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On Amendment No. 164 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, under current legislation authorities must give information to parents of statemented children, including a list of all maintained primary or secondary schools in the area, maintained special schools, non-maintained special schools and independent schools that are approved to take state-funded children with special educational needs. The new choice advisers that we are introducing will be able to help parents of children with statements. They will be expected to have knowledge of special educational needs and disability legislation and to be aware of the provision in their areas, including special school provision and how to access the local SEN parent partnership services which already play a valuable role in advising parents on the availability of local provision and how to go about the process of statementing, dealing with local authorities, and so on.
I turn to Amendment No. 181A, standing in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. I have written to him at length setting out the relevant regulations covering the duties of schools in this area. That includes a requirement to publish and make available to parents details of SEN policy and provision, including any arrangements for in-service training for staff in respect of special educational needs. However, the training, development and qualifications of staff working in special educational needs are vital. That was raised in a recent report of the House of Commons Select Committee and we shall give it full consideration in our response. I believe we can and should make improvements in that area and we shall be setting those out in our response, particularly in the important area of the provision and training of special educational needs co-ordinators, who in many ways are the key individuals in schools as regards leading provision for special educational needs.
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I turn to the issues raised by Amendment No. 179 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Dearing. In making decisions about statements, local authorities quite properly have to have regard to the efficient use of resources. Those resources have increased very significantly: resources for special educational needs have increased from under £3 billion five years ago to £4.5 billion this year. Nothing in this area, as the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, says, comes cheaply. She referred to £100,000 for a residential place in a special school which makes provision for children on the autistic spectrum. Even non-residential places are coming in at over £50,000 in special schools which make dedicated provision in that area. Of course, local authorities have to have regard to the efficient use of resources, but that is only in the context of making provision which fully considers and is in the best interests of the individual child.
Furthermore, there is a right of appeal to the Special Educational Needs and Disability Tribunal, a right introduced in 1994 on three key issues: first, a right of appeal against any refusal by a local authority to assess for statement, which includes a local authority to which a pupil moves seeking to change the assessment of the statement; secondly, a right of appeal against the provisions set out in part 3 of the statement; and, thirdly, a right of appeal in respect of the school named in part 4 of the statement by the local authority. Decisions of the Special Educational Needs and Disability Tribunal, of which there were 1,800 last year, are binding. I stress that because, having had experience of being a Minister in this area for the past year, it is very important to get into the complexity of issues and arrangements. Nothing is ever as simple as it seems.
The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, referred to Nottinghamshire, a county whose provision I know. He is quite right to say that it has one of the lowest levels of statementing in the country. It also has one of the lowest levels of appeals to the Special Educational Needs and Disability Tribunal of any local authority in the country, so there is no good prima facie evidence to think that the quality of provision in Nottinghamshire is leading parents to be disproportionately dissatisfied compared with other authorities. Indeed, some authorities with the highest proportion of statements per 10,000 pupils—I can send the figures to the noble Lord—are those with some of the highest proportions of special schools. The quality of provision in this area is not necessarily linked to higher or lower levels of statementing. In my experience, a good deal of it has to do with the quality of resourced and non-resourced special needs provision in mainstream schools. They account for the great majority of pupils with special educational needs. Whether you have a statementing level at 1, 2 or 3 per cent, the great majority of the nearly 20 per cent of those with special educational needs will be in mainstream schools. This does not apply to parents of those with severe special educational needs, of course, but for most parents the decision of whether to pursue a statement will be intimately linked with the actual quality of provision available to their child in the mainstream school, as they seek to make school choices.
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3.30 pm
That is borne out by last Thursday’s Ofsted report into inclusion, which was raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe. It directly addresses this issue, which has governed so many of our debates since the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, raised special schools so starkly a few months ago. It has done so through a substantial survey of special schools, mainstream school units and schools with resourced provision attached. The first paragraph of the executive summary of the report is on the Ofsted website, and makes clear where Ofsted’s judgment lies:
- “The most
important factor in determining the best outcomes for pupils with
learning difficulties and disabilities ... is not the type but the
quality of the provision. Effective provision was distributed equally
in the mainstream and special schools visited, but there was more good
and outstanding provision in resourced mainstream schools than
elsewhere”.
That brings me directly to Amendment No. 179 of the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, on whether to break the link between assessments and funding. I shall be clear: we are carefully considering these issues in response to the Select Committee. We have a duty to do so; the Select Committee made recommendations and the noble Lord referred to them. I point out two immediate things, however. First, you cannot make a distinction between assessment and funding unless there is an open-ended commitment from the Government simply to meet all the decisions made by the assessment body. Either the body undertaking the assessments has a budget or it does not. If it does not, the only way its decisions can be implemented in full is if the Government give a completely open-ended commitment to fund them.
