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The report to which my noble friend Lady Massey referred—the audit of low-incidence special educational needs—which was completed two months ago, refers in particular to the importance of collaboration between local authorities on a regional basis, especially small unitary local authorities that may not be able to make provision in all the key specialisms that are important to ensure that they have a sufficient range of provision. However, we believe it is for local authorities to take decisions about the range of provision they maintain. From my experience of local authorities, I like to think that they are not motivated in what I took the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, to think are almost perverse ways. That is not to say that there are not individuals in local authorities who have views that are not mainstream thinking in these areas, but local authorities have to take democratically accountable decisions in a proper fashion and I believe that most of them take their duties in this area immensely seriously and consider them properly.
The Bill will help local authorities develop a range of provision. It gives powers to local authorities so that they can propose specific requirements for special needs provision in new and existing schools within a school system that offers broader choice and more flexibility. Almost all local authorities already maintain special schools. For example, Newham, which is often referred to as one of the most pro-inclusive local authorities, maintains two community special schools. Under this amendment,
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In practice, we think that these decisions are best left to individual local authorities, and that the caricature that is often made of local authorities is quite unfair. I know Newham well because it was an issue raised by the Education and Skills Committee when I appeared before it to give evidence. If one looks at what is happening there, it is very different from the caricature that often appears in the media. Not only does it have two special schools, although it is often claimed it has none, but it has a great deal of resourced provision—unit-type provision—attached to its schools. If one looks at the population of pupils with special educational needs who have specially resourced provision, one of the areas that is most neglected is the provision of units and resourced provision in mainstream schools, which is now a substantial part of the whole. There are about 80,000 children in special schools and 20,000 children in units attached to mainstream schools or in resourced provision in schools, and that number is rising. My view is that that type of provision is likely to increase over time, because it enables mainstream schools to perform their inclusive duties in respect of pupils with special educational needs much better, and to bring resourced provision, which is essential for those with more severe special needs, into a much closer relationship with mainstream schools. That will be part of the ongoing debate about how we can improve special educational needs.
Section 14 of the Education Act 1996, which this amendment would affect, fulfils the public policy goal we are seeking to achieve. It applies to all schools, including special schools, and places a duty on local authorities to secure sufficient schools for the provision of primary and secondary education. Section 14(6) states that in exercising their functions to secure sufficient primary and secondary education, local authorities must have regard to,
- “the need for securing that special educational provision is made for pupils who have special educational needs”.
Those pupils will include children with statements who have needs which require specialist provision to be met, either in special schools or in units attached to mainstream schools.
In response to the noble Baroness, I emphasise what my noble friend Lady Crawley said: the Government have no policy whatever of seeking to close special schools. We believe that such decisions should be taken in the light of local circumstances and the needs of the parents at a local level. In fact, the proportion of pupils with statements in special schools has risen over the past five years, which demonstrates that there is no national policy of seeking to close special schools. There has also been a
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Turning to Amendments Nos. 36, 163 and 183, which seek to ensure that those undertaking certain roles have an understanding of SEN and disability legislation, I shall first set out the way in which school improvement partners are accredited and the nature of the SIP role in relation to children with special educational needs. The initial training, development, assessment and accreditation of school improvement partners is undertaken by the National College for School Leadership. This is a non-departmental public body of the Department for Education and Skills, working to a remit set by the Government. Included in its key objectives up to 2008 is a commitment to deliver a range of programmes that enable leaders of the school system to transform the quality of learning for all pupils. It is certainly not the role of SIPs just to focus on the academic achievement of the successful.
The training and accreditation of SIPs focuses on data analyses of the performance of groups of pupils in schools—in particular, in identifying inequitable outcomes that might be occurring in the school, the factors which contribute to them, and the action the school should take. This is supplemented by detailed guidance on how the SIP should focus with theschool on issues that might affect vulnerable or disadvantaged groups of pupils. This guidance is in the public domain and I will send it to Members of the Committee after the debate.
The guidance includes advice that SIPs should consider about special educational needs, and how they should address barriers to learning and to issues regarding behavioural and emotional difficulties. They should consider whether systems can be used to design appropriate curriculum and pastoral support, monitor success and respond to changing needs, and focus on whether there are effective links with other support agencies to ensure that integrated support structures are in place for pupils with additional needs.
The training and development of SIPs doesnot stop with the initial session provided for accreditation. SIPs take part in four days of professional development a year, provided in part by the national strategies and in part by local authorities deploying SIPs.
School self-evaluation is a key starting point for the school improvement partner in the process of offering challenge and support to the school. There are special educational needs sections in the school self-evaluation form. The SEN evaluation framework will form part of the continuing professional development for SIPs. In carrying out their duties, school improvement partners will, of course, have to be aware of all the statutory duties that schools have. In the area of special educational needs and disabilities, schools must have regard to the special educational needs code of practice and use their best endeavours to make the provision that a child's learning difficulties call for. Under the Disability Discrimination Act schools must not discriminate against children with disabilities, and must make
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I turn to Amendment No. 163 on choice advice, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe. Clause 40 will ensure that local authorities provide advice to parents to help them make decisions about the choice of school for their child. Some parents find it difficult to navigate through the admissions process. That means that some children, often the most vulnerable, do not get the best from the choices available to them.
