Schools: Arts Education

Baroness Warnock Excerpts

Thursday 27th November 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Warnock (CB)]

My Lords, I join in thanking my noble friend for introducing this debate. I also join in congratulating our youngest Member on her maiden speech. We hope to hear much more from her, especially on the subject of teaching and the freedom that teachers in free schools may have to adapt and improve the balance that they can introduce into their schools.

I was also deeply moved by the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Cashman. He took the subject that I was going to talk about briefly this evening. We have had many debates on arts education in the House. I normally find myself talking about music education, in which I have been involved since the golden age of instrumental teaching in the late 1950s and 1960s. I have continued to feel very strongly about the kind of opportunities that ought to be given to children and were given to them when the noble Lord, Lord Maclennan, first picked up his violin from under his desk.

Today I want to say something about teaching the visual arts, although I feel rather ashamed of speaking in such an amateurish way, after hearing the extremely professional speeches of my noble friend Lady Kidron and the noble Baroness, Lady Nye. I pick on the visual arts simply because I think that, if a parent has a child who is enthusiastic and talented musically, it is usually possible, if you have the money, to find very good teaching outside school, even very good choirs and orchestras on Saturday mornings to fill the gaps that perhaps the school is not doing anything to fill.

In the case of the visual arts, it is very difficult to find any parallel way of getting your child taught art. In fact, you probably do not think of doing such a thing. I therefore believe that schools have an overwhelming responsibility for teaching children in the visual arts from a very early age. This is not only a matter of allowing children to have the fun and experience of self-expression. Some children do not particularly enjoy expressing themselves through the visual arts. However, a good teacher of art teaches children to look; to see things that they probably would not look at or see otherwise. A lot of us—grown-ups as well as children—scurry along the street or tear down the motorway without looking at what we are passing as we go. The talent of looking and seeing needs to be followed up with being taught—it needs teaching—the skill of representation, which is a very natural human instinct, as we know. Thousands of years ago, human beings were representing what they saw on the walls of caves and so on.

If children are not taught to see and properly look at things in school, they are being deprived of something that is almost like a new sense of what the world is like, what their place in it is, and how they can contribute to the things that people want to look at. Of course, this is not just a matter of teaching children to draw or to paint, although these skills are crucial, as any practising artist will tell you. You must be able to draw before you can do anything. It is also a matter of seeing what is a good design and what is a bad design. It does not matter whether the object is a chair, a building, a window or a cushion cover. The ability to look and to discriminate between something that is worth doing and something that is rubbish needs to start at a very early age and to be taught in school, because it will not be taught outside school. The failure of maintained schools to keep up this tradition of teaching art as an integral part of the curriculum is socially undesirable, if not disastrous.

Every Government has been in danger of this, and the present moment, with the utterances of the current Secretary of State, is a particularly good one to raise this point. Successive Governments have tended to take the attitude towards art teaching that Sir Keith Joseph once referred to as the “leather blotter view” of the arts. That is, a leather blotter may be an agreeable thing to be given, and you put it on your desk, but it is totally dispensable. Everybody can live without a leather blotter. That attitude is certainly exemplified in what we have most recently heard from the department, which I find incredibly depressing.

Therefore, let us, and the Government, give up that view. Otherwise, I fear that what will happen, which is happening increasingly, is that students who enter architectural schools and design colleges, join a national youth orchestra and maybe go on to become professional instrumentalists—all these people who enter the artistic world, which includes the world of design—will come from middle-class or relatively affluent families. That is not only grossly unfair to all the talent there is in children from disadvantaged backgrounds, but is the most appalling waste of talent. We have only to think of people such as the noble Lord, Lord Cashman, and David Hockney to realise that there is no class distinction in talent in the arts. We waste one of our greatest assets as a country if we fail to allow the disadvantaged end of the school population to benefit from the kind of teaching they ought to have. That is especially true in the case of the visual arts because, as I say, it is very difficult for any parent, however enthusiastic, to substitute for the teaching of the visual arts skills that their child ought to be getting at school.

