with that. There are very successful "circles of friends" built around children who are isolated or vulnerable, and these have been working very effectively - evaluated, for instance, in Nottingham, by psychologists - showing that, just by building that, the isolated child does develop many more friends. You cannot make children be friends but you can create an environment from which it happens. A couple of months ago I was at Central Hall National Anti-Bullying day, and, I have to say, disability was not mentioned but of course physical and mental difference is one of the key issues which leads to bullying. Schools need to broaden their horizons and see that in dealing with bullying you have to deal with name-calling. With the Disability Discrimination Act - which I think Baroness Warnock had thought had gone too far - we have hardly scratched the surface. The reality is that most schools are not meeting their duties under that and the Government have decided, Parliament decided, that that would be extended to a duty, from this December coming, to promote disability equality. This is a fantastic opportunity to get all schools on board, to see what they need to do. We know what works. We know the type of pedagogy that can work. We know that it is peer support, collaborative learning. Where we are working, in a way, with different learning styles, the children can work at their own pace. In some ways, what is in the Education Bill will help that, the individualised approach to learning could help that, provided there is sufficient understanding and support for learning for all pupils. But it is also very important that children are not always isolated. When I used to be advisory teacher for inclusion in the London Borough of Hackney, schools used to ask me, "How much should children be with the form?" and I said, "If they are not in their class with their peers 85 per cent of the time, it is not inclusion." Because you can have segregation in a so-called inclusive school: you are in the library with a support assistant or working in a small group. The National Curriculum Inclusion Statement is a very, very powerful document at the back of all volumes of the 2000 National Curriculum. It is hardly ever understood in schools or followed. That provides great guidance on how to adapt this, and you start by saying, "There should be suitable challenge for all children," then: "We need to take account of difference," and only after that do we look at individual adjustments that are necessary. Most people start with the individual adjustments and do not look at the wider picture to change their teaching. The last thing I would say is that we are not preparing teachers of the future for this. The School Development Agency (as I think it is called now) is looking at bringing disability equality and inclusion training on the three-year course, but actually 80 per cent of teacher trainees now come through the one-year course and they are still not extending it to that. They have to. I think it is really important that your Committee argues that that has to be mandatory, because at the moment it is one hour on the Code of Practice. How does one hour on the Code of Practice tell you what to do in the classroom when you are faced with a lot of different children? It is the techniques of how you do all this that you have to empower teachers with. We have lots of good practice they can share. Q582 Helen Jones: Thank you. That last point was very interesting. Could I ask you one more practical thing. The problem, it seems to me, not only with initial training but with in-service training, both for teachers and for teaching assistants, as people in my local authority said to me when I was dealing with a particular problem, is: "We can put on the training, but we cannot make the heads send people to it." Do you believe there need to be any legal changes that would deal with that problem? Ms Boys: I certainly think that should be the case. We provide in-house training at the Down's Syndrome Association and we can fill our courses time and time again, but quite often teachers and learning support assistants will come along in their own time and pay for themselves to come along to the training course because they are so worried that they are not giving the right sort of level of support to the child and the school simply will not pay for that training. Ms Aspis: Certainly from my experience dealing with tribunal work, the only way you ever get any training is you have to argue it at tribunal. Any way forward in terms of ensuring legally that every teacher and classroom assistant gets some kind of disability equality training would obviously be a strong recommendation. But it is not just any training, it has to be particular types of training and particularly disability equality training, because that sets a context for understanding how disabled people are disabled by society, and how the curriculum can be adjusted and classroom practices and the school to ensure that disabled children are included in the context of removing barriers. We find that some of the training that is on offer does not always provide that. It is not only any kind of training but particular kinds of training which underpin the social model of disability and disability equality of education. Helen Jones: Thank you, that was very interesting. Q583 Jeff Ennis: It is often said that children with disabilities are physically included but emotionally excluded. What evidence is there to say how many children with disabilities fall into that particular category of physical inclusion but emotional exclusion? Mr Rieser: I think you would say it was the vast majority in most schools. From the latest figures from the DfES, 2005, there are 597,000 disabled children in school in England, and just under 15 per cent are in special schools. The rest are in mainstream schools, so there is an awful lot of disabled children in mainstream schools and unless there is a really positive ethos of valuing difference ... I went to a school, as part of the Reasonable Adjustment Project in Nottinghamshire, and it was very interesting that there the head had spent 15 years developing this way of including everybody. They had form councils and a school council. With the school council, they made a point of making sure the disabled children in the school were on the school council - I think that is really important, so they were there as a role model. They had their own assembly every Thursday morning. There are 340 children in this junior school and the head said, "It's the quietest assembly of the week." She is there, just for legal purposes, sitting in the corner, playing no role in running it. The children are running it themselves, and the children start saying, "I'm having a problem at break with so-and-so" and immediately a pupil - and these are only ten and 11 year olds who have been trained in peer mediation - comes up and says, "I'll see you afterwards." We saw him seeing them afterwards, and he said, "What is the problem there? What is the problem here?" and he had sorted it out in five minutes. The staff had reflected this in the same way, so if they had a problem with a child, because they did not have to be on break duty, because the kids were looking after what was happening in the playground - there were some primary helpers, but the staff did not need to be there - they could do collective problem solving within a 20-minute problem. If someone had a problem, they all shared it. That is a very high level of working on the emotional level, but there was nothing different about that school in terms of resources, it was that they had gone down that road. So the models are there. We can make them work. I know the Alliance have passed you a book of 20 schools that they visited where similar sorts of things are going on. We find that there is largely a sea of emotional ignorance out there, but there are islands where people have taken these things and made them work and they are happy schools. The children are happy, the exclusion rates are practically zero. They are drawing on the same socially deprived areas as other schools, but, because they are working in a different way, they are able to move forward. There is a lot more we can do in this area. Q584 Mr Carswell: I am very keen to tease out a bit more about the definition inclusion, as I am keen during this investigation to avoid having arguments at cross-purposes. You defined inclusion as making mainstream completely acceptable, and that seems perfectly reasonable. My understanding of inclusion, particularly in Essex, is very different. It means, if I may be candid, something completely different from making mainstream completely accessible; it means, in fact, a policy of forced inclusion: on the one hand, forcing children from special schools into mainstream schools, quite often where they then get excluded, expelled, or what-have-you, or de facto denying people, through the statementing process, access to special needs education in one form or another. There is a paradox here: ultimately what is done in the name of inclusion, as practised in places like Essex, ends up, in reality, with exclusion. Would you say, in terms of definition, that there is a difference between the theory that we can talk about in this room and/or agree on, and the reality as experienced and practised out there in the field, as it were? Ms Mason: I think it is very interesting, on this definition of inclusion that, as far as I remember, it was not used as a term at all until about ten years ago when it came over from Canada, where they completely transformed their education - not everywhere, but in certain places in Canada - where they closed down all their special schools and classes and made this huge effort to reintegrate all young people, on the basis that they felt it was about creating a different society where there were not barriers between people. They have made the effort. They developed all these terms of inclusion - the circles of friends, the paths and all those have all come from that basis - and we started using the term inclusion to move people on from this idea of just integration; where you take what we call the social model of disability and you look at the environment and you change the environment and the culture. What happened is that forces have taken this word "inclusion" and redefined it. They keep redefining it. I heard only the other day somebody saying, "Of course inclusion is nothing to do with location; it is just to do with a good education wherever you are" and they were trying to say that inclusion is nothing to do with where the child is. Then there is this new idea - which I believe is coming from the Labour Party - that inclusion means clusters of schools, which include special schools, and that is an inclusive education system and you can do inclusion in special schools. You cannot. You simply cannot. The reason you cannot is that, however good that special school is - and it could be the most brilliant school under the sun - it can never rebuild a relationship between disabled and non-disabled people. That is the whole point of inclusion. The point is where you go after you leave school. It is not really what happens in school. Mr Rieser: I think there is a difference between the way some local authorities take the term inclusion and what we meant by it. If you go back to the Green Paper Education For All of 1997 or the Action Programme in 1998 which came out of the National Advisory Group - which, I have to say, from 1997 to 2001 was making progressive moves in this direction - they were very clear what they meant. They said, "Just because a local authority has not included certain sorts of children does not mean that they should not think about it." Equally, there has been downward pressure from government to ration the amount of resources that are available for special educational needs - in fact that came from the education officers themselves, saying, "Too much money is going on the statementing route, so we have to put the cap on that." The Code of Practice is definitely based on a rationing of resources model, and therefore there are panels in every authority which ration which children should get the provision and which should not. I think that is wrong. I think the provision should be in all the schools, so that the schools can meet the needs. That seems to be unlikely, the way that policy is going, because we are getting these new flexibilities in the Bill that was published yesterday of trust schools and so on. I think we are going to see more and more pressure