My Lords, in moving Amendment 226 and speaking to the other amendments in this group in my name and those of my noble friend and the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, I draw the Committee’s attention to matters to do with disability. There is not much in the Bill focused on this, except for access. When we talk about access, getting those with disabilities through the university system must be a fairly high priority, as they are a large group. Indeed, it is reckoned that 20% of the school population have a special educational need, many caused by a disability. So to draw a little attention to it is justifiable at this point.
I feel a little mean bringing this again to the Minister but we are still waiting for guidance about what universities are supposed to do about their changed and enhanced
responsibility for dealing with those with disabilities. I am sure most of the Committee will have heard my speech on this on a previous day, but we have a major shift in that responsibility. Effectively, there are four bands reckoned to be a disability, although we cannot discuss it that clearly at the moment. Those in the first two are now the responsibility of universities. The guidance which was supposed to tell universities what those duties are and what is supposed to happen has still to be published, and we are now into the second term of the new regime. Indeed, when I asked a Written Question on this three months ago, the Minister said they were waiting to get the thing published. It is not his responsibility but I am afraid the person with the ball gets the tackle; it is just the way it falls. We need some guidance about what the Government’s thinking is, so a series of probing amendments is appropriate at this point.
The amendments are really attempts to extract information. At the heart of Amendment 226 is an attempt to find out what is going to happen. I do not defend the wording that closely; at this stage the debate is more important than the actual wording of the amendment. Amendment 227 looks to a precedent set within the rest of the education sector and brought forward in regulations last year, when the initial teacher training facility accepted that it must take on a higher degree of knowledge and expertise in dealing with special educational needs. The vast majority of the students who go into our university sector will come through the school system. If you have a degree of teaching, preparation and help for them at one level, merely dumping them out at the other side is something that we should not be doing, particularly as the university is supposed to be picking up this activity. Okay, it is only the bands judged to be of less severity, but if the lecturers—those doing the teaching at higher, university level—do not have some knowledge, they are going to make mistakes in their job of implementing this. The school system has proven to us that it is quite possible to have a duty and insufficient knowledge to carry it out. Let us avoid that here; let us get something in place.
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The last of the amendments in my name, although the wording may not be the most elegant ever produced, is Amendment 235, inspired by the fact that we can make mistakes when implementing across the board in those various bits of the education sector as a whole and we can make changes or create systems which have perverse incentives in them. It is probably now appropriate for me to refer to my declaration of interests. I am president of the British Dyslexia Association, I am dyslexic myself and I also have a financial interest as chairman of the company Microlink. It was decided that in order to get DSA for technical support in computing, you have to come up with a £200 initial contribution. Evidence shows that this has led to a situation where, despite having a high number of identifications, we have lower take-up rates. This affects people who have been identified as needing help to get good degrees, or even to complete their degree: they need technical support so they do not have an unfair disadvantage, usually help in word processing and in
assimilating information. You now have to pay for technical packages which are out there and have been out there for many years, and people are not taking them up. The £200 may not seem a lot to us, but at the initial part of a course it seems to act as a disincentive. There are students who will not achieve at a maximum level and are at higher risk of failing the course—probably the worst result, all round—because of this.
The Student Loans Company has an increasing role to play in administering this. I suggest we look at something like working this £200 into the student loan debt. We have something specific from the dyslexia world. The Committee may not be aware that if you have had an assessment as a dyslexic before you are 16, you have to have another one—this is only for dyslexia; it is very specific—to make sure you are entitled to this support. No other disability has this: I am under the impression that no other disability group has to do this again. Why does this matter? Because it costs £500. Effectively, dyslexic students will have a £700 up-front fee to make sure they get the help they are entitled to, that will enable them to complete their degree and mean that they are more employable in later life, when we actually have a duty to educate them and get them there in the first place. This is a ridiculous perverse incentive and it should be removed. I may have sprung this on the Minister, but the timing on this issue meant that I could not get a briefing to him in time, but I hope that the Government will start to address issues such as this.
That is one group where there are perverse incentives built in by historical cock-up. Surely we have a duty to start looking at this in the round. We have a situation where an entire section of the population does not know what is going to happen and we have not started to address some of the historical anomalies that are out there. Surely we should be doing slightly more. I beg to move.