Children and Families Bill

Baroness Warnock Excerpts

Wednesday 5th February 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ramsbotham (CB)]

My Lords, I am extremely grateful to the Minister for what she has just said, and also for the many discussions and debates that we have had with both Ministers and officials during the Bill’s passage. I am extremely grateful for what has been done. Not only is it a great advance on what was there before but it has the benefit of building on the experience of many years ago regarding what could and should be possible in young offender institutions for people with problems that have otherwise gone unaddressed. I am particularly grateful for the movement that has been made since Report and for the strengthening of the requirement on local authorities to make certain that the change has happened.

I am also extremely grateful for two other things. The first was the Minister’s assurance that those of us who are interested in this subject, including people who are far more expert in it than I am, will be involved in the preparation of a code of practice which will be such an extremely important document in the future. The second was her assurance that the Ministry of Justice will be involved in those discussions as well. As I have explained before, there have been many good initiatives around the country but the Ministry of Justice’s response to them has not been all that was desired and they have been dropped.

Finally, I am grateful for the platform that has been provided for youth offending teams. A disturbing fact is that few commissioning groups in the country appear to realise that they have a responsibility for things such as mental health treatment of people who are undergoing community sentences. The fact that that is on the statute book with a clear “must” will provide just the stimulus that is needed to pull people together and make things better. I really am grateful for all the work that Ministers and officials have done on this part of the Bill.

[Baroness Warnock (CB)]

Having put my name to the original amendment to remove the then Clause 70, perhaps I may also add my gratitude. This is a real step forward in the education of young people in custody—not just people with special educational needs, which most of them have in any case. In general, it is a landmark move forward, so I express my appreciation to the Government for that.

[Baroness Hughes of Stretford]

My Lords, if you consider the amendments on young offenders that will have been added to the Bill in total when it is enacted and compare that to the position when we started—the complete exclusion of young offenders from any of the provisions on special educations needs—you can appreciate the enormous journey that has been made. I welcome that the Government have, in the end, listened to the arguments that were made by Members across the House. This issue has concerned many noble Lords on all Benches but I want to acknowledge in particular the expertise and leadership that the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, brought to the issue, corralling us all together and making sure that we ultimately got the changes that we see today—which I very much welcome.

Children and Families Bill

Baroness Warnock Excerpts

Tuesday 7th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Warnock (CB)]

I support everything that my noble friend Lord Ramsbotham has said. This is an enormous opportunity and it would be disastrous if the Government did not seize it. It has long been an outrage that there is a large number of young people with special educational needs in places of detention. Nobody disputes the evidence that there is a huge number of such young people, and this is an opportunity to remedy the neglect that these children have had. I entirely agree that the present wording is such that local authorities may very well make no changes whatever, and the Ministry of Justice has no power to compel governors of such places to do what urgently needs to be done. I do not think that there can be any dispute about that, and I implore the Minister to come back with wording which is a great deal tighter and which will make the change that we all know has needed to be made for a long time.

[Lord Storey]

My Lords, we all know that 70% of these young offenders have special educational needs. We also know that 10% or 20% of them have statements. We know, too, that a huge number of them—I do not know the exact figure but 70% or 80%—will go on to reoffend. Therefore, it is really important that this group of young people gets the best possible special educational needs support. When this Bill first came out, I found it unbelievable that EHC plans would not be going with these young people into their institutions.

One of the hallmarks of the Bill has been the Minister’s desire to discuss, consult and listen to what people say, and I pay tribute to him for doing that. During the discussions on this matter, it has become clear to all of us that the number of young people in these institutions is declining, as is the time that they spend in them—thank goodness. The practicalities of getting their EHC plans to go with them becomes very difficult, particularly if you are talking about different local authorities, and therefore what the Minister is proposing seems sensible.

I also pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, for his remarkable knowledge in this area. I agree with him, and I hope that when the Minister replies he will be able to refer to the concern that a lot of us share about the words “best endeavours”. Sadly, the justice system is not an educational system, and “best endeavours” is too wide a hope—for example, “I use my best endeavours to get up early in the morning but I don’t”. I hope that noble Lords can see the point that I am making. The use of this phrase is a recipe for not doing the sorts of things that we in this House want to see provided for these young people. Maybe the word to use is “responsibility” or “duty”—I do not know—but I hope that the Minister will indicate that he will look at this again and come back with exact wording to make sure that the special needs provision that we all want to see is provided.