from parents to get that bit of the rationing, more statements and more of this conflict The only way we are going to move forward, it seems to me, is by being very clear about what we mean an inclusive school is and by there being requirements on schools to move in that direction. It is not acceptable for one school to be saying that they are the ones who take the disabled kids, and then all the other schools saying, "We're not very good at that. Try that one down the road." If the head teacher is doing that, that is unlawful under the Disability Discrimination Act but it is happening all the time. The other point is that there are what I would call refugees of enforced integration in many of our special schools - and I do not mean refugees because they are from another country, I mean refugees from within the system - because they are experiencing being put into schools which are not prepared to meet that diversity of pupils. There are two ways you can address that. You can either say, "They're not doing well, so we're going to rebuild the old model" or "We are going to look at what is going wrong in the mainstream and make sure it is going right." We are arguing that we need to put much more effort into making it right. We have done some training in Essex, but it was a drop in the ocean because it is a large area. There are good inclusive schools in Essex, but they are in the minority. The majority have not had the training or the change that needs to be done. Q585 Mrs Dorries: Richard, are you a government adviser, o r have you worked as a government adviser? Mr Rieser: I have. Q586 Mrs Dorries: Are you working as a government adviser at the moment? Mr Rieser: Not in this area, no. Q587 Mrs Dorries: Do you ever receive government funding or have you received government funding? Mr Rieser: The Reasonable Adjustment Project is a particular project which was government funded. To put it on the record: we got £240,000; we filmed in 40 schools; shot 180 hours of film ----- Q588 Mrs Dorries: I just need to know the answer to the question. Does that not give you a slight conflict of interest in that, the fact that you want to close all special schools down by 2020? If your reason, your raison d'etre at the moment, is to close all special schools down by 2020, do you think it is appropriate that you have worked and do work or are still working as a government adviser? Mr Rieser: I do not think there is any problem with conflicts. People can have their values and at the same time work for local government. I hope we are not going down the road that people can be challenged on their values and cannot work for government, because I know there are people in Cabinet positions who have all sorts of different views. One can do more than one thing at once. My view is that the Government itself have produced a document saying: Improving the Life Chances of Disabled People, and they have given us until 2025 you do that. Certainly the three of us are arguing - and there may be many others - that we are not going to do that without transforming the education system, because if we continue to have segregated schools we will not improve the life chances of disabled people. There was a cohort study produced by the Government which showed if you have gone to a special school as a disabled person (as opposed to a mainstream school as a disabled person) you were twice as likely not to get to college and twice as likely not to have a job, regardless of your level of impairment. That is damning evidence. It seems to me it is not for us to defend inclusion; it is for those who want to maintain a separate system to justify it, because I do not believe it should be justifiable. Q589 Mrs Dorries: The figures you read out a few moments ago from the DfES, about the number of disabled children who are now in mainstream education, could you read them out again? Mr Rieser: Yes. I said there were 597,000 children - this is according to PLASC data 2005 - and only just under 15 per cent are in special schools. Q590 Mrs Dorries: So if 15 per cent are in special schools, 85 per cent of disabled children are in mainstream schools. Mr Rieser: Yes. Q591 Mrs Dorries: Why, then, are you so determined? I have to tell you that I am going on my own experience of having been around special schools - my own daughter is in a special school. The physically disabled children I encounter in special schools are very severely physically disabled. I think special schools have moved on dramatically over the last ten years. The children I see - and we are talking about children on naso-gastric tubes, who are on intensive physio, very severely physically disabled children - could not possibly, for a moment, be included in a mainstream school. I wonder why you have this absolute ambition to close those special schools down which are serving those 15 per cent of physically disabled children so well, when 85 per cent of disabled children are in mainstream. You are there already, are you not? Ms Mason: Firstly, it is not true that children with severe physical impairment cannot be included. They are. There is not a child with any level of impairment who I have not seen well included somewhere. I think those young people who are most challenging to the education system, the ones who are in special schools, the ones who really require change to happen with the mainstream for them to be included, are the very young people who we need most within mainstream because they are the ones who are the catalysts for change, if you like. They are also the ones who are most vulnerable to exclusion as adults. I was one of the many. The 2020 campaign - and Richard did not start it - is people who have been through special education, for the most part, who have recognised where it leads. It is not it in itself - some people really enjoy their special schools. That is not my argument. The argument is that it leads to a segregated adult existence, particularly for those children with the most severe impairment, because they are the ones who the non-disabled people find the most difficult. Q592 Chairman: This is a very important question and I want Simone to be able to answer as well. Ms Aspis: We can never have influence on education unless we have a universal understanding of what inclusive education means. It seems to me that we have some integration and some inclusion. It is only when we have inclusive education, so that everybody belongs and we ensure everybody belongs - and it is a human rights issue - that we would include all children, including those who have high support needs and those who have very high support needs. One cannot really describe the effects of special education. Certainly, through the tribunal work I have done, special schools have not changed for the last ten years. I am a special school survivor and I am horrified to find that for the disabled young people I have to fight for, to support their inclusion, their experience of special education is not much different from mine, which was 20 years ago. So I would say that special schooling has not changed over the years, and that inclusion would start from the point that we make mainstream schools adapt to include all children - the education system as a whole to do that. We start from the point that all children belong to mainstream regardless. We say this is about a benefit to disabled children but we also think it is a benefit to the community as a whole. We have not even anticipated that discussion today. Having all children together is a benefit for non-disabled children - they learn to be with other children who are not like themselves, they learn to build relationships, they learn to value each other, they learn to work with each other, they learn to be with one another. We have not spoken about the benefits that non-disabled children have and non-disabled adults have. We are in a situation where disabled young people are getting ASBOs because their behaviour is antisocial, criminalised. Why? Why? Because for some kids there seems to be a lack of understanding between non-disabled people and disabled young people and that only arises because we do not have the inclusive education, in terms of a wholesale inclusive education system, that we are wanting to work towards. We really need to be shifting this, so that it is not just: What is the benefit to disabled children? but: What is the benefit to society as a whole to include all children? Q593 Chairman: Thank you, Simone. Ms Clery: I do not think we would disagree at all with the general principle, the pedagogy of it, but our stand at the moment, with the education system as it is now, is that we find in RNIB that there are certain children who can be included perhaps in early years provision - and this again is very variable in different local authorities, different local authorities take different standpoints. But for those children who have profound and multiple learning difficulties - and I would like to put the emphasis on the learning difficulties rather than the physical attributes or otherwise of those children, children in a couple of our own schools who have very profound needs indeed - we at the moment in RNIB cannot see how those children could have a really meaningful experience in a mainstream school. If you are going to have a meaningful experience in a mainstream school - and there are certain groups that we feel are excluded in certain authorities from mainstream education who should be there and should thrive there - you have to connect with what is going on in the school, you have to make the connection with the curriculum. If you have profound and multiple learning disabilities and you are learning at a stage which is a very early stage of development and you are in a secondary school following a national curriculum, we at the moment in RNIB cannot see how that would work. We would like to see it work but at the moment we cannot. When I have asked for people to point me to where really good practice is going on for children with that level of need, nobody has really shown me where I can go and see it. I have certainly set up provision in my past job for very disabled small children in early years provision and in early primary, and it has worked very well indeed, but I think the challenges come as the children get older. The curriculum becomes faster and pacier, and at some point you have to make connection with that. Q594 Mrs Dorries: If you want to close all special schools down by 2020 and you reach your ambition, and there are children who do not fit into mainstream, particularly high level autism or Asperger's children who cannot survive in a mainstream environment, where would they go? Mr Rieser: That is a big assumption to say that they cannot survive. They cannot survive in the mainstream environment as it is now in some parts of the country. In other parts of the country they can - because there is a huge variation across the country. Q595 Mrs Dorries: Why, in that case, are 27 per cent of children with autism excluded from mainstream nationally? Mr Rieser: Because of the variation across the country. I already mentioned that there are some schools with lots of children with autism who are never excluded. There are other schools where they are and those schools are acting unlawfully in excluding. Nobody does anything about it. There are many schools in Newham, for instance, where the exclusion rate is very, very low. Why is it low? Because they have structurally changed what they are doing. I know the Committee has discussed Newham before. The reality is that Newham does include a much wider diversity of pupils than any other borough in the country. It is true that some parents have exercised their choice and are going out of the borough, but they are a much smaller proportion of children out of the borough than in any other authority in the country. That has to be held as the balance. It is not perfect, but they have moved in that direction. We would like to see many more authorities moving in that direction, so that this postcode lottery which people have been talking about does not exist. I do not find it acceptable that if you happen to live in South Tyneside you have ten times more chance as a disabled person of ending up in a special school than if you live in Newham. I do not find that acceptable in a democratic society. I think it is about looking at what exists. We will not reach 2020 or even 2025 - we are not definite on the date, we just know there has to be a change - unless there is a real shift in thinking about this issue to saying, "Yes, we need to change our schools so that all