Deaf Students (Educational Achievement)

Edward Timpson Excerpts

Tuesday 13th January 2015 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Mr Edward Timpson)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Plymouth, Moor View (Alison Seabeck)on securing this very important debate. I want to take the opportunity to thank her not only for her personal insight into deafness, but for the work she has undertaken in her local area to support parents and carers of children with disability through the Make a Difference Plymouth parent support group. As she said, through her role as president of the Plymouth YMCA, she was instrumental in helping Yvette Beer and the Plymouth Deaf Children’s Society to secure new premises, which I understand she opened in December. One of the principal reasons for being so encouraged by hearing about such initiatives is that they are very much in the spirit of the special educational needs and disability reforms that came into force last September. I am sure I speak for the whole House when I express my appreciation to her for all she is doing to improve support for deaf children in her constituency.

As ever, I will do my best in the time available to respond to the points made by the hon. Lady, but if I run out of time, I will as usual write to her to pick up any outstanding issues.

The Children and Families Act 2014 sets out a range of measures to reform the special educational needs system so that it extends from birth to 25, giving children, young people and their parents greater control and choice in decisions about their support and ensuring that their needs are properly met. The reforms drew support from all parties and should work to the benefit of all children and young people, regardless of the type of need or impairment.

In addition, under the Equalities Act 2010, schools and other education providers must make reasonable adjustments for disabled children and young people to help alleviate any substantial disadvantage they experience because of their disability, and they must not discriminate against them. If children and young people need special educational provision or specialist services, the duties on schools, local authorities and others in relation to special educational needs then come into play. That ensures that strong legal protections and safeguards are in place.

To support deaf children in particular, the Department is funding many voluntary organisations to enable local areas to benchmark the support that they provide to them, and to access many of the tools and pieces of information on the most effective approaches. Much of the good practice that we know exists can then be used by many more people. We are keen to build on our understanding of the evidence about what works, and we will continue to work with organisations with expertise in this particular area. Our national voluntary and community sector grants programme is an important opportunity for us to continue to support good proposals. From my own involvement with charities supporting deaf people—including Signature, whose conference I spoke at in 2013—I know that there is a huge amount of knowledge and understanding that we can help to harness and bring to bear. We have provided £1.1 million to the National Sensory Impairment Partnership to carry out a benchmarking exercise and develop an outcomes framework for local authorities to assess how well they are supporting deaf pupils.

[Stephen Lloyd (Eastbourne) (LD)]

On that note, does the Minister agree that it is terribly important for deaf children that the local authority is flexible? My constituent has a young son who is within a few days of the switchover and being enrolled in a school for this September. He is profoundly deaf with cochlear implants. The local authority says that he must join that school, but I think it should be flexible. Does the Minister agree that local authorities must be flexible to ensure the best outcomes for deaf children?

[Mr Timpson]

My hon. Friend will appreciate that I do not know the details of that case and it would be wrong for me to comment on it, but the whole thrust of our reforms to the special educational needs system is to ensure that it focuses relentlessly on the individual needs of each child, and on the support that they and their family need, in order for the child to reach their academic potential. We must have high aspirations and remove any barriers that prevent them from reaching their goal, and I expect that to happen in every local authority, irrespective of where it is.

The Government have funded the production of an early support guide for parents of deaf children, and the I-Sign project to develop a family sign language programme is available from the National Deaf Children’s Society. That is particularly important in the first few years when children are learning to communicate, especially for 90% of deaf children who are born to hearing parents.

The most important service for all children and young people is high-quality teaching—the hon. Lady touched on that. We have set clear guidance in the new code of practice on the process for identifying and assessing children’s special educational needs, putting support in place, monitoring the progress made by each child, and securing further support where necessary. Narrowing the gap between deaf children and their peers is a key barometer for whether deaf children are getting access to high-quality teaching. Although we must endeavour to make further progress in that area, we should also recognise the enormous improvements that have been made.

More deaf children are leaving school with good GCSEs, and we want them to aspire to reach their full potential. In 2012-13—the latest year for which data are available—73.5% of deaf children achieved five or more A to C grades in GCSE, compared with 50% in 2008-09. For pupils without SEN, those figures were 89% and 80% respectively. Over that period, deaf pupils progressed at approximately twice the rate of their peers. The attainment gap has closed significantly, and that must be a testament to the hard work of pupils themselves, as well as to the work of sensory support services across the country. I hear what the hon. Lady says about recent figures from her constituency, and that is disappointing when so much progress has been made. However, I hope that with our reforms and the renewed appetite to ensure that health care, social care and education work more closely around a family, those improvements will come back on track.

Improvements in teaching practice and technological advances mean that deaf children are now far more likely to achieve their full potential than they were five years ago, and we want that progress to continue. We are working to improve the training of teachers and school leaders to help them identify where pupils with hearing loss face barriers to learning, and offer appropriate support. The hon. Lady rightly asked how we are seeking to do that. Through the national scholarship fund, teachers and support staff can apply for funding to undertake high-level qualifications to improve their knowledge and enhance their ability to support the teaching and learning of pupils with SEN and disabilities. Importantly, that fund can be used for qualifications relating to sensory impairment, and more than 1,300 staff have gained such qualifications since 2010.

