Children: Parenting for Success in School

Lord Lingfield Excerpts

Thursday 3rd February 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lingfield]

My Lords, it is with a sense of considerable privilege that I address your Lordships' House for the first time. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, for giving us the opportunity to have this debate. His efforts on behalf of the underprivileged are well known to us all.

Some noble Lords will know that I have been engaged in education policy for a good part of my life. I hope, therefore, to be able to contribute to your Lordships’ discussions on education. During the previous Conservative Administration I was appointed to lead the movement towards autonomy for state schools. This resulted in grant-maintained schools, from which the current academies programme finds its roots. However, it is about an entirely different aspect of education—special needs in education—that I want to speak today as early parenting skills are hugely important in this area.

In 2006 I was appointed by the then leader of the Opposition to chair a commission and produce a report on the reform of special educational needs. This brought home to me the huge importance of early diagnosis and early help for parents as both of those lead to success in schooling. I pay tribute to Professor John Marks, who helped me with that report, to Mr Brian Lamb, who produced the concomitant Labour report, and to those members of the Liberal Party who laid such emphasis on the early years in their manifesto.

There can be few more devastating experiences for families than finding, perhaps soon after their child is born, that he or she will need special care, possibly lifelong care. The advances in the past decades in medical technology mean that even children with the most complex and serious disabilities can not only survive birth but find much content in their life, provided they get the right attention, the right love, the right sympathy, as mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, and, of course, the right medication and the right schooling to follow. However, as he advised us, many parents do not possess early parenting skills and do not know where to go to get help to acquire them. If they have a disabled child, they will seek a statement of special educational needs but I am afraid that 40 per cent of them are turned down and the number of special educational needs statements is falling year on year. If they are refused, the parents concerned have an even gloomier prospect because they have to go to a special needs tribunal. All those parents who gave me evidence suggested that this was one of the most agonising things that they had encountered. Indeed, a man I spoke to last year told me that this was the most uncomfortable and difficult experience of his life—and he was a QC. How much more daunting is the experience for a young, inexperienced parent, who perhaps has little education and certainly little knowledge of judicial procedures. These processes are complicated. The papers were brought to me at this House a couple of days ago covering one girl’s tribunal. They numbered 500 sheets and I am told that this is pretty average.

Parents tell us that the tribunal system is getting longer, more adversarial and costly—they mention legal bills of about £12,000. The tribunal system was started for the best of all reasons as an arena of last resort, to be used rarely. Now it has become almost the norm. In 2008 it was moved from the Department for Children, Schools and Families to the Ministry of Justice. Appallingly, some of these tribunals now take place in magistrates’ courts. Parents have told me that they find themselves, with their young disabled child, sitting next to people arraigned for criminal activity or awaiting appeals against deportation orders.

Finally, I am delighted that the Government are considering a Green Paper on reform of special educational needs. Among the many reforms that will be required, to which I hope to return at a later date in this House, I very much hope that the Government will consider, first, dejudicialising the tribunal system and, secondly, inserting early on a process of mediation between those parents who require better facilities for their children and the local authorities, which of course are obliged to pay for them. Mediation works extremely well in other walks of life. There is no reason why it should not work well here, provided that the mediators are seen to be independent. Early parenting skills are hugely important, as the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, told us, and are no more important than in the area of special educational needs. I very much hope that the Government will do the things that I have asked them to consider.