Whether or not you think that is a good idea, you must consider the role of local education authorities in this process. The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, brought this out: you would not simply leave the assessment decision with that body. If it is not a local authority, it would have to be a national or regional quango; there is no other way you could do this. But because the naming of the particular school the child attends is vital to the assessment decision, if the agency were left with that decision you would in practice be taking the whole determination of local special education needs provision substantially out of the hands of the local authority and giving it to the quango. I have thought about this a good deal in response to the Select Committee, and when we were thinking abut our decision in the run-up to it. You cannot make this neat distinction between assessment and provision. The assessment obviously drives the provision. Once the quango which you set up to determine these matters starts making its assessment decisions, that will drive the pattern of local provision.
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That is not to say that this may not be a better system than the status quo; it is well worth thinking about. If I were seriously thinking about it, one of the first things I would do would be to ask the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, to chair a national inquiry to look at these issues, as he has done in so many other areas. I add a note of caution, however: noble Lords must be aware of the gravity of the decision that they will be taking. In effect, they would be removing special educational needs provision—the key decisions about funding and patterns of provision—from local education authorities, which are elected and accountable to their localities, and giving it to a quango. Noble Lords should be under no illusions that this would be the effect of their decision. We have had a lot of debates about local authorities over the three nights we have been debating this, but that would be a bigger change in the role and functions—and withdrawal of functions—of local education authorities than any other provision of this Bill currently in place.
I hope that this is considered in the run-up to Report. I am not saying that there is no case for such a change; it should be considered in a mature way. I noticed that the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, was seeking to put the idea out. I did not get the sense that he was seeking to oblige us to make a rapid choice. If the Committee were to do this, however, it would be a fundamental change of education policy and the role of local education authorities. That should not be entered into lightly.
The noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, raised the issue of the powers of local authorities in respect of support services. They already have wide powers in this respect, including in all those areas referred to in the amendment, so we do not believe that it is necessary. The Select Committee raised the uniformity between local authorities in the quality of services. In our response to the committee, one of the issues we are considering is whether there should be minimum standards, but the powers of local authorities in this area are adequate to fulfil their functions.
The noble Baroness,
Lady Buscombe, tabled Amendment No. 254, and I believe her intention is
to weaken the assumption of mainstream education for children with
special educational needs and to ensure that where parents of children
with statements want a special school, they are able to achieve that.
Section 316 of the Education Act 1996 already provides that where a
parent of a child with a statement indicates that he does not want a
mainstream education, the local authority has no duty to provide it. On
the contrary, parental wishes are a vital consideration in making any
decision about a placement. The LEA is expected to abide by those
wishes unless it believes one of three conditions specifically defined
in law: that to do so would not meet the child’s special
educational needs; that it would not be compatible with the efficient
education of other children with whom he would be taught; and/or that
it would not be compatible with the efficient use of resources. The
parent has a right of appeal to SENDIST if he disagrees with the
decision of the local authority about the placement, and
SENDIST’s decision is binding. Therefore, the current system
meets the objectives of the noble Baroness. I
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The Earl of Listowel: I hope the question I am about to ask has not already been asked; I apologiseif it has. The wife of a friend of mine teaches in a primary school in Sheffield. She has a class of32 children to manage. She has two classroom assistants, but they are taken up by two or three of the most difficult children. A number of the children have statements, and a number should have statements but do not. Dealing with such a large class is an immense pressure on her and her family. It would be helpful to hear what steps the Minister and his colleagues are taking to reduce class sizes, perhaps in certain areas.
Lord Adonis: Class sizes in primary schools have been reducing; the average size has reduced since 1997. It has reduced particularly rapidly at infant level because of the statutory requirement that classes for five, six and seven year-olds may not exceed 30, except in defined exceptional circumstances that mainly relate to appeals. The number of teaching assistants has more than doubled, and a good proportion of them are focused on primary schools. The adult-pupil ratio in primary schools has improved substantially in the past nine years, but I cannot be accountable for every classroom in the country. The classroom to which the noble Earl referred may not have seen all the benefits.
Lord Dearing: I thank the Minister for his response. I was looking not for immediate acceptance of these amendments, but for the will to look at them constructively. The Minister dealt at some length with the difficulty of the first part of the amendment; that is, separating the decision from the funding. I do not want to offer a half-baked solution; I understand the problem and we need to look at possible solutions.
The second part of the amendment is about velcroing funding to the child. I am not sure that the Minister spent much time on that. I felt that even if he had to say, “Your idea that the funding goes with the child across local authority boundaries raises big problems, but within the local authority it would go with the child”, that is a start. Even so, there is another element—the funding should be spent on meeting the special needs of that child. That does not seem to raise the problems.
