Special Educational Needs and Disability Code of Practice: 0 to 25 years
Lord Addington Excerpts(10 years, 3 months ago)
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Baroness Howe of Idlicote (CB)
My Lords, it is always a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham. As usual, he has picked on an aspect—the “must”, as it were—and it will be very important to see how that is put into effect. I am grateful to the Minister for putting his case, and what has been achieved so far, albeit that there is still some way to go.
I ask the Minister to provide assurance on three important matters relating to the changes to the special educational needs framework and the code of practice. First, what progress has been made by Ofsted in its review of the need for an inspection framework to drive improvements in local SEN provision and the local offer? That was announced earlier this year by the Minister when we were considering the Children and Families Bill, which is now an Act. We were told that a report would be published this summer. Can the Minister confirm that that is still the intention and, if not, when the report is expected? A number of charities, including the National Deaf Children’s Society, question the wisdom of passing a new code of practice without taking meaningful steps to ensure that local authorities follow it. The absence of a proper accountability framework surrounding the SEN framework remains a fundamental concern to many.
Secondly, while the code refers to “0 to 25” on the cover, as we all recall, it does not apply to disabled students in higher education. When this issue was raised in our debates on the Children and Families Bill, we were told that the SEN framework did not need to apply to higher education because a separate scheme of Disabled Students’ Allowance already ensures that the necessary support is provided. However, in April, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills announced a “rebalancing” of support from DSA to universities. Although the details are still sketchy, I understand that some support will no longer be provided by DSA and that universities will be expected to provide it instead. It remains unclear what rights a disabled student at university will have if the university fails to provide the support that would previously have been given under DSA.
I recognise that universities are required to follow the Equality Act—we have heard from the Minister that they will do so—and to make reasonable adjustments. However, should universities fail to make reasonable adjustments, the main means of redress here would seem to be a judicial review. Had the same disabled student aged 19 attended college instead and had an education, health and care plan, they would have the option to appeal to a SEN and disability tribunal over their support. It seems perverse that a student at a university has to take a more difficult route to securing the support they need. I would be grateful if the Minister could provide a view on whether disabled students in higher education should have the same or similar statutory rights as a student at a college with special educational needs aged 19 to 25. Will the Minister confirm whether his department will look again at the question of whether disabled students in higher education should be brought under the scope of the code and the SEN framework?
Thirdly, and finally, there is a strong focus on outcomes in the new code. This is certainly to be welcomed. Will the Minister confirm whether families or young people will have a right to appeal if the local authority fails to set stretching or appropriate outcomes for their child? The National Deaf Children’s Society and others are concerned that there is an omission here in both the code and the accompanying regulations. If so, what is the rationale for this?
I hope that the Minister will be able to provide reassurances on the above matters or indicate that these issues are being looked at elsewhere. It is important that we have the best SEN code and framework possible—I am sure that he is committed to that—and, where improvements are needed, I very much hope that the Minister will look at how those can be achieved.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, perhaps I may put a few more points. First, the size of the document was commented upon in another place. On going through the sections, they should of course be broken down to smaller units, for ease of use. I ask my noble friend, has he encouraged the various charitable bodies outside to print their own guides to the relevant bits for their user groups? I can see that they would be very good at making it understandable, because it is in their interests and those of their client base to ensure that it is done; and they have a better starting point from knowing exactly what language could be used. That is a general point.
Not for the first time, the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, got to the nub of what I was going to say, first. That is, that we have come from a very confrontational system, as the noble Lord said, in which we knew what we had to do and where the points in the sand were that we had to get to. We knew that we had to achieve these and needed certain points to do so. It was incredibly confrontational and probably wasted huge amounts of effort. It probably was needed when it was first brought in, to get people to take the problem seriously. We should be capable of moving on from the graduated approach commenced in school action and school action plus, as the noble Lord described. However, if we had taken into account that the schools and the providers of support are also going to have to move away from a confrontational situation, what is that monitoring? What is that “must”, and how are they going to do it? Those are very valid questions. If there is not the will to move forward, who ultimately will make sure that they do it? That is something we should know about. It is something that we should not have to do but almost certainly will do, if only in a certain number of cases. It is just the historical weight that we carry in this situation.
I have a couple of slightly more specific points. The biggest and bravest change in this was the fact of the duty to identify within the Act—not merely as a response to those who had been presented. However, I cannot help but ask: if we are putting a great deal of effort into the SEN codes here and the SEN codes are organised, has my noble friend given any more thought to improving at least a recognition course for the more commonly occurring disabilities or educational problems? He mentions in this document those with specific learning difficulties. Apparently dyslexics are out in front, closely followed by dyscalculics and dyspractics. I am not sure about the figures, but we reckon that it is roughly 10% in the British version for dyslexics. Just over 3% have dyscalculia; I have not seen the figure for dyspraxia. Probably up to 15% of our school population is covered in that group. We must make sure that we can identify the signs, or at least the danger of people falling into those groups, the specific learning patterns those people have, the support structures they will need and, indeed, getting them through not only for educational purposes and teaching them how to cope. It would be very helpful to know how to establish all that for individuals; how to bring in their parents and tell them how to cope.
I remember the discussions we had about the SEN codes. Let us face it, none of us is coming in on this cold. I think that the term used was “whole-school strategy”: making sure that work structures are in place throughout the school. In early recognition, having lots of eyes with a degree of knowledge will be better than having an expert who gives commands, because at least that way we will know to refer on to the expert. This is something that is not too much to expect, and it certainly has to be a better way forward in the earlier stages of the educational process. What steps are being taken towards this? If we do not put mandatory steps in now, how do we ensure that the SENCOs have enough scouts, troops and boots on the ground to ensure they do their job properly?
This is a change of approach and a bold step, but the transition is going to be difficult. Almost by guarantee there are going to be problems with transition to the new culture. Unless more people are brought in and provided it is not pushed off to one side, which tended to happen in the past in the worst cases, we are going to have extra problems. I look forward to my noble friend’s answers.
Lord Low of Dalston (CB)
My Lords, the SEN disability code of practice, which we are considering today, is a substantial piece of work, as has been remarked. The department is to be congratulated on it, particularly on the extent of the consultation which has taken place. It has been improved considerably in many respects since it was first issued in outline. I particularly express appreciation for the time and trouble officials have taken to meet with me and respond to the concerns I have expressed.
Within the restrictions imposed by the debates on the Children and Families Bill, the approach to inclusion has been improved. There are references to the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities; there is a statement on the presumption of mainstream education; and, as has been said, there is a greater reference to the Equality Act, although the inter- relationship between that Act and education legislation could have been better spelt out and highlighted more prominently. So far as encouraging a strategic approach to the development of mainstream provision is concerned, the statement that local authorities should be proactive in seeking to improve the accessibility of mainstream provision is most important, particularly if they do that with respect to the provision in their area taken as a whole.
That said, the Government will know that members of the Special Educational Consortium are far from giving the code their unequivocal support. They are calling for an early review of the guidance once we have seen how it is working in practice. The sector exhibits a range of views about the code. Some organisations believe it should be withdrawn and relaid at a later date. A case in point is the National Deaf Children’s Society, which has already been referred to. This is not a head-banging or unreasonable organisation; it very much has its feet on the ground. That an organisation such as this should ask for the code to be withdrawn should give grounds for concern. The society makes a number of points. I will allude to them briefly, because the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, has already referred to them.
On Report, the Minister announced the Government had asked Ofsted to review the need for an inspection framework to drive improvements in local SEN provision and the local offer. The NDCS believes it should be a higher priority to ensure the support that deaf children receive from services is inspected. As the noble Baroness said, concerns have also been expressed about the wider accountability framework around SEN provision. The Minister indicated that Ofsted would publish its findings in summer 2014 but to date we have heard very little about Ofsted’s progress. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, I would be very glad if the Minister could give us an update on how that work is going. We need a clear understanding of how the local authorities will be held to account for their local SEN provision.
Secondly, the code is equivocal about provision of specialist services for deaf children. Paragraph 9.144 states,
“local authorities should consider commissioning … peripatetic services”
for very young children with “hearing or vision impairment”. But elsewhere it states that where an EHC plan is being considered, deaf children must be assessed by a qualified teacher of the deaf. This cannot happen unless the service employing such teachers has been commissioned, so I would welcome the Minister’s reassurance that the necessary services for giving deaf children the support that they need will be commissioned.
Special Educational Needs (Personal Budgets) Regulations 2014
Lord Addington Excerpts(10 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Pearson of Rannoch (UKIP)
My Lords I am very grateful to the Government and the noble Lord for bringing forward these regulations. I think that the Minister knows I have a long history, as the father of a Down’s syndrome daughter, of asking for this sort of thing. I particularly welcome, therefore, the inclusion of parents and families in these regulations, giving them a status which they have lacked for many years.
I trust the noble Lord will forgive me if my question is superfluous. I am not sure whether I heard him say anything about the portability of these arrangements. If a young person or a child moves from one local authority to another, is there machinery in place to ensure that what has been agreed with one local authority will be transferred to another?
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, for once when I find myself talking about the noble Lord, Lord Nash, I am basically saying “Well done”, because the approach to bring parents more into the process and to bring the expertise and support together is very positive. Particularly in the case of certain types of needs or a certain child, the parent is usually the expert, at least initially, and to bring that expertise in is often required.
It is also the case that if one gets an individual need or even indeed something more commonly occurring, it is not uncommon to find a parent who has the time and energy to focus on their child to become more informed about that one child than the professional educators. So this has the potential to be a very good thing.
The devil, of course, will be in the detail and how it is seen through, but at least we have a willingness here to accept that it will need to change and develop, and it will not be one size fits all. This is probably a very good thing. I am sure that politicians and local authorities have the capacity to mess it up themselves, and not all parents will be that well informed and intentioned, but as a basic approach, I think there is much more good than harm in this.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford (Lab)
My Lords, I will say at the outset that we very much welcome, as I think all Members in Committee on the Bill did, the principle of personal budgets and direct payments for children and young people with special education needs and learning difficulties and their families. It is fair to say that we all saw it as a tremendous possibility for empowering those young people and their families and parents. If it works, it will stimulate the provision of more and better services, and hold local authorities and providers to account, using the leverage of the personal budget. However, although we welcome the provision and the regulations, I would like to raise four points with the Minister, which potentially jeopardise this outcome of the empowerment of young people.
The first is the lack of evidence from the pathfinder programme that the Minister referred to. The most recent evaluation we have was published three months ago, in March. At that time, only six of the 31 pathfinder areas had started to implement personal budgets and only four of them had actually managed to develop the necessary resource allocation system which underpins the whole thing. Therefore, as yet, there is no substantial evidence to support what the regulations should be doing in this area—there is not much experience to speak of. It also suggests that many local authorities will have difficulties, as the pathfinders clearly have, setting up personal budgets and will need considerable support and guidance. Although I hear what the Minister says—that this is a kind of iterative, developmental and evolutionary process—there really is at the moment, in this area anyway, very little foundation in terms of knowledge and experience from the pathfinders on which to build. Can the Minister be confident that local authorities generally will be able to implement personal budgets effectively and, more to the point in terms of our discussion today, in the light of that lack of evidence, that these regulations are adequate to ensure that families can really access the personal budgets if they wish?
