Schools: Special Educational Needs and Disabilities

Lord Storey Excerpts

Thursday 26th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, I start by thanking my noble friend Lord Addington for securing this debate. His tenacity and perspicacity in this area knows no bounds. I also want to thank those organisations which have sent us briefings; they are very important. I have listened to and been moved by all the previous speakers and I agree with what they have said. I guess that this is a debate in which we may all say the same things, but sometimes I have to say that I am a little disappointed. If this was a debate on international affairs, military affairs or even, dare I say, Europe, the Benches would be packed, but when talking about our children with special needs, there is a handful of people here. However, I hope that they can read the debate in Hansard and that our wise words will have a profound effect on them.

When I started my teaching career in the 1970s, there was no such thing as special educational needs—there were slow learners. Those slow learners might have been put in what was called a remedial class, or as the cleaner at my first school referred to them, the “ready meals”. Teachers had absolutely no training at all. Again at my first school, a Church of England primary school, the enlightened head teacher decided that these slow learners would go into a separate small classroom, a remedial room, and that they would do all their learning with one teacher in there. As I say, the teacher was not qualified. The effect on those children was not what he hoped for. Imagine children with a whole host of learning difficulties being kept together in a mixed age group in one classroom. That is not the way to deal with special educational needs. But, of course, he did not know that. Teacher training did not equip teachers for this responsibility and area of concern.

When we move the tape forward we can see that successive Governments came to realise, to their credit, how important this issue is. Schools have co-ordinators—SENCOs—with particular responsibility for special educational needs. The whole landscape over that period since I started teaching has changed dramatically.

I particularly want to note the work of the coalition Government—I would say this, wouldn’t I?—on the Children and Families Bill, because for the first time, SENCOs had to have the correct qualifications. It was a bit daft to have someone responsible for educational needs who had no official training or qualifications. We introduced the all-important code of practice, which has been a milestone in this area and, of course, we brought in the education health and care plans. I remember that a number of us at the time raised concerns. Before the health and social care plans there were statements, and pupils with special educational needs had a formal statement. What was written on the statement had to be carried out but the new care plans were a more joined-up approach.

We were promised that there would be a review of how the care plans mechanism was working, particularly the appeal system. There is concern about how the appeal system is working in respect of parents. However, there is still much to be done. I said that SENCOs in schools are qualified, but only newly appointed SENCOs have a qualification; the existing ones do not need it, but they can decide to get one. We should be saying bravely and boldly that every SENCO—past, present and future—should have a qualification.

The 2014 Mencap survey of 1,000 parents found that 66% who have a child with a learning disability are not confident that teachers at their child’s mainstream school understand how to teach pupils with special educational needs. That was presumably of concern to the Government. The Carter Review of Initial Teacher Training, published in 2015, which we have heard about from a number of Members, identified special educational needs as a significant gap in many teacher training courses and recommended that it should be included in a framework of initial teacher training content. I would go further and say that all teachers, whatever route they go through to be a qualified teacher—Teach First, for example—should and must have a special educational element in their teacher training. Further, teachers should be provided with regular and continuing professional development opportunities.

We know that under the Special Educational Needs and Disability Act 2001, SEN children have a right to be educated at their mainstream school if they wish. Many mainstream schools are simply not viable options for SEN children as a majority of teachers there do not have the vital base level of educational needs understanding. I very much support the other recommendation in the Carter review: that trainee teachers should have opportunities to undertake placements in special schools or in mainstream schools that have a specialist provision. But why just trainee teachers? Why not the leadership team of a school, or indeed why not a rolling programme of all teachers? I would be grateful if the Minister told us where we are up to on some of the important recommendations of that review.

