Lord Addington
Main Page: Lord Addington (Liberal Democrat - Excepted Hereditary)Schools: Special Educational Needs and Disabilities
Lord Addington Excerpts
Lord Addington
That this House takes note of the case for improved individual school capacity to deal with commonly occurring special educational needs and disabilities, in the light of the increasing number of academies and free schools.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, I thank those happy few who have put their names down to speak in this debate. It behoves me to tell the House why I have tabled this debate now. First, we had the opportunity and, secondly, there is huge reform going on in the schools system and a great deal of work going on about how special educational needs are addressed in the classroom. The Carter review is going on and we are creating more academies, so I thought it was time we had a little look at this situation.
Why has this come about? The Government have decided that they want a structure where schools are more independent and are not talking to groups outside local education authorities in the same way they did before. This means that you have something that stands much more by itself, at least in theory, than it has done before. The structures that have been developed, and indeed are still being developed, tend to refer back to something where the local authority or the local education authority is there as effectively a baseball catcher or a wicket-keeper to catch what is going past. It is the block. It will not always get it right but it has been there. Key to this is the educational psychologist. This highly trained individual who provides structure and help, and the relationship—what are they going to do? Indeed, in the individual school, how are they going to deal with the SENCO? But how is the rest of it—this structure and this idea that goes on outside—going to work in future?
When I first tabled this debate, I was not quite as aware of how the Government seem to be restructuring and going forward with the idea that the education authorities are now going to concentrate much more on special educational needs. But we still do not know exactly what that means. How is this interaction going to take place? What is the level of involvement in a school that is run individually or as part of a chain, or by the Church of England or any other religious body? How is that relationship going to develop? What is going to happen? How do we get through?
We have also heard that school places are not going to be totally removed from the educational authorities. I appreciate that this is something of a moving target for the Government but I hope the Minister will take the opportunity to give us an idea of how thinking is developing at the moment. This is something that we can genuinely expect from the Minister. What do the Government think will be the situation in a couple of years’ time? If by, I think, 2022 everything is going to be an academy or something like it, there should be something in place that reflects these duties. How are we going to get through? Indeed, what are we ruling out? The idea that a local authority is going to provide for special educational needs or be the main backstop suggests that we might be instituting more special schools.
If we want a hardy perennial of discussion in your Lordships’ House, special schools is an extremely good one. There are those who think they are the wonderful answer to all problems, and those who think they are effectively a form of apartheid in which you take somebody with a disability away from the rest of society. It is a long, well-established argument which predates the noble Baroness’s arrival in the House, but I assure her the scars are there on many of us who have been through it. How do you get in there and involve these two—at times, childishly—competing ideas?
I have always felt that education is the most important thing and should be done in a way that prepares you for later life. Being taken and locked away with a selective group of people that does not give you that cross-reference is a bad start, but occasionally it will be necessary—very occasionally and I hope increasingly infrequently, but the need will be there. How is this being looked into? The learning pattern of the individual, and whether it interferes with the learning pattern of others, is probably the only real way of justifying that exclusion. How are we going to look at that?
Those who are excluded from school tend to have a very high number of special educational needs. If you want to follow this through, look at the prison population. What happens there? You can find groups of prisoners who have incredibly high levels of functional and indeed total illiteracy. When you look at most of the people in prisons, the fact that they have been effectively been excluded from school by the age of 14 is one of the most common denominators. How are we getting on? How are we developing and structuring this?
Then there are the individual schools themselves. It will come as no surprise to the noble Baroness and many of my noble friends that I am very concerned that we improve the knowledge and preparation of the average classroom teacher for dealing with the commonly occurring special educational needs—I say commonly occurring, because anybody who deals with this will know that certain needs and groups of disabilities are very infrequent. Even if they are well known and obvious, how do you deal with the normal occurrence that you expect to find in a classroom?
It is about time I declared one of my very obvious interests in that I am president of the British Dyslexia Association. I am dyslexic and have used assistive technology for nearly 20 years. People with dyslexia are going to be a part of the career life of any teacher, as 10% of the population, or three in a standard classroom, will be on the dyslexia spectrum. We use a low definition internationally—America goes with 20%.
That is just one of the conditions. I congratulate the autism lobby on getting its briefing out on time, given only a week’s start. Autism generally affects only 1% of people, but many of those will be in the mainstream. There is a degree of argument there with high-functioning autism, or Asperger’s, but many of those will be in a mainstream classroom. You will come across them, although as opposed to three in every class you will meet one person in every three classes.
You can then go into dyscalculia and dyspraxia. I hope I get the figures the right way round; I think it is 3% and 5% according to some estimates. Then you have all the other conditions, for example those relating to speech and language. There is some debate whether there is a higher number of people suffering from speech and language problems than those with dyslexia, but there ain’t much in it. It will depend on which bit of teaching you are doing—that is, which age group—as to when you will hit these things hardest when you are going through. How do you deal with these problems?
