Education: Special Educational Needs

Baroness Warnock Excerpts

Thursday 21st October 2010 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Warnock]

To call attention to the Government’s policy on special educational needs following the Ofsted special educational needs and disability review published in September; and to move for papers.

[Baroness Warnock]

My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to introduce the debate and I look forward to hearing the contributions of all those who can be here. I particularly look forward to the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson of Balmacara.

In calling the attention of the House to the Ofsted review, I hope that the Government will not simply disregard it—a view which I am sure is shared by all noble Lords. I know that there is a Green Paper in the offing but, because we do not know when it will arrive, I hope that there is time still to take account of the Ofsted review in the Green Paper.

In 2007, the all-party Select Committee on Education and Skills, chaired by Mr Barry Sheerman, chose special educational needs as its subject and later published two powerful reports. In these reports, the committee suggested that the current framework within which special educational needs are provided for had outgrown its usefulness and that there should be a new quango to look at the whole framework from the start. I very strongly expressed that view when giving evidence to that committee, and although one has to admit that times have changed and we cannot expect a new quango, as this Ofsted report points out, matters can be addressed short of rethinking the whole issue from the very beginning.

To those who have criticised the Ofsted report, saying that it is exaggerated or false, I say only that Ofsted took and examined a fairly large sample and that its findings are reflected in my almost daily postbag from parents who are extremely unhappy with the way in which their children’s special needs are being addressed. I shall take the Ofsted report as read and if other people wish to criticise it, so be it.

One of the matters about which the Select Committee report was most critical was the system of issuing statements of special need for some children but not all. It pointed out all kinds of difficulties with statementing, the main ones being that it is contentious in every single case, it leads to an enormous amount of anxiety and misery on the parts of both parents and children, and it is extremely costly in both time and money—money that can ill be taken away from the educational purposes to which it properly belongs.

I have no wish to defend the concept of the statement—noble Lords will realise that I cannot disclaim all responsibility for the idea of it—but it should have been glaringly obvious, and it was extraordinarily short-sighted of us not to realise, that if a local authority had to assess a child and its needs for a statement, and the same body had to fund those needs, it would in the end look not to what the child needed but to what it thought it could get away with: what it thought it could possibly afford. That was not obvious to the committee that reported in 1978. I think we were so bedazzled by the light that we thought we were going to shed on special education that we were blinded to the obvious financial consequences of statements for which the local authority had responsibility for both assessing and funding. One of the main objectives of the Ofsted report was to separate the funding from the assessing in such cases. I go along with that.

However, the main body of criticism in the Ofsted report is not so much of the statement itself but of the procedure for those children—by far the majority—who do not receive statements but are assessed within schools at two grades of special need. One is where it is considered that the school can provide for their needs. The second is the Schools Plus assessment, where it is recognised that help needs to be brought in from outside. The criticism targets those children who are being assessed in school.

The number of statements issued is marginally smaller than it was five or six years ago, but the children who are issued with assessments that they need special help, in school or partly from outside, are in far greater danger of being neglected or mishandled than children whose needs are so extreme or complex that they were probably picked up and noticed at an early pre-school stage, possibly soon after birth, and who will therefore slide quite easily into the issuing of statements and will have their needs attended to as far as possible. It is the children who are less severely disabled in one way or another and whose needs are less acute who are both the more numerous and more at risk of getting a very poor education. The conclusions of Ofsted are very much borne out by what I hear from parents up and down the country. These children start by being assessed for special needs, at the request either of their parents or of a class teacher, and are then given help or support according to how the assessment rates them.

The review finds that many more children are being assessed as having special needs than should properly be so assessed—I repeat that these statements have been disputed—and gives two main reasons for it. Rather brutally perhaps, I denominate them, first, as laziness and, secondly, as greed. It is laziness that makes teachers anxious to categorise pupils who make slow progress in learning, show little inclination to learn or are very hard to control in class. It is laziness that makes teachers often assess the children as having special needs, when in fact, as Ofsted states, their needs are no different from those of most children. What they need is better teaching. Like all children, they would benefit from dedicated, observant, sympathetic and, above all, exciting teachers. There can be no one in your Lordships' House who cannot testify, either from personal experience or from that of children and grandchildren, to the enormous difference that can be made to the ability to learn and the ability to want to learn when one moves, somehow miraculously, from the class of a bad teacher to the class of a good one. This is true of all ages and at all levels of academic or practical competence.