children can thrive in them." I have seen children with Asperger's and autism - and you can see the film, we will make sure all members of the Committee get it, I will talk to the DfES - who are there in ordinary mainstream schools, but those schools have a different way of approaching it to the majority of schools. I am saying we need to get all schools to be thinking like that. Q596 Mr Wilson: Could I explore this mainstream and special school theme for a minute. Many parents would not choose a mainstream school for their child and yet you are seemingly willing to force their choice by closing special schools. Do you not think those parents should have a choice about where they send their child? Ms Mason: First of all, I would say that I am a parent as well: I have a disabled daughter. I have been part of an organisation called Parents for Inclusion for longer than I have been part of the Alliance. I am sorry you did not invite them to be part of this witness session because they have enormous experience of supporting parents. They would say, and I would say, that parents all seem to start out wanting inclusion, in their hearts. I have not met a parent who honestly wants their child to be segregated. They want their child to be safe, their child to be valued, their child to have their needs met, their child to have friends, for them, as parents, to be able to cope with the daily life of bringing them up. They try to find it. They do not find it in mainstream and then they find a welcome in a special school and they then believe that special schools are the answer. Ms Aspis: I am a special school survivor. My parents chose for me to go to a special school, and certainly my parents, unlike other parents, cannot imagine how inclusion can work for disabled children, have never had positive experiences of seeing disabled children included in mainstream. That choice does not necessarily mean it is the right thing - and I will explain that further in a minute - but also parents sometimes choose special schools because they do not have the confidence in the mainstream at the moment, as it stands now, or have not had the appropriate support provided in mainstream, so it was never a choice per se. Providing choice is not necessarily the right thing anyway. If we take, for example, a homeless person: they decide that they want to be in prison because they get three meals a day as opposed to being outside in society where they are not getting their basic needs met and support. Does that mean we respond to that and say, "Give that person the right to go to prison"? It is the same sort of thing in terms of schooling. If mainstream is not working, should we be providing an alternative or should we be improving on the existing mainstream? I do not know any disabled child who comes out saying, "I want to be in a special school" and I do not know any parent, as Micheline says, when their baby is born who says, "Oh, love to have a special school placement." So something goes wrong down the line. The issues, in terms of disabled, is that parents do not get the appropriate support to see how their children can be included, in terms of advice, disabled people as role models, and good experiences of how it works in mainstream provision - as we all know around the table. Q597 Mr Wilson: Carol, you have been very listening very carefully at the end to what you have been hearing at this end of the table. Do you think that the three towards this end of the table are chasing a utopia of a type of inclusion that can never and will never exist and forcing special schools to close by a certain date is just trying to force the issue? Ms Boys: In an ideal world we would all like to see everybody included but I believe we need to maintain the breadth of provision so that parents have a choice. For some people with Down's syndrome a 52 week curriculum is necessary in some cases with really disabled, dual diagnosis, multiple problems. Are we going to say that we will take that away from them? It is true that some families feel they need to send their children to the local special school because they are frightened of what might happen to them if they go to the local mainstream school, they are frightened that they will not get the right level of support, they will be bullied, all kinds of social issues will ensue, but I do not think that is true for all families who have got their children in special schools, some of them choose to send their children to special schools because they think the special school is doing a good job. Q598 Mr Wilson: You have got some research from your organisation. You have got 16,000 school age children with Down's syndrome and you are finding a percentage of them want to move out of mainstream schools, having tried it, back into special schools. Ms Boys: That is at secondary level. Q599 Mr Wilson: So you are still finding that, are you not? Ms Boys: Yes, we are still finding that. I can think of a number of families off the top of my head where the child has gone into secondary school and the placement has broken down. Q600 Mr Wilson: That does not surprise you? Ms Boys: No. Q601 Mr Wilson: Would you like to comment on that, Elizabeth? Ms Clery: I would actually. We speak to a lot of parents in RNIB and we also speak to a lot of children, and that is a point I really wanted to make early on. If you want to hear about how to raise quality, you must be speaking to children and young people themselves, you must be hearing their views. I wanted to say I have great sympathy with Douglas because I know that some authorities will say that they are inclusive in their approach. People do not understand the word inclusion, they understand it to mean different things. If we talk about inclusive education meaning education in the mainstream, some authorities lack the commitment to really make it work. It is not that they do not believe it should work, it is just that they do not quite know how to do it. I can give a very real example from our own research in terms of children who learn through Braille. These are children with either no sight or very little sight, not enough sight to read print. We know from parents who have to go to Tribunal to get places in special schools, it is not that they want places in special schools for their children but it is because the authority has not got the wherewithal to plan the provision properly, and yet we know in other areas of the country secondary age Braillists do extremely well in mainstream schools but it depends on the commitment of the authority, the attitude and ethos of the school, the provision of proper support to the school, to the pupils and to the families. I think there are a lot of factors at play here. It is very easy to simplify it. There was just one other thing I wanted to say. It concerns us in RNIB that in some authorities they are going down the route of additionally resourcing a number of schools and actually taking away choice for parents to look at local provision. We would want parents to have that choice of a local school as part of a range of options. Q602 Stephen Williams: A lot of the questions I would have asked have been picked up already. Just to go back to Carol on Down's syndrome, Rob said a percentage of parents, having experienced an attempt at inclusion, then want to go to a special school. Is it right that it is two per cent? Ms Boys: No, it is not two per cent. Q603 Stephen Williams: That was part of the evidence we have been given. Ms Boys: Yes, it must be two per cent if it is in our figures. I was going to say I would not like to say off the top of my head but if you are quoting our survey it was two per cent of people who responded to our survey, but there are a lot more families out there who did not respond to our survey. It was two per cent of the respondents. Q604 Stephen Williams: I just wanted to clarify that for the record. Can I come back to Elizabeth on some points that were not picked up, again from evidence that I believe the RNIB has provided to the Committee. Roughly half of children of school age who have a visual impairment just have the visual impairment and then 30 per cent have that visual impairment compounded by all sorts of other learning difficulties. Of those 30 per cent who have other learning difficulties, in essence are you saying you would prefer it if those children were educated in a special school environment rather than an inclusive environment? Ms Clery: Not at all. Our figures show of the number of children with visual impairment, 59 per cent are in the mainstream sector. That figure has not shifted over the last eight or nine years, it is still 59 per cent. Within the grouping of children with visual impairment, the number of children with very profound and complex needs is rising. The number of children with visual impairment is not going up but that number within is rising. We would not say that we would want to see them all in special schools but we would want to see appropriate provision made for them so that their experience in whatever school they are in is a very meaningful experience and they have those needs properly met. The majority of children with profound and complex needs and visual impairment are in the maintained sector mostly in schools for children with severe learning difficulties and one of RNIB's big concerns is they are not having their needs arising from the visual impairment met because they are in generic special schools. We would like to push the boundary and, if it works for children with those sorts of needs, to start off in the mainstream sector and really put everything in to make it work but we still think for a number of them, at this moment with the education system as it is, their needs will probably be better met in special schools. Q605 Stephen Williams: I know we have got little time left so I will come on to a broad sweep-up question at the end of this section. Perhaps I can start with Richard because he was quite trenchant at the start about Baroness Warnock. In some of her remarks that have been reported to us she has talked about the definition of SEN as being far too broad because it includes everyone who has a physical handicap to somebody with Asperger's. She has described this SEN category as a "disaster". That is her word, not mine. Would you agree with that? Mr Reiser: I think we should move to saying we are talking about disabled children, that they have human rights and provision should be provided to the establishment so they can meet that need, therefore we should move away from the SEN category because I think it is confusing now that we have moved on to disability. Disability is not dependent on the level of support or medication you get, if you have an underlying impairment then you are disabled. With the broadening of the definition all children who currently have SEN will be classed as disabled children and, therefore, they have rights and those rights should be maintained and the provision they need should be, as it is in FE and HE at the moment, provided by the schools automatically, and that should be monitored. That is how I would like to see it moving. Q606 Jeff Ennis: One of our witnesses earlier - I cannot remember whether it was Elizabeth or Carol - mentioned the postcode lottery of provision across many different local education authorities. How big a problem is this lack of consistency of provision across the LEAs? Ms Clery: It is a big problem actually and there is huge variation. Just taking blind and partially sighted, but I think this applies to lots of other children as well, we have quality standards for blind and partially sighted children published by the DfES that are recommended but they are not actually enforceable, so local authorities can still go their own way. Until we have actual minimum standards that say children are entitled to this right across the country and it is monitored and evaluated through some mechanism, it could be through Ofsted, it could be something else, that problem is always going to remain and to us that is one of the biggest concerns. Q607 Chairman: Should not local people in local democracy make up their minds about the level of provision? Mr Reiser: I do not believe it is local democracy, it is about inherited structures and inherited values from the local autohrity itself and it is largely the local authority that determines where children go rather than the other way round because they will say to parents, "We don't think you should go here" or "you should go there" and most parents will go along with what the local authority are saying. I sit on the SEN Disability