Children and Families Bill

Baroness Warnock Excerpts

Tuesday 17th December 2013 Lords Chamber

I understand the Government’s position, which the Minister set out in Grand Committee, that the views of the parent should be the determining factor in what school a child attends. However, there need to be stricter and clearer protocols for what steps the parents must follow in such instances to protect both them and the child or young person from the risk of receiving misinformation. Regulations should also state that, on making this decision, parents must have ready access to specialist advice that may fully explain both the potential beneficial and negative outcomes of any such decision for the child or young person. I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say.

[Baroness Warnock (CB)]

My Lords, I have added my name to the amendment of my noble friend Lord Low for reasons that I think are a worry for everybody who is concerned with Part 3 of the Bill; namely, the lack of clarity as to how children who do not get an EHC plan will be placed, and the processes by which they are placed. This must be a worry for parents with moderately disabled children as well as for people who are concerned with the clarity—as we hope—of the legislation.

I am not a wholehearted, ideological supporter of inclusion for all children. I think that special schools are enormously important, and there was a time when it looked as though we were going to have specialist special schools, beacon special schools and special schools whose expertise would flow over into mainstream schools much more readily than it does at present. Therefore, I am by no means concerned to uphold a view that would end with all children with disabilities being educated in the mainstream. In some cases, it is very difficult to ensure that children with disabilities do not interrupt or destroy the possibility of the education of other children in the school—this, of course, goes particularly for children with behavioural and emotional difficulties.

The Bill needs to be much clearer on how children will be placed within their local authority area if they do not have a plan made out especially for them—I think that that is still a matter of lack of clarity. Parents find it very difficult to make the decisions and choices that the Bill very properly emphasises, because of the difficulty of access to exactly what the ordinary, mainstream school will be able to offer their child. I know that a large number of parents want mainstream education for their children whatever their disabilities, whether they are going to get the best possible education and the best possible chances or not—it is a fixed belief that it is a right for a child to be educated in the mainstream and for parents to make that demand.

Parents who are genuinely interested in finding the right school for their child who has a disability, but may not be severely disabled or have a complex disability that speaks for itself, need the means to make a properly informed choice. That is why I like the wording of my noble friend’s amendment—although I find the grammar rather difficult—and why I strongly support it.

[Baroness Wilkins (Lab)]

My Lords, I speak in strong support of the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Low, which is set out so comprehensively and to which I added my name. If accepted, it will reassure those of us who are concerned that elements of Part 3 of the Bill could weaken the right of disabled children and young people with SEN to be included in mainstream education. Sadly, the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell of Surbiton, is not able to be in her place today because, like many people, she has a bad cold. But many noble Lords will have heard her give eloquent testimony of the blight that her segregated education laid on her life. It was not necessary, and it is something that has never left her.

It would be welcome if the amendment were further strengthened by extending the duty to post-16 providers, to ensure consistency for disabled learners across the educational experience. Local authorities such as Nottingham, Calderdale and Newham have used such duties to good effect. They have provided specialist support services and training for mainstream schools so that those schools are confident in implementing inclusive educational practice. This has increased the number of disabled children and young people with a wide range of impairments and health conditions being included in mainstream education. But while some local authorities have been proactive in promoting inclusive education at a strategic level, a lot of work still needs to be done to support the development of inclusive education across the country, especially when half of our disabled children and young people with SEN are still being placed in segregated educational provision.

I am very concerned that without an explicit duty, local authorities will become complacent—and, more worryingly, will revert to the practice of investing increasingly limited resources in existing segregated, rather than inclusive, educational provision. For instance, Kent County Council is already investing heavily in special school provision. Nigel Utton, a Kent County Council primary school head teacher and the chair of Heading for Inclusion, is quoted as saying:

“About half the children with statements in Kent are in special schools, with so much resource being targeted at special provision (not to mention the huge transport costs incurred) mainstream schools are left with a very small proportion of the special needs budget. The pressure on mainstream schools to achieve high academic standards, combined with budgetary pressures, is forcing many to not accept children with SEND statements or to persuade parents to leave”.