My second point relates to Regulation 7, which refers to the decisions by local authorities not to make a direct payment. The regulations themselves do not specify the grounds on which a request for a personal budget can be refused by a local authority but simply say that the local authority must give the reasons, in writing, for that refusal. The code of practice that was published in the last couple of days, at paragraph 9.107, refers readers to later paragraphs—paragraphs 9.119 to 9.124—for the reasons why a request may be refused. However, I have to say to the Minister that those paragraphs in the code of practice are about as clear as mud to the average family and, indeed, to me. They refer specifically to other pieces of existing legislation, which you then have to go and trawl through in order to understand what the grounds for refusal might be. Could the Minister say clearly today, and put on record, what are the grounds on which a local authority can refuse a request, over and above those basic conditions outlined in Regulation 8? In respect of direct payments, which are, if you like, a subset of personal budgets, will the Minister look at rewriting the code of practice so that paragraphs 9.119 to 9.124 are clearly understandable by families and professionals who will be looking to the code of practice for guidance?
My third concern is around Regulations 6(c) and 6(d), which the Minister referred to. It seems that these potentially constrain the provision of personal budgets by placing conditions—some would call them a get-out, as the Minister said, although he was referring to something else at that point—because they will enable local authorities to refuse personal budgets if the local authority feels that the provision of those budgets would have an adverse impact on other services or have an impact on the efficient use of local authority resources. I served a long time in local government before coming to this place, and that could mean anything in any local authority. If you are providing a whole range of services directly as a local authority, and somebody wants to take a chunk of your money and have a personal budget, any local authority can argue that that will have an adverse affect on its services and will not be an efficient use of its resources. Therefore, I am very concerned about the wide scope that those two sub-paragraphs give to local authorities to refuse, or at least not promote, personal budgets.
Education: Social Mobility
Lord Addington Excerpts(10 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, it is interesting that I have not totally disagreed with anyone who has spoken in this debate—it is always nice when you can pretend you totally disagree with someone. But the theme that is coming across from the debate is that everyone understands that it is complicated and difficult to talk about social mobility, the lack of it, how to encourage it, and the role that education plays. We all agree that it has a role. Education allows you to become more socially mobile.
It is also worth pointing out—no one has done so yet—that if you fail in education you can become downwardly socially mobile. I have made that point because I want to draw attention to hidden disabilities as a factor in this cocktail of reasoning and pressure. I will talk primarily about dyslexia because I am dyslexic and know more about it than the other conditions, but hidden disabilities are a group of conditions that covers such things as dyslexia, dyscalculia and dyspraxia, to which can be added the higher-functioning areas of autism and numerous other conditions. It means that you do not relate to your environment, particularly your educational environment, in the way in which others do. It means that you are always going to have more problems with the educational part of your life than others will.
This is probably very much accepted now. When I first spoke about this subject nearly 28 years ago in this Chamber, it was more of a revelation. People asked, “Is it there? Is it really happening?”. Now the vast majority of people understand and accept dyslexia. We still occasionally hear from the “It doesn’t really exist; I have a miracle cure” brigade. However, if we accept that these factors are there, how do they affect this argument about social mobility?
After first accepting that the factors are there, we must then identify them. If we cannot do so, it does not really matter what is in place or what understanding we have because we will not be helping the right person at the right time. We have a history of saying, “Yes, we should do something”, but not putting enough in place to do it. All political parties bear a degree of blame for this, because it is much easier to pass a piece of legislation than it is to change structures, provide funding, and change the structures that administer the funding. There is not much doubt about that.
How does this affect our outcomes? What if you cannot access, for instance, the written word successfully enough to get a qualification that says you have passed? Most structures and exams are training paths towards taking a job that provides status and money. Both are factors in social mobility; having enough confidence in yourself to apply or encourage your children to do so is another factor that we should not forget. The noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton, talked about things that are “not for us” and not relevant. These things are still happening, not in exactly the same terms but the principle is still there, based on the assumption that we know what normal is—“Normal is me”.
What do we need to do to improve this situation? The first thing we must do is to train our foot-soldiers—that is, our educationalists at all levels—to identify these problems early. This situation is better than it was, but we are still not investing enough in the teaching profession as a whole for it to be able to say with confidence, “I think that person is dyslexic and they should see X and Y”. There are still far too many cases in the dyslexia world of the parent going to the teacher and asking, “Why is my child not succeeding?”, and that is what inspires the movement through the machinery which this House and others have put in place.
Of course, my noble friend will point out that the big change that we are celebrating today—the big change in that recent Bill—means that we now have a duty to identify the problem, and to identify those at risk, if I remember correctly. When the Bill was going through the House, I said that this was a fundamental change, but do we have the foot-soldiers in place to do this easily and well? I would say that at the moment the situation is better than it has ever been, although it is still nowhere near good enough. However, at least having that duty is a step forward, so let us not get bogged down in it too much.
However, what happens if we do not identify those at risk? If we do not, we find ourselves with that hard core whom we cannot reach, and that hard core is reinforced by the factors that I have already spoken about. When you choose a life partner, one of the big things that you tend to look for is that a person has had the same educational experience as you. Two people who can discuss books, theatre and so on, and who at least had a chance to go to university, have infinitely more in common than a couple where one of the two has consistently failed. Increasingly in the dyslexia world, we find that generations of families have all had dyslexia and nobody has passed an exam. We are increasingly finding that the people in the last couple of generations of such families have never had a job, and that contributes to the downward spiral. That happens when you fail to be identified as dyslexic, when you are not given the necessary support and when your parents do not have the desire, the money or the time to make sure that you get the help that you need within the education system. This goes back to the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor. It happens when you are not economically active and do not receive the support to catch up.
It should be remembered that one of the problems is that you are on a conveyor belt in the system. You have to hit targets at points in your life that are directly related to your age, and if you are not achieving, you are slipping back. Also, if you are told that you are a failure, you are even less open to that prolonged process of still having to achieve things which you know other people have already done.
Whatever progress we have made in the nearly 30 years since I first spoke about this, unless we concentrate on the early recognition of this problem, we will always compound it. There is an argument within the prison system about whether dyslexics are over-represented by a factor of two or a factor of five. We know that the prison population has the lowest level of literacy compared with any other part of the population, at 50% to 70%. Possibly having some more substantive academic work done in that field would help, but these are the groups where you find the by-product of reinforcing failure by not identifying it.
I hope that my noble friend will have some words of encouragement on this, because unless we start to get to this hard core at the bottom of the pile—this group that reinforces failure—it will always be there. It will always be difficult to reach and to help. People in the education system need to start saying, “I think you have a problem”, as opposed to individuals having to go to the education system and saying, “I think I have a problem”. First, we should remember what some people know as normal—that nobody in their family has passed an exam—and, secondly, we should remember that people do not want to be told one more time that they are stupid. If we do that, we will start to chip away a little at our hard core and make the system a little more accessible to the people in that group. It is not a miracle cure but it might take away some of the problem.
Children and Families Bill
Lord Addington Excerpts(10 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, Amendment 48A is in my name. The noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, made the point, also made in the amendment, that hidden disabilities—my interest in dyslexia is very well known in the House—are, by definition, difficult to spot. We also know that they are grossly overrepresented in all sections of the prison and youth justice systems. My amendment suggests that there should be some duty on those institutions to try to identify people in them with such disabilities. Providing education, training and, indeed, even socialisation for people who have been denied the ability, for instance, to access the written word and education is going to be incredibly difficult. They do not respond well and it is something that they cannot do. For example, you cannot even access social security when you leave prison. That might be going slightly off the point, but it is important that the Government give us an idea about the pressure that will be placed on these institutions to try to identify those who have these problems. Most of the work that has been done in this area shows that there is a much better chance of them not reoffending if that is done.
Lord Nash
My Lords, I am delighted that the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, is satisfied that we are nearly there. However, as always, we do not quite seem to be there. The best endeavours clause that we are proposing for home local authorities would place incentives, we believe, in the right place—it is in the home local authority’s best interests to arrange quality provision, as it will remain accountable for the young person while they are detained and when they return from detention.
I remember many late nights in lawyers’ meetings when I have been strongly advised not to give a “best endeavours” undertaking, as it is a very strong under- taking, but to try to get away with a “reasonable endeavours” one. My legal training teaches me to believe that a best-endeavours undertaking is actually a very strong one.
The amendments specifically require the local authority to secure the special educational provision that is specified in the plan. If that is not possible, best endeavours would require home local authorities to do everything they could to arrange the special education provision specified in a young offender’s EHC plan while they are in custody—or provision that corresponds as closely as possible to it or to other appropriate provision. Some provision specified in EHC plans cannot be arranged by local authorities while a person is in custody: most notably and obviously, any requirement for a young person to attend a particular school or college, which of course they cannot attend while detained. It is for this reason that it is necessary to use the term “best endeavours”. It is a technical term that avoids placing a legal duty on local authorities which is impractical or impossible for them to deliver.
Amendment 47E does not, we believe, provide a get-out enabling home local authorities to have a free choice about which services they arrange for detained children and young people. They cannot simply decide, without robust justification, that some provision is no longer appropriate, just to avoid arranging it. Under the best endeavours duty, their starting point must be to arrange the provision specified in the EHC plan. They can arrange alternative or other appropriate provision only once they have done everything they can to arrange the provision specified in the plan.
Local authorities and the health services commissioner will be accountable to parents and young people in respect of this best endeavours duty. Parents and young people will be able to complain to their home local authority or to the health body—with ultimate recourse to judicial review. Our strengthened best endeavours duties will be accompanied by a robust code of practice.
The existing contracts for education services in public sector young offender institutions are due to end later this year. We will ensure that the arrangements made with the new education providers support local authorities as they seek to fulfil their best endeavours duty to ensure that provision in EHC plans continues to be delivered while a child or young person is in custody.
The current draft code of practice was of course written before we tabled these amendments. We will now rewrite the code to reflect them and the intent that I have today set out. I am very happy to discuss the wording of the code with the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, outside the Chamber. The code is of course subject to affirmative procedure. I hope that the noble Lord will find that helpful. I look forward to those discussions with him so that it will not be necessary for us to come back to this at Third Reading.
Lord Addington
“( ) On using their best endeavours to fully meet the special educational needs of a registered student at a school or other institution, the school or other institution must undertake an audit of the skills and knowledge of its workforce to deliver a graduated approach to special educational provision.”
Lord Addington
My Lords, the three amendments in my name—Amendments 45A, 46A and 46B—all have at heart addressing the idea of training for teachers in the skills required to deal with special educational needs. This is primarily inspired by my work with the British Dyslexia Association; I draw the House’s attention to my interests in this area. I am trying here to clarify how the Government propose using the code, and the ongoing need to train teachers in how to deal with the issue.
The first amendment is about the whole school: what basket of skills is required to deal with these people? Identification is an important part of this. Unless you know what you are looking for, hidden disabilities—dyslexia, dyspraxia—are quite easy to miss. I do not really have to draw on much evidence to say that it has happened throughout the history of organised education. We have got it wrong, and inappropriate training often leads to very negative results for those concerned.