In April 2014, the National College for Teaching and Leadership launched a new funding round with up to £1 million to support up to 50% of course fees for qualified teachers and SEN support staff, and 648 awards were offered from last September. We need to ensure we have provision to meet demand, and that is an area we need to continue to keep our attention on.

The hon. Lady asked a specific question about the issuing of hearing aids. She acknowledged and appreciates that that falls within the remit of another ministerial portfolio, but I understand that the Under-Secretary of State for Health, my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea (Jane Ellison) addressed this issue in a previous debate and that Health Ministers are handling and monitoring the matter closely. I will of course re-emphasise the concerns the hon. Lady has expressed this evening to my colleagues in the Department of Health. Every intervention by health professionals should be based on clinical need and the legislation is clear that reasonable adjustments legislation applies to all young people.

On funding, it is for local authorities to decide which SEN services to provide for children and young people, including services for deaf children and how much to spend on them based on the duties we have placed on them in the new Children and Families Act 2014 and the accompanying code of practice. The services typically provided by local authorities, either directly or by commissioning others in the public or the private sector, include: services for visual, hearing and physical impairment; specific learning difficulties; speech, language and communication; profound and severe learning difficulties; and autism.

Councils are reporting that they are spending no less this year on their SEN services than they spent last year. Through their local funding formula, they also include a clear amount of funding intended to meet the needs of pupils with additional needs. The majority of children who are deaf and have a hearing impairment fall outside the category of educational health and care assessments. They will benefit from that funding through the delegated schools budgets, which have been protected. Special schools and other schools with special units often use their budgets to develop particular specialist services, including those for pupils with hearing impairment. Where necessary, schools receive extra top-up funding from the local authority for the additional support costs for pupils with the highest needs. We are committed to making sure that the requirements of children with special educational needs are met, and we have been clear to local authorities that they should prioritise vital front-line services to vulnerable children.

Nationally, more than £5 billion is being made available to councils for children and young people with special educational needs, disabilities and other high needs, as part of their dedicated schools grant. Allocations for the year beginning April 2015, notified to local authorities in December, indicated that more than £50 million more was being allocated to local authorities in the high needs element of their grant. The hon. Lady may wish to know that Devon’s dedicated school grant is increasing by more than £16 million next year and that the high needs element of its grant, which this year amounts to £59.6 million, is increasing by £0.2 million.

Just as important is how that money is spent—the way we measure improvement and outcomes for children and how we hold services to account for the quality of service they provide. Most deaf children attend mainstream schools, some of which have additional specialist units offering support on site. Assessments on how well schools perform will be made as part of Ofsted’s school inspection regime. The Ofsted inspection framework places a clear emphasis on meeting the needs of disabled pupils and pupils with SEN, and on considering the quality of teaching and the progress made by those pupils. Where a school has a specialist resource for deaf children, or for other forms of SEN, it is specifically covered by the inspection report.

One of the central tenets of the SEN reforms is to provide clear opportunities for families to influence and shape the development of local services, and to maintain legal rights to challenge individual decisions at the first-tier tribunal for SEN and disability. Last year, I asked Ofsted to carry out a study of local authorities’ planning in preparation for implementation of the special educational needs reforms, and to advise me on whether there was a need for an inspection framework to drive improvements. Ofsted’s findings and key recommendations were published in December. I have invited Ofsted formally to inspect local areas on their effectiveness in fulfilling their duties.

The hon. Lady talked about the key role of health in delivering support for deaf children. Ofsted will inspect along with the Care Quality Commission, and inspections will also involve a local authority officer. Inspections will form part of a wider accountability framework we are putting in place that has strong local accountability at its heart and which should provide assurance to families. Ofsted is now working up the details of the new arrangements, after which I hope to be in a position to provide further details.

With a significant number of children in England having been identified as having a hearing impairment and requiring extra support, it is imperative we ensure that they all benefit from the new SEN reforms. Not only do the SEN and disability reforms in the Children and Families Act provide legal protections, but they establish a better system for identifying needs and commissioning services across education, health and social care. The hon. Lady rightly spoke about the need to improve identification at the earliest opportunity so that the best support can be put in place to ensure that progress is made as soon as possible and that we do not delay ensuring that every child progresses, not just in their education but in the other development goals we know they are capable of.

The reforms should help ensure that services are responsive to local needs and that families do not feel they have to battle to find out what support is available or to access services. The evidence from the pathfinder areas and the early implementation of the reforms indicates that many parents are starting to see a different approach from the different agencies involved with them and their child. The new education and health and care plan will clearly set out in one place all the support across services that a child will receive, and crucially will focus on the outcomes, in education, work and other areas, that the child and their family want to achieve now and in the future.

This has been a thought-provoking debate, and I am sorry that we do not have more time to elucidate many of the important matters the hon. Lady has raised, but I again thank her for bringing this matter to the House and raising awareness of the importance of ensuring that all deaf children are given the best possible chance of succeeding, both educationally and more widely in their lives, as they move into adulthood. Our SEN reforms will help to deliver that well placed aspiration, and I look forward to continuing to work with her and the professionals who work day in, day out to provide the best possible support to help achieve the goals we have set, not just for ourselves, but more importantly for the children we are all there for.