Such investment in special schools is not compatible with the Government’s Article 24 obligations. One such obligation is to develop and promote inclusive education across the country by building the capacity of mainstream schools to support the inclusion of disabled learners. The situation will only worsen if the Bill, and the draft SEN code of practice, do not include the explicit duty to promote inclusive education practice. I urge noble Lords to support the amendment.

Children and Families Bill

Baroness Warnock Excerpts

Monday 11th November 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Cormack]

Will my noble friend amplify that point? He very kindly said that he would be glad to convene a meeting to discuss this appalling problem of the internet. Could he give reasonable notice of that meeting and try to convene it as soon as is reasonably possible?

[Baroness Warnock (CB)]

Can the Minister answer the point made by my noble friend Lord Listowel about the ways in which teacher training could concentrate on this area that I roughly think of as moral teaching? There is no requirement that this should be taught in any particular way. I quite agree with the noble Lord about the futility of making lists but the point is that teacher training does not concentrate sufficiently on it simply because it is not part of the national curriculum. Can he say what he thinks about my noble friend’s point?

[Lord Nash]

We have great concerns about the quality of teacher training in this country, which is one of the reasons why, frankly, we do not think qualified teacher status is essential. If teachers were trained for many years, like doctors, vets or lawyers, it might be different, but they are not. In ITT colleges, somewhere between one-half and two-thirds of training is in schools. We are expanding in-school training and have substantially beefed up, for instance, behaviour management training. I will look at this and write to the noble Baroness, as well as talk to Charlie Taylor about what more we can do in this regard.

Children and Families Bill

Baroness Warnock Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Warnock]

My Lords, I shall confine myself to Part 3 of the Bill and certainly shall not cover everything. I welcome the Government’s attempt to substitute something better for the discredited system of statements, which has long produced more problems than solutions and has been the cause of great antagonism between parents and local authorities. There will still be appeals against decisions in this area, but the aim is that there should be fewer and that parents should be involved in the assessments at an earlier stage and more realistically. It is also very welcome that the assessments will be independent and that the recommendations can continue up to the age of 25, not only because this will cover the transition from school to college and beyond but because the age of 19 is for many children with special needs a time of quick improvement, so they need help at that stage. I share the astonishment of the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, that the continuation to age 25 does not cover students at university. I can think of no reason why it should not as they very often need the kind of support that will be offered to people at college.

The new plans are intended to enforce the collaboration between different providers of services, which the original report in 1978, the committee of inquiry, so conspicuously failed to bring about, although it thought about it a great deal. However, there are still certain areas of confusion which I shall be very pleased if the Minister could help to sort out. There is a good deal of vagueness in the Bill and uncertainty about how things are going to work in practice, such as personal budgets.

However, the Bill might be an opportunity to clear up an underlying confusion that has been around for a number of years—in fact, ever since an attempt was made to bring the Education Acts into line with the Disability Discrimination Act. I refer to the difficulty that we have in distinguishing between a disability and a special educational need. Of course, the two often overlap but, as my noble friend Lord Low pointed out, not all disabled people have special educational needs. As the noble Baroness, Lady Wilkins, pointed out, most helpfully I thought, the use of the term SEN is liable to be very misleading because people use it as though all people designated as having an SEN have the same sort of need. I was extremely moved by her appeal to separate off those who have a sensory deprivation of one kind or another and who very often, if their needs are addressed, do not have any other special educational needs. This seemed to me the kind of confusion that the Bill might help to clear up.

