My Lords, I shall confine myself to Part 3 of the Bill and certainly shall not cover everything. I welcome the Government’s attempt to substitute something better for the discredited system of statements, which has long produced more problems than solutions and has been the cause of great antagonism between parents and local authorities. There will still be appeals against decisions in this area, but the aim is that there should be fewer and that parents should be involved in the assessments at an earlier stage and more realistically. It is also very welcome that the assessments will be independent and that the recommendations can continue up to the age of 25, not only because this will cover the transition from school to college and beyond but because the age of 19 is for many children with special needs a time of quick improvement, so they need help at that stage. I share the astonishment of the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, that the continuation to age 25 does not cover students at university. I can think of no reason why it should not as they very often need the kind of support that will be offered to people at college.
The new plans are intended to enforce the collaboration between different providers of services, which the original report in 1978, the committee of inquiry, so conspicuously failed to bring about, although it thought about it a great deal. However, there are still certain areas of confusion which I shall be very pleased if the Minister could help to sort out. There is a good deal of vagueness in the Bill and uncertainty about how things are going to work in practice, such as personal budgets.
However, the Bill might be an opportunity to clear up an underlying confusion that has been around for a number of years—in fact, ever since an attempt
was made to bring the Education Acts into line with the Disability Discrimination Act. I refer to the difficulty that we have in distinguishing between a disability and a special educational need. Of course, the two often overlap but, as my noble friend Lord Low pointed out, not all disabled people have special educational needs. As the noble Baroness, Lady Wilkins, pointed out, most helpfully I thought, the use of the term SEN is liable to be very misleading because people use it as though all people designated as having an SEN have the same sort of need. I was extremely moved by her appeal to separate off those who have a sensory deprivation of one kind or another and who very often, if their needs are addressed, do not have any other special educational needs. This seemed to me the kind of confusion that the Bill might help to clear up.
In general, I confess to deep scepticism about whether it will be possible for local authorities to fulfil their duties in the face of more financial cuts. In particular, I should like to ask the Minister how local authorities are supposed to fund the training of SENCOs, the cost of which is approximately £3,000 for each trainee. At present, that is paid for centrally, but from April 2014 the cost is to fall on local authorities. Without properly trained SENCOs in each school, the whole new system will collapse. Under the proposed new arrangements, SENCOs will have to make decisions about the needs of children with an SEN but with no education, health and care plan—probably almost 90% of the group of children with SEN—without the help of the school action and school action plus framework. I have not found anything that helps me to understand the rationale for abolishing this distinction, and I should be very grateful to hear the Minister’s justification of it.
It is hard not to suspect that a large group of children—probably 18% of children in any given school, and more in some schools—are going to find themselves at the mercy of very variable and inadequate levels of educational support. I am referring to pupils who have SEN but do not have plans. The supply will be dictated, as usual, by financial considerations rather than considerations of need. I do not complain about that because that is the world that we live in, but the SENCO will have to be both a powerful advocate and very well educated in all different disabilities if he or she is to be able to make that kind of decision.
In particular, I should very much like to be confident—I am not—that the new structure will not lead to an increase in the employment by schools of ill trained and often totally inadequate generalist classroom assistants. Such assistants may do more harm than good to the pupils they are supposed to serve, because their aim is that the child they are looking after should appear more or less to keep up with the rest of the class. They tend to do the work for the child, rather than take time to make sure that the child properly understands what is going on. In the case of dyslexia, I believe that they often do more harm than good. As the noble Lord, Lord Addington, well knows, teaching a dyslexic child involves skill. Such children can be taught and they can be marvellously helped and supported, but an untrained classroom assistant is not the best person to do that.
I regard this Bill as an opportunity rather than anything else, and unless it is suitably amended I think we will have wasted a chance. I refer particularly to Clause 57, which is concerned with special educational provision other than in schools. This has particular, although not exclusive, application to children who have been excluded from mainstream schools. We know that children with special educational needs are many times more likely to be excluded than children without. Pupil referral units—they are mainly pupil referral units but there are other kinds of provision as well—are mostly inhabited by children with special educational needs. There are some very good PRUs. I know quite a lot about one in particular in Tower Hamlets, which does extremely good work. It puts students through GCSEs and A-levels. The work that it does is good, but in particular the teachers are most remarkable people.
Teachers who choose to teach in PRUs are not regarded by the profession or by the department as proper teachers. They are not allowed, for example, to assess school-assessed work at GCSE or A-level because they are only teachers in PRUs. PRUs are not recognised as places where trainee teachers can train because they are only PRUs and not proper schools. This seems to be grossly unfair on those teachers, but there is also a lack of use of what could be a marvellous resource. After all, they are teaching the most difficult children whom other schools have failed to teach, and they are a last resort for extremely vulnerable children. If this last resort is not supported and used, and if the skills on display there are not disseminated through other schools, the children in these units will be undervalued and the resource that they are using will be conspicuously undervalued.
My final point is that I entirely agree with my noble friend Lord Ramsbotham when he says that Clause 70 should be taken out of the Bill. PRUs are places from which children in secure accommodation could most benefit, not only through the skill of the teachers but through the use that the best of these places make of interactive distance learning, which is the most useful kind of teaching that these disaffected children can have. If these children are disaffected at school, they are likely to become yet more disaffected from society as a whole and they will end up in prison.
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