Children and Families Bill

Debate between Lord Lucas and Lord Ramsbotham

Wednesday 23rd October 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, may I ask the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, whether he has addressed Amendment 76, or is it postponed to a later group?

[Lord Ramsbotham]

I addressed Amendments 76 and 78 together.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lucas]

Then I shall add them to what I am going to say. I very much support what the noble Lord says about Amendment 70A. It is very important to create a system for identification and picking up kids when you start to see symptoms that might be symptoms of a special need. A lot of the time, there is no sensible way in which a classroom teacher can tell; the difference between ADHD and bad behaviour is not obvious. The motivations behind that behaviour can come from all sorts of things. You need a specialist. You need someone to look, in a one-to-one situation where they are not trying to deal with 30 other children at the same time. You need a decent length of time just to concentrate, and to really know your stuff. It needs to be a proper process of finding out what the problem is.

I have happy memories of going into my child’s school in his second week, by which time he had been given 15 detentions, five of them for having too many detentions. That ought to be saying something to a school, but they need to have the resources available to pick up on what the problem is and settle down and identify it, rather than just having to react to the symptoms. Amendment 70A would put in a backstop—a long way back from where good practice should be, but at least it would be there. That second exclusion really should trigger a proper analysis of what the underlying cause is of the symptoms that the school and the child are suffering from.

I also very much support Amendment 80. There is a lot to be said for having a decent data set for what is going on, not least because it would enable us to spot patterns across the country of differences in diagnosis and in how children were being assessed and treated, which is very important with a process that is essentially local but conditions that are not. The conditions are national, and you want to know what is going on so that you can inquire whether a particular pattern is the result of good or bad practice and either deal with it or spread it, depending on what is right. The base for that has to be data, something at local authority level that can be quite detailed without giving away any personal information and can be a useful and comparable source of information. That should be one of the foundations of our policy.

However, I do not support Amendments 76 and 78. I do not like the idea of the local authority having to scour the country looking under every stone for people with special educational needs. That would be particularly objected to, quite rightly, by the home education community. A lot of those children have been brought out of education because of how badly their special needs have been dealt with by schools, and the last thing that they want is the local authority lording it over them and saying that it has to be in every three months diagnosing their child and telling them what to do. That relationship does not succeed in those cases.

We should not try to create something that intrusive by a local authority. Yes, as was said, the local authority should have its ears open, be a point of contact and have a duty to respond when someone thinks that their child has special needs and wants something done about it. Coupled with the other duties, I think that the Bill will achieve a responsive local authority—a body that will pick up on problems that come to its notice and which has to have its eyes open in ordinary ways, so that it knows what is going on in schools, but which does not have to scour the highways and byways for people with special educational needs. To my mind, that is the right balance.

[Lord Ramsbotham]

The noble Lord has completely misunderstood what I was saying about Amendments 76 and 78. I suggest that the best thing is probably for me to talk to him and explain what I was trying to say, because that was certainly not my intention at all; it could not be further from it.