Education and Adoption Bill

Debate between Baroness Hughes of Stretford and Lord Watson of Invergowrie

Tuesday 10th November 2015 Grand Committee

[Baroness Hughes of Stretford]

Before my noble friend Lord Watson speaks, perhaps I may ask a question. This is an important amendment and it made me realise that I did not know terribly much about what academies have to do in relation to children with special educational needs and disabilities. Can the Minister tell us—if not today then in writing after the Committee—what information schools have to provide, when they are to become academies, about the arrangements that they will make for children with special educational needs and disabilities? Secondly, what statistics does the department have on the numbers of children with SEND who are currently in academies, compared with those elsewhere in the education system?

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie]

My Lords, I am not sure which Minister will respond to this debate—I see it will be the noble Baroness. I am sure that she will tell us that the amendment is not necessary, but I hope she will say that that is because the two requirements in it are already in place. She is nodding—and if that is the case, it is most welcome.

The issue of special educational needs is much underestimated and is not fully appreciated by many people. Like other noble Lords, I have been in contact with the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists, which provided an interesting briefing with some rather worrying statistics. Two in particular stood out for me. First, one in five of all pupils has a special educational need of some sort; that represents about 1.6 million people in England. Secondly, 50% of children in areas of social deprivation have significant language delays, which of course have all sorts of other spin-off effects, not least the fact that children with vocabulary difficulties at five are significantly associated with poor literacy, mental health and employment outcomes in adult life. So it is important that schools deal with those issues as far as possible.

While the noble Baroness’s initial response is encouraging, we need to be clear whether there is any tendency—I am not aware that there is one and perhaps I could ask whether figures are available—by academies to exclude more children with special educational needs, like for like, than maintained schools. I would be concerned if that were the case. Certainly, the last part of the amendment, proposed new paragraph (b)(ii), which talks about,

“children with special educational needs and disabilities who do not have an education, health and care plan”,

is the most important because those children are most at risk. The school itself has to decide, in place of the plan that exists for other children, what it will do and how it will care for those children. I suppose it is self-evident that some schools do it better than others. This is not a division between maintained schools and academies. It is obviously more challenging to deal with children with special educational needs if there are only a few of them than if there is a significant group of them within the class and perhaps teachers can specifically be there full time to care for their needs.

With those points and the particular question about the comparison between academies and maintained schools, I await the Minister’s response with interest.