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Memorandum submitted by Professor Brahm Norwich,University of Exeter Introduction: This submission is a summary of the outcome of a policy seminar held on June 13 by the SEN Policy Options Group (see below for those present and for Steering Group aims and membership). This Group has held regular policy seminars related to the SEN disability field since 1992/3 and published over 20 policy papers since then. It was constituted as an independent group when initially funded by the ESRC (now funded by NASEN), and has continued to renew its membership of professionals, local authority officers, voluntary sector officers, consultants working in voluntary and public sectors, academics and researchers across the UK.
This submission addresses the 4 questions from the Select Committee, but goes beyond them. It also points out some other relevant questions that were not asked, such as 'what are the purposes of Statements?' and 'how can ethical standards be upheld for professionals undertaking assessment?' It identifies and responds to a key question that seems to underlie the Select Committee's 4 questions, 'what can be done to raise parents' confidence in the system of assessing and providing adequately for the individual educational needs of children with SEN/disabilities?'
Select Committee's questions 1 and 2: 1. How might assessment of special educational needs be undertaken other than by the relevant local authority without the establishment of a new separate agency for the purpose? 2. How might local accountability for assessment be maintained if the local authority does not directly undertake the assessment? The questions posed by the Select Committee appear to address the concerns of parents in the context of the Government's refusal to review the whole system of assessment and statementing as recommended by the Select Committee (and earlier by Audit Commission). Moreover they appear to assume that assessment is a single 'one-off' event. Current 'good practice', according to the Special Needs Code of Practice and of the Common Assessment Framework, considers assessment and intervention to consist of a progressive sequence of formulating an assessment of children's needs, implementing provision to match the need, evaluating the outcomes, and modifying the assessment and provision as necessary. This involves the child's teacher/school, the parents/carers, the child/young person as well as other relevant professionals. What the Committee calls assessment is the advice provided at the point of statutory assessment when a Statement is under consideration. This involves summative assessment which is generally based on previous assessments by those in direct contact with the child and support professionals. In exploring the models of how the assessment of SEN might be done other than by local authorities (LAs), the Committee appears to assume that 'needs assessors' are inhibited or biased to some degree, and sometimes advising provision that is limited to what is available rather than needed. Parental evidence to the initial Select Committee enquiry may have led to this assumption, but the Committee needs to consider how representative and widespread is the evidence for parental dissatisfaction. Though there is a need for larger scale evaluation research on the matter, this Group came to the view that there is not much evidence of serious and widespread parental dissatisfaction over the assessment bias question (for example, see recent study of experiences of disabled children, young people and their families commissioned by the DRC, Lewis et al.,2006, 'My school, my family, my life: telling it how it is'). This line of questioning also assumes that it is inappropriate for the same organisation to identify needs and decide about provision. In other areas of public funded services (e.g. health), it is common for the same organisation to be involved in identifying needs and making decisions about provision. Associated with possible bias are ethical questions about professional assessments. An ethical professional position involves regarding the child and the family as the client (duty of care). Where other pressures or factors undermine this commitment, then systems need to be established to support ethical practice by professionals involved (see below for more detail). This Group recommends that the Committee focuses on how the system can raise parents' confidence in the system of assessing and providing for the individual educational needs of children with SEN/disabilities. We identify several ways in which this might be achieved: i. Encourage ways of clarifying for parents the roles and processes in the assessment system - so that parents understand whether particular professionals are there to advise about needs and aspects of the provision required, or to make decisions on the part of the LA. ii. Establish minimum standards and expectations on all contributors to the process of assessing SEN. iii. Support the participation of parents in the on-going good practice assessment approach mentioned above; placing the parents and child at the centre of the assessment process so that they are fully engaged throughout the process. iv. Ensure that the points under iii above are used to clarify the distinction between decisions about resourcing and decisions about assessment of needs. A demand by parents or schools for the