Special Educational Needs and Disabilities Review

Lord Watson of Invergowrie Excerpts

Wednesday 30th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness the Minister may be surprised to hear that, having read the review, my initial thoughts are positive—a view that echoes what many in the education, care and children’s charity sectors are saying. She knows that there is a “but” coming, but I will delay that for the moment.

The Statement says that it is proposed to establish a new single, national special educational needs and disabilities and alternative provision system across education, health and care. That is welcome. But there is not a great track record of government departments working together. Too often, there is a silo mentality in the Civil Service, which is long established and often insurmountable. That cannot be the case in terms of this review or it will fail in its aims.

There are three key challenges that the SEND reforms need to address. The first is poor outcomes for children. The second is that navigating the system is often a traumatic experience for families, with many left to reach crisis point before getting meaningful support. The third concerns not delivering value for money. How was it that the £1 billion deficit in the dedicated schools grant, referred to by the Secretary of State yesterday, was ever allowed to happen? He spoke of being ambitious for young people, but where has that ambition been for the past 12 years? Where was that ambition when he was Minister for Children and Families? The Secretary of State cannot disown the legacy of 12 years of Conservative Governments, which have left us with a broken, adversarial and aggressive system that is letting down young people and often leaves families in despair.

So who is responsible for the £1 billion shortfall? The answer is central government, which I suspect is why the DfE appears to want to introduce a funding agreement, or contract system, with local authorities to secure provision. Where else have we heard about funding agreements with the DfE? With academies, of course—so this would be more of the inflexible rod of central government. Will any new system be successful if local endeavour, creativity and innovation are ironed out of it?

A vicious cycle of late intervention, low confidence and inefficient resource allocation is driving the challenges for effective SEND provision. The current system does not prescribe in detail exactly who should provide and pay for local services, leaving it to local agreement and First-tier SEND Tribunals. Similarly, delivery of alternative provision is inconsistent across areas and schools. As a result, parents, carers and providers feel that they have no choice but to seek EHCPs and, in some cases, specialist provision, as a means of legally guaranteeing the right and appropriate support for children and young people. The Government’s reform simply must do much better than this in terms of the support given to parents of children with special educational needs.

It may or may not be a coincidence that the 13-week consultation that the Secretary of State launched yesterday will reach its conclusion at the end of June, which is around the time when the independent review of children’s social care is due to report. That would be entirely appropriate, as the SEND review cannot be seen in isolation—and I do not believe that the Government do see it in isolation.

Early intervention is essential in correctly identifying needs, but the current system often prevents that. All too often, local authorities need to spend on non-discretionary services, such as child protection, taking money away from preventive services like children’s centres. The barriers that prevent children from having their needs met as early and as close to home as possible must be removed.

We welcome the recognition in the Green Paper of the importance of building expertise and leadership in SENCOs. This would dovetail with the Government’s proposals in the skills Bill for SEND to be an integral part of initial teacher training. Perhaps the Minister could confirm that that is how she sees it as well. However, many children with complex and interrelated physical, health and learning needs, such as those with cerebral palsy, autism or communication difficulties, require a specialist approach to education which is provided by professionals with expertise and a deep understanding of their condition and how it impacts on their learning and development.

The reforms that emerge following the consultation should ensure that the best possible use is made of prompt specialist expertise to enable vulnerable children with disabilities to be identified and assessed early, opening the way to delivery of the optimum level of support throughout their education so that they can reach their potential. It is important that alternative provision—too often hidden away—is included in the Green Paper. We also welcome the integrated role and the recognition of the need to improve oversight of AP placements.

The role of colleges in supporting SEND students is understated in the Green Paper, which is contradictory given that the aim of the reforms is to create a system that serves young people all the way through to age 25, from childhood to adulthood. Colleges are a lifeline for students with SEND, many of whom have struggled at school but thrive in a college environment. Many students with EHCPs progress to their local college where they are supported into independence and often into work. Can the Minister say what the DfE sees as the role of colleges in their provision for SEND students and what resources will be made available to support that role?

