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Session 2007 - 08 Publications on the internet General Committee Debates Education and Skills Bill |
Education and Skills Bill |
The Committee consisted of the following Members:Nick
Walker, Tom Goldsmith, Committee
Clerks
† attended the
Committee
Public Bill CommitteeTuesday 26 February 2008(Afternoon)[Hugh Bayley in the Chair]Education and Skills BillClause 65Assessments
relating to learning
difficulties
Amendment
proposed [this day]: No. 57, in clause 65,
page 35, line 13, at end
insert—
‘(2A) If a local
education authority in England maintains a statement of special
educational needs for a person and if, during the year, the person
leaves school to pursue alternative post-16 education, the authority
must arrange for an assessment to be conducted early in the first year
of the new course.’.—[Mr.
Gibb.]
4
pm
Question
again proposed, That the amendment be
made.
The
Minister for Schools and Learners (Jim Knight):
Mr. Bayley, I trust that, like the rest of us, you are
refreshed after our short break.
The clause
requires local authorities to arrange learning difficulty assessments
for young people with statements of special educational needs who are
expected to leave schooling during or at the end of the current school
year. Every Child Matters and Youth Matters signal the
Government’s commitment to giving local authorities
responsibility for Connexions services, and those assessments are
currently carried out by Connexions.
There is a statutory transition
planning process for young people with special educational needs
statements beginning in year 9 and continuing until the young
person leaves school. Connexions, and specifically
personal advisers, take the lead in supporting young people with
learning difficulties at key points of transition. For example, the
personal adviser might decide that a young person with learning
difficulties would benefit from school-college link courses, or from
work placements. Personal advisers also make sure that young people are
aware of the various learning options, such as diplomas or the
foundation learning tier, available to them.
Carrying out a learning
difficulty assessment is part of supporting and planning for
transition, working closely with professionals supporting young people
with special educational needs to ensure that all the young
person’s needs are fully met. In completing the assessment, the
Connexions personal adviser works closely with the professional service
that has been supporting the young person through school, and other
specialists help. The personal adviser also works closely with the
young person and their family and/or carers to ensure that the learning
difficult assessment adequately reflects that young person’s
needs. Once a young person has started a new course, Connexions will
also follow through to check that the provision is suitable.
The transfer
of legal responsibility for the assessments to local authorities would
put local authorities’ accountability for them in law on a sure
footing. The Bill widens the circumstances in which the assessments
should be carried out to cover not only those who are leaving school at
the end of their compulsory schooling, but those who remain in school
after the age of 16 but subsequently leave to pursue education or
training elsewhere. That might be the case if a young person wishes to
remain in school to improve his or her GCSE results, for example, and a
year later, having done so, wishes to attend college. Or it might be
that a young person simply changes their mind about what provision best
meets their needs.
The extension is a necessary
measure arising from our reforms of 14-to-19 learning and the proposals
to raise the age of compulsory participation in learning. It means that
those young people who are subject to a statement of special
educational needs who leave school to pursue further learning at any
point after the end of compulsory schooling, rather than at the end of
year 11, will have their future needs
assessed.
The clause
requires the assessment to be carried out at any point during a school
year. For young people who have very clear long-term plans, the
assessment would ideally be carried out in the autumn term of their
last year of schooling, to support applications to colleges and other
forms of higher learning. That will be set out in guidance to local
authorities. However, some young people change their minds and decide
to go into further education or training quite late in the school year,
so it is right that the local authority should carry out the assessment
at whatever point in the year is sensible for the young person
involved. Stipulating a certain time in the year when the assessments
need to be carried out risks local authorities missing hundreds of
young people who make the decision to continue in learning after that
point.
The amendment
is intended to ensure that if young people with special educational
needs in their last year of compulsory education change their plans at
short notice, the duty to arrange an assessment applies. I am delighted
to tell the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton that this is
already the case and that the amendment is therefore unnecessary. If a
young person is of compulsory school age, the local authority is
already under a duty to arrange for the special educational provision
set out in a statement. It does not matter whether that provision is
delivered in a school or in other appropriate settings, although the
statement may need to be amended to take account of the new
environment. During year 11, if the young person intends to carry on in
further education, training or higher education, they will receive a
learning needs
assessment.
It is
important to remember that the local authority must arrange for an
assessment to be conducted at some time during a young person’s
last year of compulsory schooling. That duty applies whether the young
person has clear, fixed long-term plans or makes a decision, or changes
their mind, in late August, say after their GCSE results. In the latter
case it might be that, for practical reasons, the assessment is not
carried out until early September, but that does not stop the duty to
arrange the assessment from applying.