I appreciate that the Minister—my noble friend Lord Nash—has given me some assurances, particularly for the amendment that deals with SENCOs, but actually there I suggest that the person in charge of the overall position get a bit more specific knowledge. The Minister has moved quite a long way already on this, and I thank him, but a little more specific knowledge about the actual nuts and bolts of the subject would be helpful.
The really beneficial provision here is on something that I think will come back, if we do not get it through today: initial teacher training. Some 10% of the population of any school, and indeed of the population as a whole, is dyslexic according to the British definition; you can stick in 3% for dyscalculic and dyspraxic, and you can stick in ADHD and one or two other problems. Those are the hidden problems. If you know what you are looking for, you have the opportunity to call in help and support, and not to make the classic mistake of saying, “Work harder”, which leads to a very negative educational experience. Such an experience invariably leads to the child either being disruptive in the classroom, or doing that wonderful disappearing act into the middle of it and making damn sure that they do not pay any attention to the class and that the class pays no attention to them.
If the Minister can assure us how the Government will work towards the goal of making sure that the entire establishment, and the individuals themselves, are better prepared to provide the help and support that will lead to better outcomes, I will be very much reassured. I beg to move.
Lord Storey
I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Addington. I used the expression “a dog with a bone” in Committee. He has stuck with this issue and made real progress on it. I also congratulate the Government, because we have now seen real movement: there have to be properly qualified special educational needs co-ordinators in schools. That is real progress, and the Government are to be congratulated on taking that important step.
My noble friend rightly points out two areas. One is the need to ensure that all teachers, particularly those in primary education, have training—perhaps a unit of training—in special educational needs. Every report has shown that the two crucial elements are early identification of a problem and providing the resources to deal with it. I hope that we might see movement on that. Maybe we can move towards a road map for how we ensure that all teachers going into our schools have an understanding of—maybe a qualification in—of special educational needs. I have forgotten the second issue, so I will sit down.
Lord Nash
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Addington for tabling these amendments and leading the debate on this important issue of ensuring that schools and other institutions have the right expertise within their workforce to support children and young people with special educational needs. I cannot disagree with my noble friend’s intentions. Ensuring that we have a well trained workforce is essential, and is something that this Government are committed to doing. I hope that I can reassure my noble friend that it is possible to achieve this aim without placing requirements in the Bill.
Schools and other institutions that support children and young people with SEN must build the appropriate skills for their staff, and the draft 0-25 SEN code of practice makes that clear. Chapter 6 of the draft code requires schools to make sure that teachers’ ability to meet SEN is included in the school’s approach to professional development and in their performance management arrangements for all teaching and support staff. The chapter also requires schools to review teachers’ understanding of strategies to identify and support vulnerable pupils, and their knowledge of the special educational needs most frequently encountered. This would particularly cover issues such as dyslexia, which my noble friend has spoken passionately about on a number of occasions.
I mentioned in Committee that the latest newly qualified teacher survey, which at that point had not yet been published but was nevertheless giving off strong signals, reveals that teachers feel that the quality of their training in SEN has improved significantly in recent years. Just 5% of newly qualified teachers surveyed this year rated their training in SEN as poor, while 69% of primary teachers and 74% of secondary teachers rated their training as good or very good in helping them to teach pupils with SEN. That compares to as few as 45% in secondary in 2008. I am sure that noble Lords will agree that this is a significant improvement, and I am sure that we all welcome it.
Furthermore, initial teacher training courses must ensure that they enable trainee teachers to meet the Teachers’ Standards. These standards define the minimum level of practice required of teachers, and no trainee should be recommended for qualified teacher status until they have met those standards. Teachers’ performance is then judged against these standards throughout their career.
The Teachers’ Standards state that teachers must,
“have a clear understanding of the needs of all pupils, including those with special educational needs”.
Teachers must also be able to adapt teaching to the needs of all pupils, and have an understanding of the factors that can inhibit learning and how to overcome them. Of course, noble Lords will know that this Government have a strong drive to have more ITT in schools, and many more teachers are now coming through who have been trained in SCITTs, some of whom are at special schools particularly appropriate for training teachers in SEN.
Ofsted has an important role here as well. It inspects both the quality of initial teacher training and the quality of teaching in our schools. These standards and the ability to adapt teaching to meet special educational needs are central to these inspections.
With regard to further education, chapter 6 of the draft 0-25 code of practice sets out that colleges should ensure their curriculum staff are able to develop their skills and knowledge, and that colleges should have access to specialist skills and support when required to help students with SEN to progress. As autonomous bodies, FE colleges are responsible for ensuring that their staff are properly equipped. To support the development of the FE workforce, we are investing £1 million for the existing workforce to undertake the specialist diploma in teaching disabled learners. We are also providing initial teacher-training bursaries of up to £9,000 to help to attract high-calibre graduates to specialise in teaching students with SEN in FE.
Schools and other institutions have very clear duties to ensure that their staff are equipped to support children and young people with SEN. I do not think that it is necessary to introduce a skills audit in addition to these very clear requirements. The Department for Education is funding a range of specialist organisations covering autism, communications needs and dyslexia to provide information and advice to schools on implementing our reforms. The Dyslexia-SpLD Trust, for example, is providing an online professional development tool for teachers to help to assess their current knowledge of dyslexia and access further training. It will also be providing a toolkit to help teachers to identify and respond to literacy difficulties and dyslexia.
I hope that I have made clear that the Government recognise the importance of good teaching for pupils with SEN and that, through the changes in the code and the requirements of the Teachers’ Standards, there are clear requirements on all schools.
I turn to Amendment 46A. When Clause 63 was debated in Committee, I made clear that the appropriate regulations—the Special Educational Needs (SEN co-ordinators) Regulations—continue to require that the SENCO is a qualified teacher, and that SENCOs new to the role must study for the National Award in SEN Co-ordination. This should ensure that SENCOs have a thorough grounding in the knowledge and skills that are required for the role.
My noble friend Lord Addington’s amendment would go further than that in requiring that these skills are kept up to date and that schools ensure that their SENCO has adequate support and opportunities for training. I entirely agree with that aim but do not believe that the amendment is the best way to achieve it. Schools could fulfil the proposed requirement by providing the bare minimum opportunity for further training, and I fear that it would fall short of my noble friend’s intention.
Instead, I propose revising the section of the SEN code of practice that deals with the SENCO role. We will set out that schools “should ensure that the SENCO has sufficient time, training and resources” to carry out their role. This will place an ongoing expectation on schools to ensure that the SENCO is sufficiently supported and trained. As qualified teachers, SENCOs are also judged against the Teachers’ Standards. The code of practice already makes clear that the quality of teaching for pupils with SEN should be,
“a core part of the school’s performance management arrangements and its approach to professional development for all teaching and support staff”.
I hope my noble friend would agree that, taken together, this should deliver what he is seeking to achieve.
On the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, about governance, since I came into office governance has been at the top of my list of priorities. As things stand, it is true that governing bodies should have a governor with specialist responsibility for SEN.
I hope that I have reassured the House and my noble friend that the Government are committed to ensuring that our teaching workforce is well trained in identifying and supporting children and young people with SEN. Continual professional development and training is essential for the whole workforce but it is particularly important for the role of the SENCO and, as I have said, I am committed to ensuring that the code of practice goes further than before to adequately reflect that. On that basis, I urge my noble friend to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Addington
My Lords, I thank my noble friend for that answer. I would, of course, have been happier if we had got a commitment, particularly to initial teacher training having a more comprehensive element, and, basically, if all the amendments had been accepted, and accepted a long time ago, and I did not have to raise the subject.
The Dyslexia-SpLD Trust wrote the amendments and, although it is working with the Government, it would still like slightly more from this. It is a long-established fact that if you know what you are dealing with, you stand a much better chance of getting it right. Although the teachers of today are undoubtedly better trained than those of yesterday, I still feel they could be better trained. Having said that, progress is progress. It is fairly late, and the Government are putting pressure on to go forward on this. I will withdraw the amendment, but I am sure that the House will be addressing this issue on numerous occasions in the future. Unfortunately, we cannot draw a line under this. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Addington
“Apprenticeship support
Apprenticeship training providers must enable individuals undertaking an apprenticeship to access the full range of special education provisions to which they are entitled under this Act, the Equality Act 2010 and the Apprenticeship, Skills, Children and Learning Act 2009.”
Lord Addington
My Lords, we now come to an issue that has taken up a great deal of my time and this House’s time over the past three or four years. We have found that, through a variety of unfortunate events, people with dyslexia taking apprenticeships have been unable to obtain the final qualification because they could not take the necessary English or maths test. It is an absurd situation about which I have bent the ear of numerous Ministers over the past few years. Indeed, numerous Ministers have given me a series of responses, such as “This should not be happening. Oh! It is happening”, and then they have read out briefs which have stated that.
After Committee stage, I was rather surprised when I got a letter from the Minister which stated quite clearly that this situation is not lawful, effectively. I do not know whether that is exactly the correct term, but under the Equality Act, this should not have happened, and the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act did not preclude it taking place. We have come to a situation that should not have happened. My noble friend rather took the wind out of my sails for a few minutes when I received his letter because I just did not expect that something that definitive would arrive. A series of emotions went through me and I asked myself what I had I been wasting my time on and why.
This amendment is to ask my noble friend what should happen now. If it does not happen, what will be done about it? We have a situation in which practice has been established. Providers of apprenticeships do not have to get people with dyslexia through this. They do not have to make the adaptation provided here. The examining bodies and colleges have not been doing it, so if we are changing this now, which I believe will be the case—I hope it will be the case— I would like to know exactly what will happen. Indeed, if these people do not do this, what will happen to them? What is the legal framework? What is the duty involved?
Having established this, the need for Amendment 46D became apparent to me when I had the first meeting with officials on this. Indeed, when I asked about an appeal, the expression “no good deed goes unpunished” must have been running through their heads because there is now another issue. There are people who have been failed because people have been saying it is a legal requirement. What happens to them? Potentially, there is a legal challenge here. If we do not do something about it, there will be a legal challenge about loss of earnings or lower earnings for life because of not being qualified. Are we going to employ the plumber, the carpenter or so on who has the apprenticeship or the one who does not? If you do not get some form of redress here, somebody has let you down. There is a challenge. I suggest that a reassessment or an appeal of some sort is the most sensible thing to do. I look forward to what my noble friend will say about this.
On the process and criteria, there will be some cases that will be easy to assess. If you have completed the course but failed the English test and you are dyslexic, it is not that difficult. There are problems because we have changed the name of the English test and have slightly changed its nature—it has gone from “key skills” to “functional skills”—but it should not be beyond the wit of man. It has been going on for less than four years and there are records. We should be able to follow them up. I owe my noble friend a great deal of thanks for making sure of and correcting the legal situation—unless there has been another bolt from the blue over this—and I hope he will be able to give me some assurance that this will take place, because it should. I beg to move.
Lord Nash
My Lords, progress on this issue has been far too slow, and I am very concerned that some individuals have been denied the reasonable adjustments that could have helped them to demonstrate what they know or can do, and subsequently to achieve an apprenticeship.