I do not deny that there are many children in mainstream schools with special needs, and many who can be identified very early on in their school career by well trained and vigilant teachers. That is to the great advantage both of the rest of the class and of the children so assessed. However, I also note Ofsted’s conclusion that,

“schools should stop identifying pupils as having special educational needs when they simply need better teaching and pastoral support”.

I hope that this will be addressed in the Green Paper when we have it.

The greed is displayed at managerial level. More children with special needs at school, especially at Schools Plus level, means more classroom assistants and perhaps other perks in the form of equipment or refurbishing. Perhaps a school can gain in reputation for being apparently so caring of its pupils as to bring in classroom assistants whenever it can, but extra classroom help does not necessarily solve the problem of learning difficulties. Merely providing extra classroom help does not necessarily improve the educational outcomes of children. On the contrary, many parents testify that very often the support provided to a child is totally inappropriate. Many children find themselves being taught almost exclusively, and sometimes on their own, by classroom assistants who have not been trained as teachers, still less as teachers with the proper skills to teach children who for one reason or another—there are very many different reasons—are finding it difficult to learn. The latter case tends to be worse than the first. In the past, Ministers have sometimes spoken as if one-to-one teaching is the best form of support for a child with learning difficulties and as if that sort of idea should be aspired to, but I very much doubt the truth of that. There is nothing in the ideal world so good as good classroom teaching, where children learn from one another as well as from their teachers. They are competitive and appreciate one another’s efforts. My belief is that the class is the place where children should be taught, if possible.

What makes it worse is that inexperienced teachers, when they have either a child on their own or just two or three children together, very often tend to intervene too soon. Amateur teachers are nearly always guilty of this, and even parents trying to help their children with their homework are guilty of intervening too soon. In the end they do the child’s work for them and do not wait to find out whether the child has really understood. If the assignment has been completed, that is okay. They do not know enough to know how to help people understand what the work has involved.

Some years ago—I think it was in 2005 or thereabouts —the Audit Commission published a report in which complaints that a number of children who had special needs were being taught almost entirely by untrained amateur assistants were very clear. The then Government disregarded it, just as they disregarded the Sheerman report in 2007. At the time, of course, no reason was given. I blame no particular Government for this; it is just Ministers’ habit of saying, “We do not think it is a good time to do this”, or “We do not think it is necessary”, without giving the faintest answer to the criticism or explanation of the point.

I have some questions for the Minister. First, do the Government have any solution to this overassessing? Secondly, there is a great difficulty for some children whose school time ends at 16 if they are disabled or have learning difficulties. There is no automatic transition from that stage to college, where they do not have a guaranteed place. Can the Government look very seriously at the need that everybody has to continue with their education from 16 to 19, as that should be as of right? It is an age when children with learning difficulties often make huge steps, as long as they are not kept hanging about.

My third question is rather more complicated. Can the Minister possibly contrive a way to persuade his colleagues that mixing up the terminology of disability discrimination with special educational needs has been a disaster? That happened in 2002. I believe simply that those two concepts are completely different—the concept of trying, lovingly and caringly, to help a child overcome or at least make the best of his educational difficulties, and the concept of making it illegal to discriminate unfairly against disabled people in the workplace or in society. Those concepts need to be separated out, and the Ofsted report calls attention to the extremely confusing nature of the terminology used to discuss these problems. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Warnock]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have taken part in this debate. It has been extremely enlightening, enjoyable and very good. I particularly thank the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson of Balmacara, for his maiden speech. I loved it. He comes from the most difficult and recalcitrant of all areas of special educational need. I therefore congratulate him on that as well.

I especially thank the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, because what came through to me from her admirable speech was the need for optimism, which informed our report all those years ago. We felt that there was hope for children with special needs, whatever they were. She spoke of the low expectations that in her early days would have inhibited her progress if she had not had such admirable expectations of herself. She made a marvellous and inspiring speech which reminded us of the attitudes towards special educational needs that informed the late 1970s, before the horrors of the cuts came.

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, for taking the whole issue so seriously—she always has—for what she said, and for providing the hope for more discussions. I finally thank very much the Minister, who was extremely interested and in learning mode before this debate. He is obviously interested and well informed. I thank him for his reply and I beg leave to withdraw the Motion.

Motion withdrawn.

House adjourned at 5.11 pm.