Care Services: Abuse of Learning Disabled

Baroness Kidron Excerpts

Thursday 13th December 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kidron]

My Lords, it is a great privilege to rise for the first time in your Lordships’ House and I would like to take this opportunity to extend my thanks to noble Lords from all sides of the House for their very warm welcome, as well as to the delightful staff whose acts of kindness and gentle instruction have kept my transgressions to a minimum.

I will detain your Lordships only a very short while to tell you my own journey to involvement with young people with learning difficulties. I declare an interest as a trustee of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, which over many years has done excellent work in the area of learning disabilities, and as co-founder and vice-chair of the educational charity, FILMCLUB. FILMCLUB was founded six years ago as a way of engaging and educating young people with the intention that they should see a broader world. It has been a very successful endeavour, with many tens of thousands of young people each week watching, reviewing and debating subjects both in and out of the curriculum, and in doing so learning about a world much richer than the one they usually inhabit.

One of the surprising outcomes of the scheme was the number of SEN teachers in mainstream and specialist schools who adopted the FILMCLUB programme to teach young people with learning difficulties. For some it was simply a peaceful moment for a restless mind; others found a place where they could engage with subjects and emotions that they recognised but in daily life struggled to articulate. It is one small space where young people—some with very challenging behaviour—found a method to communicate on their own behalf what concerns them.

I am by profession a film-maker and it was in this capacity that I was introduced to Louise, a young woman with complex needs who—as is the Government’s ambition—lives in her community with her family. She is exemplary in her achievements against the odds—bright, humorous and ambitious to make the most of her life. She is an advocate for Young Advisors and a keen sailor. She also has cerebral palsy, is confined to a wheelchair and needs a communication aid to speak. Louise’s life has been blighted by a series of disagreements and misunderstandings about where her physical disability ends and her learning difficulty begins, putting her family at odds with those who deliver the support she needs.

Louise has been shunted between schools of every possible variety, each in turn unable to cater to her complex needs. In her last school, for young people with physical disabilities, she was accused of attention-seeking, resulting in punishments that included encircling her wheelchair with furniture, taking her from her chair and laying her on concrete paving, and removing her communication aid. These punishments, which were casually meted out by staff with little knowledge of learning difficulties, were experienced by her as acts of incomprehensible cruelty. When I asked her how the removal of her communication aid made her feel, she said, “It was as if they put tape across my mouth”.

Louise lives in her community with her very loving family, but still her treatment was out of sight of her parents. She did not have the capacity to describe what was terrifying her, but she did protest at going to school. She started self-harming and repeatedly said that she wanted to die because she was “bad”. Feeling powerless at her distress and unable to get answers from those entrusted with her care, her family withdrew her from school permanently to give her 24-hour care themselves. She was 12 years old.

Winterbourne was a shameful episode, both for those who inflicted violence and humiliation on the vulnerable and for us as a community. However, my concern is that in moving back to community-based support we do not overlook the indignities and cruelties routinely experienced in other contexts, because a culture of “not understanding” can, as in Louise’s case, prove as abusive as deliberate criminal acts.

There has been a broad welcome of the Government’s plan to transfer more than 3,000 people incarcerated in inappropriate care settings, but we must have concern that the burden of care is not subtly or cruelly transferred on to families, many of whom are already on a lifelong journey of supporting loved ones with complex needs, without them being assured of a fully resourced effective implementation, delivered with a level of competence that meets the needs of even the most challenging, for the newly released and for those already struggling with care in the community. The legacy of Winterbourne must be that the care provided in our all institutions and services is imaginative, compassionate and trustworthy.

It is the tradition of a maiden speech not to be controversial, and I will leave it to others in this Chamber more expert and able than I to judge if the Government’s response is adequate to the task of providing a level of care in institutions and public services of which we can be proud. However, it is my hope that in my time in this House I will be able to lend robust support to the voices of the young and those on the margins to whom we often do not listen closely or hear clearly when they try to speak.

I thank my noble friend Lord Rix, who has been tireless in his support for people with learning disabilities, for bringing today’s debate to this House.