initiation of the Statement procedure would indicate a final attempt to match need and provision. v. Establish systems of independent scrutiny (structured external review) of the assessment process adopted in an LA, and the ways in which subsequent support and provision is monitored. Specific ways of establishing independent scrutiny might involve: a. Enhance the status of the guidance offered in the Code of Practice for Special Needs and the Common Assessment Framework into a national code of professional practice for the assessment of children with SEN/disabilities b. Establish systems for peer professional review of assessment advice, as part of the continuing professional development of advising professionals, where peers are not employed by the assessing organisation. c. Establish audits of LA assessment processes and decisions in the context of the Select Committee's recommendation for national standards with local flexibility. Regional Partnerships might become involved in this. d. Include some external representative/s on LA panels involved in initiating statutory assessment, issuing Statements and decisions about resources. e. Establish an entitlement for parents who are dissatisfied with the processes/outcomes of statutory assessment to seek further professional advice external to the LA. (Regional partnerships might establish additional advice systems between LAs and/or voluntary organisations, like the Independent Panel of SE Advice (IPSEA) who provide such advice, might become involved). Such systems would need to reduce expenses and administrative demands of monitoring 'approved professionals' and be careful about raising parental expectations unrealistically. Select Committee's question 4: This question will be addressed before the third question. What models from other countries could usefully be drawn on to demonstrate how separation of assessment and funding for special educational needs might be achieved? The Group investigated systems in some other countries as regards the separation of assessment and funding. Scottish model: The Scottish model of abandoning SEN in terms of a wider notion of Additional Support Needs (ASN) is worth examining as it demonstrates how a system that was similar to the current English one has been reviewed and developed. In the analysis of the previous Scottish system that we considered, the main difficulties were similar to those identified in the English system by the first report of the Select Committee, but not interpreted as requiring the separation of assessment and funding. One of several difficulties of the previous Record of Need system in Scotland was that assessment tended to be driven by the reality of resources rather than needs of the child. The changes have included enhancing parental roles considerably for the wider group of children with ASN (e.g. parents can request specific types of assessment, request the use of mediation services). The Co-ordinated Support Plan (CSP) is a new statutory document in the Scottish system, corresponding to Record of Needs. CSPs are relevant when 'significant' additional support is required from education and one other service (e.g. social work or Health Board). The statutory responsibility to provide what is determined applies to health, education and social care services. This contrasts with the primary legislation in England, where the NHS can state that it cannot provide and so provision responsibility defaults to the LA. The education authorities in Scotland have planned for a much reduced level - about 1% of pupils requiring a CSP - a Group member reported that in one Scottish authority there were now 4 CSPs, rather than 400 Records of Need. Other European models: The Group also examined country reports from the European Agency for Development in SEN (EADSEN) website, the recent EADSEN report on 'Assessment in Inclusive Settings' (EADSEN, 2007) and had personal communications with some national experts (Sweden and Germany) and EADSEN officers. The conclusion drawn from the 'Assessment in Inclusive Settings' study was that it is hard to consider and implement changes to assessment policy without making changes to the wider system. This implies that the separation of funding and initial identification cannot be made without considering possible changes to overall systems of SEN provision. This EADSEN project also concluded that national educational systems that are heavily geared towards the initial identification of SEN, and not other forms of assessment (formative. and continuous assessment), appear to have relatively high levels of segregation. More focus upon diagnosis and identification of SEN tended to result in increasing numbers of pupils labelled as requiring SEN support. The study also showed examples of different forms of strategic behaviour in requests for assessment from schools, teachers and parents, if an assessment of need is directly linked to resource allocation. However, there are very few examples of the separation of resource allocation from initial identification processes. It was evident from this examination of systems in various European countries, that there is not a widespread concern about professional bias in the identification / assessment for SEN. This was confirmed by personal communication with the national experts from Sweden and Germany. In several European countries, there is no system for parents to appeal against local authority