In response to what the Minister said about the right of appeal, a parent who is not a good reader on receiving eight pages of typescript about rights and so on would tend to shelve it as being too difficult. One must recognise that there are big differences between how people are able to use their rights. Some are much more able than others and I suspect that there are a lot of parents who on seeing this formidable piece of paper saying what their rights are will put it on the shelf.
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I add one comment to what the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, was saying. It is right to encourage an aspect of the Government’s thinking about partnerships. Within the partnerships it would make sense for one school to say, “We are particularly skilled in dealing with autism”. Another one’s skill might be dyslexia. Within the partnership the schools can meet the needs of the community, as each school clearly cannot meet the whole diversity of needs.
Lord Adonis: I could give further responses to each of those points in turn, but perhaps I may write to the noble Lord to pursue a number of them.
Lord Lucas: I entirely support what the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, said about timescale. Clearly, as the Minister said, to move in the direction of the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, is a major change and takes a lot of consideration. There is no reason why this should be done with any hurry, particularly if we are doing so with consensus. We all agree that it is something we want to get right rather than having some politically competitive imperative to get it done before the next set of elections. I still think that it is the right way to move.
The Minister asked whether the quango would have to have a budget, whether the rationing would be done by the quango and whether that was right. I do not expect some locally elected representative to have a part in the decision of whether I need a knee replacement, and I cannot see the decision on whether my child needs support for his special educational needs as anything different. It is an assessment of somebody’s need. The provision of that need should be completely outwith local politics. Exactly how the quango sat with all the bits of apparatus from the NHS to social services to everything else like that is something we should have a long and constructive discussion on. The purpose of this, as much as anything else, would be to make sure that other means of dealing with the problems were incentivised at the same time as the purely in-school one of dealing with the problems at that end.
There are a lot of things to think about, but this is a very positive way to move forward. Obviously there is a budget. Whether someone with standard-grade dyslexia gets £1,000 or £2,000 a year is something that can be dealt with in the context of that budget. You can produce incentives in the budget so that if the child goes to a residential school he gets X and if he goes to a day school he gets X minus something, but part of the saving is going to the mainstream school to make that child and that bit of the decision more attractive. You can incentivise decisions which are sensible.
I am sure that the
independent sector will respond by providing, as it does with the care
of the elderly, care at the level of funding which will be available
from the state. I do not see that as a problem and I see the
fundamental question of whether the decision should be taken in some
way by elected representatives or by experts to be a no-brainer. That
decision of
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The Minister says, and I have no reason to think that he is wrong, that Nottinghamshire has wonderful provision in its mainstream schools, so everyone chooses that. If so, that would stay. I see no difficulty in differences evolving in response, especially to parentally influenced decisions as to what provision they want. That seems entirely right. To agree that the pattern of provision should be the subject of local authority fiat goes against everything that the Minister has been saying about other aspects of education being responsive to parental wishes and provision changing to meet wishes of children and parents. There is a great deal to be said for looking seriously at the direction proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Dearing.
Baroness Buscombe: This has been a good debate, which has confirmed what I said at the outset, which is that there is a need for a proper review of special needs education. That is something that could emanate from your Lordships' House as the level of debate, knowledge, experience and concern on the issue speaks volumes in what has been said both today and in previous debates on the Bill.
I do not want to detain the Committee but, briefly, I entirely concur with the noble Lord, Lord Dearing. As I said, there is a real problem with regard to statementing and funding and, somehow, we need to separate that process. As he said, this is a complex issue. I accept what the Minister said about the law stating that there should be a choice between special needs schools and mainstream schools but in fact, because of issues, especially funding, a different thing seems to be happening on the ground. There is real inconsistency across the country among LEAs. That is a strong impression, which is confirmed from our experience from talking to people directly affected. That does not merely affect parents who are unable or find it difficult to read. For parents there are hugely confrontational moments with local authorities. That is agony for all parents. This is an extremely difficult area and one in which the problems are manifest among more and more young children—ironically, as the noble Lord has attested, because of medical advances. This is not something that will go away; it is something that we must sort out for the future chances of all those children.
For now, I will take away what the Minister said about our amendments, read it in Hansard and beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
[Amendments Nos. 165 and 165A not moved.]
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Lord Adonis moved Amendment No. 166:
- (1) In section 88 of SSFA 1998
(admission authorities and admission arrangements), after subsection
(1) insert-
- “(1A)
Where the admission authority for a community or voluntary controlled
school is the local education authority, it is the duty of the
governing body to implement any decision relating to the admission of
pupils to the school which is taken by or on behalf of the admission
authority.
- (2) In
section 86(2) of SSFA 1998 (duty to comply with parental preference)
for “a local education authority and the governing body of a
maintained school” substitute “the admission authority
for a maintained school”.
- (4)
In section 94(1) of SSFA 1998 (responsibility of local authority to
make appeal arrangements) in paragraph (b) for the words from the
beginning to “the authority” substitute “in a case
where the governing body of a community or voluntary controlled school
maintained by the authority are the admission
authority”.”
