Clause 16
Education and Inspections Bill
4:00 pm
John Hayes (Shadow Minister (Vocational Education), Education; South Holland and The Deepings, Conservative)
What a great pleasure it is, Mr. Chope, to serve under your chairmanship. I shall rely on our intimate familiarity to guide us through our proceedings.
The amendments give us the opportunity to return to the subject of special educational needs. Those tabled in the names of my hon. Friends and myself, and those tabled in our names and those of Liberal Democrat Members, are relevant to the capacity of the Secretary of State to alter special needs provision, and to the proper consultation that should take place with parents on his decision to alter such provision. The clause deals with precisely those matters, but it needs to be seen in context. So, I make no apology for re-amplifying our real doubts about the commitment to special schools.
I was lucky enough last night to have dinner at the Athenaeum with a distinguished group of experts in that field, including parents of special needs children, head teachers at mainstream and special needs schools, academics, educational psychologists and others. Over a splendid meal, we had the opportunity to discuss those matters. The conclusion that emerged from our discussions, which were wide-ranging, was that educational need must be the key determinate in matching provision and children. Yet that was not always taken as an a priori assumption.
During discussion on the Special Educational Needs and Disability Act 2001, Baroness Blackstone said that the
“commitment to inclusion has been strong and constant...The potential social, moral and educational benefits are significant.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 19 December 2000; Vol. 620, c. 635.]
The order in which she put those benefits is interesting. Of course, we are concerned about the social, moral and cultural interests of people with learning difficulties, but their educational needs will, at times, be more significant than any cultural concerns that we might have.
It is critical that the effect on the educational potential of individual children is the key factor in assessing the adequacy of special needs provision. We are concerned that this part of the Bill might facilitate the process by which the number of special schools could be further reduced. I do not think that that is the intention, and I do not claim that the Governmentare malevolent in that respect, but without the clear recommitment to special schools, which our amendments would provide, that doubt will remain.
There was some debate about that in earlier discussions, so I thought that it might be useful to have a look at some Government figures, which I did over breakfast—[Hon. Members: “Where was that?”] In a small Italian cafÃ(c) on the junction of Great Peter street and Great Smith street—it serves exemplary scrambled eggs. The Government’s figures show that there were approximately 93,000 children attending special schools in January 1999, but that by January of last year, that number had declined by about 8 per cent. to 85,540. I think that the Government remain committed to a policy of including as many children as possible in mainstream schools. I shall wait to hear what the Minister says about that. That policy has resulted in the closure, since 1997, of 93 special schools. I do not blame the Government alone for that—it was the prevailing orthodox thinking after the Warnock report and the following Act that was passed, of course, under a Conservative Government.
Baroness Warnock, whose report in 1978, as I mentioned, started the bandwagon for inclusion, said recently that the policy had backfired and left “a disastrous legacy”. Of course, the survey, about which we have talked, of teachers and head teachers, suggests that many of them know that the legacy has indeed been disastrous. In that survey, conducted by The Times Educational Supplement, they concluded that as many as one in four children with special needs integrated into the mainstream would have been served better by education in a special school. It is therefore vital that in the Bill we reaffirm our commitment to the continuance of special schools, and that we use this debate as an opportunity to celebrate their work and their excellence.
The Committee will know that one such special school threatened with closure, which might be protected by legislation that reaffirmed the role of schools in the way that I describe, is the Nuffield speech and language unit. My hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (John Bercow) has been a great champion of that place. The unit was part of the Royal National Throat, Nose and Ear hospital and, therefore, of the Royal Free Hampstead NHS trust. It has been in existence since 1971 and provides intensive teaching and therapy for children aged four to seven withsevere speech and language disorders, for whom there is no provision of comparable quality in mainstream schools. It is recognised as a centre of excellence. Between 1998 and 2003, 41 per cent. of the children leaving the unit returned directly to mainstream education.
My point about that school is that it is evidence of the fluidity that can occur when children spend time in special education and are then better equipped to take advantage of opportunities in the mainstream. We do not have to see the matter as static. It should be a dynamic process in which children’s needs are catered for most appropriately at each stage of their time in education. A child might well start off in a special school and then move to a mainstream school, as those Nuffield children have done—7 per cent. of children return to local language units and 38 per cent. transfer to the Meath school, a specialist school for children with specific speech and language difficulties.
The total cost of running the unit is some £300,000, whereas the expenditure of the trust is in the order of £300 million. The trust gives as the main reasons for its decision to recommend closure the Government’s inclusion policy and the preference of the local education authority for inclusion. The Committeewill understand, therefore, why we have tabled the amendment. Although we accept that the Government are not malevolent, we fear that we are all still suffering from the misassumptions about special educational provision that prevailed following the Warnock report and the legislation to which it gave rise. No such provision for children from four onwards can be found anywhere else. The fact is that the children with the most severe disorders need specialist intensive help, which units such as Nuffield can provide.
The school is critical, partly because the Government are keen to reduce the number of statements and partly because many LEAs, for ideological or financialreasons, are reluctant to issue statements before the age of five, and even when they do so, they are loth to finance out-of-area placements. I would go further: it is not enough simply to defend existing special schools; where we identify good practice, we should look to expand that kind of provision if the need warrants it. I want to see a new generation of special schools if that is what children need and parents want—that is the critical determinant.
That brings me to the other amendments in the group. Parents of children attending a community or foundation special school should be key consulteesin the case of any direction that requires the discontinuance of that school. Amendment No. 33 would, therefore, add them to the list. Furthermore, we ask in amendment No. 34 that the Secretary of State should give reasons for any such directions.
The first purpose of the amendments is to make a bold case for schools that provide excellent educational opportunities for disadvantaged children, and there are few children more disadvantaged than those with stated special educational needs. Units such as the Nuffield speech and language unit deserve the support that the amendment would give them. The second purpose is to ensure that the people most directly affected are properly involved in the process.
I make no apology for speaking to the amendments at some length, because the matter is important and they would add quality to the Bill. They will undoubtedly be accepted by the Minister in precisely that spirit.