In general, I confess to deep scepticism about whether it will be possible for local authorities to fulfil their duties in the face of more financial cuts. In particular, I should like to ask the Minister how local authorities are supposed to fund the training of SENCOs, the cost of which is approximately £3,000 for each trainee. At present, that is paid for centrally, but from April 2014 the cost is to fall on local authorities. Without properly trained SENCOs in each school, the whole new system will collapse. Under the proposed new arrangements, SENCOs will have to make decisions about the needs of children with an SEN but with no education, health and care plan—probably almost 90% of the group of children with SEN—without the help of the school action and school action plus framework. I have not found anything that helps me to understand the rationale for abolishing this distinction, and I should be very grateful to hear the Minister’s justification of it.

It is hard not to suspect that a large group of children—probably 18% of children in any given school, and more in some schools—are going to find themselves at the mercy of very variable and inadequate levels of educational support. I am referring to pupils who have SEN but do not have plans. The supply will be dictated, as usual, by financial considerations rather than considerations of need. I do not complain about that because that is the world that we live in, but the SENCO will have to be both a powerful advocate and very well educated in all different disabilities if he or she is to be able to make that kind of decision.

In particular, I should very much like to be confident—I am not—that the new structure will not lead to an increase in the employment by schools of ill trained and often totally inadequate generalist classroom assistants. Such assistants may do more harm than good to the pupils they are supposed to serve, because their aim is that the child they are looking after should appear more or less to keep up with the rest of the class. They tend to do the work for the child, rather than take time to make sure that the child properly understands what is going on. In the case of dyslexia, I believe that they often do more harm than good. As the noble Lord, Lord Addington, well knows, teaching a dyslexic child involves skill. Such children can be taught and they can be marvellously helped and supported, but an untrained classroom assistant is not the best person to do that.

I regard this Bill as an opportunity rather than anything else, and unless it is suitably amended I think we will have wasted a chance. I refer particularly to Clause 57, which is concerned with special educational provision other than in schools. This has particular, although not exclusive, application to children who have been excluded from mainstream schools. We know that children with special educational needs are many times more likely to be excluded than children without. Pupil referral units—they are mainly pupil referral units but there are other kinds of provision as well—are mostly inhabited by children with special educational needs. There are some very good PRUs. I know quite a lot about one in particular in Tower Hamlets, which does extremely good work. It puts students through GCSEs and A-levels. The work that it does is good, but in particular the teachers are most remarkable people.

Teachers who choose to teach in PRUs are not regarded by the profession or by the department as proper teachers. They are not allowed, for example, to assess school-assessed work at GCSE or A-level because they are only teachers in PRUs. PRUs are not recognised as places where trainee teachers can train because they are only PRUs and not proper schools. This seems to be grossly unfair on those teachers, but there is also a lack of use of what could be a marvellous resource. After all, they are teaching the most difficult children whom other schools have failed to teach, and they are a last resort for extremely vulnerable children. If this last resort is not supported and used, and if the skills on display there are not disseminated through other schools, the children in these units will be undervalued and the resource that they are using will be conspicuously undervalued.

My final point is that I entirely agree with my noble friend Lord Ramsbotham when he says that Clause 70 should be taken out of the Bill. PRUs are places from which children in secure accommodation could most benefit, not only through the skill of the teachers but through the use that the best of these places make of interactive distance learning, which is the most useful kind of teaching that these disaffected children can have. If these children are disaffected at school, they are likely to become yet more disaffected from society as a whole and they will end up in prison.

Schools: Academies

Baroness Warnock Excerpts

Thursday 14th February 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

We have a number of proven successes. I was delighted to see that Eton College is going to sponsor an academy. There are many other independent schools, and we are keen to involve as many as possible.

[Baroness Warnock]

Can the Minister tell the House whether any research is going on to monitor the progress of children with special educational needs in academies and free schools?

[Lord Nash]

Like all schools, academies have a clear duty to use their best endeavours to meet the needs of children with SEN, and they can go further with their freedoms. Special academies are at the heart of our programme.

Schools: Classics

Baroness Warnock Excerpts

Tuesday 6th November 2012 Grand Committee

[Baroness Warnock]

My Lords, I am sure that I speak for everyone in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, for this inspirational occasion to talk about classics. However, I am not going to do that. I am going to talk about Latin and linguistic considerations, but nobody who has heard the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, speak could fail to weep with recognition of the excitements that there are in classical literature.