Tribunals and it is not true that every parent is appealing that, the vast majority of the 256,000 parents who have got statements are happy with where the location is in that statement but the location is largely decided by the local authority, not by the parents although parents are given a choice. I think that is the problem, if you have a set of schools you will direct children to fill those schools up. We need to bring down the level of special schools across the country. For instance, there are still 28,000 children with moderate learning difficulties in special schools but in many parts of the country none of those children are in special schools and they are getting exam results. Q608 Jeff Ennis: Moving on to disability legislation, how does the new disability legislation overlap with the SEN legislation? What are the implications for how well they will work together to meet the needs of all disabled children? Ms Mason: I think Richard said it really. Bringing the DDA into education is one of the best things that have happened. It is like the DDA outside education, it was only when it suddenly became law that I could get into the bank at last after 30 years. Miraculously ramps were appearing everywhere. It is very sad that people need the legislation, it would be much better if they did not, but unfortunately they do. It seems to me the reason we say there needs to be an end date to segregation is so that all those people who would really rather not bother going down this inclusion route, because it is not an easy one, will have to because there is not an alternative so they can say "that authority is interested but we are not". I completely agree with Richard, I believe all children who are currently under the SEN label are considered to be disabled children protected by the DDA and have rights and you will get to understand this issue a great deal better than it is currently being understood. Ms Aspis: Building on what has been said, but also in terms of ensuring that all provision is entitled by law under the Disability Discrimination Act because one of the benefits of the SEN statementing process is once it is seen you need it you are provided with it, unlike the Disability Discrimination Act that we would like to see extended so if you need provision in the mainstream that should be provided for as a right as well. The definition should be widened to include all disabled children, including those who have emotional and behavioural difficulties where we do not know where the "cause" lies. They should be covered by the DDA. There should be a clear enforceable right for all children to go into the mainstream so we do not have to go through a tribunal system where we decide who is and who is not out and thereafter provision in terms of ancillary equipment and support to be provided as a right as well. Then you have got the legal system in place to ensure that disabled children have the right to attend mainstream school as the very basic. Q609 Dr Blackman-Woods: I want to ask you a couple of questions about evidence really. What evidence do you have that if parents were able to choose across the state sector they would choose mainstream rather than maintained special schools? I am asking what evidence is there that they would do that. Mr Reiser: I think the evidence I have quoted from Newham is strong evidence. Parents do have a choice under the SEN structure to name the school and if the authority does not agree then go to the Tribunal and get it. Some parents have done that but what I am saying is where there is a strong, supported, inclusive system with the value that children first of all go to their local neighbourhood school and if parents are not happy with that they can go to resourced schools, of which there are 21 across the borough, parents are voting with their feet and mainly going for that. A very small minority are still going for something else. You have to compare that to the authorities that do not have that range of provision where far more parents are choosing alternatives. It seems to me that is quite strong evidence that needs to be looked at. Q610 Dr Blackman-Woods: I think your organisation has said, however, that you think local authorities respond badly to some of the demand for mainstream education from parents because they have pressure to fill special school rolls. Have you got evidence for that as well? Mr Reiser: Yes, there is evidence of that in that there are significant numbers of parents who have had to go to tribunal to argue for wanting mainstream places where the authority has said, "No, we have got this special school and you need to go there because that is where your needs can best be met" and the parents have had to fight very hard and a number of those cases have gone right the way up to the High Court. They are a minority of children so you need to look at the SEN Disability Tribunal Annual Report and there are statistics in that which show the movement is both ways. There are parents fighting in certain authorities to get into mainstream schools and there are equally, in Essex for instance, parents who are fighting to go the other way because things have failed in the mainstream. It seems to me that there is direction going on there by the local authority. Q611 Dr Blackman-Woods: Yes, but the local authority could argue that is in the best interests of the child, not because they are trying to fill school places. Mr Reiser: The local authority does not have the right to argue what is in the best interests of the child, under section 316 they can only argue that this child will interfere with the education of other children otherwise if the parents want to choose mainstream that is where they need to provide the provision and they are not doing that in all authorities. Q612 Dr Blackman-Woods: Lastly, what evidence do you have that parents who choose the special school route realise too late that it is not helping their child in terms of education results, social integration, et cetera? Mr Reiser: It is qualitative research which has looked at the lives of disabled people once they have been through. We did a small piece of research which showed what it looked like and they said, "If that is what you mean, I would have preferred to have been offered that". There needs to be more research on that because I think it is too easy to say, "Do you want what is currently here in the mainstream or in the special school?" and it depends very much what is available locally. We know hundreds of parents have said, "Why can't we have what they have got in the next borough or across there?" One piece of evidence there is that numbers of parents of disabled children have moved house to authorities where they know their children can get into the mainstream as opposed to others. That is not just in Newham, it has happened in the North of England. Q613 Chairman: And the other way round? Mr Reiser: Maybe. I do not know because they do not have to the other way round because they have the right if they want to go for segregation to have it, and that is there in the law. Q614 Mr Carswell: A very short question, one word answers, please, starting with Richard. I know you have got very strong views about what is appropriate for other people's children but as a matter of public record - yes or no - do you think parents should have the final say choosing between whether their children should go in mainstream or special schools? Should parents have the final choice? Mr Reiser: Not the final choice. Q615 Mr Carswell: They should not? Mr Reiser: I think the disabled child should have the final choice. Chairman: It has been a fantastic session, a very good session, controlling this lot asking more and more questions, and David did not even get called. You have been a very good group. Will you remember that this is only an oral session, we want to remain in communication with all five of you and if you think there is something we did not ask you please be in communication with us by email or whatever. Thank you very much all of you. Memoranda submitted by National Autistic Society, British Dyslexia Association, I CAN and Mencap
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Mr Mike Collins, National Autistic Society, Ms Susan Tresman, British Dyslexia Association, Ms Virginia Beardshaw, I CAN, and Mr David Congdon, Mencap, gave evidence. Q616 Chairman: Can I welcome Mike Collins, Susan Tresman, Virginia Beardshaw and David Congdon. Can I start with an apology. So many people want to give evidence to this Committee on these hearings that we do have to cram a lot of you in, I am awfully sorry about that, and on a Wednesday we then start budging right into Prime Minister's Questions, so you do get squeezed, apologies. It is going to be pretty much rapid fire and rapid response, is that all right? I am sorry about that. Starting with David, tell me which is your organisation and why you have asked to give evidence. Mr Congdon: David Congdon, Head of Campaigns and Policy at Mencap. We have a long history of campaigning in the field of equal rights for people with a learning disability. We wanted the opportunity to get our message across that we believe in a mixed approach to education and inclusion is the long-term goal but both mainstream and special schools have a role to play. Ms Beardshaw: I am very pleased to be giving evidence to the Committee representing I CAN which helps children communicate. Our special focus is children who find that extremely difficult, children with communication disabilities. Having a communication disability means you have got problems in using and understanding words, discriminating between speech sounds, using words to convey meanings or using language in a social context. An important point here is that many children have speech and language difficulties as a primary disability but this is a pan-disability issue because many children who have disabilities, like Down's, autism, dyslexia, have an element of communication disability which has a knock-on effect on their learning and literacy capacity and also on their behaviour. Behavioural difficulties in many, many, many instances have a communication route. Mr Collins: Mike Collins, Head of Education with the National Autistic Society. We have over 14,000 members. We have a variety and a range of services for parents, including advocacy, supporting them to tribunal and so forth. Also we work with local education authorities at a strategic level in developing specialist provision within authorities and directly with teachers through training. In the last year we trained over 5,000 teachers in responding to the needs of children with autism in mainstream schools. Ms Tresman: The British Dyslexia Association is the leading membership organisation representing those with dyslexia and those who support people with dyslexia. The membership spans individuals, organisations, support groups and an extensive network of local charities, small charities. The national helpline and the website take in excess of tens of thousands and a million hits respectively and that is free and confidential advice at the point of service. Chairman: Thank you. I hope my team has noticed the self-denying ordinance of the Chairman. Q617 Mr Chaytor: Could I ask about the question of what might be called the invisible disabilities, in particular the scale of these and the question of how good are we at recognising them and responding to them. How many children are identified at the primary phase of education? Maybe, Mike, if you could kick off from the Autistic Society's point of view. Our interest is in the emergence of autistic spectrum disorders as a serious area of concern over recent years. Mr Collins: When I was nine years old the boy at the desk next to mine actually had Asperger's syndrome but we did not know anything about it at the time. He went on to the grammar school and I went to the secondary modern, which says something. There are particular groups across the autistic spectrum that are beginning to emerge. The classic Kanner type child, very obvious with socio-learning difficulties, may well also have Down's syndrome and so on. The invisible children in the autistic spectrum have been the Asperger's, those who appear odd, eccentric and so on in their school careers and perhaps have been subject to bullying throughout their school careers and felt quite socially isolated. The other group that concerns me greatly from my work with authorities in our own school are those children with autism who exhibit very passive behaviours; if you do not engage with them, they do not engage with