I will resist the temptation to put it on YouTube.
The schools that I have mentioned and others will welcome the Bill’s insistence that the new education, health and care plans must be effective for young people all the way up to 25 years old. I specifically want to single out the work of Richard Aird, newly OBE and head of Barrs Court school, and of Alison Sheppard on behalf of parents in the county in pushing hard for proper further education for disabled young people in Herefordshire. Why should a young person with special needs be treated any worse than one without?
I welcome the new duty on local authorities to set out a local offer of suitable schools and institutions for each individual with special needs, but I want to draw the attention of the House and of Ministers to the fact that this carries with it a risk that the new duty will be interpreted in a purely local and parochial way, cutting out national providers with specialist expertise in particular areas. In Hereford, the Royal National College, for example, has superb facilities for the blind and partially sighted and is dedicated both to the skills of learning and of living. It combines these with a track record of innovation over several decades, ranging from special new Braille technologies to flexible learning methods for the visually impaired to the development of blind football and other sports at an international level. If any Member of the House has not seen a blind football match, I strongly encourage them to do so. It is a magnificent sport and full of extraordinary skill.
No local provider could match the Royal National College for expertise and deep understanding of the highly complex special needs associated with visual impairment. The students’ experience bears this out. I think of the student at the RNC with a passion for information technology who arrived, having been bullied for having a teaching assistant and special support at a mainstream school. He took his GCSEs three times and struggled to do a standard IT course because of his visual impairment. After two years not in employment, education or training, he was finally referred to the RNC by the local Jobcentre Plus. He now takes specialist IT training for the visually impaired and courses in art, and is back on track for the IT career he always dreamed of. I invite the Minister to meet me and the Royal National College to discuss its expertise and these issues in more detail.
In closing, let me say that there appears to me to be a straightforward solution to the problem of parochial local offers. This is to require that local authorities include national specialist providers as well as regional and local ones in those local offers. This has three benefits: it maximises choice, promotes competition and preserves the national providers’ deep reservoirs of
skill and expertise. It also perfectly fits with the Bill’s distinctively Conservative emphasis on excellence and institution building. I ask Ministers to give this idea their close consideration as the Bill progresses.
6.42 pm