I am sure that I am not alone in judging our colleagues on the Bishops' Benches by the way that they read the Parliament prayer. The Parliament prayer, as everybody here knows, contains at its core an ablative absolute: “we … laying aside” and then it goes on until the words “partial affections”. The bishops who know Latin properly know that you have to pause after “grant that”; then comes the ablative absolute; then it goes on with what is being asked for, which is that our deliberations should have good effect. If you do not know that it is an ablative absolute, you make absolute nonsense of the grammar and the syntax of the prayer. That is my criterion of what is a good bishop, or archbishop.

I believe that the study of Latin is unique in that it gives one a feeling of the sense of the structure of a sentence, its syntax. I do not think that Greek, although it is a wonderful language, is quite as good as an instrument of learning about language as Latin is. Latin is indescribably clear and moreover small children, youngish children in primary school, love learning Latin because it is in the nature of code-breaking; there are certain rules and you can apply them to the sentence in front of you. You can get it right or you can get it wrong and that is of enormous attraction to children when learning. It is better, in some ways, than a modern language because it can be taught in its purest form—it is formal in the purest sense—and you do not have to be inhibited by pronunciation, accent or keeping up with slang. You do not have to learn how to ask the way to the station or how to get on a bus. It is there without the necessity of speech. It is to do with writing. Of course, that affects the way one speaks but it is essentially the written word. I believe that there is no profession—not just that of journalists and writers—where one does not need to be able to write coherently, clearly and in a way that is persuasive. The utility of learning the structure of sentences and their syntax is therefore without compare.

For about 20 years, I have been setting a paper and examining it for an essay competition for the Girls’ Day School Trust—it covers about 25 schools. There is the most enormous difference in the essays that I read, of which there are about 220 every year, between those girls who can write proper sentences and those who cannot. Even if their ideas are exciting or interesting, if they cannot write proper sentences then I cast away the essay. Over the 20 years, I have noticed a very severe decline in this ability. Largely, it is connected with the way that children communicate with one another through blogs and various kinds of electronic devices, which have changed the language. They can no longer distinguish between informal and formal writing: the kind of writing which they will need if they become civil servants, politicians, lawyers or doctors. They will all need to be able to write, so I recommend very much the use of formal Latin teaching. Also, as I have said, children greatly enjoy that kind of formal teaching.

Although I would hope that many of the people who learnt Latin at school would go on to study classics, ancient history or Greek or even classical studies—although I have never been quite sure what that actually embraces—Latin on its own is nevertheless infinitely worth teaching. I am delighted that there is this movement towards teaching it. As for finding the teachers who are able to do it, there is much to be said for the suggestion of the bolt-on to the modern language training course, as there is for someone who is already in the school—perhaps a modern linguist or an historian—teaching themselves Latin as they go along. If children can learn it, so can the teacher. It would be great fun, when teaching, to go along one step ahead of your class in North and Hillard, or whatever the appropriate Latin book now is. I hope that this will gather weight and that the Minister can assure us that the Government are behind this and see the point of it.

Schools: Well-being and Personal and Social Needs

Baroness Warnock Excerpts

Thursday 14th June 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Warnock]

My Lords, in July 2011 the Office for National Statistics published a paper called Measuring Children and Young People’s Well-being, which showed that the belief that they were doing well at school was a crucial factor in the sense that children from the age of eight upwards have of the quality of their own lives. Given the many hours that children spend at school, as we well know, that is not in the least surprising.

I am sure that your Lordships will agree that a good school is a happy school. More than that, if, at the crucial age of 14, we could adapt the school curriculum more to the wants and ambitions of the children than we do at present, in the manner advocated by the noble Lord, Lord Baker, who is no longer in his place, we would find that far more children than do at present had the peculiar satisfaction of believing that they could succeed and the feeling that they were doing something that was worth doing. Nothing could be more central to personal and social well-being than that kind of sense of the worthwhileness of what you are doing. The Minister should give even more attention, and I am sure that he is, to the plans for changing schools and changing the direction of the curriculum at the age of 14.