you. From the point of view of teachers both in special schools and mainstreams these children are no trouble and they can be often overlooked and their needs are not met. This is the group that particularly concerns me and I know increasingly concerns teachers. Q618 Mr Chaytor: In terms of the identification of needs, what needs to be done to improve the early identification? Mr Collins: The key is training. Children's services and diagnostic services are now much more aware. There are national standards and instruments and so on which will assess children. The key is the interpretation of that information, what is the impact of the condition on the child and, therefore, how do we need to respond to that condition to give them every chance of success. Whilst health professionals - there are still a few - are getting better at that, where the next tranche of major training needs to be placed is for teachers, particularly those in mainstream. Primary schools are beginning to get there but some children are not picked up until nine, ten or even later and they suddenly arrive at secondary school and their world collapses. The key there is training, particularly for SENCOs because usually they are the first line of contact teachers with concerns about children. Q619 Mr Chaytor: What is your estimate of the total number of children with Aspergers, particularly the proportion of those who are not identified until the end of their primary school careers? Mr Collins: Because they are not identified we cannot count them. Q620 Mr Chaytor: They are identified later presumably. Mr Collins: Yes, sorry. We know there are around 90,000 children with autism across the education service. We know that those who are identified make up 14 per cent of those with statement who are on School Action Plus, so those are being picked up, but in terms of responding to their needs we also know that there are only 7,500, I think it is, specialist - that is the difference, not special but specialist - places for these children who are often in mainstream schools through either resource bases that children can access for various times and so on, or they may be within special schools or specialist schools. Q621 Mr Chaytor: Could I ask Virginia about the question of communication difficulties and the link with behavioural problems and ultimately exclusion. Is there a strong link? How should schools respond to this failure to identify children with these invisible communication problems? Ms Beardshaw: Overall there are 1.2 million children with communication disabilities in the UK. That is three for every primary school classroom. There are problems of early intervention and I would agree that the key here is early intervention. I CAN works inclusively every year with a group of nearly 12,000 pre-school children to do just this. In the many, many parts of the country where education and health services are still not properly integrated children do fall through the net and there is conclusive evidence that links communication disabilities with behavioural disorders and it is obvious. All of us as parents know that if our children cannot express themselves they get very, very frustrated and angry and two things happen. One is that they create mayhem in one way or another, and these are children that schools find very difficult to cope with. The other is the left-out bit, they withdraw and become isolated. I CAN says our worry is for children who are left out and left behind, either left out because they cannot be coped with in the classroom or because, in a sense, they exclude themselves because they cannot understand what is going on and they cannot make their needs known. Q622 Mr Chaytor: Is this a significant factor in the rate of exclusions? Ms Beardshaw: Yes. Q623 Mr Chaytor: Is that documented? Ms Beardshaw: Yes, there is good research evidence and I can make more available to the Committee. There is quite a bit in our written evidence. Anecdotally, in April I CAN is holding a national conference on this very subject and we have got 600 practitioners beating a path to our door and we are having to turn them away. That is the degree of interest among practitioners in this link which is best dealt with by early intervention. I believe what we cannot continue to do is wait for children to fail because they have not got the expert help in the system that they need. If I may, I would underline the importance of what Elizabeth from RNIB was saying in the speech and language context. We need a system of national standards with professionals trained appropriately to meet those standards. We outlined in our written evidence to you what we believe those national standards should be. On the point about local democracy that was made earlier, it is not democracy for children to miss out on learning and literacy and to miss out on making friends because their needs are not met by techniques and skills that we know about now, we can put in place now and we must put in place now. Q624 Mr Chaytor: Could I just pursue that and pick up on a comment from Elizabeth Clery in the previous session because she argued that certain children have such profound needs that it is completely impossible to expect that they should follow the National Curriculum. My question is, is not really the heart of the problem why should they follow the National Curriculum? Do you think that the proposals in the Education Bill published yesterday for the changes to the curriculum will in any way help the process of inclusion for the kinds of children we are describing? Mr Congdon: I will try and answer it but I think it is a very broad and very important question. Our stance would be - echoing some of your earlier evidence - the goal should be to try to include all children but we have an awful long way to go and we could dwell on that in further answers. There are all sorts of issues about quality of teaching and too great a dependence on teaching assistants. Taking the specific aspects of your question, we know there are a larger number of children with complex health needs entering the education system and they do pose an amazing challenge for the education system. We know that their health needs in school settings are very badly met, there is a lot of evidence on that. We have recently done quite a bit of work with the DfES and produced a guide for teachers called Including Me designed to deal with some of those aspects. If you cannot get the health needs right you are certainly not going to get the educational needs right. Whilst the goal should be to get more inclusion, the reality today is for a lot of those youngsters with profound and multiple learning disabilities, struggling with their health difficulties, struggling to learn, the challenge is how can you improve their education in the broadest sense but recognising you have probably got to have a differentiated curriculum for them. You have got to be realistic. Equally, we would not want to go back to the days when they were necessarily just stuck in a school miles from anywhere learning very little. You have got to be challenging. There is nothing wrong in being challenging and saying you do need to have a differentiated curriculum. The biggest overall challenge is to get schools to take their educational needs seriously. We would want to echo some of the points you heard earlier. There is a need for all schools to try to be inclusive but that should not be at the exclusion of retaining choice of special schools for parents. I think that is the biggest challenge now facing the education system and how can they deliver that. Ms Tresman: In terms of dyslexia, the biggest challenge to including those children who we would argue for placing in the mainstream is adequate training for their teachers. I absolutely support the line of a welcoming ethos, a socially welcoming and open environment, but I would say without access to literacy, without access for those with dyslexia and other communication difficulties to the written word, there will be no connection with learning or very limited - I was very struck by Elizabeth's comment - and without that there can be no inclusion for these children in the written world and, therefore, no access to learning. The key challenge is we have to build capacity within the system. We know what works and we know how to do it. The great benefit is what is good for learners with dyslexia is good for all children, so we are in a win-win situation. Q625 Mr Chaytor: The sections in the Education Bill about the greater personalisation of the curriculum will be helpful in particular to children with dyslexia and communication difficulties. Ms Tresman: They will be helpful and very powerful but only if those who are charged with facilitating those understand how to look out for children with problems caused by dyslexia or other learning difficulties and deal with them before they become a difficulty or a disability. Then those things will be very powerful. Ms Beardshaw: That is exactly right. It is about skilling up the whole system to be able to use the techniques and the expertise that does exist but patchily, that is why you get the postcode lottery that Elizabeth referred to and we referred to in I CAN's written evidence. It is about bringing the rest up to the standards of the best, as everybody has said, and I do not think you can do that without some national standards which must revolve around the basic skills that children need to access the curriculum. Q626 Dr Blackman-Woods: This is a follow-up question for Susan particularly. You are probably aware of the research from Durham University that I think is based on a lot of Canadian research challenging the whole notion of dyslexia and it is saying instead of putting efforts and money into the diagnostic testing and following up with resources for this particular group that, in fact, the issue is about a whole range of learning and reading difficulties across the population and what we should be doing instead is having a wider availability of reading schemes in school, more personalised learning, so that their problems are picked up much earlier. I just wonder what the opinion of your organisation is on that research because you seem to be coming to similar conclusions about the way forward. Ms Tresman: Thank you for that question. It does offer me the opportunity to refer you to the comments raised by Lord Adonis in the Lords debate on 7 December, who I met this morning in this very building, in fact, where he was pleased to put on record the Government's unequivocal support for the existence of dyslexia certainly as a spectrum condition but one that can be well-diagnosed. The key point to mention beyond the Durham hypothesis is that dyslexia ranges far beyond reading, so while there are many interesting and well-developed tools that will enable teachers to teach reading, along with their assistants, to a wide spectrum of children, we are talking here about building capacity for a system that can spot when things are not working, can spot when phonics is not working - we would all support that as an approach to reading - when children are not able to absorb those systems because of their spectrum of learning needs. One has to have capacity in the system of skilled professionals to know how to deal with those and provide solutions. The tools alone, the reading schemes, the 12 weeks of phonics teaching, will not do that. It is very much a step in the right direction which we would support but there is the greatest consensus ever around the neurological basis of dyslexia and related learning difficulties as a condition and I think it is quite, quite unhelpful that the Durham hypothesis is put forward that really detracts energy away from where we should be concentrating our efforts, which is to build capacity in the system to deliver inclusion successfully. Q627 Chairman: Is that because you do not like the research? It makes it easy not to like a bit of research because it goes counter to the existence of some of your work. Ms Tresman: I think it would be fair to say in terms of the Durham episode, which is the one we are thinking of here, ---- Chairman: You are talking to the MP who represents Durham, so it is going to be a sensitive area. Q628 Dr Blackman-Woods: Can I just say I asked a very specific question which was although they are challenging the existence of dyslexia I thought you were coming to the same conclusion which is the way to tackle this is through a general availability of a wider range of reading schemes, more effort being put into how all children learn to read, to more personalised