The Answer we got at PMQs saying that the Carter review is going to have a look at this and do something about it is reassuring, but Carter is not the first review into teaching. Lamb and Rose come to mind as fairly recent examples. We can have reviews and make recommendations, but unless we are prepared to implement them it means nothing. Are we prepared to implement? In the new structure suggested in the recent White Paper on teacher training, how do you get a sufficient level of awareness or specialism to catch the vast majority of students going through the system and give the correct support?
In the current environment, let us face it, we have put a great push on things such as spelling. The British Dyslexia Association’s helpline had a rare experience recently: we had lots and lots of inquiries from teachers asking: “How do I get my dyslexic student through their spelling tests for SATs?”. The answer was: “We cannot help you here now”. Remember that these are disabilities which mean that you will always have greater difficulty—you always will. It does not matter how wonderful your phonics teaching. A dyslexic, with the language processing problems you have and the short-term memory, is always going to be worse at spelling.
If you sit them down and say simply, “Do more”, do you know what you are doing? It is the equivalent of taking a weak man or a small woman and saying: “Carry sacks of coal, and if you can’t do it, let’s make sure you do some more” and then, when they collapse in a heap, saying, “You didn’t try hard enough”. You are cutting that person off from the entire learning experience. We would not do it to somebody in a wheelchair. We would not say to them: “Go and do the cross-country course”. Well, we might, and the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, would have got round, but it would not do her any good. It would not have helped anybody. Most people would have been left behind; most would have failed.
Are we going to get the expertise into the classroom with the freedom to change the way they teach, the freedom to say: “This is not appropriate”? Let us remember, for many years we have given a legal responsibility to educate these groups. They have different learning patterns; they will not be able to learn in the same way. That is recognised in law, but we are not equipping teachers to do the job. That is a ridiculous situation, one where we are frequently contradicting ourselves in legislation. In the previous Parliament, I spent a great deal of time pointing that out on one issue.
If we are to carry on encouraging schools to go their own way, what support can they get? Will we appoint more educational psychologists—those people with six years of training? It was pointed out to me in conversation that at the moment, there is generally about one of them to between 25 and 30 schools. With the best will in the world, that is not a great resource. Each one will be dealing with at least 10,000 pupils, perhaps half that number again. How are we going to make sure that teachers in the classroom are supported, that the normal—run-of-the-mill, if you like—teacher, will be able to say to someone: “I think you have a problem here; I think it is X”, and then inform the parents of that child? At the moment, as I have said before, the normal pattern is that an interested parent batters away, identifies what is going on, does some research, gets in touch with a charity and then goes to the teacher. That is ridiculous.
Then we talk about raising standards. We are going to have to prepare the classroom experience to be one where teachers can work smarter: identify, support and help appropriately. That is what is required. Unless you have an intervention structure where you can find out who is there, go to outside structures and be guaranteed that they exist, you will get a degree of failure, or at least underachievement. Surely we do not want this. Surely, this is utterly counterproductive.
I shall pull my comments and arguments together, I hope. Where will we take the necessary action to make sure the situation is better in this brave new world of independent schools? If we are giving the ultimate support responsibility to those outside, what are going to be the links? What are we going to do to make sure that people are not forever fighting over whose budget it will come out of? How are we going to progress here?
I could think of several more questions, but I think noble Lords have probably heard enough from me for today. However, I hope that we get a better idea of the rate of travel and the commitment from the Government to make sure that, with teacher training, something actually takes place, as opposed to simply having another review that sits in a big pile while people say, “That was a good idea—we’ll get round to it someday”. Unless we take action now, we are in real trouble—or we will continue to be in trouble.
Lord Addington
My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have spoken in this debate, and I thank the Minister for what was as good an attempt as I have had at answering my questions—of late, certainly. We had a great deal more clarity about the role of the local authority. The Minister said that teachers have a duty to teach everyone, but she did not say what that duty involves in terms of training for specialist teaching. The learning process of those we are talking about is going to be different, which means that what comes out of Carter is going to be important. Unless you get that straight, accessing support becomes almost irrelevant because you are unable to identify the problem. I talked about dyslexia and the noble Lord, Lord Warner, spoke about autism. My noble friend has shown me a list of other conditions set out in two nice long columns on a piece of A4. I identified some of them as subsets of other conditions. This is complicated and difficult, and I am talking about commonly occurring conditions only. Unless you get into initial teacher training, CPD or something a good base of awareness about the types of problems so that every teacher will get it, you are going to miss large numbers and put a great deal of stress on your support structures. There is no other way around it.
Therefore, before I thank everybody, I shall say that unless we all commit to making sure that the Carter review is converted into real, solid action, we will miss a huge opportunity. I give formal notice that I will not be letting this go, and I will continue to press it. I have a Private Member’s Bill on this subject. Nothing would give me greater pleasure than not to have to introduce it or not to have to bring it back next Session if I do not get enough time now, but I will unless we get something that says that we are going to address this in the near future, because we have waited too long already. Carter is merely following up the work of Lamb, Rose and dozens of other academic studies.