Clause 1
Special Educational Needs (Information) Bill
9:30 am
Maria Miller (Shadow Minister, Children, Schools and Families; Basingstoke, Conservative)
Again, I congratulate the hon. Member for Gateshead, East and Washington, West on securing the debate. Any debate on special educational needs helps push the issue up the agenda so that people will take notice of the importance of delivering not just words, but real action. The premise behind my amendments is to ensure that the provisions are not just words written on a piece of paper, but that they result in action at school level.
Many children who have special educational needs do not realise their potential in school. That is brought into stark light by GCSE results. In England, 54 per cent. of children gain five good GCSEs including English and maths. The figure is significantly and dramatically lower for children involved in school action and school action-plus. About 13 per cent. of children in school action achieve five good GCSEs, including English and maths, and the figure is just 9 per cent. for those in school action-plus. The situation for statemented children is of even greater concern. We are discussing the introduction of a mechanism that will help parents, children and teachers to ensure that such children achieve their potential.
I was concerned to read in the Royal National Institute for Deaf People briefing to the Committee that the achievement levels of children with deafness are also impaired by the current system. Among children who have no learning difficulty, just an impairment in hearing, only 32.9 per cent. achieve five good GCSEs, which should give us all cause for concern when compared with the other figures I have given.
It is only sensible that we gauge whether the support that children need is in place. We have all read the 2004 Ofsted report, which notes that only one in four local education authorities has strong strategic management of special educational needs and that the majority have weak evaluation systems. High-quality information is critical in ensuring that children meet their objectives.
Amendment No. 3 covers similar ground to the amendments tabled by the Liberals. I want to press the hon. Member for Gateshead, East and Washington, West on the specificity of the Bill to ensure that it will be a useful and valuable addition to our legislative format for special educational needs. Amendment No. 3 deals in particular with the diversity of the problems that children face. It would ensure that we have the levels of training in special educational needs that the hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole outlined earlier. It would introduce monitoring of the timeliness of the statementing process, about which many of my constituents in Basingstoke have great concerns, despite the fact that they live in an education authority that is deemed excellent in its delivery in that regard.
I pay tribute to the work of TreeHouse on the background of the Bill. It did a great deal of work in establishing the fact that there was a lack of information, particularly with regard to autism. The Bill hints at the sort of information that might be required, and amendment No. 3 is probing to see if that point can be taken a little further. I am trying to ensure that the Bill is the effective document that it needs to be.
On levels of training, we must ensure that there is continuing professional development. In my county of Hampshire, there is a very developed CPD programme that teachers can access on a regular basis. However, no information is available about which schools in my constituency or throughout the county are taking up that good-quality professional development training. Parents of children with special educational needs would be most interested to read about that.
Dealing with special educational needs is part of every teacher’s daily life, and compelling statistics from the National Union of Teachers show that there are massive gaps in teacher training, as the hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole hinted. The NUT’s survey found that only 16 per cent. of teachers had specific special educational needs qualifications. That might be understandable, because those teachers who are going to work in special schools might be the ones who want to go forward and take those specific qualifications. However, 86 per cent. of teachers have not received any continuing professional development training in the area of moderate learning difficulties, and only a quarter have received professional development training on behavioural, emotional and social difficulties.
Teachers face these issues in the classroom every day of the week, and we are simply not giving them the tools to deal with them. The figures show that more needs to be done to support teachers in the classroom, and we should be able to look regularly at whether that is being achieved, because the vast majority of teachers want to receive such training and support.
There is a particular problem in the areas of dyslexia and autism. Many teachers lack confidence in not only supporting those children affected, but identifying needs. I know that that area is of particular interest to the hon. Member for Gateshead, East and Washington, West and that it is one of the reasons why we are here today discussing the Bill. Xtraordinary People, which is an organisation that does a great deal of work in this area, estimates that three quarters of the children with whom it is involved are being taught by those who have not been trained to deal with dyslexia or other specific learning difficulties. That reiterates the scale of the problem and the need for us to be able to monitor it more closely.
I will briefly address the aspects of the amendment that deal with the diversity of children’s special educational needs. The number of different needs that a child might have, and how those might be dealt with, are currently looked at in some way within the school census, but that does not go into the sort of detail that would ensure effectively that the training provided to teachers is of sufficient quality. There is still confusion about the level of special educational needs in our schools, particularly when we consider an area such as autism. The Medical Research Council says that around one in 166 under-eights is somewhere on the autistic spectrum, whereas teachers say that that figure is significantly different—as high as one in 80. A provision in the Bill to address the diversity of children’s needs would enable us to clarify the situation.
Finally, with regard to the statementing process, many parents are greatly concerned that local authorities are in a difficult position because, in many ways, they must act as both poacher and gamekeeper by assessing needs, granting statements and also providing budgets. There is thus the potential for a conflict of interest. In 2006, the Education and Skills Committee looked at that in some detail and called for a completely fresh approach. It stated:
“The Government’s failure to even consider the current statementing process is a real missed opportunity.”
While this debate is not about the statementing process, or indeed to call for changes, monitoring the timelines for when statements are put in place might shed a little more light on several of the problems experienced by parents in some parts of the country when trying to get the sort of support that their children need.
The Conservative special educational needs commission, led by Sir Bob Balchin, recommended that statements should be replaced by special needs profiles that would be drawn up by an independent and accredited profile assessor and that funding should come from a national funding agency, thus removing the need for unnecessary adversarial appeals and the apparent conflict of interest in local authorities. That is a practical way in which we could change the system, and within the Bill there is a practical way in which we could monitor the grave concern experienced by many parents due to an unnecessarily long statementing process.