learning, and that would deal with a lot of the problems of dyslexia without having to label a separate group of children. Ms Tresman: We are talking about matching need and, however we label it, those children who are currently labelled with dyslexia have needs which extend far beyond reading and their learning is not met by a particular reading scheme. If you look at evidence such as the Clackmannanshire study, when that phonics-based reading scheme was introduced with the children, 14 per cent of children who worked with that scheme were not able to improve their reading comprehension, ten per cent could not improve their spelling, five per cent could not improve their reading accuracy, so in a sense there was still a significant proportion of children who were not able to access the sorts of approaches that the Durham research is purporting to provide the solution to. If we are going for inclusion we are not including 14 per cent of the children in terms of reading, comprehension and learning if we deal solely with the outcome. I think the research does not stack up in terms of that approach. Dr Blackman-Woods: I saw it and I happen to have read a bit about the research, but their point is there are a lot of resources going into identifying dyslexia and diagnostic testing that would be better spent on the very types of reading schemes that you are suggesting and they should be available to all children from an early stage because children learn to read in different ways. Q629 Chairman: In a sense all of you have a vested interest, do you not, and as a Select Committee we have to say we understand where you are coming from but is there not a temptation for you to exaggerate the problem of dyslexia, say, in that you will take the best survey of how many people suffer from dyslexia who are diagnosed or undiagnosed. If you were sitting in our seats you would have to take with a pinch of salt that all of you will say that the problem is rather worse than it is. Ms Tresman: I can quite see where you are coming from and maybe offer just a couple of examples in terms of are we exaggerating this. Within our prisons, and we work extensively within our prisons, 20-25 per cent of prisoners have undiagnosed dyslexia. That is a piece of action research that is now being reported on. Q630 Chairman: You agree with that bit of research but you reject the Durham research because it does not help you. Ms Tresman: I am not rejecting it. The Durham research is about learning to read and what I am saying is dyslexia is about far more than reading. Q631 Chairman: You do understand this Committee likes to check that you are basing what you are saying on good research. Ms Tresman: Yes. The Durham research is research about reading and the research I am referring to you is research about incidence of dyslexia in prison. For those people who have been marginalised and made vulnerable through their dyslexia that would be ---- Q632 Chairman: We have done a recent inquiry into prison education where we picked that up very strongly indeed. What about the rest of the vested interests? Virginia? Ms Beardshaw: In terms of young people and children with communication disabilities, I would like to build on the point that Susan made about building capacity for children who find communication hard, that that builds capacity that is needed for all children. There is a lot of quite worrying evidence that communication skills overall are slipping in schools. Again, all the parents in the room can think of lots of reasons why that might be true which basically come under the heading of modern life. If you have good techniques and good ways of encouraging, involving and including children for whom communication is difficult with the attendant literacy and emotional and behavioural problems that brings, you improve the life of the whole school. It is building capacity for everybody at the same time as you are avoiding the downstream problems that Susan so ably talked about in terms of prison and real exclusion from society. Mr Congdon: I would say our vested interest, to use your terms, Chairman, is simply to ensure that all children with a learning disability fulfil their potential in education. We are delighted at the progress that has been made over the last 20 years in having more children with a learning disability included in mainstream schools but relying on research, say the Audit Commission report, which I know has already been quoted, which talked about: "Not enough use is made by mainstream schools of the potential for adapting the curriculum and teaching methods so that pupils have suitable opportunities to improve key skills". In other words, there is a lot more to do. Although we do not do a lot of research, we have not got the resources to do large scale research, a few years ago we commissioned a report from the University of Birmingham called On a Wing and a Prayer to look at the role of teaching assistants. One of the problems is in classrooms up and down the country too little responsibility is accepted by the ordinary school form teacher for the responsibility to ensure all children develop their potential and the responsibility is loaded entirely on to teaching assistants who are often untrained and not involved in planning the curriculum. The challenge is to raise the game. We see our role as trying to challenge to ensure the game is raised in education to give those children the best possible education. The final comment I would make is that most children with a moderate learning disability are in mainstream schools, which is good. Most children with a severe learning disability or a profound learning disability are in special schools. Certainly we want to see more of them have the opportunity to get involved in mainstream schools but that is going to take a long time for the reasons I alluded to earlier. Stephen Williams: I do not think we have covered exclusion from schools as we did with the previous witnesses. Chairman: You are free to ask anything you like. Q633 Stephen Williams: Mike, some of the evidence that has been given to us suggests that 23 per cent of children with autism have been excluded from school more than once, in fact, and four per cent have been excluded once. Why do you think that is the case? Q634 Mr Collins: I was going to respond to the Chairman's comment. In terms of evidence, of research, we can show it to you but we can also give you hard facts. If you look at the children who are educated directly in the six schools run by the National Autistic Society, which is just over 400 children, a significant number of them have been excluded from every form of mainstream school, and in that I include mainstream special schools as well, before they have arrived with us. The reasons why that may well be are that it is this lack of understanding and lack of capacity and, in some instances, lack of will and intention to look at why these children are being excluded. It tends to be because their reaction to situations is unusual in that they may panic, they may become very distressed and then engage in behaviours that are inappropriate for a mainstream school setting. The system as it currently is then excludes them and then they begin to make their journey through PRUs and wherever they end up, sometimes with us, as I say. The flipside of that is where schools are aware of the need and take the time to look at why a child might be excluded. I can think of one where the young man did not get the right plate in the dinner queue that he always had flipped completely, ended up in a brawl with the deputy headteacher and the school excluded him, but the school then worked closely with the parents and with the young man himself to go through the reasons why, so justice was seen to be done. They then recognised this was a problem they could deal with, sort out and get him back into school, which was what they did. That is the difference. You can either get on to this road to exclusion based on lack of understanding, lack of time to respond to that child's needs and understand why they have reacted in the way they have, and most of the time it is because they do not understand, they are panicking, they are anxious, they are distressed, it is not a deliberate intention on their part to cause mischief. Q635 Stephen Williams: Are these exclusions concentrated in any particular point in the autistic spectrum or are they across the spectrum? Mr Collins: They are across the spectrum and it might be for a child who is in a maintained special school that the level of perhaps self-injury or aggression or what appears to be aggression towards other children is at such a level that the other children are not deemed to be safe. In the mainstream settings again the ethos of secondary schools can be quite challenging for young people who are often of at least average ability and intelligence, but find the whole way in which secondary schools operate, which can often be on a very confrontational basis which children with autism do not understand, it is all to do with the empathy and so on, that they are being challenged by teachers and it passes them by. That is seen as passive, I have lost the word, but challenging the teachers' authority, so consequently they find themselves being short-term expelled and so on. Q636 Chairman: You are all mentioning this difference between the cut-off at 11 going into secondary school and somebody mentioned that was to do with training. Is it to do with training? Are the early years' teachers better trained or is it a sense of size? Mr Collins: It can be both. The case I gave is of an inner-city, split-site school with over 2,000 young people on the roll with very, very high achieving academic standards, yet they took the time to work with this particular individual. I think what we are finding, certainly with autism, is that over the past five or ten years firstly children were being identified as they entered school, so primary schools were beginning to react and respond, and specialist provision and resource units were established and outreach teams from local authorities. Those children then arrived at secondary-age education, so in a sense a number of local authorities, even though they have seen them coming, have been caught on the hop, and certainly much of the work I have been doing over the past two or three years has been working directly with secondary schools who have established, or are establishing, specialist resource bases within the main body of the school. Q637 Stephen Williams: I would follow that up with a general point. I do not know whether the witnesses were listening to the previous evidence session, but it just seemed to me, and I hope this is not a caricature, that the witnesses who were from a more general campaigning standpoint for disability rights in general, the Disability Equality in Education Association, appeared to favour phasing out special schools, whereas those representatives who came from a specific disability or learning difficulty seemed to favour the retention of special schools. Can I just ask the witnesses whether that is reflected in this evidence session as well? Ms Tresman: If I take primarily dyslexia and talk from that standpoint, we do believe, as an association, that for dyslexia and related perhaps dyspraxia and dyscalculia, almost all children, if the capacity was there in the system, could be educated and reach their potential in the mainstream and they could be included, but that is a very long way from where we are at the moment. I really want to pick up on comments which Elizabeth made, that, taken where we are at present, we have a fraction. We did a small piece of research with our colleagues, Extraordinary People, and 96 per cent of teachers said they had had three hours' training or less either in their PGCE or in their three-year undergraduate teacher-training to cover all special needs, so they are desperate for additional training in order that they can remove the barriers to achievement and fulfil that agenda. Therefore, with that proviso, I would say we could meet the needs within the mainstream. Ms Beardshaw: I CAN believe that much more can, and should, be done to include children with communication disabilities. We think there are particular problems at secondary, but also that problems emerge, and this came up in the evidence earlier, as children begin to struggle with literacy. Where those are not addressed, then you get the problems of exclusions. I would agree with Susan, that I would like to see a world, and I am working for a world, where all children can be included, but I do believe