Given your previous encouragement for speakers in the debate to be brief, Madam Deputy Speaker, I will try to do so. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Torbay (Mr Sanders), who has spoken on the specific issue of diabetes in schools. I was contacted only last week by a family in Romsey whose four-year-old son is due to start school in September. They had been told that, should he feel a “hypo” coming on, it would be his responsibility to get himself to the school office, where he could be tested and the appropriate treatment administered.
I commend to the House the work of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation in encouraging local education authorities to put in place protocols and care plans so that schools can be made aware of the appropriate treatment and teachers can be properly informed about addressing the problem. This is particularly important for those dealing with very young children, for whom needles and testing kits might still be a relatively strange and foreign concept. Older teenagers might have become accustomed to them.
3.15 pm
I want to take this opportunity to mention the work of the Bill Committee, of the Under-Secretary of State for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe
and Nantwich (Mr Timpson), and of the hon. Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson). Our discussions were always undertaken in a consensual and collaborative manner. A lot of amendments were tabled but many were not pressed to a vote because we were able to come to an agreement on them. I commend the work done by the Minister in outlining exactly what the Government were seeking to do in the Bill, so we could reach agreement on areas of particular concern to us.
I should also like to commend my hon. Friend the Member for South Swindon (Mr Buckland), who has done an enormous amount of work in the field of special educational needs. He illustrated earlier the depth of his knowledge and understanding, and he has done fantastic work to highlight the difficulties faced by parents and families in relation to assessment. In Committee, we often used the words “fight” and “battle” when discussing the struggles that families went through to ensure that their child had an appropriate assessment and statement to address their needs. I hope the Bill, and the education, health and care plans, will remove some of that necessity to fight, and make things a great deal easier.
In Committee, I mentioned a specific subject, and I am pleased to see that the Secretary of State has taken it up. My constituency has a significant number of military families who, by dint of their career paths, are frequently moved around the country. A disproportionate number of those families with children with special educational needs, having secured a statement in one part of the country, are then moved elsewhere through no fault of their own. This can result in their having to go back to square one in the process. I am therefore delighted that new clause 9 takes account of that in seeking to make the EHC plans far more portable, so that families who have already been through that struggle do not have to revisit it.
There are many reasons for a family moving. I have mentioned military families because of my constituency interest, but I have also done a massive amount of work with an organisation called Ambitious about Autism, which runs the excellent TreeHouse school in north London. In highlighting to me the difficulties that families face if they seek to move to a different area, it has specifically mentioned the case of one young boy, Mohammed. He is 12 years old, and has autism and complex learning difficulties.
Mohammed’s family live in Westminster and he travels every day to the TreeHouse school, which is a considerable distance away. His family were desperate to buy their own property, and as Westminster is a phenomenally expensive borough to live in, they were hoping to move to another part of London. They felt constrained from doing so, however, because they felt that if they left Westminster, where they had secured Mohammed’s statement, they would have difficulty in ensuring that their new borough would continue to provide for his education at TreeHouse school. Such was the importance to him of that school that they were not prepared to put his education at risk. Instead, they have continued to rent a home in Westminster, even though their long-term plan was to move out of the borough and further away.
I promised to keep my comments brief, and I think I have managed to speak for only four minutes. I would like to thank the Secretary of State and the Minister for
having tabled the new clause. Portability and an ability to recognise care plans across different local authorities will be of critical importance to all those families who have struggled to ensure that their children get the provision they need.