Schools White Paper

Lord Addington Excerpts

Tuesday 29th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My Lords, I will pass on my noble friend’s very warm words to my right honourable friend the Secretary of State. I am glad that she appreciates the White Paper. I agree with her wholeheartedly about what parents want. I was lucky enough to spend some time with a group of parents yesterday while visiting a school in Newham, where 94% of the children have English as an additional language. The mothers and fathers to whom I spoke were all crystal clear about how important it was for their children to achieve.

In relation to my noble friend’s specific questions, the Education Endowment Foundation, which we fully endowed through, and announced in, the White Paper, provides us with the academic rigour in terms of evaluating different interventions across the education system, so that teachers, school leaders and MAT leaders can feel confident in the interventions that they use. All that we have suggested in the White Paper has been supported and recommended by the EEF. In relation to excluded children, if my noble friend will bear with me for another day, we are taking the Statement about the special educational needs and alternative provision Green Paper in this House tomorrow, when I will be delighted to talk about that in more detail.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, there is a great deal in this White Paper on special educational needs and teacher training. Indeed, teacher training is the main thrust of it. Then we talk about 90% literacy. Some 15%—or 10% if you are being conservative—of the population are dyslexic. Another 5% are dyscalculic. If you put the other “disses” in there, you have a great pot of people who are going to struggle in the classroom. How, unless you have a major investment in special educational needs, are you going to hit that target? Or are we going to do something very sensible such as saying that if somebody communicates through a computer coherently—every computer that you buy now has a built-in voice-operated section and read-back facility—we will count that as being literate? If we are, we can achieve it. If not, we are basically going to break the back of people achieving an unrealistic target if it is still with a pen and paper. If the Minister can give me an answer now, it will help the rest of the debate today, and the debate on the Statement tomorrow.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I hope I can give the noble Lord a fuller answer tomorrow, when we talk about the SEND Green Paper. But in terms of this document talking a lot about children with special educational needs and disabilities, that is intentional. We are absolutely clear that the best place for the majority of children with special educational needs is in mainstream education close to their home and their friends. We need to make sure that mainstream schools are a safe, welcoming, supportive and effective environment for those children. We have looked at and tried to model the interventions that are set out in the White Paper to see how we can reach the targets that we have set out. As the noble Lord knows, however, currently only 22% of children with special educational needs reach the expected standard, compared with an average at key stage 2 of 65%—so it is well below what we need to get to.