Education Bill

My Lords, this is a straightforward amendment which I hope the Minister may be willing to accept. The proposed new Clause 42, which I am moving, ensures that schools cannot be designated as teaching schools by the National College for School Leadership unless they have received an outstanding grade for teaching special educational needs. The schools White Paper, The Importance of Teaching, made it possible for schools to apply for teaching-school status, allowing them to become centres of best teaching practice in their local area. Schools’ ability to apply for teaching-school status was extended to special schools teaching children with predominantly complex special educational needs in the SEN Green Paper, Support and Aspiration: A New Approach to Special Educational Needs and Disability. The eligibility criteria for schools applying for teaching-school status include an Ofsted rating as outstanding for overall effectiveness, teaching and learning and leadership and management. In these days, when so many more children with SEN are educated in mainstream schools, it is hard to see how a school could get a rating of outstanding for overall effectiveness without being able to demonstrate excellence in the teaching of children with SEN. However, given the specialised nature of this work, it would seem sensible to require schools to be able to demonstrate expertise in this area as well as those already listed in the criteria if schools are to be expected to improve teaching in the area of SEN and improve standards and spread best practice. The Special Educational Consortium is concerned that under the existing eligibility criteria a mainstream school applying for teaching-school status could achieve this without having the necessary expertise in the teaching of children with SEN. This is a concern because many children and young people with special educational needs are now being taught in mainstream educational settings, where it is essential that schools should be able to recognise the particular challenges they face in accessing the mainstream curriculum. Given the importance of the teaching workforce having the skills to work with children with SEN, it is vital that schools be able to demonstrate their excellence in this area as part of the criteria for achieving teaching-school status. Having an outstanding rating for the SEN element of a school’s work is also important for giving parents and children confidence that the practice being spread through local schools partnerships will help ensure that children with SEN can participate fully in learning. Introducing the additional criterion that schools have an outstanding rating from Ofsted for their SEN teaching will encourage schools considering applying for teaching-school status to address the way they open up the curriculum to children with SEN and, where children are taught in an SEN unit outside the mainstream school, how learning outcomes can be improved. This would help to address a significant barrier across all education settings, and the lack of expertise and understanding around low-incidence impairments such as deaf/blindness where access to communication and other teaching specialisms is necessary if the challenges are to be overcome. Any sharing of best practice needs to have a well-developed knowledge base to draw on. However, the Special Educational Consortium’s experience is that knowledge of SEN and the added difficulties that learners with special educational needs face is lacking in many local areas. Requiring schools desirous of acquiring teaching-school status to be able to demonstrate expertise in teaching children with SEN could help to address this issue. I beg to move.