Written evidence to be reported to the House
Education and Skills Bill
12:00 pm
Brian Lightman: If you want to break down the costs, you are going to need additional staff who can offer specialised support. For example, in our school we employ a youth support worker who provides specialised counselling and mentoring to young people. That is an extra member of staff. You have an extra teaching assistant within a very small class to give those children one-to-one support because often they have something like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or other special educational needs, and need help to engage in learning.
Once you get down to small group and one-to-one support, it is just like any other SEN provision. Those are expensive types of support. There is also a higher pupil-teacher ratio in whatever context they are learning. If you put them into smaller environments—in the children’s plan, for example, there was the idea of studio schools—then that is obviously going to cost more money because they are smaller institutions and they are going to require accommodation and the ensuing additional costs. There are certainly additional costs. I think it would be very wrong and naive to assume that you could do this on the cheap, and I do not think that would be practical.