Children and Families Bill

Debate between Baroness Walmsley and Baroness Wilkins

Wednesday 6th November 2013 Grand Committee

[Baroness Wilkins]

My Lords, I will speak briefly to support the amendment moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Howe. She has made a strong and clear case for action. This issue has been raised elsewhere several times and the fact that it continues to be raised must show the Minister the strength of feeling on it. The current approach of asking voluntary bodies to support improvements in individual local areas is just too piecemeal. The progress being made is far too slow, and deaf children are suffering because of it. Access to communication support for families with deaf children and young people is fundamentally important; the Government must send a clear signal to local authorities that it should be provided where needed. Otherwise, we will be here in 10 years’ time, still having this debate about the lack of sign language provision for families. I beg the Committee to support this amendment.

[Baroness Walmsley]

My Lords, I, too, rise to support the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, and agree with the points that she has already made. In July 2011, the Prime Minister said in response to a Question from my right honourable friend Sir Malcolm Bruce MP:

“We do a lot to support different languages throughout the UK. Signing is an incredibly valuable language for many people in our country. Those pilot schemes were successful”.—[Official Report, Commons, 13/07/2011; col. 308.]

The scheme that the Prime Minister was referring to was the I-Sign consortium, which has piloted family sign language classes in two regions. NDCS, with support from the Department for Education, continues to work to support the development of sign language courses. However, local authorities cannot be compelled to provide sign language support because there is no duty to do so. As has already been outlined, a very high percentage of deaf children are born into hearing families who have no previous first-hand experience of deafness. These families really need support to communicate with their child, particularly where sign language is chosen.

It has been estimated that where deaf children need to communicate in sign language, eight out of 10 parents of deaf children never learn how to communicate with their child through sign language. Without the right support from the start, deaf children and young people are vulnerable to isolation, abuse, bullying, poor self-esteem and low levels of attainment. We have already heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, how local authorities are very patchy in their provision of sign language services.

The SEN reform in this Bill offers the potential to generate a step change in the provision of sign language courses for families. For example, personal budgets may enable families to pay for this support themselves. However, while SEN reform might generate more demand for sign language courses, it really will be useless while local authorities can walk away, which is very damaging to deaf children and their families.

Children and Families Bill

Debate between Baroness Walmsley and Baroness Wilkins

Wednesday 30th October 2013 Grand Committee

[Baroness Wilkins]

My Lords, belatedly, I will speak to Amendment 118 and in support of Amendments 112, 113 and 114. I will be brief because most of what I was to say has been said. The aim of Amendment 118 is to improve accountability around the local offer by requiring local authorities to meet basic expectations around provision for children with special educational needs. This issue is particularly acute, as we have heard, for children with low incidence special educational needs because local authorities are often ignorant of the support that these children need.

A number of organisations, including the National Deaf Children’s Society, the RNIB and Sense, are concerned that the Bill is extremely weak on overall accountability, particularly on the local offer, with a system that relies solely on the parents of children with sensory impairments—many of whom are, as we have heard, busy being parents. A system that relies on them policing it across all 152 local authorities is not likely to deliver the significant change that many of these children need here and now. Other noble Lords have also spoken on the need for increased accountability.

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, I have a few additional comments to make in support of Amendment 113, to which I have added my name. I reassure the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, that in our amendment we do not seek a one-size-fits-all approach as far as local authorities are concerned. Of course we understand, and hope, that the provision made will vary from area to area, depending on the needs of the local population. We are simply looking for some commonality in the way the offer is expressed. The advantage would be that it would not just be helpful to parents in enabling them to choose between one local authority or another if they were able to move from one to another; there would be two other benefits.

First, it would deter a local authority from publishing a weak offer, because it would be very obvious that it was a weak offer. The “very little indeed”, as expressed by the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, would jump off the pages if there were some commonality in the way that offer was expressed. Secondly, it would help policymakers because this is a very new system. Undoubtedly the Government will wish to monitor how it is going and assess where it is going well and where it is going badly, and whether the regulations need to be tightened up at some point in the future. It would be very much easier to do that if there were a common way in which the local offer could be expressed; otherwise, I can see civil servants spending months digging into all the different local offers, expressed in different ways, in order to dig out that information.