Education Bill

Debate between Lord Touhig and Lord Lingfield

Tuesday 1st November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Touhig]

My Lords, by introducing these new clauses into the Bill the Government will allow local councils to test the use of direct payments for meeting special educational needs. I certainly welcome and support the greater personalisation of educational provision for young people as does the noble Lord, Lord Low, and the noble Lord, Lord Rix, who I know had some very fruitful and useful meetings with the Minister and his officials. Both noble Lords wished to be here this evening, but are unavoidably unable to be with us; they have asked me to mention to the Minister how much they appreciate the courtesy and the assistance he and his officials have given.

Direct payments have played an important role in allowing disabled people to have choice and control over the services they receive. Nevertheless, there are some significant risks in the use of direct payments in education, particularly in schools. The Department for Education has been working closely with the Special Education Consortium to mitigate these risks, and I know that the Special Education Consortium has certainly welcomed that collaboration and consideration. The matters they are still concerned about include ensuring that the pilot schemes must be set up by an order by the Secretary of State. Establishing the details of the pilot scheme within the legislative framework is a necessary safeguard if these significant changes to the way education is delivered are to be properly scrutinised by Parliament.

The order which establishes the pilots was originally to be the subject of a negative resolution. The noble Lord, Lord Low, and I tabled amendments to ensure these important changes were properly debated through an affirmative resolution procedure. We have withdrawn these amendments because the government amendment means the pilot schemes will be subject to the affirmative resolution procedure as the Minister told us this evening. This is very welcome, and we are grateful to the Government, particularly as the initial amendment on direct payments in education was tabled at such a late stage, as the noble Lord has explained.

The noble Lord, Lord Low, and I also tabled further amendments concerning the details of the scheme. However, as the order will now be subject to the affirmative resolution procedure, we believe these concerns might be more usefully spelt out and discussed in detail during that debate. These too have been withdrawn. Nevertheless, we would still like to put on record some of the issues we hope will be addressed by the order.

We need to know how to measure the reaction of education providers to individuals holding direct payments for special educational provision. This may interact with school and college finances and employment policies, and will affect the ability of schools to plan for all children with special educational needs. Perhaps the Minister will say what steps will be taken to ensure that the viability of specialist SEN services is not threatened where direct payments are taking money out of the system. We also need to know how decisions about the amount of direct payments will be made, particularly if statements are poorly written—there are examples of that as I am sure we all know—and how parents can appeal those poorly written statements. Finally, we need to know whether there will be a thorough evaluation of direct payments in education in particular before Parliament is asked to renew the order in two years’ time.

The noble Lords, Lord Low and Lord Rix, and I welcome the Government’s new position, but we urge the Minister to make debating this order a priority in the parliamentary timetable so that these proposals, which are rightly being tested, can be given the fullest opportunity to show their worth. Great progress has been made, and I have been asked by my colleagues—who are not able to be with us this evening—to say to the Minister in particular how much they and I and especially the Special Education Consortium have appreciated the fact that he has genuinely worked with us to try to resolve our concerns. This seems to be a better way to make law.

[Lord Lingfield]

My Lords, I particularly welcome this new clause because one of the most important items in it allows a continuation of funding post-16 and 18 to the age of 25. Many parents are dismayed that their “special education offspring”—as one put it to me—fall off the end of a funding cliff when they reach early adulthood, and this pilot will help us see much more accurately how this can be done. I hope, however, with the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, that the Government will set out very clearly how these experiments are to be monitored, so that best practice may be observed and reported. It is also important for the Government to make clear to parents what they should do if they want to challenge the amount of payments, and contend that the health or social service elements are too little. My view is that the clauses are necessarily restrictive, in that as I understand it parents frequently agree part-funding with local authorities, but are not to be allowed to supplement the amount of the direct payment to purchase the provision set out in a beneficiary statement. Perhaps the Minister would look at this again. However, I welcome this step in the right direction—albeit it is a small, pilot step—to alleviate the great problems that there are in the special needs sector. I look forward eventually to seeing the careful evaluation when it is published.

