Schools: Funding

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 29th November 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, on her excellent introduction and on bringing this subject to our attention. I can find almost nothing to disagree with in her analysis of the situation.

It will surprise no one in this Chamber that I want to concentrate on special educational needs, which both the previous speakers have mentioned. When you have, as we do, a crisis of funding and the fear of a lack of funding, which is affecting planning and structuring, it is not surprising that it is funding for the groups that are seen as being the most expensive that causes some of the greatest consternation. In his Oral Question a few days ago, the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, raised the fact that very high costs are being incurred by local authorities fighting, usually unsuccessfully, against education, health and care plans, the successor to statements. People are winning on appeal and local authorities are running up at least tens of millions of pounds—I think the Times said £100 million but I do not know how accurate that is—in debts, so we are effectively subsidising a branch of the legal profession as opposed to helping those in the education system. In such a situation, the children who end up getting helped are those with a “tiger parent”—I was lucky enough to have one—who will go out and fight for them. So those who will benefit the most are, let us put it this way, the exam-passing classes. They are the ones who will get the help, and money and energy are absorbed into that battle as opposed to being spent on the rest of society.

In the past we wrote off large sections of our population academically, but there were jobs for them to do and they did not need a qualification. That is no longer the case. If you look at the dyslexia world in the round, you see the very high needs of this community. I should mention that I am president of the British Dyslexia Association, and my other interests are in the register. There are large numbers of people who discover late on that they have the problem, and it becomes apparent that that is why they have never passed an exam and probably why their brothers and sisters have not either. You cannot get away with not passing exams or filling out forms now. You cannot work on a building site without doing a health and safety check and knowing how to fill out the form correctly.

People with other special educational needs have similar problems, although not quite the same. One of the personal revelations that I go through is, “Oh, you mean you’re like us but you’re not”—there is always a slight change. However, all of them have problems with the classroom and going through the system.

Information provided to me is that 20% of the primary school population have problems with reading. Reading is a problem that in many cases tends to correct itself later on but is never quite as good as other people’s. Spelling is usually a more permanent problem. However, we are now discovering that in secondary school that group seems to disappear; I think the figure for those registering with a need is just under 3%, where the figure is something like 20% in primary education. However, we then discover new people in universities. So what is happening to support in the secondary system? Something is not right. We are ignoring a whole section of that group. Our system is confrontational and expensive. I am one of the few left in this Chamber who was around when we initially discussed statements. They were designed for the few high-end needs that had been identified at the time. The system really had not established that this was a mass problem.

Dyslexia accounts for about half of the neurodiverse community, both those who have it by itself and those who have it as part of their problems. That is 10% of the population who have a different learning curve and will learn in a different way. How do you get the best out of them? You do not do that by taking them off to a small area at the side for specialist help. Everyone who has worked in this field knows—this is not just a problem today but a historical problem—that getting a teaching assistant without proper qualifications who sits and nursemaids someone is a very common experience. Indeed, a member of my family—surprise, surprise, neurodiverse problems run in families—who has now successfully got himself through his A-levels remembers that his statement meant that that was what happened.

We must ensure that we invest in highly qualified teachers, the very people who become expensive and are being got rid of or sidelined at the moment. The only way we can do this with the existing stock is by improving continual professional development. To address this problem, we must ensure that we have teachers with a better understanding and who know how to deal in the classroom with commonly occurring conditions: the 3% of the population who are dyslexic, perhaps 5% dyspraxic and 2% or 3% who are suffering from dyscalculia. They will be present regularly and there needs to be training to handle different learning patterns. Otherwise—this is another example where if you do not invest, you get more costs later—you encourage the parent to fight to get special provision under the plan, encouraging legal costs, slow development and being in conflict with teachers. Just think about what that does. Little Johnny does not have a problem—he is a problem. The parents who are supportive and helpful are the problem. The conflict being built up here is massive.

We can address this only if teachers are equipped to deal with the situation in the classroom. When we talk about educational attainment, we ask, “What’s his spelling like?” I am sorry to return to dyslexia again, but it is my subject. You are not going to pass a spelling test by putting extra effort in, you need to know how to deal with it by different learning patterns—for instance, increasingly, using computers. Even the standard computers that we are given here have a special needs support package. True, I have not been taught how to use it properly, but I am waiting to be taught. I am told that the specialist set I have on my computer is still better. These things are available.

How do you work that into a classroom? How do you take stress off the child’s mechanical skills so that they can do work that leads to examination success? These are all known and existing pathways, but we do not teach our teachers how to get the best out of our children. At the moment, the most expensive block is becoming a problem that people are trying to avoid.

I pray in aid our discussion inspired by a document from Warwickshire County Council which said that dyslexia does not exist. To be fair, the entire House took a huge intake of breath and said that that was not on, but the council published that. It found the one academic who supports that point of view. Think how much money you could save if you took 10% of your problem out of your schools or did not have to do anything special for them. Which group will be next if we allow that to happen? I thank the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, because he intervened and helped. If that is the culture, we must do something to address it very quickly. I suggest that finding a bit more money for education and investing in staff to enable them to handle the problems that they are statistically almost guaranteed to meet day to day would be a very good start.