Special Needs Education

Annette Brooke Excerpts

Tuesday 6th September 2011 Westminster Hall

[Annette Brooke (Mid Dorset and North Poole) (LD)]

I shall begin by declaring an interest. I am patron of Diverse Abilities Plus, a Dorset charity that, among a range of activities, runs Langside school. I have a long acquaintance with the charity, which was formerly known as Dorset Scope, and with the school. I have seen the school’s intake change over many years; the children now have extremely complex needs. It is a fantastic school. Sadly, since the last boundary changes, it is no longer in my constituency, but I share its concerns about the future. The Minister will be aware that I have an equal passion for Montacute school, a maintained school that I expect to gain academy status; the children there also have complex needs. I believe that the schools complement one another, and that both should be allowed to thrive to ensure that we give children with disabilities the very best start in life. The charity’s name change reflects well on the positive outcomes that can be achieved with the right support.

I welcome the Government’s recent Green Paper on special educational needs, and its vision to improve outcomes for children and young people who are disabled or who have special educational needs. In particular, I believe that there is widespread support for a joint education, health and care plan, and I share the Minister’s aim to minimise the adversarial nature of the system for families. The role of special schools in providing specialist expertise is also recognised. However, concerns have been expressed about the provision of special needs education by non-maintained and independent special schools, which cater for around 13,000 of the most vulnerable children in the country who have wide-ranging but complex needs.

As well as Langside School, I have been contacted by the National Association of Independent and Non-Maintained Schools—NASS—which reminds me that I know well and value highly another of its members, the Victoria centre in Poole. I have also heard from I CAN, the National Autistic Society and Ambitious about Autism. I CAN has two special schools, Meath school in Surrey and Dawn House school in Nottingham, which specialise in providing intensive support for pupils aged four to 19 who have severe or complex language and communication needs. As well as supporting children directly in their settings, I CAN schools provide outreach to the mainstream, facilitate academic research and provide an assessment service for local authorities and parents. Both schools were rated as outstanding in the 2011 Ofsted inspection care reports.

The National Autistic Society provides six specialist schools for children with autism and complex needs. Inspectors recognise that those schools are excellent and provide good out-of-school services. Ambitious about Autism runs the TreeHouse school, with its outstanding provision; I am proud to have visited it. I mention those schools to give a flavour of the type of school that I wish talk about today.

I thank the Minister for generously allocating time to meet representatives from NASS earlier this year. However, its concerns remain and I am pleased to have secured this debate so that I can seek further clarification about the future of the sector in the Government’s vision for provision for children with special educational needs. There is deep concern that non-maintained and independent special schools are misunderstood or have been overlooked by policy makers. As a result, the sector faces a number of challenges in connection with its funding arrangements and the policy environment in which it must operate.

Ambitious for Autism has written to me, and I would like to share what it says with the Chamber. The Minister will be aware there are over 70 non-maintained special schools; they are approved by the Secretary of State for Education under section 342 of the Education Act 1996. To become approved, the schools have to be non-profit making and have demonstrated that they operate to a level at least equivalent to state maintained special schools. Their day-to-day running must be controlled by a governing body, the articles and instruments of which are to be agreed by the Secretary of State. To keep that status, schools must comply with the non-maintained special school regulations. Local authorities fund pupils to attend them. The schools cater for pupils with extreme and/or low incidence difficulties, and they provide specialist schooling.

The charity writes:

“While we welcome the diversification of provision for children with special educational needs, the creation of special academies and special free schools has created additional complexities and uncertainties for the special school sector.

Non-maintained special schools share many key characteristics with special academies and free schools, in that they are effectively special schools with freedom from local authority control but are not independent schools. However, the funding systems for these types of schools are all different, which creates unnecessary complexity and confusion in the system, as well as the potential for an unfair playing field.

Furthermore, special schools are being asked to apply to become special academies and special free schools without adequate information about the funding implications. This information is essential if the Government is asking schools to consider these options and make informed decisions.

Ambitious about Autism is increasingly concerned that a new and separate model is being developed with very little regard for the impact that this may have on a large number of highly successful schools that continue to provide an excellent education to some of the most complex children in England. We would welcome the opportunity to further engage with Ministers about new funding arrangements.”

For the purposes of this debate, I turn to the Green Paper on SEN, and specifically to page 52, which clearly states that parents will have the right to express a preference for any state funded school, including academies and free schools, but that does not seem to extend to non-maintained and independent special schools. That is despite the Government’s commitment to develop a national banded framework for funding provision for children and young people with SEN that has the potential to create greater transparency of funding. That needs clarification, as both non-maintained and independent special schools are usually funded by local authorities rather than parental placements, which means that in legal terms they are similar to academies and free schools and have less in common with the mainstream independent sector.

