Memorandum submitted by Mrs Deirdre Holland, retired SEN Teacher, Volunteer Parent Supporter, and Chair, Swindon Dyslexia Association

 

I undertook voluntary training to become a volunteer parent supporter, having retired from my post as a special educational needs teacher in a large mainstream comprehensive school.

 

Council-run Educational Psychology Services give parents significant cause for concern. Parents find the Educational Psychologist for their school may not have expertise in their child's difficulty; they also fear that reports will lack clear recommendations since there is obviously a conflict of interests when Council employees both carry out the assessment and arrange the provision. Educational Psychologists form a central part of the LEA Support Services and this is precisely why parents feel they should be independent of the LEA - to ensure that parents receive an independent view that focuses entirely on the needs of the child. Many parents would like Educational Psychology Services to be part of the Child and Family Consultation service,

 

Parents feel that LEA Educational Psychologists may be restricted in the way they describe a child's needs and in what they are able to recommend because of the necessity to have regard to LEA policy when writing their reports. Parents feel that although the sole focus should be the child, there is a perverse incentive to understate the child's needs and work to local guidelines, partly to save money; this prevents the right support being put in place at the right time. The children have to wait until they meet criteria that indicate significant underachievement. This is regardless of their IQ or potential. Parents would much prefer the Educational Psychology Service to be independent of the LEA so that they could go to an educational psychologist of their own choice who specialises in their child's difficulties when they have concerns regarding their child's progress.

 

·       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?

Ideas put forward by parents include the following:

1. Make Educational Psychology Services part of the Child and Family Consultation Service and not under the control of Local Authorities. This would facilitate working in partnership with other agencies as envisaged in The Code of Practice. Children could be referred either by the SENCo of the school the child attended, by the parents, or via the Doctor if the failure in academic progress was causing detrimental emotional or physical effects. Clear guidelines are already given in the Code of Practice as to when an assessment is necessary. This would make it much easier and quicker for a concerned parent to gain access to an Educational Psychologist to obtain a cognitive assessment for their child so that a clear picture of the degree of underachievement could be revealed and also the causes for this. Parents whose children are failing to make satisfactory progress at school should be able to choose an Educational Psychologist who specialises in the learning difficulty their child shows signs of having.

2. Through private enterprise. Allow Educational Psychologists to form private group practices and tender for a government contract to undertake assessments of children with special educational needs. They would operate rather like a Doctor's surgery does. The group would require specialists in different areas of special educational needs. Referral would be via the school SENCo, the parents themselves or the family Doctor.

3. The schools could form clusters and employ a group of Educational Psychologists to undertake all the assessment work for the children in their cluster who were not making satisfactory progress. Costs would be built into the budget for the schools. Referral would be made by the school SENCo, or the parents themselves, where a child's lack of progress was giving cause for concern.

·       How might local accountability for assessment be maintained if the local authority does not directly undertake the assessment?

The school would become accountable for ensuring that those pupils who were failing to make satisfactory progress received an assessment. Schools try to do this now but are thwarted by local authority criteria, which can often prevent an assessment being carried out until a child has fallen many years behind their peer group, i.e. having a reading age of between 5 and 6 years at a chronological age of 11 years.

There is no local accountability now. It is impossible to call a Local Authority to account for failing the children educationally for whom they are responsible

·       What other issues need to be addressed in order to make the separation of assessment and provision effective?

The issue of fair funding for the educational psychology services, wherever they are based. This funding must come from central Government and not depend on how generous the local council was feeling. It is estimated that 20% of children have special educational needs, which gives some idea of the scale of the budget required. Then there is social deprivation, the other cause of underachievement. It is felt these are two separate strands of underachievement and must be treated as such. Free school dinners are used as a measure of deprivation and, at present, schools with many children on free dinners are receiving a great deal of extra money at the expense of schools with very few children on free school meals. The schools with fewer children on free meals do not have sufficient funding to meet the special educational needs of the 20% of children in their school who require extra support. So if separation of assessment and provision is to be effective, all schools must receive sufficient funding to enable the assessment of all pupils giving cause for concern, not just those on free school meals.

Parents feel that if assessment is undertaken as it should be, the government would be shocked by the numbers of children who are underachieving significantly and who do not receive sufficient support to enable them to leave school functionally literate. There are around 22% of school leavers every year who are functionally illiterate and innumerate.

·       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?

No-one I spoke to had any knowledge of systems in other countries, so no views are offered. Many parents feel that we start formal education at too young an age in Great Britain and that this causes children to feel like failures at a very young age, especially little boys.

June 2007