Local authorities are responsible for the funding of children with special educational needs and are tasked with ensuring that all students, including special needs students, have a place. As the noble Lord, Lord Warner, rightly pointed out, as the number of free schools and academies grows, there is a danger that there will be a disconnect between the responsibility of local authorities to support children with special needs and the level of control that local authorities have over schools in their area. It is likely that more funding will go directly to academies and free schools, meaning that the LAs will have fewer funds at their disposal to meet their responsibilities. How does the Minister see LAs carrying out that responsibility in an ever-changing schools landscape, with fewer and fewer resources for them?

I turn to funding, which is complicated. At times I struggle to understand how we make the funding work. I will give two examples. We know that the high- needs funding block is the money given to local authorities to manage and develop local SEN provision. It provides top-up funding for education settings to help them support pupils with high-level needs that they cannot reasonably expect to meet themselves. A friend of mine has a daughter who has mild cerebral palsy. She is also on the autistic spectrum and dyspraxic. That family, along with the local authority, has struggled to get the support she needs. The authority is pressurised because of its budget constraints, so it looks at every application very closely. The family had two formal interviews. That seems to me the wrong way to do it. The pressure put on that family did not seem right.

Yesterday, I went to visit Tower Hamlets FE College. It has a very successful special needs department, but it has also built a special needs unit in the basement of the FE college. I visited that unit and was amazed by the love and care of the staff there. What I did not realise was that the pupils in that unit come from a local special school. Why? It is because we have to make provision up to the age of 24, but a special school gets funding only when the pupil is 18, even though the mainstream special school might have capacity. The special school has had an arrangement with Tower Hamlets College whereby it can send its post-18 students and its teachers to Tower Hamlets because the college can access the post-18 funding, whereas the school cannot. That seems a strange way to deal with funding. If a mainstream school has the capacity to continue supporting special needs students, that should be how it operates.

At the beginning I mentioned the importance of teacher training in special educational needs. The other issue is early identification. If a teacher is trained they can identify where problems occur. As a head teacher, for me, one of the most important resources was the school psychological service. It was the gem for giving support. A bit like with funding, I gradually saw the educational psychological service resource decline, not in quality, but in the amount of time I could have with it. To take the example of a young boy, the ed psychs, as we called them, would come in, help to identify problems and put together an action plan or a statement —now, it would be an education healthcare plan. But there was always a long gap between visits because their time had to be given out sparingly. Mine was a 600-place primary school; we ended up seeing the ed psych maybe twice a month if we were lucky.

A boy with adoptive parents who had been battered as a baby showed all sorts of emotional and behavioural problems at school. He would come into school and just want to escape. When he was settled, suddenly, there were problems again. His parents were so supportive. We tried everything to work out the issues. Of course, the ed psych identified them—and the solution—but that process seemed to take for ever and a day. If we are genuine about dealing with this issue, we must make sure that that resource is supported. As both the noble Lord, Lord Warner, and my noble friend Lady Sharp said, we should not drip out ed pyschs’ time but make sure they are there as often as needed. How do the Government intend to deal with the shortage of EP support in schools? What plans do they have to recruit more educational psychologists? How can we ensure a more seamless service?

The noble Lord, Lord Warner, talked a lot about autism. Last year, I was privileged to visit Treetops School, which is ambitious about autism. Again, I was stunned by the quality of the provision there, and how caring and supportive they were. That made me think: why cannot that provision be available for all autistic children? On Tuesday, I met a boy called Alex. He was a pupil with special educational needs who struggled with mainstream schooling. He left school and applied to the Salvation Army’s step-up programme. There, he was given specialist support. I was shown some examples of that support, focusing on what is important to Alex, what those who know Alex say and how Alex can best be supported. He was given the specialist support he needed, completed the course and now has a job as a barista. The course gave him the interpersonal skills needed for the world of work.

We have made great strides in the provision of special educational needs, as I said at the beginning, but there is so much more we can do, equipping all teachers with the knowledge and training they need, and ensuring that the resources, funding and regimes for special needs are provided equitably and do not become a constant struggle to access. We need to realise the importance of the educational service. The support Alex got should be available for all pupils. We should champion the importance of educational needs, which I know is something all of us in this House feel strongly about.