The amendment, as worded and as
positioned in the clause, would apply only to young people in
compulsory schooling. However, I am also happy to reassure the hon.
Gentleman that, should a young person beyond the age of compulsory
schooling decide that school is no longer the right environment in
which to learn and transfer to alternative provision, either
immediately or at the beginning of the next year, the duty will still
apply. Again for practical reasons, if the young person leaves school
at short notice, the actual assessment might take place after they have
left and quite possibly are already undertaking alternative provision.
That does not stop the duty from
applying.
On the basis
of that fairly full explanation, I hope that the hon. Gentleman will
withdraw his
amendment.
Mr.
Nick Gibb (Bognor Regis and Littlehampton) (Con): I am
grateful to the Minister for his response. I am reassured that the
circumstances envisaged by the amendment are already covered by
existing legislation. However, the clause as drafted seems to say that
new section 139A(2) of the Learning and Skills Act 2000 will apply only
if the local education
authority
“maintains a
statement of special educational needs for a person,
and...believes that the person will leave school, at the end of
his last year of compulsory
schooling”.
Only
if those two conditions are met will the requirement
that
“The
authority must arrange for an assessment...to be conducted at some
time during last year of compulsory
schooling.”
apply.
Will
the Minister briefly explain why the duty still applies and why the
person who is staying on to the sixth form will still get an
assessment? If the young person is not leaving school, I would have
thought that the condition in proposed new subsection (1)(b) would not
apply and that, therefore, the assessment under subsection (2) would
not be required. I am happy to rely on the Minister’s assurance,
but it might be clearer if that particular point of principle was
addressed, if he is able to respond to that
point.
Jim
Knight:
I am trying to work out the detail in order to
answer the hon. Gentleman’s perfectly reasonable question. The
answer is not coming to me immediately, but if he bears with me for a
second, I am sure that my swift reading of the clause will
help.
Perhaps the
best thing for me to do would be to write to the Committee, reiterating
that staying on in sixth form with a statement lasts until 18. I will
signpost for the Committee exactly how that works in the wiring of the
Bill, because I do not have that immediately to
hand.
Mr.
Gibb:
I am grateful to the Minister for that promise. On
that basis, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the
amendment.
Amendment,
by leave,
withdrawn.
Mr.
Gordon Marsden (Blackpool, South) (Lab): I beg to move
amendment No. 160, in clause 65, page 35, line 22, leave out
‘may’ and insert ‘must’.
Mr. Bayley, I
apologise for my late arrival at the sitting.
I say at the outset that the
proposed amendment is probing; I will not be asking the Committee to
vote on it this afternoon. Also, some of the ground covered by the
amendment has been covered previously in Opposition amendments. I was
encouraged by some of the assurances that my hon. Friend the Minister
was able to give and the importance that the Government attaches to the
position of young people with special educational needs in the context
of the Bill and specifically in the context of assessments.
The amendment comes from the
Special Education Consortium. I emphasise that the
fact that it is a probing amendment in no way diminishes the importance
of the subject matter. The purpose of the amendment, which deals with
some of the issues we have discussed from a different direction, is to
give local education authorities, which, through the transfer process,
are taking on onerous responsibilities for the first time, a duty to
conduct a school-leaving assessment for all young people who have
learning difficulties, not just those who have an SEN
statement.
As we have
already heard, currently the Bill contains only a power for LEAs to
assess those young people with SEN but without a statement. It was the
poet Stephen Spender who said that power ends in weariness and duty,
but in the context of the amendment, power and duty are separate:
power, is only a pale imitation of duty. It is the concern that that
power will not empower young people with special
educational needs that brings the various organisations in the Special
Educational Consortium, including Barnardo’s, I CAN, the Royal
National Institute of Blind People, the Royal National Institute for
Deaf People and the National Autistic Society to voice their concerns.
My hon. Friend the Member for Kingswood (Roger Berry) and I expressed
those concerns when the Bill that became the Education and Inspections
Act 2006 was going through Parliament, so this is not new territory for
me.
The consortium is
concerned because the proposal to extend to the age of 18 the
requirement to stay on is a crucial one for disabled pupils and pupils
with special educational needs. It is decidedly not the case that all
those young people who fall into the category of having special
educational needs have statements. We have heard again some of the
arguments for that. For example, the Disability Rights Commission found
in a 2003 survey that non-disabled young people are twice as likely as
their disabled peers to transfer to sixth form or college at 16-plus.
