Children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities
Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne Excerpts(1 month ago)
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Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne (Con)
My Lords, the Prime Minister has declared that 75% of five year-olds should have reached a good level of development. This is one of his key goals—I support that fully. I will refer exclusively to deaf children in these few minutes. Nearly 1 million people are born in the UK profoundly deaf. This gives us approximately 50,000 deaf children, as of today. Those children are nearly all put into normal classes, where they have no specialist teaching to help them speak, nor to understand what others are saying; yet speaking and comprehending what others are saying are the essential keys to these children reaching the good level of development to which the Prime Minister refers.
There are only 860 qualified teachers of speech therapy in Britain, so the lack of speech therapy is one of the key problems. Deaf children need to learn to speak in the same way as their family and classmates; and, equally, they need to be able to understand what others are saying. Yet there are 1.9 million children in the queue for speech therapy in the UK today. The likelihood of deaf children getting to the front of that queue is rather small. Deafness, of course, excludes children, not just from speaking and from understanding speech, but from other subjects as well. Even sports, for example, give deaf children problems with balance, since physical deafness means balance is also harmed.
There is another way and I ask the Minister to consider singing teaching. The strength of singing lies in its capacity to create correct articulation; language; the meaning of words and sentences; plus strengthening physical health through breathing and posture. Even better, social participation of all kinds comes when children are in a choir or taught singing individually. Singing and interacting with others through music is an important window out of the loneliness that is a direct result of the disability of deafness in children.
I ask the Minister to make these 50,000 children a top disability educational priority. This could be an easy win that flows right into this Government’s commitment to education for all children, provided that every possible tool is brought into place, including, but not only, music. Might the Minister meet me to discuss the ways in which music brings all children, even those of every disability, right into the harmonious fold with others? I would be grateful.
King’s Speech
Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne Excerpts(5 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne (Con)
My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness in commenting on the gracious Speech. I pay tribute to the noble Baroness the Minister, whose maiden speech was wonderful and enthralling. I thoroughly enjoyed it, thank her and ask her to pass on my congratulations.
The Minister remarked on the need to reduce inequality of provision in the Mental Health Act, for example. I wonder whether she might like my thoughts and those of my colleagues outside this Chamber on the need to reduce the need for mental health services at all. In other words, we have a rising number of mental health requirements and I believe that that could be tackled before anything else. Reducing inequalities is imperative, but it is more important to reduce the need for mental health provision—in other words, to strengthen the mental health of our total population.
This is particularly important for children, and perhaps that is where I might be able to offer something. We now know that musical training affects cognitive development quite dramatically. There are now studies, which some of my team have participated in internationally, as part of their charitable work. They make it very clear that the plasticity and growth of the brain are affected by music studies. Such evidence has not been available before.
The charity I chair, the AMAR International Charitable Foundation, has access to such evidence because we have been working with the neediest of the needy: victims of genocide. The cultural group in this case is the Yazidis, but it does not really matter which one it is, simply because the musical training we have offered has very clearly had an impact on the brain. By “the brain” I mean, in this context, the mental health of those who have suffered what the United Nations says is the worst crime against humanity of all. After a decade of training, which is imperative inside the camps themselves and with the victims, we have firm proof of the difference that it makes to mental health. Indeed, we have had a tour of the Yazidi choir we formed in Oxford University and in the Jerusalem Chamber, and also in other places in Windsor and Oxford. I hope to bring it back another time before too long, if I can find some funding, because the mental health impact of coming here has been dramatic as well.
Of course, that is not the only example I can offer. As a former student of the Royal Academy and of the Royal College of Music and a graduate in teaching there, I was an early board member of the Nordoff and Robbins charity, which, as your Lordships may know, is one of the most powerful and important international music therapy charities of all. I was lucky enough to be on its board in the very early days. I had to stop after a while because I moved into computer programming, which was non-conducive to the timing of the charity’s board meetings. None the less, I will give your Lordships one example of how music training can impact on physically badly developed people.
A small boy who was a long-term patient in a hospital had only one movement, which was his right arm. He could not control it. It was the only piece of his body that moved at all. It went up and down erratically, all day and all night. The lead music therapist, who was an ancient lady at the time and was very experienced indeed, was asked to have a look. She went into the hospital and sat at the far end of the ward—at that time it was in wards—so the boy did not notice her, and she watched his arm. After a week or two, she steadily moved nearer and nearer to his bed. By the time she was sitting beside him, he did not realise that he was being scrutinised, because she was then a familiar figure on the ward. Her instrument was a very small drum, which she used with her fingers. Sitting by the bed, she watched this erratic arm. After a little while she started tapping the drum in line, as far as she possibly could, with his erratic movements. After about a week, she felt she had mastered the erratic movements and then, the week after that, she taught him to follow her. Six months later, for the first time in his life, this teenage boy was feeding himself.
I say again that the plasticity of the brain is impacted by music training. We now have this information. I therefore ask the Minister to think hard about music in all schools—not music hubs but actual practical music in schools—and about looking at music as a therapy and health tool rather than just as something enjoyable.