Schools: Special Educational Needs and Disabilities

Baroness Sharp of Guildford Excerpts

Thursday 26th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sharp of Guildford (LD)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Addington on securing the debate today, which strikes me as a very timely one for us to have. I declare an interest as the special educational needs governor at a local primary school in Guildford.

Nationally, something like 15% of pupils in schools, 1.3 million, are classed as having special educational needs. Of those, 2.8% are classed as having quite substantial special educational needs. It used to be that when they were given special treatment it was called being statemented, because the statement of their needs identified the support that they needed. The Children and Families Act 2014 changed the concept of statementing to one of producing an education, health and care plan—EHC plans, as they are now called—although in many senses the process is very similar, in the sense that once a child is identified as having quite substantial special educational needs there is an assessment that involves, among others, educational psychologists with specialisms in particular areas, and the needs of the child and the support that is needed to help them are identified. The school has to provide that support although, as before, the cost of it is met by the local education authority.

The SEN part of the Children and Families Act was very much the brainchild of a colleague of ours in the House of Commons at the time, Sarah Teather. She was concerned to ensure that the care given to those with SEN cut across the various services provided and that there was joined-up thinking on the part of the Government. Frequently it was found that it was not just a matter of educational needs; that need would often spill over into social need, not only the child’s family background but also housing and similar issues. Sometimes social services were involved, and it was necessary to have the social services input and to have the health input from the NHS. As things stood, the emphasis was very much on the provision of educational services but there was not nearly enough joined-up work across the services to provide the necessary support for the child. As I said, much of the thinking that lies behind the concept of the new education, health and care plan was that there should be co-operation, in statute, between these various services so that you can get the joined-up working that is necessary to make sure that the child gets the support they need.

The other thought behind the Act was that perhaps too many children were being statemented. I know that, when she was a Member, Baroness Warnock believed that many schools pushed for children with autistic tendencies, for example, to be statemented, partly because the schools could then get enough resources to provide the necessary support. If truth be told, the figure has been at 2.7% or 2.8% for some time now, and there is no indication so far that there will be a reduction in the number of those put forward for the new EHC plans.

However, one should bear in mind that a very large number, some 15%, of young people with special education needs of one sort or another are looked after by schools and not by special provision. A very small proportion, some 3%, receive this special provision, but 15% of young people in schools need some sort of attention. This used to be called school action or school action plus, according to how serious the need was judged to be. That assessment is now entirely up to the school. In my own school, children’s needs are assessed when they come into the reception class. Although our school has links with the nursery school that feeds into it, not every child who comes to our school is from that school. We serve an area of relative deprivation so are slightly above the national average in terms of the number of children with special education needs as a whole, and we are very much on the national average as regards those who need special plans. The current arrangements emphasise the role of and provision made by the school as well as the point that my noble friend Lord Addington made—that the ordinary classroom teacher needs to be trained to cope with special educational needs. As I say, in the school where I am a governor we have a special educational needs co-ordinator, a SENCO. She has a number of higher-level teaching assistants whom she has largely trained to cope with particular areas. One is concerned with speech and language and another with behaviour. We also have a home liaison team and a home/school link worker who works very closely with the SENCO. That provides us with much of the social care element that is often necessary as well as with a link to the home.

The school is backed up. It is an academy, but we still use the local education authority when we need special services. For example, quite a few children come into the school with behavioural problems so we look to the local education authority when there is a need for a behavioural specialist. I believe that we buy in the services of that specialist. That emphasises both the importance of the special educational needs co-ordinator—every school now has to have a trained SENCO—and the role that she plays in co-ordinating services across the school and training the classroom teachers. In my school, there are sessions after school when she runs through the special educational needs issues. She also runs a surgery for classroom teachers between 8 and 8.30 in the morning. The school opens at 8.30 am and any teacher who has a particular problem can pop in to talk to her about it. She, together with the deputy head and the small team with whom she works, assesses the needs of every child coming into reception. The classroom teacher is obviously part of the group that makes the assessment and he or she can look to the specialists among our teaching assistants to come in if they need extra help. We also make assessments on a one-to-one basis of those with special educational needs and, if necessary, we put them forward for education, health and care plans.

I want to talk a little about the difficulties that we run into at that level. There has been the switch from statementing. Every child who had a statement has had to be reassessed, and that has created something of a backlog. It is up to the local authority specialists to conduct this reassessment and, as I said, by next year every child has to have an education, health and care assessment and plan.

In that regard, we are very dependent on being able to pull in the services of the local authority. Getting these local authority specialists to find the time to come in is very difficult, and I know that that is a problem that arises not only in relation to the school where I am a governor but to schools across the country. A child with autism coming into a reception class sometimes needs one-to-one support. In the last year we have had a couple of cases of children coming in with very real problems. They have not been able to settle into the classroom environment and have needed one-to-one support within the class. However, it has taken about a year to get statements for those children and, in consequence, the school has had to pay for a teaching assistant at a cost of about £16,000 a year. The cost of providing two one-to-one teaching assistants for a year in a relatively small primary school is substantial.

The key issue here—it has been noted by both my noble friend Lord Addington and the noble Lord, Lord Warner—is educational psychologists, and I have a question that I would like to put to the Minister. At the moment, the training period for educational psychologists is long—it takes six or seven years—and people will also be working in a classroom during that period. They get a bursary for the first year but, after that, I gather that they are employed by local authorities in an apprentice capacity, so to speak. However, they are not paid for the first year of their more specialist training. These are what are called “commissioned” places for educational psychologists.

At present, the Government provide 150 commissioned places but we desperately need more. Quite a number of vacancies across local authorities cannot be filled. There is a high turnover, partly because the young people who go into it are not particularly well paid. Even when fully qualified, they earn only just over £30,000, so it is not very well paid after six or seven years of training. They move from one job to another, and sometimes of course they move for other reasons—for example, their husband may have changed jobs. Can the Minister tell us why the number of places cannot be increased, given that there is a very real bottleneck in a lot of schools? There is the whole question of getting an educational psychologist to find the time to help with assessments of one sort or another or, for that matter, of getting support within the school when the SENCO needs help in coping with problems that arise from time to time. Why can that not be increased? The Association of Educational Psychologists feels that we need 200 places. Could not that be done?

I am quite impressed by the degree to which, in “good” schools—our school now is recognised as a “good” school—the children are not only assessed when they come in but there is careful monitoring of how they are proceeding, whether they are exceeding their age-related expectations and how they are doing in relation to other children in the class. It is good to see the attention that is being given to this, how carefully the SENCOs work with the classroom teachers, and how the classroom teachers respond. However, it is necessary that those teachers are properly trained. Again, this point was raised by both previous speakers. It is also necessary that more time is given in initial teacher training to identifying particular special educational needs. As my noble friend Lord Addington said, quite a number of children suffer from dyslexia and it would be sensible if those training to be teachers were more knowledgeable about it.

Classroom teachers face a diverse number of young people with whom they have to cope. The outside services are often overstretched and cannot meet the deadlines required, leaving a backlog of work to be done, assessments to be completed, education, health and care statements to be negotiated and agreed, and tribunal hearings to attend. One recognises how pushed many of the local authority people are in their jobs. All this reverberates back on the school, the SENCO and his or her staff, and the classroom teachers who have to cope with running the class—and that class is often made up of a diverse group of young people with diverse needs. They need to be properly trained to cope with these demands. Increasingly in our schools we have well-trained specialists in terms of the SENCOs and their support staff. However, they in turn depend upon the classroom teachers to recognise and understand the specialist needs that emerge from the diversity that they find among the pupils in their care.