Resources is, of course, the but. All of this is dependent on the provision of adequate resources and on that score, I fear the mood is more downbeat. I have already mentioned the DSG deficit; the Statement mentions £1.4 billion of capital spend on high needs between 2023 and 2025. Presumably, this is to increase capacity and places within schools. It averages out at roughly £60,000 per school on a one-off basis. Will the Minister say how the Government imagine that capital spend flowing?

Finally, the Secretary of State also says in his Statement that there is to be an additional £1 billion in the current financial year for children and young people with high needs, but then what? Is that figure to be consolidated in the high needs budget? The families of children with special needs of all kinds deserve to be told.

No matter the Government’s good intentions in terms of SEND and AP provision, without the resources to ensure a system that is fair, joined-up and effective from an early point in a child’s life, little will change for those families that so desperately need support for their children.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, first I remind the House of my declared interests in this field: I am dyslexic; I am president of the British Dyslexia Association; I am a long-established user of assistive technology and chairman of a company that provides that across the education and working sector.

The best thing about the system is acceptance of the problem. In the current system, you are advised to get legal advice to get the best results. If ever there was a definition of failure, that is it: people cannot get the help they need from the mainstream system which the law dictates unless they have legal support. There really is no bigger condemnation, and I congratulate the Minister on bringing forward something that recognises that. The system we have has not worked. It has not worked for a variety of reasons, mainly, I feel, because the school process, whereby schools take money out of their budgets to support individual pupils, is counterintuitive to the school. They can take £6,000 out of their mainstream budget to support a pupil, but not put £6,000 into training staff to meet the recurring needs.

We talk about pupils with a commonly occurring condition, but I agree that this is not the full package: there is a range of subjects and most people who come into this category have a cocktail of conditions. If they are lucky, with good parents—the tiger parent—fighting for support, a bit of resource, they generally get a decent result, even if they have to pay lawyers. If they do not have that, they get a bad result and will end up in alternative provision. Can the Minister give me some idea about how those who will initially be below the threshold for intervention needed for the plans will get help and support? I cannot see how that will occur.

The noble Baroness will say something positive about SENCOs, which is good, but it requires more than that. It requires a recognition strategy caused by having good teachers, teachers with knowledge, in place to identify and get help in early. Because we all know that is the way it works: identify early, get strategies in place, get structure, and there is less resistance from the pupil. How will we do that with this system? How will we make sure that the system knows what it is doing when somebody starts to fail? Are we going to have a degree of flexibility built into this national plan?

Why can I never remember the exact name of the phonics system? It is specialist synthetic phonics. The Government say that the phonics system is suitable for everybody; guess what? The British Dyslexia Association, the biggest individual group, says it does not work for dyslexics, so we will need an alternative provision of teaching and how to implement that throughout the system to get the best out of the biggest cohort. It is not the only cohort, but it is the biggest. How will we do that? How will we make that work if we do not have a degree of flexibility built in and do not address the fact that certain people will always struggle?

We cannot ignore what happened yesterday. Apparently, 90% of pupils in this country are going to reach literacy standards. I have already identified 10%—and that is a conservative estimate—of those who will have extra problems with reading and writing. We can also stick on 5% or 6% who are dyscalculic. But wait, look at the good news—some of them are included in the first 10%, so they actually have multiple disability problems. It is called “comorbidity”, but I think that “co-occurring” sounds better. You can stick dyspraxia and autism in there, and they are just the hidden disabilities. How will we achieve this unless there are people who can identify early, and not take it to this system of struggling identification? I quite understand that the Minister may well be able to make it less legally driven, but there is a danger that it will go back there.

I hope that the Minister can give us some idea about guidance. If the Government want to achieve their high literacy levels, how about someone who word processes by talking and listening to their computer, as opposed to just tapping the keyboard? That is available to everyone. I know that the Minister has had some experience with this; she is the first Minister I did not need to show this technology to.

A slightly more flexible approach will get far better results here. If the Minister can assure us that, with guaranteeing standards, they agree with that flexibility, all things are possible. If we go back to saying, “No, this is the way we should do it”, and having conflicting stories, we will just have failure—it may not be quite as bad, but we will still have failure.