I thank my noble friend Lord Addington for bringing this very important issue to the attention of the House. He has been an assiduous campaigner for children and young people with dyslexia, and I pay tribute to the way in which he has presented his concerns in this House, particularly during Grand Committee debates. I pay tribute to his passion and persistence. Saying that I managed by my letter to take the wind out of his sails is high praise indeed. I want to take this opportunity to clarify the system allowing reasonable adjustments to qualifications and appeals, and I hope I will be able to reassure him that additional action will happen with an urgency that has been lacking.
As my noble friend knows from our discussions, I share his desire to see reasonable adjustments offered to all young people on an apprenticeship who need them, so that they have a reasonable opportunity to achieve the required qualifications in English and maths. I want to take this opportunity to clarify the clear duty in Part 6 of the Equality Act 2010 on learning providers and awarding organisations to make reasonable adjustments so that disabled people are, wherever possible, not put at a disadvantage compared to other learners. I share my noble friend’s concern that this duty should be applied in every relevant case.
Where a body breaches this duty, individuals may bring a challenge in a county court. The county court can grant any remedy which the High Court could grant in proceedings in tort or in a claim for judicial review. Available sanctions include damages, injunctions and a declaration. In addition, repeated breaches may lead us to challenge the body’s ability to deliver training or to award qualifications. Following the important points that my noble friend Lord Addington made in Grand Committee, I am pleased to be able to place on record that there is nothing in the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act, or in the associated specification for apprenticeship standards in England, that prevents the use of assistive technology for functional skills qualifications.
I am aware that Ofqual has for some time been working with awarding organisations and the British Dyslexia Association to continue to widen opportunities to use assistive technology as a reasonable adjustment. The Access Consultation Forum meets three to four times a year. The next meeting is on 30 January, and this will be on the agenda. Ofqual assures me that it takes the issue of equality very seriously. I understand that the BDA and my noble friend have examples of individuals who have been disadvantaged, and I invite them to provide details of the specific cases to Ofqual, via officials if that would be helpful. Ofqual has committed to investigate the circumstances of all these cases. In addition, we will include new text in the skills funding statement to remind education and training providers of their duty to support young people with learning difficulties or disabilities and of their responsibility for providing reasonable adjustments, including the use of assistive technology where appropriate.
I also agree with my noble friend that we can do more to provide straightforward advice and information on the support available to individuals with learning difficulties or disabilities, so that they understand their rights and can challenge appropriately if they are not properly supported. Noble Lords will be aware that I wrote to the noble Lord, Lord Addington—as he mentioned—on 2 December and committed in that letter to some additional steps to raise awareness of the support on offer.
I know that my noble friend is also concerned that young people should make a good transition out of school and into their next stage of learning. The system that we are replacing has not always served young people well in this respect. The nought to 25 system created by the Bill will ensure a much greater continuity of support between different phases and types of learning. Local authorities will be under a duty to identify all young people aged up to 25 in their area who have, or may have, special educational needs, and to consider whether local provision is sufficient to meet their needs. They may publish a local offer setting out the full range of post-16 education and training provision, including apprenticeships. Young people who need the most support will receive an EHC plan regardless of whether they stay at school, go to FE college or to work-based provision in the private sector, unlike the current disjointed system.
The new nought to 25 code of practice is clear about how schools and colleges should focus much more strongly on helping children and young people prepare for their transition into post-16 education and on to adult life. Chapter 6 states:
“Schools should help pupils to start planning for their future adult life as early as possible, and by Year 9 at the latest”.
This should of course include,
“the range of post-16 options which may be available”.
The draft code also explains the importance of a school sharing information about a pupil’s special educational needs with the college before the young person starts. As a result of my noble friend’s recent appeal, we are working with the Dyslexia Trust to produce clear information explaining the support available to apprentices with learning difficulties or disabilities. This will be made available through the National Apprenticeship Service website and will also include information about assistive technology and reasonable adjustments.
In response to the concerns raised by the noble Lord, Lord Addington, I also asked officials to look into the process of complaints, retakes and appeals to ensure that it is as fair and transparent as possible. Although a process is in place and is consistent with other national qualifications such as GCSEs, I believe that more could be done by centres and training providers to publicise it. My officials checked several apprenticeship provider websites, and, although there were examples of good practice, many do not provide details of their procedures. This contrasts with information on school or university websites, where it is generally very clear how to get advice about support or exam results, and about how to complain. I will ask officials as a priority to find a way to ensure that centres and provider websites publish good information about complaints and appeals on their websites in future. I hope that my noble friend will recognise that, taken together, these measures represent improvements for those undertaking apprenticeships. I hope also that the House will acknowledge the outstanding personal commitment that the noble Lord, Lord Addington, had demonstrated in bringing this about.
I move now to historic appeals for those who failed key skills tests because of failures to make reasonable adjustments. As noble Lords may know, key skills qualifications have been replaced by functional skills qualifications. The last possible date for certification was in 2013. Key skills were phased out very gradually, allowing plenty of opportunities for learners to resit them. Nevertheless, as my noble friend has so eloquently set out, we cannot ignore cases where there is evidence that legal duties have not been adhered to. I have therefore asked officials to work with the British Dyslexia Association and Ofqual to gather evidence and seek a solution to any issues identified, whether current or historic. Officials will be able to advise on specific cases or systemic issues.
I will now make a further specific commitment. Where an apprentice with learning difficulties or disabilities has previously completed all other requirements of a particular apprenticeship, but was not able to pass a key skills qualification, for example because reasonable adjustments were not made, they will be able to sit the alternative functional skills test. They will be entitled to the appropriate support and reasonable adjustments. If this test is passed at the appropriate level, the Government will enable the individual to receive an apprenticeship certificate, even if a year or two has elapsed.
I hope that this will reassure noble Lords that the issue is of great concern to the Government and that we are taking substantial and appropriate action to address it. I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Addington for his work, as I have already said, and I hope that with these assurances he will feel able to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Addington
My Lords, this is one of the speeches I thought I might never get to make. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Nash. Another Minister might have done the job, but it was he who did it. Other Ministers have not addressed this subject. He has gone in and probably made the lives of a substantial number of people considerably better by his actions. I thank him profoundly on their behalf and on my own.
However, I hope the whole House will pay attention to the fact that we took this long to get here, and that officials provided answers for the noble Lord’s colleagues at the Dispatch Box that did not concur with what he has said. This is something about which this House—and indeed the Government—should be worried. The noble Lord took a bold step and corrected something. Once again I thank him. Unfortunately he should not—as I should not—have had to battle away for this long. I thank him for his efforts and for what has happened here. He has made people’s lives better with one blow. That usually makes the day feel a little better in the end. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Schools Careers Service: Apprenticeships
Lord Addington Excerpts(10 years, 11 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Nash
I entirely agree with the noble Baroness. It is very important that we get a higher participation rate of girls in STEM subjects. We are funding the Stimulating Physics Network and the Further Maths Support Programme to increase the take-up of A-level physics. The STEM Ambassadors programme gives careers advice on more technical qualifications and apprenticeships. However, as my colleague Liz Truss said recently, it is excellent teaching and a culture of equal aspirations for all that will help engage more girls, so all we are doing to improve the quality of teaching helps in this regard.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, can my noble friend assure me that a teacher or careers adviser will be able to advise a dyslexic pupil in a one-to-one interview that he or she can now access, or will soon be able to access, the apprenticeship system, as the barriers to dyslexics getting through the functional skills test in English and maths will be removed?
Lord Nash
My noble friend speaks with great passion and personal experience on this subject; I have heard him do so many times, and we have already met on this subject. The Government are aware of the technical issues with assisted technology in the English and maths assessments. We are meeting the British Dyslexia Association, Ofqual and the Dyslexia Trust to try to ensure that we send a very clear message to all involved, providers and examiners, that there is the ability to use screen readers, in the case of dyslexia, as well as other assistive technology. I think that my noble friend knows that he has my personal commitment —if he does not know, I give it to him now—that we will do as much as we can to sort this out.
Children and Families Bill
Lord Addington Excerpts(11 years ago)
Grand CommitteeRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Addington
“(g) apprenticeship training providers.”
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, I draw my attention and that of the Committee to the subject of apprenticeships and dyslexia and special educational needs generally. In doing so, I return to a subject which I feel I have imposed on Members of this House rather too often over the past few years. Although I suspect that one or two noble Lords present will have heard everything about it, most have heard some of it and some have heard most, so I apologise for going over the ground again. However, it all goes back to the 2009 Act, brought in by the previous Government, and the principle that people should be able to pass a qualification in English and maths. At the time, I said that that requirement would make things extremely difficult for those in the dyslexic spectrum, and received a degree of assurance that it would not be used as a barrier.
I then said, “Oh, that’s done” and forgot about it. Just over a year later, I received the first of a series of communications from Lynn McCann about her son David, who had passed all the components of a carpentry course, except for the English requirement because he was dyslexic. The normal way of getting through an exam if you have a problem with dyslexia is—we touched on this earlier with my assistive technology amendment—to dictate the exam to someone. It is nice and simple; it is easy for a person to programme. This cannot be done for this qualification for the simple reason that you have to pass it yourself.
The logic behind it seemed quite overwhelming at the time. The big employers had said that they wanted people who were good at certain things, such as basic skills in English and maths. When you think about that for a few seconds it starts to fall apart because employers also want people who do not get sick, who do not have children who get sick and who do not ask for pay rises. These are all attractive things to employers.
So far, we have a situation where people cannot take the exam. When I first raised this—it was more than three years ago so I apologise for the brief history lesson—I was told, “Let’s go and meet the Minister”. The Minister said, “That’s ridiculous, let’s sort it out”. I then went to my first big meeting, where I was told that there was a problem, and then to another meeting where I was told that the legislation states that the candidate has to pass the exam, we cannot do anything about it and assistive technology cannot be used because it is a test of their skills. I have since discovered that that is rubbish. It can be done and the main area of concern is apparently the formatting of the exam; that is, the way that it is written down in the computer language is not compatible with assistive technology. Therefore, it does not read it back properly and the types of communication get into trouble.
In the course of this debate I may hear that this has changed. If I hear that it has all changed, is all wonderful and tomorrow we can go away and forget about this, nobody will be quicker out of the door than me. However, I suspect that that will not be the case. We ask ourselves: why is this important? I have heard some pretty dreadful things from officials in this case. One which I played for a laugh last time—I do not think I will do it again—was somebody who said, “Well, nobody’s complained about it so it can’t be a big problem”. I said, “You mean nobody has written to you or sent you a long e-mail”. It is good; it still works. At the time, his face went through an interesting change of colour as he realised what he had said. Before that, I had heard that nobody would lose their job. To go back to David McCann, no, he would not lose his job because he works for his father. I suggest that changing his job without this qualification is like stamping “NEET” across his forehead and sending him out there.
I realise that I have done the classic thing that everyone with dyslexia, or on any disability spectrum, does and used myself as too much of an example. Many dyslexics might get by with support, even taking a written, or in this case a keyboard-based, examination. However, my Amendments 190 and 194 suggest that support should be provided for apprenticeships within the college structure. At the moment, there is not much teaching done by qualified teachers, and there is no desire or embracement. As the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, said, the culture for providing assistance is not there. The amendment makes it explicit.
