My Lords, I, too, give my full support to the amendment moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Wilkins. I shall make three points in support. The amendment is inspired by Sense, the RNIB and the National Deaf Children’s Society. As vice-president of the RNIB, I declare my interest in that connection.
Nowadays, the majority of school-age children with sensory impairments attend mainstream provision and often rely on support from specialist visiting teachers and services. Whether the support comes from outside or inside the school, the development of mainstream provision for children with sensory impairment is of sufficiently recent origin for it to be the case that many schools in which children with sensory disabilities and impairments are being educated are still unfamiliar with the methods of educating children who are blind, deaf, or deafblind, and with the special skills that they need, the communication methods that they use, and how to inculcate those skills. It is vitally important that there should be a system of inspection to assure us that services are of an adequate quality. At an early stage of this transition to mainstream, services are not yet of the quality that we want to see; it is in the nature of the case that you do not always get services of the quality that you want just at the beginning of a new development. But I want to argue that the existence of a system of inspection and accountability is absolutely vital to raising standards and avoiding bad practice just by default. The lack of scrutiny afforded to these services places these children at risk of poor provision, particularly as mainstream teachers and schools are still unlikely to be familiar with the specific needs of children with sensory impairments.
The second point that I would like to make is that, in other areas, the department has already recognised the importance of strengthened accountability. In its response to the responses received to the consultation on secondary school accountability, the department stated:
“The most effective education systems around the world are those that have high levels of autonomy along with clear and robust accountability”.
That is the kind of point that we were trying to make in relation to the local offer in the first debate this afternoon. We want there to be local autonomy, but we want also to be satisfied that that is not developing as a postcode lottery and that too many services are not falling below the mark. We need a system of clear and robust accountability alongside the notion of local autonomy.
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The OECD has produced evidence that shows that,
“a robust accountability framework is essential to improving pupils’ achievement”.
And this is my third point—that Ofsted has identified that local authorities are very weak on evaluation of SEN provision. A 2012 Ofsted report on effective practices and services for deaf children found that there was,
“limited strategic overview and no systematic approach across all services to evaluate the quality of services and their impact on improving the lives of deaf children”.
The OECD evidence, the department’s own response to the consultation responses that it received and the Ofsted report that I have just quoted are more than enough to substantiate our argument that a vigorous and thoroughgoing system of inspection is absolutely essential to the development of a system of provision for children with SEN in which we can have trust and confidence.