level Board decisions, other than go to the Ministry (Denmark, Sweden); there is no the tribunal system as in England and Scotland. This can be seen to reflect that a European model of assessment and decision-making that is more professionally centred than the more user or consumer centred English system. This difference can be linked to the statutory position of the Statement, elements of which were imported in the 1981 Education Act framework (and still operating) from the US IEP system with it origins in civil rights litigation. Select Committee's question 3: What other issues need to be addressed in order to make the separation of assessment and provision effective? We have recommended in this submission that the immediate and short term approach to the questions raised by the Select Committee is to find ways of increasing parents' confidence in the system of assessing and providing adequately for the individual educational needs of children with SEN/disabilities. However, as the European evidence indicates changes to the assessment system require wider and longer term changes, some of which have been indicated in the above sections. They include: 1. The need to reaffirm a broader conception and model of assessment as a continuous process linked to the planning of teaching and the evaluation of learning progress. This kind of assessment is distinct from but can inform the advice given at a point in time for statutory assessment. 2. The need for system-wide changes: a. A basic review of the purposes and functions of the Statement system in the context of the Every Child Matters framework and the operation of the Common Assessment Framework (CAF). This would also involve finding ways of securing cross-agency support that is provided at an early stage of schooling. This could address some parental concerns that lead them to use the statutory procedures to secure provision from other agencies (e.g. physio/speech therapies) b. Reducing the negative impact of the current narrow system of prioritising academic standards on the flexibility required for more inclusive policies and practices - cf. the Select Committee Report para 277, p65. c. Greater focus on improving school-parent relationships in terms of greater partnership and parent friendly policies and practices. d. More awareness of improving schools' responsiveness to the need for more flexible additional provision for those with SEN/disabilities. This involves finding mechanisms that enable LAs and schools to recognise the gaps between needed provision and what is available. This calls for a more integrated system of planning additional provision at local authority level and for schools to have more ownership of such provision. e. LAs should be encouraged to set up a consultative group of representative parents, with whom they can discuss the resourcing of support for children with special educational needs and disabilities. The particular aim of these discussions would be to establish a joint understanding of the implications of the community's prioritising principles in the allocation of funding. Seminar participants 13 June 2007 Amanda Allard, Head of Policy, Treehouse; Judith Cameron, Newham LA; Julie Dockrell, Institutue of Education London; Ray Evans, Coventry LA; Seamus Hegarty, IEA; Tom Kelly, Rotherham LA; Ann Lewis, University of Birmingham; Geoff Lindsay, University of Warwick; Brahm Norwich, University of Exeter; Penny Richardson, SEN/Children's services Consultant; Helen Roberts, Family Welfare Association; Philippa Stobbs, CDC; Klaus Wedell, Institutue of Education; Tom Williams PEP East Ayrshire. About the SEN Policy Options Group This group started to organise the initial series on policy options for special educational needs in the early 1990s with funding from ESRC - Cadbury Trust. The success of the first series led to a second and further series which has been supported financially by NASEN. The group has published over 20 policy papers arising from these events.
The main orientation of the SEN Policy Options Group is to consider likely future policy issues in order to examine relevant practical policy options. This emphasis is on being pro-active on one hand and examining and evaluating various options on the other. The purpose is to inform and suggest policy ideas and formulation in this field. More specifically the aims of the sixth series will be: 1. To continue to provide a forum where education policy relevant to the interests of children and young people with SEN/disabilities can be appraised critically and pro-actively in the context of the development of children's services. 2. To inform and influence policy formulation and implementation, to encourage and support an active and ongoing dialogue on SEN policy and practice between key stakeholders such as NASEN and other professional associations; schools, local authorities, parents and other agencies 3. To examine and evaluate policy options in terms of current and possible developments and research in order to inform and influence policy formulation and implementation in the field. 4. To organise events where policy-makers, professionals, parents, voluntary associations and academics/researchers analyse and debate significant issues in the field drawing on policy and practice in the countries of the UK, and: 5. To arrange the dissemination of the proceedings and outcomes through publication and summary briefing papers.
July 2007 |