Amendment 192A makes it explicit that the technical support should be included. I am sorry to jump around a bit—we dyslexics do that—but the argument against technical support is an interesting one. I have subsequently heard that to reformat and include it would be against the security of the examination. You would think this was so serious that a nuclear launch code was intrinsic to this English assessment exam. A dyslexic who could memorise and do the exact test for this examination is not a dyslexic. Spellings cannot be restored and sequential thought in the areas of the brain that handle language do not work well enough for that. So that is one group who could not cheat at this, and I suspect that there are a few others who could not do the English language test either. The maths test is also a problem, especially as I have it on good authority that anyone who uses strange language to describe the information and, if it is written down, does not understand the words, cannot work with it.
All I am saying is that for apprenticeships, a system for saying that you have acquired a practical skill should be accessible to those who have disabilities. I started with dyslexia, but I discovered that that is not the only group affected. The Alliance for Inclusive Education, known as ALLFIE, a group that I do not always agree with, says that it has found similar problems for those with learning disabilities. We have a system that is not sensitive to special educational needs. To include these amendments would start to encourage it to become so.
We are in Grand Committee. I regard this as the first round in the end game. I have been going on at Members of this House for far too long on this matter. I should not have had to in the first place. I accept that the cock-up school of history has got in there somewhere. I do not think that anyone seriously intended this to happen. But we should surely take the opportunity in this Bill to change it. To go back to the first meeting I had when an official told me that it was in the legislation, my reply was, “We change legislation in Parliament, don’t we? We do it all the time”. I did not think I would have to wait this long and I thought it was a stalling action at the time. Can we have some final action?
If I am offered a meeting, may I draw on another fact? The British Dyslexia Association has had a series of 60 meetings on this. I have come to the conclusion that the lead negotiator, the person who has taken on the role of saint and poor bloody infantry in this, one Sue Flohr, probably has a secret admirer in one of the departments who wants to keep on meeting her. If you have had 60 meetings, something is very wrong. With one you accept that there is a problem but two means you have not come up with an answer. I suggest that somebody somewhere has to start making sure that a practical change is made. This has gone on for too long and has affected too many people, and I have not even gone on about all those who have failed. Lots of people have failed; what has happened to them? There may be a case for that later in the Bill. Something has to happen.
I leave with one example. The British Dyslexia Association has a series of examples through its helpline. You have to be pretty lucky or desperate to find your way to the helpline of that small charity on this subject. A girl called Sophie was doing a visual merchandising apprenticeship. I will not go into the details, but her college basically said, “You ain’t going to pass, so we ain’t entering you”. That is the worst condemnation of this situation that I have come across: “You ain’t going to pass, so we're not interested”. I suggest that colleges are probably getting wise to the fact that if you are dyslexic you will have a problem, but “We ain’t going to take you” is only one step away from that background knowledge. To go back to the culture and experience raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, we must do something that makes this explicit now. It must be something that has an end game attached to it. I beg to move.
Baroness Walmsley
I may have misheard my noble friend but when he gave a list of all the different kinds of exams for which these assisted technologies are available, I do not recall hearing him mention apprenticeships.
Lord Addington
My Lords, perhaps I may clarify the situation. It is the functional skills test and, before it, the key skills tests that are the problem. There has always been a much better attitude towards GCSEs, A-levels and degrees. I should draw noble Lords’ attention to my interest as chairman of a firm that provides some of the kit for the DSA, which for a dyslexic is voice-operated technology—the stuff that I use that was initially provided by the House of Lords authorities. So there is an establishment. The problem is with this one set of exams, which are crucial to getting this qualification, in which the dyslexics—who are 10% of the population in this country and 20% in America—should be overrepresented. Even if this would be appropriate for only half those dyslexics, that would still represent a hell of a lot of people.
Earl Attlee
My Lords, I have already said that I am not entirely satisfied and have some sympathy with the points made by my noble friend Lord Addington. However, I have not finished my speech and have not reached the point about apprentices.
I return to what we have achieved already. Personally, I was not aware that such welcome advances have been made. I hope I have convinced my noble friend Lord Addington that there is not a legislative gap in relation to such technology, and that there is good progress and continued willingness to work together to eliminate the practical and technical issues that remain.
Amendments 190 and 194 taken together would require apprenticeship providers to use their best endeavours to secure support for SEN. I recognise the concern of my noble friends Lord Addington, Lady Sharp and Lady Walmsley that young people with SEN may need additional support during their apprenticeship. I should like to make it clear that young people with EHC plans are able to attain their plans during their apprenticeship with all the support that they set out. Where a local authority has agreed with a young person who has an EHC plan that an apprenticeship is the best option, arrangements to support them should be built in at the point at which the place is commissioned. For example, if the local authority commissions a place from a private apprenticeship provider, the terms of that contract should include any SEN provision required. If that is not possible, the local authority should not place them there.
Lord Addington
My Lords, I did not ask for that: I asked for there to be assisted technology. I have conveyed all the information to everyone in this Room by talking into a microphone that is attached to my computer, which is technology that is now two decades old. This can be done cheaply and efficiently. There is just no argument about that. Voice-to-text technology is well established and used everywhere else. If you use a computer as your primary form of communication, it is cheap and available. It is easy to train. I do not know how many dozen people do so but everyone you have talked about can use that technology. This is not about removing qualifications but proving that your communication skills can be established.
I have just reached the point where I need glasses because my arms got a little too short. They are of technical assistance and may well be more expensive than the software that I am talking about. It is a ridiculous thing to say: the technology merely allows you to access things in a different way.
Earl Attlee
My Lords, I understand how passionate my noble friend is about the use of technology. I am not opposing it. I applaud the development of these technologies. But if we were to introduce an additional duty, it would increase the regulatory burden on many hundreds of private businesses, which goes directly against the considerable efforts of the Government to reduce red tape for businesses. Finally, good practice guidance from the 16 Diversity in Apprenticeship pilots is now available on the National Apprenticeship Service website. The Government commissioned an independent report on creating an inclusive apprenticeship offer, and their response, the apprenticeships action plan for learners with learning difficulties and/or disabilities, is currently being implemented. Action includes: use of the Equality Act definition of “disabled” for the apprenticeship offer, employers being able to signal willingness to recruit more disabled apprentices on apprenticeship vacancies online using the “two ticks” scheme, which guarantees disabled applicants an interview if they meet the basic requirements for the role; and work to improve the reporting of data.
The National Apprenticeship Service is offering additional one-to-one support for young people who have been unable to secure an apprenticeship due to competition for a place. The DWP is working with the Joint Apprenticeship Unit to promote additional support, such as access to work payments.
Ministers are not deaf. We have listened to what noble Lords have said in Committee. We will look very carefully and consider what steps we need to take to meet the concerns of noble Lords. Primarily, we will have further meetings outside the Committee to look at this further but I suggest that government officials and noble Lords carefully read Hansard to see where we are. I hope that noble Lords will not press their amendments at the appropriate points.
Baroness Walmsley
My Lords, I have a quick word to say before my noble friend withdraws the amendment. The Minister has obviously been given a very long brief by officials but I can probably say that the Committee is not bamboozled by it. I do not think that that was the intention and I have been reassured by hearing about how much support can be given to young people with dyslexia as they go through their apprenticeships. But the point that my noble friend is making is that all this is to no avail if they cannot get that piece of paper at the end of the course. The fact is that without some technical help with their written English to enable them to express what they have learnt, those young people cannot get that piece of paper, and that means they cannot move on. It really is as narrow as that. All that good stuff that the Minister has been talking about is welcome but does not cover getting the piece of paper—in other words, passing the functional skills test. That is the problem. There have been lots of meetings but no progress has been made. I appeal to my noble friend to have further meetings with those of us who are concerned about this, if that is what is needed, but something has to be done. This issue is much narrower than what is in the vast majority of my noble friend’s briefing.
Lord Addington
My Lords, to give the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, a rugby analogy—good players catch bad balls and take the tackle. The noble Earl has been tackled, stood on and everything else—it has all happened—but I congratulate him on being man enough to stand up to it in the first place. The subtext that I take from the response is, “Oh, it can happen but it does not”. I am afraid that that is not good enough; it is more of the same with regard to what I have already spoken about. Technical assistance is provided in the Access to Work programme; it is not just a question of DSAs. The thinking appears to be that we help dyslexics by providing them with a government grant from another department to enable them to go to work but we do not let them take a qualification. We provide that metal box with those little gadgets on the side of it to allow someone to function after they have obtained a qualification, but not before. The point about English and maths just does not stand up for anybody who requires minor assistance, and never did. I will, of course, withdraw the amendment but I do not want to come back in two or three years’ time, or wait for another Bill, to correct the position. I do not think that anybody’s interest, including that of the Minister, would be served by going through this again.
Lord Low of Dalston
My Lords, just before the noble Lord withdraws the amendment and sits down, I would say to the Minister, on behalf of the Committee, that, as was said in relation to Amendment 192, it is not the form of words that matters, it is the outcome. As regards this amendment, I think what the Committee is saying to the Minister is that it is not the meeting that matters, it is the outcome.
Lord Addington
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Low, and say to him that the grouping of these two very important amendments did him no favours. I would have commented further on that matter if I had felt there was time to do so. I think that we have gone as far as we can today but we must have an end game soon. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Addington
“( ) The appropriate authority must designate a member of staff who shall be a qualified teacher and must have undertaken training to include a mandatory module on special educational needs, including specific learning difficulties at the school (to be known as the “SEN co-ordinator”) as having responsibility for co-ordinating the provision for pupils with special educational needs.”
Lord Addington
My Lords, I shall endeavour to be quicker on this issue, which concerns the training of those who deal with pupils with disabilities, or hidden disabilities, such as dyslexia. I apologise to the Committee for having rather overdone the “misspelling mafia” scenario in the past few minutes. Unless a teacher is trained to deal with pupils with very different learning patterns, he or she will not be able to teach them well. That is the underlying philosophy running through these two amendments.
A great deal of work has been done. Indeed, under the previous Government, a lot of the foundation stones for this approach were put down, and we had Rose and Lamb looking at this issue. If teachers do not know how to spot why somebody is failing to learn, or is learning in a different and slower way, they cannot give the appropriate assistance. Why is dyslexia mentioned here? It is the most frequently occurring condition. It may not be the biggest educational problem, but—the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, is not in the Room—with certain aspects of speech and language, I will bet that there is a high degree of comorbidity.
If we are dealing with something this important, then we have got to make sure that a degree of training is instilled in those people who have got to deal with it on a day-to-day basis. The people who will start to notice that somebody is working differently will also be able to go to that person and say, “This is why you are not learning quickly”. One of the most standard conversations in dyslexia is this: a parent comes in and says, “My child needs help” and it is then discovered that the parent is also dyslexic but has manfully struggled through without assistance. We have got to try to get the identification going properly. One, help the child; two, enable them to open up and access assistance so that the coping strategies that we have just discussed can be put in place.
