Education: Special Educational Needs

Baroness Walmsley Excerpts

Thursday 21st October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Walmsley]

My Lords, it is my pleasure to follow the excellent maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson of Balmacara. The noble Lord hails from the north-west of Scotland and read natural sciences and chemistry at Oxford. He was a senior policy adviser to the former Prime Minister Gordon Brown. For 11 years he had a most distinguished career as director of the Smith Institute, which, as noble Lords will know, is a centre-left think tank, established in the name of the late, great John Smith, former leader of the Labour Party. The institute describes its purpose as pursuing,

“policies for a fairer society”,

and aims to build on John Smith’s passion for social justice—a passion many of us in this Chamber share. The noble Lord has a hinterland and I am delighted to welcome a fellow gardener to your Lordships’ House. No doubt the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, will be pleased that the noble Lord is also very keen on cinema and was the director of the British Film Institute. However, the noble Lord will be pleased to learn that he is not alone in your Lordships’ House in having an interest in beekeeping. Here he will find plenty of workers and not a few queens. He will also find a tremendous cross-pollination of ideas in this Chamber, to which he has already begun to make a valuable contribution. I think we can assure him that we will keep him very busy. I look forward to many more excellent speeches from the noble Lord.

I turn now to my own thoughts about the Government’s policy on special educational needs, following the Ofsted report. I will concentrate on speech and language needs and teacher training. The previous Government found that children with speech and language needs were not being well served and set up the Bercow review, led by the now Speaker of the House of Commons. Its report has served as a useful basis to allow us to move on. Your Lordships will be aware that my honourable friend Sarah Teather, the Minister of State for Children, has now sent out a call for views about the experience of children with SEN and their parents, with a view to making further improvements. Ministers are considering options on how to give parents a choice of educational settings to meet their children’s needs; transform funding for children with SEN and disabilities; make the system more transparent and cost-effective while maintaining quality; involve parents in any decisions about the future of special schools; support young people with SEN and disabilities post-16; and improve diagnosis and assessment to identify children with additional needs early. All these objectives are important to children with speech and language impairment.

Following the publication of the Ofsted report, a great deal was made of the suggestion that there may have been a large amount of misdiagnosis of children with special needs. I am convinced that this was something of a distortion of what the report actually said. However, it is true to say that if teachers were better trained about special needs, and if leadership teams were more focused on them, there might be less necessity to attach a label to some children and their needs could be fulfilled by more flexible interventions in the classroom. This would avoid the need for parents to have to battle for additional services. While I am all in favour of improving the qualifications of teachers and turning the profession into a Masters level one, it is important to emphasise the value of teachers learning about SEN and child development during their initial teacher training. This will underpin their practice for the rest of their careers and allow them to make sounder professional judgments. We must not lose that in initial teacher training as we move to more classroom-based training. As we free up the curriculum and rely more on the expertise of teachers, we have to move from training teachers to deliver the national curriculum to training them in pedagogy and child development. Then perhaps we will have teachers who understand how to use the tools already available to them for recognising and diagnosing special needs, and who have real ambition and aspiration for all children with special needs.

It is true that most children with speech and language impairment and hearing impairment are just as able as the rest of the population to get good GCSEs and A-levels and to go to university, given the right interventions. However, sadly, some children are labelled as having learning difficulties just because of speech impairment. It is sad to hear a parent say, “They think my child is stupid”, when all he needs is speech therapy. However, as with many things, early intervention is important. I welcome my Government’s announcement that all children will be screened at five. However, I urge the Minister that we need screening in the early years, and perhaps yesterday’s announcement about two year-olds will give us more opportunity to do that. This is already Liberal Democrat policy. We need to screen children soon after they move to secondary school, perhaps after the transition year when they have settled down, and always if a young person enters the criminal justice system. As the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, is not able to be here today, let me be the one to remind the Minister about the large number of young offenders with speech and language impairment. Will he therefore say how the focus on avoiding custody and having community penalties for young people will affect the drive to identify and deal with this sort of special need among young offenders?