Academies Bill [Lords]

Charlotte Leslie Excerpts

Thursday 22nd July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Vernon Coaker]

That is a very good point. I mentioned yesterday that this is not simply a question of young people being assessed by a local authority and not receiving a statement, even though most people think that they should have received one. I have no professional expertise in that area, however.

To be fair to the Government, the inclusion in clause 2 of proposed new subsection 8A, which deals with low incidence special needs, is important and significant. We are talking not only about the young people who everyone would expect to have statements for their special needs, and for the first time the Government have put into the legislation the term

“low incidence special educational needs or disabilities”.

That represents a significant improvement to the Bill. I know from my own experience that young people with low incidence special needs often do not receive the support that they deserve, and neither do their families. They often do not receive the kind of educational or social support that they need.

[Charlotte Leslie (Bristol North West) (Con)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Vernon Coaker]

I will in a moment.

Proposed new subsection 8A is very well intentioned, but clause 2(6) also states that the Secretary of State may intervene when

“a local authority fails to secure satisfactory provision for pupils with low incidence special educational needs or disabilities”.

What does that actually mean? It is all very well to put that proposal into the Bill, but how will it be funded, organised and co-ordinated? How are we going to decide in a meaningful way what

“low incidence special educational needs or disabilities”

means? This is a huge problem. I am not criticising the Government; I think the inclusion of those words is very good. I would rather have the problem of trying to identify what they mean than not have them in the Bill, which would risk people not having those needs met.

The inclusion of the provision raises the serious question of how it is to be funded. Where will the funding come from? How much is it expected to be? Who will co-ordinate the arrangements if, instead of the local authority, we have lots of independent academies, special schools and free schools? How is this part of the Bill going to be achieved?

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[Charlotte Leslie]

The hon. Gentleman has partly anticipated my question. Does he agree that our looking at how to cater for low incidence special needs in the Bill is symptomatic of the much wider question of how to deal with programmes such as School Action and School Action Plus? I am sure that they represented a well intentioned move away from statementing and the closure of special schools, but their results were questionable. Does he agree that this wider problem needs to be addressed, and that the Bill provides a spectrum through which to look at it?

--- Later in debate ---

[Pat Glass]

I agree with my hon. Friend.

The biggest body blow to centrally supported specialist low incidence SEN services came from delegation targets. In order to reach delegation targets, which were mandatory, local authorities arbitrarily put over the side into schools anything that would take them to the magical 96%. In some local authorities, specialist services were lost and they have never recovered.

[Charlotte Leslie]

I am enjoying and being informed by the hon. Lady’s contribution, which is based on her experience. On both sides of the Committee, there is a recognition that SEN provision is inadequate. I did a study a while ago that showed that children on school action plus had higher exclusion rates than those on other forms of SEN statementing. We need to tackle a range of issues in this area, and I wonder whether we are looking at a large problem through the small angle of one clause in this Bill. The problem may be solved only by—to use the cliché—a root and branch review of the entire SEN system. That would improve the role of academies in that area as well. Perhaps the Minister could address that point as well.

[Pat Glass]

I understand the hon. Lady’s point, and there are many deficiencies in the wider SEN system. My concern is that if the issue of low incidence SEN is not defined properly, the situation will be made much worse. In some respects this is not a party political issue, because we are all here to do the best that we can for children with SEN and their parents, whose lives are a struggle without making things worse.

We have lost good specialist services over the years, when funding was delegated to schools but they did not buy the services back. I have learned to my cost, when these things have happened, that we simply cannot get those services back quickly. Teachers of the deaf and the visually impaired and blind do not hang on the back of cupboard doors; they take years to train, and it is hugely expensive. Building those services back up once they have gone, particularly if the local authority does not have the funding to do so, will be impossible and will severely disadvantage these groups of young children.

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[Mr Hancock]

I have nothing but admiration for the hon. Gentleman for having both the ability and the courage to take on the system on behalf of his children. Parents get worn down by the system, having been frustrated by it time after time. They are physically worn out—as young people, in some instances—because of the struggles they have had to make. He was lucky that he had both the courage and the resources to take on the system, because so many parents do not have that and are always relying on somebody else to fight their battles for them.

[Charlotte Leslie]

I realise that this does not directly relate to the amendment, but part of the Bill deals with additional schools or free schools. There are parents of children with autism who are very much looking forward to setting up a free autistic school. That will benefit other parents of children with autism in their area who would wish to send their children to a particular school but whose local authority has not recognised that need until now. They have had their ambitions stifled by a local authority system that may not be working.

[Mr Hancock]

I would love it if we had an autistic school in the heart of Portsmouth. However, what happens if the autistic school is on the other side of Dorset and suddenly somebody has to pick up the bill for sending a child there? It simply will not happen and this provision will not be there. This approach is okay in London, where travelling is not a problem. Setting up specialist schools for autistic children would be great in closely defined neighbourhoods, but if these schools have to cover a large area, they will be very expensive to set up, extraordinarily expensive to staff and expensive for local authorities to fund places for or for parents to have to pay for.

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[Mr Mike Hancock]

Once again, in all the years that I have been here I have seldom been in the House on an occasion where so much common cause has been put by people who care so passionately about the issue. Of course the hon. Gentleman is right. There is a widespread lack of clarity about who diagnoses, about who is prepared to do it and about who is really suffering. For years, autism was seen as something that kids would grow out of. It goes back to the point made by the hon. Member for Weaver Vale (Graham Evans) about his son’s failure to be able to do his maths properly. The old adage of, “He or she’ll grow out of it”, was used for years as an excuse to people whose children had autism. That was a complete failure of the medical and educational systems in this country.

[Charlotte Leslie]

Will the hon. Gentleman get rid of my confusion on one issue? There seems to be inconsistency in the attitude towards parents. On the one hand, there has been concern that parents are not key in the Bill and that they have not been consulted enough, but on the other hand, when it comes to empowering parents the same enthusiasm is not shown. Speaking from my experience, I find that parents do not want to be consulted so much as to get what they want. The measures in the Bill to enable parents to do that are, according to my experience of what parents want, far more important to parents than just being listened to and not having what they want happen after that.

[Mr Hancock]

That is the story of the past 60 years. Parents were spoken to but they were not listened to, so they ended up not getting what they wanted. When parents are consulted, particularly parents who have children in this situation, they are only too aware of what they would like to see happen. They would like to see services without having to arm wrestle for them and without having to fight the system and to appeal. That has happened with the failure of many local authorities properly to carry out assessments and to provide statements for children. Why should parents have to struggle to get a statement for their child, as they have to, simply because they disagree? I have been to statement conferences on children where none of the officials in the room had met the child. They were all talking from somebody else’s notes, which had been provided by people who had met the child. The parents were sitting there in total disbelief and I just told them, “Let’s get up and go,” and we walked out.

[Charlotte Leslie]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way yet again. I find that the debate is again moving towards a general complaint about the whole system of SEN provision and I want to thank the Minister for his announcement today that there will be a Green Paper to look into this matter. Once we have the whole system of SEN sorted out, the issues that we are facing with this Bill will become much clearer and much less problematic.

[Mr Hancock]

The hon. Lady is a formidable supporter for the Minister, and one that the House will have to learn to deal with. She is fighting his corner and that of the coalition very well, and I would probably be grateful for it except on this occasion I do not agree with one word of what the coalition has come up with.