I agree entirely with, among other people, the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, that the early stages of school are crucial. I ask the Minister whether the Government could not, even now, rethink the connections between the needs that children have at this age. I know that we have been promised an end to the concept of the statement of educational need by 2013. I know that the multiple assessments and long delays to which children are now subjected are to be replaced by a single assessment that will culminate in an education, health and care plan.

That holds some promise. But, in my view, it also points to something further, and I would be grateful if the Minister could tell me what he thinks of this. As long ago as 2006, the House of Commons Select Committee on education published a report that was highly critical of the present structure and framework of special educational needs and urged the then Government to start again and radically rethink the concept of special needs. More recently, in 2010, Ofsted reported on the inflated numbers of children who were classified as having special educational needs, suggesting that, for various reasons of self-interest, schools were wrongly so designating children, and sometimes masking incompetent teaching with claims of special educational needs among the pupils.

As a way to reverse this expensive and ultimately futile and damaging trend, I suggest that the idea of special educational needs, as opposed to other needs, should be dropped altogether—at least for nursery and primary school years. Instead, we should conceive of the duty of the school as to meet the needs of the child without distinction, by whatever means are available, through the skills and the training of teachers, the vigilance of the head and the governors, and, in general, the ethos developed within the school. After all, for very young children, every experience is educational. For children who are disadvantaged and, above all, for children who come to school with a poor vocabulary and poor communication skills, the most crucial need is that they should be enabled to develop these skills and thus to learn. Of course there will emerge—and probably will already have emerged—children whose special needs include specialised teaching of one kind or another, children who are perhaps profoundly and multiply disabled, and children who genuinely prove to be dyslexic. These children will emerge and can have specialised teaching. The rest of the children do not need to be scrutinised to see whether they have special educational needs. They have special needs. They need to be taught to communicate, to play, and to take part in dancing, music and drama. All these things are highly educational, but are absolutely crucial to the development of the child, and to his or her feeling that he or she can succeed. This is where the happiness that can be generated by a school really lies: the feeling that you are doing something at which you can succeed. The main task of the first years of education must be to enable children both to succeed and to learn to believe that they can. This is the basis of enjoyment.

The concept of SEN was introduced into legislation in 1981, more than 30 years ago. The inquiry that preceded the 1981 Act had been expressly forbidden to take any account of social deprivation in its consideration of what were then known as “handicapped children”. This is now practically unbelievable but it was the case. Therefore, the concept of educational need seemed to be the only way of grouping children together when they required something beyond what most teachers provided. We have come an enormously long way since those days.

It is time for us to change our attitude to the function of schools, and to put right at the front the function of making children believe that they can succeed. We should not designate them as having special educational needs unless they have some specific, sometimes very profound, difficulty that needs a different kind of education altogether—perhaps different teachers with different skills. We should change not only our attitude but our vocabulary accordingly. Therefore, I ask the Minister whether the Government will, after all, consider a fresh start in this area, which should be completely divorced from party politics.

Education: Music

Baroness Warnock Excerpts

Wednesday 30th November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

Yes, my Lords, I agree with the right reverend Prelate about the important role that music and dance can play. In our national plan there is quite a lot about the role that music technology can play, particularly for those who might have special educational needs. In terms of monitoring how the plan works, we would obviously want to look at and hold to account providers for the way in which they provide services for children of all abilities.

[Baroness Warnock]

Does the Minister agree that one of the cheapest and most effective forms of music education is choral singing? I know that is mentioned in the pronouncements that he has referred to. Can the Minister confirm whether it might be worth considering having people who are not qualified teachers coming in to schools to set up choirs and get choral singing off the ground? We all know that there are very talented choir masters who have not necessarily qualified as teachers.

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

I agree very strongly with the noble Baroness about the important role that choral singing and being part of a choir can play. I hope that one of the ways that these new hubs will work is to draw in a much wider range of providers. They will be covering a broader area so that one can get that kind of specialism that one could then extend to a range of schools in an area.