The department’s guidance to local authorities on the provision of this advice to parents, issued at the start of April, covers the specific issues raised in the amendment, stating that advisers will need to know about special needs policy and provision for children with special educational needs, drawing on the knowledge and expertise of local parent partnership services, which I know has been welcomed. We will update the guidance to ensure that choice advisers can demonstrate, in addition to knowledge of SEN law and best practice, an understanding of disability legislation.
Amendment No. 183 on professional standards for teachers was tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley. The new clause relates to professional standards. It is of course very important that teachers are properly prepared for working with children with special educational needs and disabilities. There is no issue of law here. The Secretary of State and the National Assembly for Wales already have the power to set professional standards for teachers, and currently do so in secondary legislation and associated guidance. As the noble Baroness recognised, we are currently revising those standards and working closely with the teacher training and development agency on seeking to improve them.
There is no need to set out specific standards in primary legislation, which by its nature is inflexible and does not easily allow for changes to reflect developing awareness and the importance of such issues. Revised standards for qualified teacher status, induction, threshold, excellent and advanced skills teachers were, as I said, recently issued for consultation in England. They offer for the first time a progressive framework for expectations of teachers at different points in their careers.
Once revised, it is proposed that the new standards will include one which requires teachers to know and comply with current legislation on the well-being of children and young people, one that requires teachers to know and understand the role of others when dealing with children who have special educational needs and/or disabilities, and one that requires teachers to communicate effectively with parents and carers. Taken together, those requirements will be stronger than the requirement in the amendment to demonstrate an understanding of SEN and disability legislation.
We are also working with the TDA to strengthen the training that teachers receive in SEN and disability, which we recognise is an ongoing challenge
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The SEN and disability populations overlap, but we recognise that they also raise separate issues.My department is developing an ambitious new training resource on implementing the Disability Discrimination Act in schools and early years settings, which will be made available to teacher training providers.
Amendment No. 183 also refers to head teachers. The National College for School Leadership addresses issues relating to special needs and disability through its various programmes and activities, including special focus events. In accord with the NCSL's declared goal of ensuring the well-being and achievement of all children, the National Professional Qualification for Headteachers is currently being redesigned and will equip future school leaders to fulfil their responsibilities for the education of children with a variety of special educational needs and disabilities in a range of different contexts.
In light of those assurances, I hope that the Committee will feel that the Government are alive to the issues being raised. We have further to go; we will respond in full to the report of the Select Committee in another place; but we are making progress.
Baroness Buscombe: Can the Minister confirm tonight that the system no longer contains a bias towards mainstream schooling? Is that what he wants me to feel assured about concerning SEN and mainstream schools?
Lord Adonis: Our bias is towards the needs of the individual child. The provision that should be made is the provision that meets those needs and reflects, as far as it is possible to do so, the preferences of parents.
Lord Lucas: Whatever the Minister says about LEAs, there is still far too much disparity between behaviour in one LEA and another to suggest that they are merely variations around some agreed and benevolent mean. The differences to which parents are being subjected are, to my mind, not the result of some rational, reasonable process of thought and consideration. When we come to AmendmentNo. 179, we will consider that further.
The Minister said that there was a move to units. Indeed there is in some parts, but other LEAs are abolishing units. I can think of one LEA that is clearing out all its units in favour of something called resourced provision. I think that that is the Nottingham model, which may already exist in Nottinghamshire, but I am thinking of another part of the country. It is crunching provision which, only a few months ago, was in receipt of glowing letters from the Minister himself for its undoubted quality. I
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That eccentricity is unwarranted and should be brought under some form of informed guidance, because having one authority favouring units and building them up—saying that that is the right division between inclusion and special schools and working well at that—while having the neighbouring authority abolishing them cannot be a rational state of affairs. We return again to the second part of Amendment No. 179. The money needs to follow the child and, perhaps under trust status, the school must have the ability to maintain its units in the face of whatever the LEA decides to do to allow us to get into a pattern of provision that can truly respond to parent demand rather than being—I say this advisedly—subject to the whims of individuals and individual local authorities.
9.45 pm
The Earl of Listowel: I thank the Minister for his helpful reply, because we are all very concerned about children with special needs being well cared for in schools. I understand from the Cambridge University report that has been referred to that, quite often, the child with special educational needs is passed to the classroom assistant and is very much looked after by that one person. It would be interesting to hear at some point what level of training classroom assistants receive. But the principal concern in the report is that teachers should take more responsibility for children with SEN, and that those children should not be left alone with the classroom assistant in a motherly rather than a teaching relationship. There is also a concern in the report that some SENCOs are not qualified teachers. Again, perhaps the Minister will comment on that in due course and say how that works and whether it is desirable.