NASS is concerned about a response given by the Minister to the Select Committee on Education, which it says implies that parents will get the choice of a non-maintained and independent special school only after other local options have been considered. The association believes that this exclusion is based on untested assumptions that non-maintained and independent special school placements are always more expensive than similar placements in the maintained sector, and it calls on the Government to give parents the right to express a preference for a non-maintained or independent special school.

I hope that the Minister recognises those concerns and that she will give a clear answer on whether parents will be able to choose non-maintained or independent special schools. We also need to know why parents are given the choice of free schools but not schools from the non-maintained or independent sector.

The perception is that places at non-maintained special schools are consistently more expensive than local authority provided packages of support for children with the same level of need. NASS quotes the Minister as speaking of parents pressurising local authorities for expensive independent school places, but that should not be needed if the Government get early intervention right. There are two issues here: is provision more expensive, and will early intervention obviate the need for highly specialist provision?

On the first, as a former chair of education for a small local authority, I understand only too well the financial pressures of providing expensive placements. The costs of providing the right services for a child with complex needs are high. However, a local authority should not have to fund entirely these low-incidence cases, as such highly specialised provision is likely to be provided over a wide area.

In a recent constituency case, a young person with autism needed a highly specialised course that entailed residential provision. Some children and young people with autism and many other conditions have extremely complex needs and need highly specialist provision with perhaps a 24-hour curriculum. Obviously, in this period of reduced resources, it is crucial that the Department for Education and local authorities do more to achieve better value for money in the commissioning and delivery of special educational needs. As there is lack of information available in the SEN sector about cost-effectiveness, I urge the Department for Education to commission research on the cost of placements in the non-maintained and maintained special school sectors. The non-maintained sector obviously has accommodation, social care, health and allied therapy costs that will be reflected in direct financial transactions, so we need true costings for both sectors. That would go some way towards ensuring that there is a level playing field between the non-maintained and maintained special school sectors and that value for money is delivered at this time of fiscal restraint.

What evidence can the Minister point to that indicates that places at independent and non-maintained special schools are consistently more expensive than local authority packages of support for children with the same level of need? If there is no evidence on that at the moment, can it be collected?

There cannot be any disagreement about the value of intervention in early childhood for children whose needs can be identified early. In addition, the SEN Green Paper asserts that good early intervention will reduce the need for placements in non-maintained and independent special schools. NASS is concerned that that reinforces the view that placements in its sector are made only as a result of family breakdown or poor early placements. The small group of children who actively benefit from residential placements would like the Green Paper to say more about the role of residential provision and how it will be supported or explored further. Will the Minister provide some comment on that matter?

NASS would like greater recognition by the Government of early intervention for emergent special educational needs later in childhood. Although those often relate to early life experiences, some social, emotional and behavioural difficulties are not apparent until later in the child’s life. Often such young people are then subjected to multiple interventions before specialist assessment and support is offered. NASS would like to see this group of children and young people better reflected in the Green Paper.

I have two specific concerns about the treatment of this sector compared with the maintained sector, particularly bearing in mind the fact that 99% of places are funded through the public purse as a result of local authorities making placements. In legal terms, it is very similar to academies and free schools, and it has less in common with the mainstream independent sector.

One concern relates to specialist school funding. NASS discovered by chance that funding for non-maintained special education schools had not been allocated as part of the move to direct school grant funding. It was concerned about that, especially as it seemed that those schools under local authority control had actually received a commitment that money would still be passed on to them. It seems that there was a communication problem within the Department, and the schools will now receive only a proportion of the money they were originally expecting. Clearly, there are some concerns, especially around communication.

At the end of July, NASS was made aware that new non-maintained special school regulations had been laid before Parliament on 8 July—they came into force on 1 September 2011. Neither NASS nor the schools had been made aware that that had happened. By then, schools were on summer holidays and were unaware of the new regulations to which they were returning in September. I am aware that NASS contacted officials at the Department for Education and also wrote to the Secretary of State for Education in August 2011, but it is still awaiting an official response.

Finally, special schools in the independent sector are concerned about Lord Hutton’s recent review of public service pensions. There is great concern that teachers in the independent sector might be excluded from the pension scheme, which would affect movement between the two different sectors quite considerably and could affect the supply of highly qualified and specialised teachers.

In conclusion, will the Minister provide assurances that the excellent specialist provision that the sector provides for some of the most complex children is recognised and is not hindered, and that there will be a level playing field in which such schools can operate?