When it comes to making sure SENCOs get better training, it is a no-brainer. If the administrative structure of a SENCO is fine and everybody teaching is fine, they should also know what they are talking about. Dyslexia is the most common but there are other conditions out there. I am merely saying that this is where we are coming from but that we are not the whole story. Please will the Government give me an idea about what they are going to do to make sure that there is better training and awareness among teaching staff so that those with these needs can get into the school population and open themselves up to receive the help that is there? We end up doing it slowly, later on and then encountering problems, as we indicated just a few minutes ago. I hope that my noble friend has something positive to say on this. This is very much a probing amendment, so how are the Government thinking about getting better awareness and training about this particular problem, and special educational needs generally, into the teaching profession and particularly, those in charge of it? I beg to move.
Baroness Walmsley
My Lords, I support my noble friend in these two amendments. Amendment 195 seeks to put what sort of qualifications a SENCO should have in the Bill, because currently it just says:
“The appropriate authority must designate a member of staff at the school (to be known as the “SEN co-ordinator”)”.
Clause 63(3) says that regulations may,
“require appropriate authorities ... to ensure that SEN co-ordinators have prescribed qualifications or prescribed experience”.
Looking at the draft SENCO code of practice, I was reassured to see that it says on page 78 that governing bodies,
“must ensure that there is a qualified teacher designated as Special Educational Needs (SEN) co-ordinator (SENCO) for the school. The SENCO must be a qualified teacher working at the school”.
Newly qualified SENCOs,
“must achieve the National Award in Special Educational Needs Coordination within 3 years of appointment”.
That is very reassuring, but what I do not understand is why that cannot go in the Bill. That is what my noble friend is looking for in Amendment 195.
Amendment 196 goes further and suggests that all teachers in their initial teacher training should have some proper training in how to identify special educational needs. The fact is that all teachers know that they are teachers of SEN because in every class there are children with special needs. It is crucial that every teacher has some idea of how to spot that and make sure that the appropriate, additional and more specialist skills and provision are made for them if the teacher cannot give it themselves. There is something in these two amendments which requires a little more reassurance and explanation from the Minister.
Lord Nash
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friends Lord Addington, Lady Walmsley and Lord Storey for highlighting the importance of high-quality teaching for pupils with SEN. I hope to set out in my response to this debate how the Government are taking this seriously.
I will first speak to Amendment 195, which would require the SENCO to be a qualified teacher and to complete mandatory training on SEN. I entirely agree with my noble friends that this should be the case. The draft Education (Special Educational Needs Co-ordinators) (England) Regulations for Clause 63 were published on 4 October. They require the SENCO to be a qualified teacher or, indeed, the head teacher of the school. In addition, schools must ensure that SENCOs who are new to that role obtain the master’s-level National Award for SEN Co-ordination within three years of being appointed. That is mandatory, as my noble friend Lord Storey said. Since 2009, we have funded 10,500 new SENCOs to complete this award. These requirements mean that SENCOs are often among the most highly qualified and experienced teachers within a school, which is absolutely fitting for the importance of the role that they fulfil.
The current specification for the national SENCO award requires SENCOs to cover approaches to assessment and teaching for pupils with special educational needs. They must demonstrate that they understand the four areas of need as set out in the code of practice as well as implications of these for teaching practice. They should specifically demonstrate that they know and understand about high-frequency special educational needs, such as dyslexia, and know how to draw on expert external services to meet these needs.
Amendment 196, tabled by my noble friends Lord Addington and Lady Walmsley, would impose mandatory training in SEN and specific learning difficulties for all new teachers. There are no mandatory modules and no required curriculum for initial teacher training. Instead, ITT providers must ensure that their courses enable trainee teachers to meet the Teachers’ Standards. No trainee should be recommended for qualified teacher status unless they have met the standards. The Teachers’ Standards already state that teachers must,
“have a clear understanding of the needs of all pupils, including those with special educational needs”.
Teachers must also be able to adapt teaching to the needs of all pupils and have an understanding of the factors that can inhibit learning and of how to overcome them. Anybody who works in a school today knows that the identification of SEN is at the core of a school’s life. Ofsted inspects both the quality of initial teacher training and the quality of teaching in our schools. These standards, and the ability to adapt teaching to meet special educational needs, are central to these inspections.
As the noble Lord knows, we are focusing more teacher training on training in schools. Ofsted reports that 31% of SCIIT training was rated good or outstanding, compared with 13% for higher education institutions. NQTs trained through School Direct rate the quality of their SEN training more highly than other trainees. New teachers report that the quality of training in SEN has improved. In fact, it is the best ever reported. A DfE survey of 12,000 newly qualified teachers in 2012 found that just 7% of them rated their training in SEN as poor, and that 59% of primary and 66% of secondary teachers rated their training as good or very good in helping them to teach pupils with SEN. That compares to as few as 45% in 2008. The 2013 survey of NQTs on the same subject will be published on Friday. For reasons I cannot entirely fathom, I am not allowed to reveal the results today, but I will tell noble Lords—probably breaching some rule—that they are going to show a considerably improved picture.
Taking the slight digression, as she called it, of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, about unqualified teachers’ SEN training and her general point about unqualified teachers, I shall make two points. Although I entirely acknowledge that the previous Government invested heavily in teacher training, they did not go as far as making SEN training mandatory for all teachers, so there is a slight inconsistency in her position. That is as nothing compared with the inconsistency in the shadow Secretary of State for Education’s position the other night, when nine times he declined to answer a question from Jeremy Paxman about whether he would send his children to a school with unqualified teachers, but let us not digress any further.
Following similar concerns put forward in another place, we have also strengthened the expectations on schools as set out in the SEN code of practice. The new code makes it absolutely clear that schools should ensure that teachers are equipped to meet pupils’ special educational needs. The code requires that teachers’ ability to meet SEN is included in the school’s approach to professional development and in their performance management arrangements. Section 6.5 of the code requires schools to review,
“teachers’ understanding of strategies to identify and support vulnerable pupils and their knowledge of the special educational needs most frequently encountered”.
I know that my noble friend Lord Addington has a long-standing interest in dyslexia and will be particularly keen to ensure that teachers are equipped to tackle this issue in schools.
The Department for Education is funding a range of specialist organisations covering autism, communications needs and dyslexia to provide information and advice to schools on implementing our reforms. The Dyslexia-SpLD Trust, for example, is providing an online professional development tool for teachers to help assess their current knowledge of dyslexia and access further training. The trust will also be providing a toolkit to help teachers identify and respond to literacy difficulties and dyslexia.
I hope that I have made clear that the Government recognise absolutely the importance of high-quality teaching for pupils with SEN and that we are determined to ensure that they get an extremely good deal. I therefore urge the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Addington
My Lords, I listened to my noble friend and he seemed to be saying that more or less everything other than making my proposal compulsory for teacher training is fine. That might be understandable but provision has been made in Scotland, which has a compulsory unit that was agreed among the universities that carry out teacher training. I had a conversation with Dyslexia Scotland, which was of the opinion that Edinburgh had the best provision at that time—but all such universities have a unit. It does not hurt anyone and I ask my noble friend to have another look at this. Will he consider what can be provided to make sure that the average teacher has every incentive and opportunity to at least get a basic awareness component into their knowledge base? I am assured that units have been prepared by numerous people and other bodies in relation to conditions such as autism. There should be an awareness programme that means that classic mistakes are not made; in dyslexia, the one I know best is, “Just work harder”. That will not work. Even if you do synthetic phonics, you will still learn at a slower rate. It is a little like making a small man carry large sacks of coal; regardless of how well he does and how he builds himself up he will never match the bigger guy and will always be at a huge disadvantage. He will be more tired, slower and learn less well.
The standard response to, “Let’s not forget the rest of the class” is either to disappear into the middle of it or to disrupt at the back, so they are not exposed to something unpleasant. If you can get to that pupil and give them some support and help, they are less likely to make life difficult in the classroom and for those around them. On average, three people in every class being taught will be on the dyslexia spectrum. You could probably stick a couple of other hidden disabilities in there as well. So an awareness package is something that we should look at. My noble friend does not look like he wants to respond now but we need to look at this later on.
I shall have to look my noble friend’s response on Amendment 195, and have a word with advisers to make sure that it covers most of our points, but it seemed to be a better response. I hope that we can have another look at this issue and at least clarify where we think the weaknesses are. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Addington
“Screening for specific learning difficulties
After section 562E(2) of the Education Act 1996 (literacy and numeracy assessments) insert—“(2A) The host authority must make arrangements to ensure that a detained person undertakes a screening test for dyslexia as soon as reasonably practicable.””
Lord Addington
My Lords, for me this is a case of “three times pay for all” when it comes to dyslexia. The reason I have tabled this amendment is because you find abundant evidence of special educational needs among our prison population. The estimates for the number of prisoners on the dyslexia spectrum range from 20% to 50%, the higher figure being the more frequently occurring. It is generally accepted now that every problem to do with literacy and educational attainment occurs in abundance throughout our prison population. I have singled out dyslexia for screening because of my interest in it and because it will probably be the most frequently occurring problem.
Why do we need to conduct screening for dyslexia? A few years ago I became familiar with a project in Chelmsford Prison under the leadership of Jackie Hewitt-Main. She discovered that lots of dyslexics would go nowhere near the education department. One realises in three seconds that they go nowhere near it because it constitutes a bad experience for them. Most prisoners are no longer in school by the age of 14. If someone has not been attaining in the education system, it is an unpleasant experience and they often find themselves getting into enough trouble to send them to prison. It is as if they are saying, “Let us go in there and go through a bad experience in the classroom”. Suddenly, it becomes obvious that they will try to avoid that. The redoubtable individual I mentioned was originally looking at head injuries, of which she found many. She did a survey of prisoners who would not go into the education block. She found that once you had established that link to their previous experience these prisoners became much more open to training and to assistance in changing their lives. The incidence of violence on the wing in question dropped and the prisoners stopped hitting one another quite so much—perhaps they had something to talk about. It was subsequently discovered that half the prison warders were in the same boat. As an aside, dyslexics tend to like regular hours and regular forms et cetera. They do not like promotion when they have to change the form, but that is an aside for another day.
So having a form of assessment on entrance into the system would seem to be sensible idea. Once again, I have one caveat, which I have given before: you should probably extend this to a list of other conditions. For example, I discovered that Asperger’s is overrepresented as well. If you have problems with communication and you have problems with the law, once again it becomes quite obvious how that could happen and you go down the list. But the principle of screening is a good one. Of course, you have to back this up with the correct action. I am afraid that bits of the Prison Service have a history of screening and saying, “Yes you are”, and then doing nothing about it. An awareness programme must back it up. That is what is required.
The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, who I am afraid has had to leave us, asked me to speak to his Amendment 213. The idea that you should maintain the EHC plans once you are inside the prison system or custody service does not require much thought. If you have an identified process going or a pattern of activity, it should be maintained or at least replaced by something extremely similar to it or better. That is fairly straightforward.
