I shall speak to Amendment 106, to which I have added my name because of the word “monitors”, which I shall refer to on my Amendments 117 and 123. I shall also speak to my Amendment 115.
Regarding Amendment 115, I make no apology for continuing to major on speech, language and communication needs, despite the Minister’s welcome reassurance to me that they were climbing up the list of priorities. As I have said, bearing in mind that speech, language and communication needs are a growing 21st-century scourge, I would like to see them coupled with special educational needs in education, health and care plans, which are made for everyone—not just those with such needs. Amendment 115 is a probing amendment to ensure that children and young people with speech, language and communication needs who are not eligible for an EHC plan will not be overlooked by services available under local offers. In that connection, I am very glad to see that paragraph 11(a) of the
schedule to the draft code of practice states that local offers must set out what speech language therapy provision is available. The Government should therefore also stipulate that local authorities’ local offers must be backed up by evidence-based research, on which I commend to the Government the Better Communications Research Programme, whose reports they published last year.
I move on to Amendment 117. Local offers, however well intentioned, are bound to end up as postcode lotteries if we are not careful—hence my call for a strategy. The Minister told the Committee that a strategy was in place for the period when a child was in school during its nought to 25 pathway, but it is not apparent for the periods before and after that, or indeed in linking those three periods together in what I call the child development strategy. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Nash, for his recent letter on teacher training but I am not wholly reassured. He referred to assessments and professional judgment but did not confirm whether child development is taught, compulsorily, during all teacher training to enable teachers to do what he describes in his letter. I would be grateful for confirmation that that is so.
The Better Communications Research Programme, which I mentioned, showed that too many children enter school without their speech, language and communication needs being satisfactorily addressed, or even identified. This is being addressed in the early years foundation stage. I have already drawn attention to the need for health visitors and others who carry out assessments to be trained by speech and language therapists to identify the indicators of speech, language and communication needs. In an overall strategy there would then be a “So what?”—remedial treatment designed to enable every child to engage with its teacher, and so with education, to the best of his or her ability. However, to ensure that this happens, local authorities must be held to account for their service provision, including their mechanisms for identifying needs. I believe that is best done by independent quality assurance by an inspector or regulator.
I have mentioned before the crucial role played by health and well-being boards, because they are the only organisations which are in touch with every individual from nought to 25. In this connection, I admit to being wary about Ofsted, which suggests that whatever method is selected for holding local authorities to account, it should preferably be independent of either education or health to ensure objective judgment. I give notice that when we come to Part 5 I shall be reflecting that the Children’s Commissioner might be ideally situated to take on this role.
Much has already been said about the need for information. The purpose of Amendment 123 is to ensure that a school’s special educational needs provision is consistent with local offers and that schools have to think about their provision of special educational needs as a whole. I hope that the amendment is designed also to ensure greater transparency for parents—an issue that has already been raised several times in this Committee. Therefore, I hope that the probing will result in due consideration being given to these proposals.