Education Bill

Debate between Lord Touhig and Lord Lingfield

Thursday 30th June 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Lingfield]

My Lords, I have enormous sympathy with the amendments that the noble Lord, Lord Rix, would no doubt have moved and spoken to if he had been able to stay. His record on behalf of the vulnerable and the disabled is superb. He has spent all his life doing these things.

The assessments for which he calls in his second amendment raise a question of some difficulty. Most schools in most of the 6,000 cases of permanent exclusion call for some reassessment at that stage. Not all schools do and that record should be improved. However, it is a stage that triggers—at least in the mind, if not in legality—a reassessment under those circumstances. There is a huge problem over that. Most SENCOs, most teachers and many professionals working in this area will tell you that when the assessment is triggered—which does not always happen, as we know—it is not independent. Some local authorities have a fine record in this area but there are some whose record is, frankly, poor. Too many of the professionals I have mentioned believe that because the assessment is made by local-authority-employed educational psychologists, it reflects rather more the funding and provision available in the local authority area than the needs of the child.

The Green Paper, which has already been mentioned, gives us a glimpse of hope on this. We all rather hope that when it becomes a White Paper it will become more definite. It promises that in some trial areas we shall find some real independent assessment of the kind that is necessary here. I hope that that will happen, that we will see many of those trials and that at the end we shall see a new system that will able to assist excluded children in this way.

I suspect that when the noble Lord, Lord Rix, reads Hansard he will find that the Minister has not been able to grant him immediate gratification. Nevertheless, he should be able to give some guarantee that those assessments must become more independent and be conducted by more objective criteria than they are at present.

[Lord Touhig]

My Lords, I support Amendment 35 and Amendments 48 to 52 in my name and that of the noble Lord, Lord Low. Children who have been permanently excluded are less likely to achieve five good GCSE results or to be in employment in later life. There is a long-established link between being excluded from school and being involved in crime. Research from the prisons inspector in 2004 found that 83 per cent of young men in custody had previously been excluded from school. There is a clear consensus that exclusion from school results in dramatically poorer outcomes for the child concerned and has significant long-term costs to society.

Exclusion disproportionately affects disabled children and children with special educational needs, further compounding the disadvantages that they face. The Bill’s equality impact assessment itself recognises that pupils with SEN account for 72 per cent of all exclusions. Disabled children and children with SEN continue to be over eight times more likely to be permanently excluded from school than the rest of the school population, a point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, on behalf of the noble Lord, Lord Rix, when she gave us his speech.

Children placed in School Action Plus who have significant needs but who are without the statutory support of a statement for special educational needs are over 20 times more likely to be excluded. The Special Educational Consortium, which provided a brief for today, recognises that the Government are seeking to ensure that children with SEN are not disadvantaged by the new system. However, I share its concern that the Government have not gone far enough to mitigate the potentially negative impact that the proposals would have on children with SEN. The consortium tells me that it is often unmet learning needs, including unmet special educational needs, that are at the root of the persistent behavioural difficulties that these young people become involved in. In Committee in the other place, the Minister for Schools said,

“Incidents which prompt multiple exclusions will often be an indication that a pupil has underlying difficulties that may not have been correctly identified”.

This recognition is most welcome; I think that we would all welcome it. The Minister went on to say that the Government,

“will recommend in exclusion guidance that children are assessed through an effective multi-agency assessment for any underlying causal factors. We will suggest that schools trigger this assessment in instances in which a pupil displays poor behaviour that does not improve despite effective behaviour management by the school”.—[Official Report, Commons, 15/3/11; col. 378.]

On Report in the other place, the Minister said that it was the Government’s intention to ensure that those assessments actually take place.

The Special Educational Consortium rightly has serious concerns that those assessments will not happen if there is only a recommendation and they are not included in the statutory guidance. All my experience, both in the other place as a Back-Bencher and a Minister and, as I said in the earlier debate, as a councillor for 20 years, shows me that that would be the case. Exclusion guidance is already clear about the need to look at underlying causes of behavioural difficulties, yet this has not reduced the number of children with special educational needs who are routinely and regularly excluded from school.