Then we come to another thing that the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, has tabled: removing Clause 70 from the Bill. I was half thinking about putting my name to this amendment, but I was beaten on the draw by many other Members of the Committee. Noble Lords should not press this if the Minister can tell us that the Ministry of Justice has a specially constructed programme that will address the needs of its client base that goes beyond, and is more appropriate than, that provided outside. That would be a good reason for not removing the clause because—nobody disputes this—we have a very high need base. If there is something that it is appropriate for adults or young people disaffected with the education system and is especially suited to them, you should not remove it.
If we do not get that quality assurance, we will not get people who will be able to talk about administering educational needs identification or coping strategies for how to access further education, where it is appropriate, and there will be problems. If you do not have people with a degree of sensitivity and skill in there, you should remove the clause. If we hear that we are going to do lots of wonderful things with people who are not properly trained, not skilled and not accustomed to the environment they are going into, the possibility of achieving nothing or even doing damage is high. These are probing amendments and I look forward to hearing what my noble friend has to say.
Lord Storey
Any hope of improving the education of detained young people must include addressing their special educational needs. It is a frightening statistic that 70% of those young people have special educational needs and 20% of them currently have statements.
The existing statutory duties placed on those councils that have a youth offender institution in their area—a host authority—by the Apprenticeship, Skills, Children and Learning Act 2009 are to use,
“best endeavours to secure that appropriate special educational provision is made”,
but of course councils have never had the funding or the commissioning responsibility for securing that education. Those duties are currently fulfilled through contracts made by the Education Funding Agency funded by the Ministry of Justice.
As the concept of the host authority has never been implemented in practice, it would perhaps be helpful to see this complicated situation resolved by repealing those clauses in the Apprenticeship, Skills, Children and Learning Act 2009 that refer to the host authorities. The Government have acknowledged that the current situation is not working, and could use the opportunity to make provision for young offenders with special educational needs that can work in practice and really address the needs of those young people.
The Earl of Listowel (CB)
My Lords, I apologise for asking a quick question. How does the virtual school head that this Bill puts on a statutory basis keep track of a looked-after child who enters the secure estate? Many of them will have special educational needs. There is no need for a response now but perhaps it is a matter that the Minister can think about for us to discuss at some point.
Lord Addington
My Lords, I thank my noble friend for that—shall I say?—reassuring answer. It was not the radical announcement that I was half hoping for, perhaps forlornly. However, it is certainly reassuring to know that people are thinking about this problem. I should also say to my noble friend that there is a lot of cross-party consensus on this. I do not think that anyone has any idea other than to try and improve this Bill, so I encourage him to make sure that we are all engaged in this. The continuation of political support on this issue can, on this occasion, be added to and built on. All of us want to find a sustainable and improving way to reach this incredibly hard-to-reach group. My noble friend Lady Walmsley talked about the problems that someone who cannot read has in accessing help. To take that one step further: try accessing the benefits system without being able to fill in a form, and then have the fear of humiliation in admitting that you cannot read. I encourage my noble friend to encourage the Ministry of Justice to address this. It must do so because everyone is a winner if we get this right. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Children and Families Bill
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Baroness Sharp of Guildford
My Lords, my name is added to that of the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, for Amendment 147 and I endorse what she has said on this issue. Statements for special educational needs require an educational psychologist to endorse them and it is obviously sensible and important that this should be extended to the post-18 age group. I probably also should have put my name to Amendment 168 because the argument there is just as cogent and important.
While I am on my feet, I should say that I have a lot of sympathy with the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lingfield. As he said, as we have a set format for statements of special educational needs, it would seem sensible for it to be carried forward in relation to the EHC plans.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, perhaps I may very briefly add a few words of support, particularly to the last amendment in this group. Good transference of these provisions around the country would be an opportunity for the Government to deal with a fairly ancient wrong. It has always been difficult and has always been seen as too difficult, but if we can embrace it now we will go forward and take on board something which runs through a lot of this legislation; namely, that it has genuine cross-party awareness and support at heart. Even if this amendment is not perfect—even the noble Lord can make an error in drafting—I hope that we can say something positive in this regard. If we can go forward and see how it can be addressed in the future, that would help everyone and would probably make people’s lives a little bit easier.
Baroness Whitaker (Lab)
I speak in support of Amendment 175A in the name of my noble friend Lord Touhig. I have in mind a particular group of children with disabilities who move and I am not sure whether this amendment exactly covers them. If the Minister is going to say that Clause 47 covers the concerns of the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, will he clarify whether Clause 47, or the new clause proposed by Amendment 175A, would cover the situation of travelling children? This might be the child with disabilities of a showman who is based in one area, say, for three or four months over the winter, and then moves every few weeks to wherever the parents’ have work. The care plan needs to be transferred to each local authority. I had thought that Clause 47 might cover that, so my first question for the Minister is: is that covered? My second question is: if he entertains my noble friend’s amendment about children who move residence, as opposed to moving where they live from time to time, would that cover the situation of travelling children who return to a base but only once a year?
Lord Addington
My Lords, perhaps I may briefly add something. It has been a tradition that the independent sector has periodically supported the state system in specialist areas. If we are to use specialist support and help here, then making sure that it is stated up-front that that is possible will probably be more helpful than otherwise.
Lord Nash
My Lords, this group of amendments concerns independent specialist provision. I thank all noble Lords who have spoken in this debate. I particularly thank my noble friend Lord Lexden for his Amendments 153, 157 and 159, which seek to ensure that independent schools, including those specially organised to cater for children with special educational needs, continue to play an important part in SEN provision.
Currently, parents can request that a maintained school is named in a statement of special educational needs. The local authority is then under a qualified duty to name that school and, if so named, the school has to admit the child. The Bill extends to young people the right to ask for a particular institution to be named in an EHC plan and the coverage is extended to a wider range of institutions. Parents or young people will also be able to ask for an academy, including a free school, a further education or sixth-form college, a non-maintained special school or an independent institution approved under Clause 41 to be named in an EHC plan. The local authority will then be under the same qualified duty to name the institution and the institution will be under the same duty to admit the child or young person. For this change to be of real benefit to parents and young people, it is important that, when a parent or young person requests one of these institutions, the local authority is under a qualified duty to name that institution in the EHC plan and that the institution is under a duty to admit the child or young person.
Turning to Amendment 153, I understand my noble friend’s desire to ensure that parents and young people can ask for any independent school to be named on an EHC plan and not just those on the list under Clause 41. I reassure my noble friend that parents and young people will be able to make representations for any independent school, and the local authority must consider their request. In doing so, it must have regard to the general principle in Section 9 of the Education Act 1996 that children should be educated in accordance with their parents’ wishes, so long as this is compatible with the provision of efficient instruction and training and does not mean unreasonable public expenditure. Paragraph 7.11 on page 111 of the draft SEN code of practice makes this clear. Of course, the local authority would not be under the same conditional duty to name the school in the EHC plan as it would in the case of an institution approved under Clause 41, and the school would not be under a duty to admit the child or young person.
My noble friend’s amendment would place local authorities under a duty to name an independent school in an EHC plan with no guarantee that the independent school would admit the child or young person, leaving the local authority unable to fulfil its statutory duty to secure the special educational provision in the plan. As we have heard many times from noble Lords in this debate, it is important that children, parents and young people are clear about what they are entitled to. This is key to their confidence in the new system.
Turning to Amendments 157 and 159, I reassure my noble friend that Clauses 39 and 40 require the local authority to consult the institution which might be named in an EHC plan, including an independent special school or independent specialist provider approved under Clause 41. This will allow meaningful discussions, especially if a school or college feels that it cannot make appropriate provision to meet the pupil’s needs. After this consultation, the authority will name the institution that it feels is appropriate. If it is decided that an institution approved under Section 41 is appropriate and that institution is named in the EHC plan, the institution is under a duty to admit the child or young person. It is important to remember that only those institutions that have chosen to apply to be approved under Clause 41 and are subsequently approved will be under such a duty.
Amendment 158, tabled by the noble Baronesses, Lady Hughes and Lady Jones, and the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, seeks to protect the right of children, young people and their parents to choose the school or institution named in their EHC plan. I agree with the intention behind the amendment—the importance of a person-centred system is at the heart of our reforms. The Bill places specific duties on local authorities to consult a child’s parents or a young person while drawing up an EHC plan. Clause 38 requires the local authority to send the draft plan to the parents or young person and to make clear their right to make representations about its contents, including the right to request a particular school or institution. In the event that a parent or young person is not satisfied with the school or institution named in their EHC plan, they have recourse to mediation and an independent tribunal.
Children and Families Bill
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Lord Touhig (Lab)
My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 77 in my name and that of my noble friend Lady Hughes of Stretford and to Amendments 82, 83, 84 and 85 in my name. Before doing so, I add my support to Amendment 70A in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham. For me, this amendment represents an important first step in reforming the exclusion policy in schools so far as people with special educational needs are concerned. Some 70% of children excluded from school in England are SEN. That is telling us something: it is a real challenge for us to tackle, and the noble Lord’s amendment at least goes some way to start looking at that. I know from family support workers in south Wales that in some of our cities they are concerned about what they call “soft exclusions”, whereby a child is told, “We don’t want to see you for the next 10 days”, or, “It’s half term next week; we don’t want to see you till we come back after half term”. There is no record kept. This is illegal but it happens, and I fear that young people with learning difficulties are much involved.
In evidence given to the All-Party Group on Autism’s commission on special educational needs, one mother said that she had not been called into school about the behaviour of her autistic son for some considerable time because his teacher was someone who had an autistic child herself and understood the problem. I fear that youngsters with special educational needs are, probably unintentionally, the victims of school exclusion policies, and that is not what we want. I hope that the Minister is minded to welcome this amendment.
I now turn to Amendment 77, which seeks to address the issue of early identification. I know that I am not alone in the Committee in believing that identifying and supporting children with special educational needs as early as possible is the most important factor in improving outcomes. Clause 22 requires local authorities to seek to identify children and young people in their areas who may have special educational needs. Amendment 77 would insert the words “as early as possible”, which most people would believe is common sense—after all, why would we not do that? Why would we not seek this information as early as possible?
The professionals who work with children have a crucial role to play: they are the first educators that the children come into contact with. A number of issues, such as speech and communication problems, developmental delays and behavioural and literacy issues can be better addressed by a good quality early years provider. This means that children start school in a much better position than they would otherwise, and fewer resources are required in later years.
There is evidence, though, to show that the early years workforce is typically the least qualified in the education sector. Reductions in local council budgets have meant that they have cut their training spend for early years staff by 40% in the past three years. This has resulted in many cutting back on early years area SENCOs that they have previously employed to provide advice and training in early years settings. However, the support that they provide is needed now more than ever. A recent Communications Trust project, Talk of the Town, evidenced that across a federation of schools, children and young people’s speech, language and communication needs were under-identified by an average of 40%. The Communications Trust said it,
“remains concerned over how the Bill will ensure that the mechanisms for identification will work in practice across all educational phases and also on local authorities’ ability to identify needs as early as possible, and to respond to these needs”.
The National Deaf Children’s Society, RNIB and Sense are also concerned that overall proposals do not place sufficient emphasis on the importance of early years support for children with sensory impairments and their families.
The Opposition tabled this amendment in the Commons and in response the Minister said:
“One of the things we will consider is whether, and if so how, some of the good practice on the area SENCO role can be reflected in the code of practice”.—[Official Report, Commons, Children and Families Bill, 19/3/13; col. 369.]