On Question, amendment agreed to.
Clause 41 [Prohibition on interviews]:
[Amendment No. 166A not moved.]
[Amendments Nos. 167 and 168 had been withdrawn from the Marshalled List.]
Lord Adonis moved Amendment No. 171:
(a) omit the “and” at the end of paragraph (c), and (b) after paragraph (d) insert “and (e) in the case of a foundation or voluntary school which has a religious character for the purposes of Part 2, such body or person representing the religion or religious denomination in question as may be prescribed.””On Question, amendment agreed to.
20 July 2006 : Column 1476
[Amendment No. 171A, as an amendment to Amendment No. 171, not moved.]
Clause 42 [Restriction on alteration of admission arrangements]:
[Amendment No. 171B not moved.]
Clause 43 [Objections to admission arrangements]:
[Amendments Nos. 172 and 173 not moved.]
[Amendment No. 174 not moved.]
3.45 pm
Lord Adonis moved Amendment No. 175:
- (1) Section 100 of SSFA 1998 (permitted
selection: pre-existing arrangements) is amended as follows.
- (2) In subsection (1) for the words from
“so long as” to the end of the subsection substitute
“so long as-
- “(1A) In
subsection (1)(a), “the permitted proportion”, in
relation to any relevant age group, means the lowest proportion of
selective admissions provided for by the school's admission
arrangements at any time since the beginning of the 1997-1998 school
year.””
On Question, amendment agreed to.
Baroness Buscombe moved Amendments Nos. 176 to 178:
On Question, amendments agreed to.
Clause 49, as amended, agreed to.
[Amendment No. 179 not moved.]
Baroness Buscombe moved Amendment No. 180:
- (1) The Secretary
of State must publish annually a list of all regulations for which the
Department for Education and Skills is responsible which lay a burden
on any educational establishment or nursery school, and at the same
time publish an estimate of the total compliance cost of each such
regulation and of the average time taken by each person affected by the
burden to comply with each regulation.
- (2) The Secretary of State shall have a
duty to reduce by10 per cent the number of regulations
established under legislation for which his department is responsible
within two years of the coming into force of this Act.
- (3) At the end of a period of two years
after the coming into force of this Act the Secretary of State shall
lay a report before each House of Parliament detailing his proposals to
reduce by a further 10 per cent the number of regulations established
under legislation for which his department is responsible and the
timetable by which he expects to achieve that
target.”
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The noble Baroness said: Amendment No. 180 is concerned with reducing regulation. The central tenet of the Bill is to offer our schools the freedom to make their own decisions, but unnecessary Whitehall-driven red tape threatens to stifle schools' freedom and commitment to hours spent in the classroom. This amendment would reduce the burden of regulation on schools by 20 per cent over the next four to five years.
Meeting the requirements of regulations takes up much of teachers' time, and that time would be better spent in the classroom. This issue was hotly contended in debates on the Education Act 2002. My late noble friend Lady Blatch, much missed in your Lordships’ House, raised this issue with great passion four years ago. We had the support then of noble Lords on the Liberal Democrat Benches and I hope that they will be able to support us again now.
Over-regulation is an increasing burden on our economy. We are at a stage now where the burden of business regulation in this country amounts to the cost of 123 Scottish Parliaments. According to the latest Burdens Barometer from the British Chambers of Commerce, published in March 2006, the total cost of regulation since 1998 has increased by £14 billion to £52.7 billion, excluding the cost of the national minimum wage. In 1997 this country was 13th in the world on a measure of government regulation, but by 2005 we had sunk to 30th.
This Bill is about increasing choice for parentsand encouraging schools to undertake healthy competition to provide the very best education for our children. It is also about encouraging charitable trusts—independent financial funds—to take an active and responsible part in our education system. Yet schools remain beset by the burden of regulation and targets, while at the same time charitable trusts will be deterred from involvement in a system that does not demonstrate a commitment to reducing the burden of regulation.
Following a recent gathering of 70 aspiring managers at an event organised by the Centre for Excellence in Leadership, the TES, Channel 4 and Policy Unplugged, the TES’s debate of the week this week is whether further education colleges suffer from constant political interference. I am sure that we can draw an informative comparison from the evidence taken. Most striking was the following comment from an aspiring manager:
- “We are so busy
making the lousy changes politicians demand we can’t find the
time to do what we know is best for the
learner”.
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The Treasury March 2004 report on better public services, Devolving decision making, found that, altogether, schools were weighed down by no fewer than 207 externally set targets. Another 307 separate criteria had been laid down in LEA-based education delivery plans. I wonder whether the Minister can tell the House what improvements have been made since then. Do the Government have a current number of externally set targets?
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