Baroness Williams of Crosby: The Minister, for whom I have great respect, responded rather elegantly to the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, when she asked him directly and appropriately whether there was any move away from an earlier move towards getting SEN children into mainstream schools, that his bias was in favour of the parents’ wishes. May I press him a little further? My recollection goes back quite a long time, and I recall that some 20 years ago the practice was very frequently for almost any children who were severely affected with SEN to be in special schools.
The mood in the education world then changed quite sharply in the late 1970s and early 1980s towards the adoption of mainstream education, with more and more children who were statemented—it would not have been called that at the time but it was the same thing—being moved into mainstream education. The Minister will know very well that the crucial question is whether the additional resources of teaching and teaching assistants can be brought to bear. In some cases—I shall give the example of autistic children—that demand is very considerable if
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Is the Minister therefore persuaded that—because of the admittedly beneficial increase in the number of classroom assistants, for which the Government have every right to take credit, and the greater training of teachers in the concept of special educational needs—not only will mainstream schools cope even with children who have a major need for attention for their particular problem, but that it will not affect the other children in the class? I add one other thing. Understandably, most parents, if asked to choose, will assume that their children should go into mainstream education, even though that may not be quite right because of the impact on other children of such demands being made on teachers by a very small number of children. I ask the Minister to respondto that.
Lord Adonis: As it happens, I can answer that question by telling the story of my morning. I visited TreeHouse School, a special school for pupils with severe conditions on the autistic spectrum. Its chairman is the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, and it does the most outstanding work with children with severe autistic conditions. The view of the parents whom I met—I met a good number of them there—and of the support staff is that it would not have been appropriate for those pupils to have been in mainstream provision, certainly not all the time, but, again, it is difficult to make bold generalisations.
As a way of dealing with the complexities of the issue, I draw to the attention of the noble Baroness three facts that came out of my visit. First, most of the children at TreeHouse got there without needing to go through a battle on statementing and having to go to the tribunal. It was a consensual decision reached between the parents, the local authorities and the schools on the best provision for their children. There was no bias in the system that they should be obliged to go down an inappropriate mainstream route.
Secondly, a number of the children and their parents share the provision between TreeHouse, a school with a special focus on severe autism, and a mainstream school. The children take the support that they have at TreeHouse into the mainstream school as a way of ensuring that they are better socialised and able to develop the skills and experiences that will be vital as they develop. I thought that that was a very interesting line of work from TreeHouse, which is also developing a training centre to enable more teachers to be trained, so that it has more interaction with the wider community of special schools and mainstream schools.
Thirdly, the expense is striking. I was informed this morning that a place in TreeHouse cost £53,000 a year, which is a very large allocation of public resources. Therefore, when the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, asks whether we mean that parents should have an unfettered choice, we do not. It has to be a process of engagement by parents with local authorities as part of the statementing process to
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I cannot give a straight yes or no answer to the noble Baroness. A lot depends on the provision available in the school that the child wants to attend and whether the parents are satisfied that it will meet the needs of their children. For many pupils who are at the severe end of the autistic or other special educational needs spectrum, I believe that in very many cases it would be appropriate for them to go to special schools. They therefore have an important, ongoing role. Our policy is to ensure that those schools are available to them.
Baroness Walmsley: Before the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, speaks finally, I thank the Minister for his response, on which I should like to say something more. Perhaps I may first pick up the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, about the importance of the money following the specific child and his or her needs when in a mainstream school. We think that that is a very important matter. The noble Earl, Lord Listowel, was concerned about teaching assistants being put in charge of children with special educational needs. I do not think that that happens too much now, but I suggest that, where it happens, it is an indication of the lack of confidence of the teacher in the classroom to deal with that child. That is the result of a feeling that they have not been adequately trained, which brings me to Amendment No. 183 on training.
I accept what the Minister said about the fact that we do not really need to be so specific in the Bill and that this sort of thing should be in regulations and guidance. Our amendment of course was probingin order to put some upward pressure on the Government on training. I was pleased to hear about the review of standards and course content for initial teacher training and right through the spectrum up to what the National College for School Leadership is doing for head teachers. There is no doubt that, although the individual skills and understanding of classroom teachers are very important, the leadership of head teachers in a school and an understandingof what children with special needs need are also important, if they are not specialist schools. They should also understand the additional training that their teaching staff will need in the form of CPD in order to build up their skills to the right level. School leaders who have that commitment find themselves in charge of the schools that are the most successful in including special educational needs children and seeing them thrive comfortably and happily in that environment. I thank the Minister for his comments because the thing seems to be moving in the right direction.
Baroness Buscombe: This has been an excellent debate, but sadly perhaps a little premature because of
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