Children: Early Intervention

Baroness Warnock Excerpts

Thursday 17th March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Warnock]

My Lords, it is an enormous pleasure to follow the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich. I congratulate him on his excellent and most interesting maiden speech. He is a man of extremely wide experience and, obviously, deep humanity. I am particularly delighted by the fact that he was introduced to this House on St Felix’s Day—Felix being the name of both my grandfather and my eldest son—and my having spent a very happy time just before the birth of my eldest son at Dunwich, no less, which now hardly exists but then was still a recognisable place, not taken over by the sea, as the right reverend Prelate said. Apart from that, we have every reason to be very glad that he is now a Member of our House and look forward to his contributions over a wide field, not just what we have heard him talk about today. I need hardly make the speech that I was going to make now that he has made his.

I shall concentrate for a few minutes on the question of communication, as the most crucial field for early intervention in childhood. I have been mildly encouraged by the recent Green Paper on special educational needs, because the Government have treated education, health and the social circumstances of the child as a seamless whole. That is, as far as it goes, encouraging. My only question is whether any concrete changes will come from the fine words in the Green Paper. The battle to treat those three areas as one in the life of the child has been fought for a very long time. As the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, said, it seems to have been fought a great deal for the past 30 years and will, I hope, change in the right direction hereafter.

It struck me that, thinking back to the 1970s when the report of the Committee on Special Educational Needs, which I was privileged to chair, was published, we were charged by the then Government with what now seems a completely absurd and impossible task, which is to recommend what such children need without mentioning a deprived background as part of the problem from which many of them suffer. That now seems ridiculous, but at the time, we were still in the days when being educationally subnormal, as it used to be called, or handicapped, put you into a class apart, a separate race of people. It seemed that we had to rule out mentioning deprivation or not having English as the first language spoken at home when talking about education, because it would put the children suffering from deprivation into the category of the handicapped, and that was known to be inferior. It would have been snobbish, at best, and racist at worst, if we had mentioned deprivation.

It is worth reflecting on what an absurd embargo was put on us at the time. It could not happen now. That is good, but it is most important to recognise the role that teachers, as well as parents, must play in identifying, and knowing what to do when they recognise, the difficulties that some children are having and the special needs that they may be demonstrating in the classroom. That means that not only specialist teachers must be prepared to intervene but that all classroom teachers must be trained to recognise such children and take the next step.

I end my remarks on a more optimistic note. This week, I was present at the launch of a new website especially designed for teachers in training and in post in the classroom. It was launched at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital School, which is a marvellous school. The website gives information and advice on an enormous number of difficulties that children may be experiencing in classrooms, starting with severe allergies and going through every possible educational obstacle. I very much hope that that website—which, incidentally, was financed entirely by Google—will be very widely used in teacher training establishments and by teachers as individuals when they are faced with a problem that they do not quite understand. I recommend that website very highly to all teacher training establishments. That may be a good example of the big society working.