I have had a look at the redrafted code of practice, and I cannot see where this is taken forward. Perhaps the Minister, who has considered this in much more detail than I have, can update us on this issue.
I have added my name to Amendment 80, which was tabled by the noble Baronesses, Lady Brinton, Lady Walmsley and Lady Howarth of Breckland, but, in view of the time, I do not propose to speak to it.
Amendments 82, 83, 84 and 85 would ensure that Clause 24 placed a duty on health services to inform the relevant local authority if a child under compulsory school age may have SEN. These amendments would extend this duty to apply to all children or young people who may have special educational needs, regardless of age. It is important that children do not fall through the net and go unidentified early simply because they do not fall within the specific age group set out in the Bill. Having spent 20 years as a councillor, I remember taking up problems on behalf of constituents, often only to be told, “Sorry, councillor, he or she falls through the net”. Who created the net? We did. We, the legislators, the makers of the rules, want to make sure that in this case the net helps and protects people.
In the other place, the Minister referred to single integrated checks and sought to assure Members that the provisions in the Bill would support the identification of children’s SEN and make the these amendments unnecessary. If that remains the Government’s view, will the Minister rehearse for our benefit the argument that the four amendments are not needed and set out clearly where in the Bill the objectives that these amendments are seeking to realise are covered and catered for?
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, I support the amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham. For anyone who knows anything about the system, even in passing, it is brilliantly obvious that we should have had something like Amendment 70A in the Bill. If a child has been excluded twice, it is statistically almost inevitable that there will be a problem, and he or she should be assessed so that the problem can be identified accurately.
We all carry a degree of history with us in this Room. Mine is of dyslexia. The standard way you identify dyslexia is by the difference between spoken and written language. If you cannot speak correctly, the chances of identifying that person as dyslexic go down. We know there is comorbidity. You have to get into the system and look in the round. It is very important.
I have interests to declare. I have used voice recognition technology for years. It requires a degree of use of language verbally to have a way of dealing with that problem. We should thank the noble Lord for bringing to our attention the fact that everything about communication levels starts to come together in the spoken word or the written word. The way these things hang together is always complicated and difficult. It gets more difficult to deal with them the later they are identified.
To say thank you to the Government, I think that Clause 22 is the most radical and brave thing I have seen in a Bill for a while—saying that we will go out and identify those with special educational needs. Most of the special educational needs lobby has been about saying to the educational establishment, “Oi! There’s a problem. Come over here and give us a hand”. I have lost track of the number of times I have had conversations with Members of both Houses of Parliament about dyslexic children and grandchildren: “How do you get the help?”, “Who do you go through?”, “What’s the matter?” and “Do we tell them they have a problem or not?”. Identification here is very important. Making that a stronger duty, despite the fact that it might be difficult, will make the rest of it easier. You cannot help someone if you do not know what the problem is. I very much support this amendment and the sentiment behind it.
Baroness Whitaker
My Lords, I record my support for all these amendments and declare an interest as the patron of the British Stammering Association. In particular, I urge the Minister to take on board Amendments 70A and 77. I shall cite three pieces of research. The first is from his own department, almost a year ago. It found that speech, language and communication needs were significantly under-identified among children. The other research is from the organisations that form the Communication Trust. Language development at the age of two is shown not only strongly to predict children’s performance on entry to primary school but to link to outcomes into adulthood. That means employment prospects as well as education. Tied to that is the fact that language development in the early years has a significant impact on the behaviour and emotional development of children. We are talking, of course, of an adverse impact—anti-social behaviour. The final fact is that too many children enter school without their speech, language and communication needs being addressed or even identified. These deficits are already known and it is imperative that the Bill should take more account of them.
Literacy
Lord Addington Excerpts(11 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord Addington
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the effect of hidden special educational needs and disabilities on levels of literacy in England and Northern Ireland, in the light of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s recent low ranking of England and Northern Ireland in terms of literacy.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools (Lord Nash) (Con)
My Lords, there is a gap in literacy and numeracy levels for pupils with SEN, some of whom have their needs identified late. Twenty-three per cent get grade A* to C in GCSE English and maths compared with 59% nationally. All pupils need high quality teaching in the basics. Our focus on phonics is playing a key part in that. It also supports earlier identification of issues such as dyslexia, so that schools provide effective support in line with our SEN reforms.
Lord Addington (LD)
I thank my noble friend for that Answer, especially as this Question was tabled at such short notice. However, would he agree that teachers do not receive enough training both initially and in service to have a good chance of identifying those who are finding it difficult to learn to read, particularly when they are on the less extreme end of the spectrums that they encounter? Will he consider that we should, at the first available opportunity, try to improve this level of training and awareness in the teaching profession?
Lord Nash
My Lords, Teachers’ Standards requires that all teachers have a clear understanding of the needs of all pupils, including those with SEN, and must be able to adapt their teaching to meet those needs. All teachers must also now receive IT in synthetic phonics, and Ofsted inspects against that. Also, the draft SEN code of practice that we published on 4 October requires that teachers’ ability to meet SEN is included in schools’ approach to professional development and their performance management arrangements. We have invested heavily in SEN training, educational psychologists and other programmes over the past few years, but I am sure there is more to be done.
Children and Families Bill
Lord Addington Excerpts(11 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Addington
My Lords, this is one of those debates in which you discover that you agree with most if not all of what has been said but that even the one point you have that you thought was going to be unique has already been touched on by someone. In this case, the noble Lord, Lord Rix, has jumped in front of me on apprenticeships.
We have been waiting for this Bill for a long time. It is one of those things that has been coming along for a while. When I looked at its framework, I thought about what is required to make the education system work. I should say that I am going to talk only about Part 3. You start to look for what is not there, and one of the things that is not there is a specific comment about teacher training for dealing with special educational needs. We have to square up to the fact that many teachers get very little support in their initial training on special educational needs. Indeed, I am told that in some cases it is two hours.
Let us look at the conditions that those teachers are dealing with by considering the “dyses” first—dyslexia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia—along with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. I pointed these out to a friend of mine who is not dyslexic but who said, “It would take me two hours to learn how to spell them all accurately”. Two hours of teaching is not enough. If you do not know what you are dealing with, how in hell are you supposed to give the correct support? I do not know; you are supposed to be a good teacher, so you will pick it up.
The noble Lord, Lord Touhig, has talked about the “sharp elbow brigade”. We dealt with this before when a previous Government were thinking about getting rid of statementing. It was clear that the average informed parent with sharp elbows knows a lot more about these individual conditions than the average teacher does. They might not have perfect knowledge and it might not be rigorously tested, but they have knowledge while initially the teacher will have none. They will acquire it via the bumps and bangs of being knocked around while going through the appeals system. Unless we deal with this properly, we are not going to make the progress we should. However, I am not talking about turning every teacher into an expert on a category of disability.
I must declare my interests, which arise from the world of dyslexia, which is reckoned to affect around 10% of the population. That would make dyslexics the biggest disability group, but the condition feeds into other groups such as those related to the development of speech and language, which can be contributing factors. Having sharp-elbowed parents is a factor in the personal cocktail. If you have mild dyslexia and you come from a middle-class background with wealthy parents who can afford interventions, you ain’t got that many problems in this world. If you come from a council estate with offending in the family and no one expects you ever to pass an exam, quite often you end up in the prison system. This has recently been recognised by the Government. I had the honour with Chris Grayling of launching the Cascade Foundation, which is considering the prevalence of dyslexia in prison.
The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, is in his place across the Chamber from me. If you want to find any kind of disability group, look in the prisons first, because you will find a good study sample. It is reckoned that some 70% of the prison population cannot read properly, while many studies have shown that 50% of prisoners are within the dyslexia spectrum. Asperger’s syndrome is over-represented among prisoners as well. I ask this of my noble friends on the Front Bench: can we have an undertaking to describe what will be done for those who are incarcerated in the prison system? We need to find out exactly what is to happen because it will affect the rest of it.
If we are to make sure that the people who teach are trained, we must look at those who are supposed to be supporting them, because no matter what you do you have to support people so they can identify problems, understand what is said to them, and transfer it to the classroom. I say again that not everybody can be an expert—it will just not happen. What about SENCOs? This has been mentioned before. Will they have superior training and back-up to be able to support that person? If this is done and someone is competent, the need for any type of special label will be reduced. We do not know by how much, but it will be reduced, so how this works is very important.
In the few minutes left to me, I will draw the House’s attention to the ongoing saga of apprenticeships. I first discovered a problem with apprenticeships when the then head of the British Dyslexia Association told me during the passage of the apprenticeships Bill, when the party opposite was in power, that people needed to pass a compulsory English language test. During the course of the Bill I was assured, “Do not worry, we are not going to make life more difficult”. However, the wording was not changed and people regularly fail that test because they are dyslexic. Other groups suffer too, but I shall talk exclusively about dyslexics.
This was first brought home to me by a lad called David, who had passed every component of his test to become a carpenter, apart from the English test. He could build a replacement for the table that stands in front of us, but nobody would know it because he did not have that piece of paper that says he can do it. That is what a qualification is for. It does not give you the skill, but it says that you have it. It identifies the skill, and you can take the qualification with you and improve your employment prospects. The system fails because of that. Why can David not take the test?
At first we were told that this was in the legislation. However, I met the right honourable John Hayes when he was the Minister in charge and I told him about it. He shouted at an official—bizarrely, over a speakerphone, if I remember correctly—and told him, “Sort it out, sort it out”. Then as the meetings went on, I was told, “It is terribly difficult, you cannot do this”. Then I was told, “We can do this, but it is difficult. It has to be online and we have not formatted it”. The colleges now respond by saying that they cannot put people forward for a test that they will fail because it is not formatted.
We need some peripheral vision here. For nearly two decades we have been assisting people in the higher education sector by giving them voice-operated and other technological assistance on computers to allow them to prepare written work. In this society, how many times is anybody required to pick up a pen to provide written communication outside a classroom? Noble Lords should take that on board. It is ridiculous. I have a list here of other people who have failed. I would read it out, but I do not like reading things out—I am dyslexic.
Here are a couple of examples involving girls. One was a visual merchandising apprentice—I think that means a window dresser—but, hey, advertising sells and is necessary. Once again, she was refused entrance when it was realised that she could not get through the English assessment and the college did not have the support structure in place. Another girl doing retail failed again and was refused being put forward. An engineer passed the assessment on the third attempt by the skin of his teeth. If he had had a bad day and failed again, eventually he would not have been allowed to carry on taking it; colleges will not carry on putting you forward.
I will read out the best example. This involved somebody doing agriculture and animal husbandry. This is his final comment: “I am fed up with everyone reminding me what I cannot do. I am good at my job. My boss tells me that all the time. I even won an award from a professional body that recognised my skills, so why am I bothering with English and maths? I can count sheep and cows. Isn’t that enough?”. You have to sympathise with him. With a few lines in the Bill, the Government have the technical ability to make sure that something happens very quickly, and that person will at least stand a chance of passing those tests. I suggest that this is an opportunity that is way overdue.