in, and support, parents who send their children to schools, like the I CAN schools and the I CAN FE college where they can get the very specialist help that they need to access the curriculum and have some hope of getting the skills to engage in 21st Century life. Q638 Chairman: Virginia, that is all right if you come from a supportive home which would partially help with identified problems and special needs, but what is your research, and I have not heard this yet, though it may have been in some of the stuff you sent to us which I have not seen yet, but what is your research on which kinds of children are more prone to having these communication difficulties? You mentioned modern life. Well, is it modern life where no one talks over the dinner table? Is it modern life where nobody drags the child away from the television or ever talks to them? What sorts of homes, for example, are more prone to producing a child with dyslexia or with other communication difficulties? Do we know? Have you done that research? Ms Beardshaw: We know a good deal about it. As for dyslexia, there is a very strong genetic base for all communication disabilities. Q639 Chairman: It is equally spread across all social classes, dyslexia, and you have got the research to show that? Ms Tresman: Yes. Ms Beardshaw: In fact there is a genetic base, and I know all about that because I am one of those families, middle class, as I am sure you will see that I am. Q640 Chairman: I would rather you were really basing it not on personal experience, but on research. Ms Beardshaw: But, as ever with research evidence, it is a complex picture and, I am sure like Susan, I get very impatient with these class-based simplicities. There is a genetic base --- Q641 Chairman: But we are not talking about simplicities; I am asking for research. It is not simplistic to say that in every other piece of research we look at, as the Education Committee, we would like to see research to say that there is a relationship between this and social class, for example. It is not a bad question to ask, but it may be that there is none. Ms Beardshaw: Chairman, there are two things to take into account here. One is the very strong and conclusive genetic evidence which links neurological differences in the brain with communication and other problems like dyscalculia and things Susan has been talking about. The other is a depravation link, so, as with many, many, many conditions, there is both an environmental aspect and, if you like, a thematic aspect, and that is true in many other conditions as well. Q642 Chairman: Is it true in autism? Mr Collins: Yes, there is overwhelming research that shows there are genetic links in terms of autism. It is culture-free, it is society-free and people with autism all over the world are as they are, but certainly there are very strong genetic links and that is known. Thinking about what the questions were and so on, I think you are getting a consensus of view certainly in terms of inclusion and we, as an organisation, recognise, and support, the number of children in mainstream schools, but one thing that has not come through to me is the fact that a child's education is not a fixed thing. A child of five is not the same as a child of ten or a child of 15 and their needs may change as they move through their education. It may well be that there are times when they need very specialist support and later perhaps not. Q643 Chairman: But that is true of every child surely. Mr Collins: Indeed, but let me give you an example of one authority that placed a group of young children in a specialist provision with the intention of that specialist provision giving the children the skills and the strategies that they needed in terms of structure, organisation and communication forms to make sense of the world. Once those skills had been imbibed by the children, they were then able to move back into their mainstream school, go through their mainstream career and, certainly in two cases, go on to higher education very successfully, but they had that specialist input at the right time. Chairman: That is a good point. Q644 Jeff Ennis: My question is directed towards Mike because Mike knows I have got the Robert Ogden School, which is the biggest NAS school in the country, in my constituency, in Rotherham, and I will be going to the school again on Friday morning. What I think is very good about the Robert Ogden School is that it is very much based on, what I call, 'child-centred education' and there are certain techniques used in the school, Mike, which have been especially developed. Are there any of these types of techniques which you use with the children at Robert Ogden that do not really readily lend themselves to being transferred into the mainstream setting? Obviously we are looking at whether a child should be educated in the mainstream or in a specialist school, so are there any techniques which have very difficult transferability elements? Mr Collins: I think, given the nature of a number of the children at the school, and you yourself know, Jeff, they do have complex and challenging behaviours that manifest themselves in a physical way, they do, therefore, need a very skilful management to ensure that the child remains physically safe and that other children do and staff do also. Now, the transference of those particular sets of skills into mainstream schools will be a real challenge into the future because it is not only the way in which the child is physically managed, but it is also the environment within which they are managed, so if you are in a class of five or six youngsters and one becomes very distressed and you have experienced, trained staff in those techniques, then you can more readily resolve the difficulties that the child is having. If you are in a secondary school of 30 children and it is a science lesson and you have got an experiment going on with Bunsen burners and things, you are in a different ballgame, so I think in that sort of area it is those techniques which will not transfer. Having said that though, the underlying principles of NAS schools, what we call the 'SPELL Framework' - structure, positive, empathy, low arousal and links with families and mainstream education - those can be applied to a mainstream school, to a mainstream classroom and for an individual child in the mainstream and they transfer very readily, and we are doing a lot of training work with teachers across the country on that. Chairman: There is some good stuff coming out here. Are we a secret session today or are there any members of the press here today? So we have someone from Disability Now and someone from the De Havilland News Agency. It is interesting that the great educational press of this country, as soon as you get on to special needs, they have the attention span of a gnat! We should send a message to the education editor of the so-called great conscience, The Guardian - where are they this morning? It is some of the best evidence we have had. Are they here? No. Mr Marsden: Looking at the idea of solutions and the question I have been thinking about as to what Mike and Virginia might have to say about it, I was very pleased to read in your evidence that you seem to be keen on the idea of choice. You write in your written evidence that we need to have a wide spectrum of educational provision, including mainstream special schools, specialist units attached to mainstream schools and residential provision. You go on to say that many children with autism can be supported to play a full role in mainstream schools, but some children may do better in a more inclusive experience in a specialist setting. It is so refreshing to hear commonsense in a place of so much dogma! Chairman: That is a comment rather than a question. Q645 Mr Marsden: Absolutely. Today we also heard though some people say that they did not want choice, they did not believe in parents having choice, or rather they said that the child should decide. How a five- or ten-year-old disabled child decides, I do not know. I rather suspect that saying a child decides is a way of saying that the expert should decide on the parents' behalf. Solution: would you consider a radical change, first of all, to the statementing process that would see the statementing made far more specific and perhaps even quantify the amount of money that the child should have to get that level of education, and, secondly, would you consider possibly giving a legal right to the parents to request and receive that share of funding? When I say "receive", I mean receive control over that share of the funding. It may certainly upset the establishment, but do you think it would help improve special educational needs for children? Mr Collins: I happened to be a statementing officer once, so when I work with parents, that usually gets a round of boos, but yes, I do think that the system we have got overall can, could and should work. We might want to tweak with it and we might want to improve it, and it could certainly do with improvement, but, having said that, it serves a function and I think, and this goes right back to Baroness Warner, it does have the child at the centre of it, at the heart of what it is trying to do. Our challenge is to make the damned thing work basically and that is for all organisations to come together under the direction of government, including local authorities. In terms of the second question about giving money directly to parents, I want to think about that one. The reason for that is it would be about making sure, in order for them to spend that money as wisely and in the best interests of their child as possible, that they have the information that they need as to what a range of provision was within the local authority, which I would like to think was the first choice, within their local school. I could see perhaps some arrangements where a family could work directly with their local primary or secondary school, saying, "We have this money. This is what it will buy". It would certainly get over the problem of money going out to a school and then disappearing and nobody seeming to know where it is and how it links to the child. I think there is some merit in that, but I think we need to give it some further thought. Ms Beardshaw: On statementing, I CAN, I think, is a bit more critical of the statementing process, but we too believe that parents need rights and that is one aspect of the statementing that needs to be retained. I would recommend to the Committee a really important point which we put in our evidence about ensuring and enforcing joint ownership between education and health. Many, many I CAN parents are driven to distraction and despair by the fact that, although there are recommendations about speech and language therapy in a child's statement, they cannot be accessed because the statement is not enforceable on health. I believe that, with the changes to children's services and particularly the implementation of integration across children's trusts, we have a once-in-a-generation chance to address that, and I would recommend that to the Committee. It needs to be enforceable on all the agencies concerned. It is quite wrong to make recommendations which have budgetary impacts on other agencies and then there is no way of families enforcing that, so I am making that point very strongly. Mr Congdon: What I really wanted to add is that we certainly do support the statementing process because it does underpin parents' rights, and I think in some of your evidence the contrast was made between rights in this field compared with the health and social care field, and I think there is an important distinction there, and retaining the rights implicit in the statement is important. I well recall, when SENDA was going through the Houses of Parliament, a lot of very strong lobbying to avoid any watering down of statements, that things in the statement had to be specific and quantifiable, and there was quite a parliamentary row, if I remember reading all the reports of that, so that is very important. The other thing is that I would like to reinforce what Virginia said about the health side. I mentioned earlier about health needs and education, and we know there is an awful lot of evidence, although parents are reluctant to come out of the woodwork and shout about it because they eventually get their sons and daughters to settle in a school, but they have a lot of heartache when their children have got health needs which are not being met, children being sent home because the school cannot give medication, as simple as that, or children not being