That has a significant impact on their life chances. According to DRC
statistics, by the age of 19, 9 per cent. of non-disabled young people
are not in education, employment or training, whereas three times as
many, 27 per cent. of disabled young people, are NEET. Because of this,
disabled young people and young people with SEN have the most to gain
from participating in education and training between the ages of 16 and
18.
The former Select
Committee on Education and Skills considered those matters. We have
heard previously how important it is that the support that is given to
young people with special educational needs is continued post-16 in a
way that it has not been in the past. The direction of Government
policy is to reduce reliance on statementing. The guidance issued by
the
Department for Education and Skills in 2001
highlighted all the advantages of that approach, but the Department
showed its concern about the statementing by asking the Select
Committee to look again at the question of separation of funding from
statementing. We have heard in a previous debate about some of the
pressures that may bring some local authorities to duck out of
statementing.
Overall,
however, there is no doubt that new legislation needs to support and
not undermine the cultural shift against statementing. LEAs do vary in
their policies on issuing statements. It is not always the case that,
for example, young people who come under School Action or School Action
Plus have missed out of statements. It is not as simple as that; the
process is much more complex. Furthermore, there is great variation in
LEA statements in practice. I can confirm that from the evidence that
was taken in the Education and Skills Committee’s SEN
inquiry.
What I am
asking the Minister to do this afternoon is to reflect further on some
of the points that have been made and to go away and talk with his
officials about how some of the guidance might be beefed up. There is a
real concern in the SEN community that, as an unintended consequence of
the transfer process, the situation in which we have first-class and
second-class special educational needs young people—those who go
through a proper assessment process and those who do not—could,
in some cases, be at risk of expanding. I know that that is not the
Government’s intention, nor the intention of anyone on this
Committee, but because those concerns exist in the community, I ask the
Government to reflect further on what more they can do to ensure that
those fears do not become a
reality.
4.15
pm
Jim
Knight:
My hon. Friend the Member for
Blackpool, South seeks to amend the clause to extend the duty on local
education authorities to arrange for learning difficulty assessments to
be conducted so that all young people who appear to an authority to
have a learning difficulty, whether or not they have had a statement of
special educational needs, are assessed. The extended duty would apply
to young people who are in their last year of compulsory schooling or
who are over this age but not yet 25 and are expected to undertake
further education, training or higher
education.
I
congratulate my hon. Friend on consistently championing the cause of
young people with special educational needs. Earlier this month at
departmental questions, he pressed my ministerial colleagues and me on
what more could be done to improve provision for young people over the
age of 16 with special educational needs. I understand that the
amendment is supported by the Special Education
Consortium.
As I set
out in an earlier discussion, I do not think that it is in the best
interests of all young people with learning difficulties to put them
through a formal assessment automatically, when one might not be
necessary. Obviously, I will reflect on what my hon. Friend has been
saying and discuss it with ministerial colleagues. We do not want the
two-tierism that he and some others fear in which different individuals
get different treatment.
Children who are the subject of
a statement of special educational needs have the most severe and
complex needs. Therefore, it is right that the local authority has a
duty to carry out a learning difficulty assessment when they leave
school if they are moving into further education, training or higher
education. However, even though young people with learning difficulties
but without an SEN statement are not covered by the duty, the local
authority has the power to arrange for such a assessment. There will be
many instances in which it will be appropriate for such young people to
receive an assessment, and where a young person would clearly benefit,
the local authority would be expected to arrange for an assessment
using that power.
Local authorities could be
legally challenged if there is an unreasonable failure to exercise the
power to arrange for an assessment that the clause gives them. We will
issue statutory guidance to support local authorities in their decision
making in this area. In effect, we will have something that feels a lot
like a duty and a power but is judged on a case-by-case basis and with
the sort of flexibility that some hon. Members on the Committee would
want. I do not believe that it is right that we should compel
assessment for every person. It is right that we should take a
case-by-case approach.
On the basis of what I have
said and my promise to continue to listen to the arguments and discuss
them with my noble Friend Lord Adonis, who is responsible for such
matters within the Department, I hope that my hon. Friend will withdraw
his
amendment.
Mr.
Marsden:
I am reassured by what my hon.
Friend the Minister has said. On the basis of the assurances that he
has given, I beg leave to withdraw the
amendment.
Amendment,
by leave,
withdrawn.
Clause
65 ordered to stand part of the
Bill.
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