able to be tube-fed. All those sorts of things are a growing problem and that is where, I think, the statements could be strengthened along the lines Virginia was saying, making that side of it as strong as the educational side of it. That would be a significant improvement and would actually help the education system to deal with the bigger cohort of children now going through education with complex health needs. Ms Tresman: As to the first question, a qualified yes. I think the key issue would be that we have to in some way enforce a consistent interpretation and implementation of the statementing process because I think lots of the money, the £90 million, is caught up in the legislative and then tribunal kind of process where LEAs and children's services are not enforcing equally, so make that work and let us remove the postcode lottery and some of the wasted money. As to the second question, a qualified yes. I think if we could make that funding much more transparent and possibly set sort of tiered levels and amounts of money and involve parents and the children in those decisions, that would be a great step forward, so I would commend additional investigation of that. Q646 Mr Marsden: Can I ask a couple of quick questions. First of all, I am very interested in the issue of how children with behavioural, emotional and social difficulties are dealt with in school and can I ask if you have any evidence, bearing in mind the Chairman's strictures, that issues around the transience of children, particularly children perhaps at the secondary level, have a major impact on how they behave in schools? You are nodding your head negatively, Virginia. Is that because you are not aware of any research? Ms Beardshaw: There is no evidence. Q647 Mr Marsden: So no research has been done on that, as far as you are aware? Ms Beardshaw: I am not aware of research having been done on that, but I am not the right person to ask either. Q648 Mr Marsden: Does anybody else have any experience in this area? I am raising this particularly because in my own constituency of Blackpool there is a high level of transience in schools, particularly in autism and Asperger's. It is something which has cropped up on a fairly regular basis and I was just interested if there was anything. Mr Collins: From experience, there are some families that do move because of the services that they are or are not getting. It is true to say that some families understandably have a real difficulty in coming to terms with the diagnosis. I can think of three or four instances in my own experience and within our schools where we have worked significantly and successfully with families to return children to mainstream school and the families have gone and left because they wanted a specialist school and they have gone elsewhere and started again and we have worked with the authority to return them to mainstream, so there are probably a range of different reasons as to why that might be within autism, but why I did not initially answer is we do not have any research on that. Q649 Mr Marsden: Can I ask a follow-up question on that whole issue of management in mainstream schools because I was very interested in the range of answers earlier on. There seemed to be a slight implication that you might have a very different attitude towards inclusion in the primary sector than in the secondary sector. Would that be fair? I mean at the present time and I am not talking about in the ideal world, but at the present time. Would that be a fair assessment of your view? Mr Collins: I think within primary schools the teachers tend to be more genetic across subject areas and so on and there is a greater partnership between a class of children and their teacher. When you arrive in a secondary school, you can be taught by up to 12 or more teachers in a week, so the opportunities to form and establish those sorts of relationships and understanding on both parts is not as great, so that might be one factor. Mr Congdon: In some respects, it is very, very disappointing. I remember having a conversation with a parent recently about that very issue. She was very, very supportive of inclusion. Her son was in a mainstream primary school that was providing good education which she was delighted with. He was nine and I said, "What are you going to do at secondary level?" She said, "Well, undoubtedly I am going to get him into a special school". I said, "Well, why is that?" and, echoing some of the evidence you had earlier, there were a variety of reasons, one being one of the things that Mike was talking about, the way secondary schools operate with children charging around from lesson to lesson where, incidentally, a lot of the bullying goes on at schools at that stage. Bullying is a second point as well. Bullying of children in schools is appalling. We all know it goes on. Some schools deal with it well, some schools deal with it badly and I think, when you actually start questioning more and more parents about their children's education, the issue of bullying really comes out. For youngsters, when they have been through schools, it is undoubtedly the case that some schools handle bullying very well, and you heard an example earlier today, but it is not across all the schools. Therefore, what you have got is a situation where today in general people are much more supportive of their sons and daughters going to a mainstream school if they have got special educational needs and much more hostile towards secondary schools for the sorts of reasons given. I think there are curriculum reasons and Mike might be better able to develop those than I would be able to, but it is quite a daunting curriculum when you have gone from the comparatively more limited curriculum of primary school to secondary school, taking on some subjects for the first time. If you are a youngster who is struggling to cope with reading and writing, faced with some of the other subjects, it poses other problems and all those factors contribute towards parents being more concerned. Q650 Chairman: But is that not true for any child? Mr Congdon: I think it is. Q651 Chairman: It is a nonsense, is it not, if a child arrives in secondary education at 11 for all sorts of reasons not being able to handle the basics of communication, and it seems amazing that in so many schools they are then pushed into the curriculum which must be absolutely daunting for them rather than being given intensive help with the communication difficulties and for those views and all the experiences to be analysed and for those to be sorted before throwing them into the curriculum. Is that not just commonsense? Mr Congdon: I am sure that is right, but I think over the years it has been proven, and I cannot quote you the research, I do apologise for that, but I have read reports in the past which have shown the poor transfer of information about children, for instance, when they go from primary to secondary school, so there is almost a starting again. You have been in that more protective environment, though that is probably not the right way to describe it because it is not always, of a primary school into what will appear to be a much more hostile environment. You are right, that schools need to focus on those sorts of things because children do go to secondary schools at vastly different levels of development. When you have got a child, say, with a severe learning disability, struggling to get some of those basics right, their problems are going to be magnified and that is why schools need to pay much more attention to it and take it seriously. I think that is the other side of it, that if schools do not value having youngsters in them with severe special educational needs, if I can use that term, then they are not going to get the quality of education and I think, sadly, too many schools are not as welcome as they should be to youngsters with those sorts of needs. Q652 Mr Marsden: That is very useful. You alluded earlier, Mike, to a lack of instruction of teachers and teaching assistants. Can I ask all of you, in your own capacities in your own organisations, whether you feel that (a) the Department for Education and (b) the schools with which you have had dealings are using you enough in terms of perhaps providing training or guidance manuals or instruction particularly for those teachers they are talking about? Ms Tresman: I would say that in the very recent months we have felt we have made a breakthrough with the Department for Education in terms of recognising the need to put into the initial teacher education and into the teacher development standards a large piece of curriculum which is not optional, but that is really not yet mandatory and has to be. There has to be, I think, a radical rethink of what is in the curriculum of the initial teacher education programmes and only then can we build the capacity. It is almost less important to have the content of history or science or whatever and everything is about enabling the individual educational programmes of learning and teachers to deliver those. Mr Collins: There are two areas. One is in terms of direct contact with teachers and providing training. In trying to respond to the need and anticipate the need, we are developing a three-day course for both primary, secondary and for those in special schools, alongside the existing courses that we provide. Those are one hits and what is also needed is ongoing support and resources for teachers, and I think to that end the Department's good practice guidance that it issued some time ago, although we spelt "autism" wrong on the cover - no matter, these are now collectors' items - and on the website as well there are examples for authorities, for individual schools and for subject teachers as to what works for children with autism, so I think that is something that is almost again for the Department to look at and really raise its profile. Ms Beardshaw: I would like to see much more recognition of the fundamental links between communication and skills or the absence of them and learning and literacy problems and behaviour problems and with that recognition needs to go a much more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of exactly how you skill up the system. As colleagues have said, that is of course always inevitably done by teachers, learning support assistants and SENCOs who do need higher levels of understanding about the techniques that really work. Then there is a second aspect, which we have not touched on at all today, which is about getting the expertise that is in special schools actually out informing the whole network of the school system. It is absolutely true that we have got enormous expertise in the schools, but it tends still, and this is very sad, to be locked within those school walls. What again I would recommend to the Committee is a set of recommendations from you about how outreach work, dual placements and a whole range of things that are done in some places, but not others, hence the postcode lottery, can become the generality so that we can actually get the support to the children wherever they are. Mr Congdon: I think most of our work with the Department is around things like health needs and education, bullying and things like that rather than on the curriculum per se. I think my message would be slightly broader than that. There are certainly some officials in the DfES who are very keen on driving forward the SEN agenda, as evidenced by the strategy barriers to achievement, which is a very good policy. The problem is lack of consistency within the Department and, bluntly, having interest across the Department. There have been examples, though I cannot remember them off the top of my head, over recent years of documents coming out not even mentioning special education and disabled children, which is incredible when actually some of the policies in place are excellent. Therefore, one of the key messages is that it needs to be embedded across all aspects of the Department's work and then it would inform all those other activities. Chairman: Thank you for that. It has been an excellent session. I hope that, as you leave, on your way home or back to your offices, you will think about the questions which, as Virginia pointed out, we have not asked and we should have asked and also some of the things you might have told the Committee, but you have not, either today or in your written submissions, done so. Again make the relationship ongoing; we want to make this as good a report as we possibly can and we can only do that by listening to the resonances out there. Thank you very much. |