Performing Arts: GCSE and A-level Qualifications

Lord Addington Excerpts

Wednesday 26th April 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I just do not fully accept the deficit that the noble Baroness describes. I absolutely agree with her that arts organisations bring an important, valuable and different perspective, but schools themselves are also doing an extraordinary job. As we can see from our incredibly successful creative industries, we are getting something right.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, the Minister has given responses that say, “Yes, we like the things outside the formal GCSE structure”. Will the Government go a step further and identify those who are interested in arts activity—that is, performing—and positively channel them towards those who are doing it outside? If you are not going to give exams or structure, you must at least help people get to those who will do it voluntarily.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

If I may, the Government like “both/and”. We have the arts clearly in the national curriculum and over half of children in schools are doing either GCSE or a vocational technical qualification —but, in terms of the richness of children’s education, the opportunity to engage outside brings a great deal of added value.

Special Educational Needs: Employment Support

Lord Addington Excerpts

Monday 24th April 2023 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Addington]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what plans they have to ensure that anyone identified as having a Special Educational Need in the education system is passported through to the appropriate support when looking for employment in adult life.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, in begging leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper, I remind the House of my declared interests in the register.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education (Baroness Barran) (Con)]

My Lords, we recently set out plans in the SEND and alternative provision improvement plan to ensure that every young person with special educational needs and disabilities achieves good outcomes and is prepared for adulthood. As part of this, we are developing good practice guidance to support consistent, timely, high-quality transitions for young people with SEND, including into employment. We are also supporting the Department for Work and Pensions to pilot an adjustments passport, which will to help smooth that transition.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for that response; I appreciate that she is primarily answering for a department that is not her own. At the moment, if you talk to anybody in employment going through this, they will give you a list of things that do not happen: people do not know what an adjustment is or how to find out what it is, and employers do not know exactly what they are supposed to do. Can we have a guide to what will happen when somebody goes into employment and, for instance, goes for Access to Work, where they are not required to get the job first, apply and then require the employer to ensure they are prepared to sustain them, without being at full capacity for a period of time before they get the benefit of it? Unless people can get some form of passporting or labelling system that says that they are entitled to it as they go to work, they are going to be in trouble.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The Department for Education is piloting the use of the adjustment passports in a number of settings. We started with higher education, and we are now looking at supported internships and apprenticeships. We need to understand how useful they are in that setting, and then we will look at whether they will apply more widely in future.

SEND and Alternative Provision

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 9th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for the Statement. There is much to welcome in this long-awaited SEND improvement plan. Children and young people with special educational needs, as well as those with disabilities, all too often have to battle an unwelcoming and sometimes unsupportive world, including at school. Labour has some concerns, however, which I would be grateful if the Minister could address.

First, as your Lordships might be aware, the Children’s Commissioner has raised concerns that much of the substance of this plan, including the welcome new national standards, is not coming into effect until 2025 or even 2026. Children needing SEND assessments cannot put their lives on hold. Can the Minister reassure the House that this delay will not subject children, in the words of the Children’s Commissioner, to years of a vicious cycle of poor outcomes?

In particular, when will the initial teacher training review conclude? For the new area SEND inspection framework, we are told that timeliness will be assessed. What amount of time will be considered timely to have a SEND assessment initiated and completed? This involves pupils and parents who have spent their school lives waiting for appropriate assessments and subsequent placements, so time really is of the essence for this pupil group. The focus on additional skills in the workforce to improve SEND provision is welcome, as is the commitment to review the initial teacher training and early career frameworks. However, the timeline is not clear. Can the Minister advise this House when the review will be completed?

I note that Speech and Language UK is keen that the review of teacher training should also include how to support children with speech and language challenges, from early years and throughout school. Will this be included?

I would particularly like to highlight paragraph 75 of chapter 2 of the plan, which refers to data on inequalities

“in relation to certain characteristics such as place, gender and race”

and is the only paragraph that refers to gender or race. This is unduly light on detail, given that black children with special educational needs are increasingly likely to be permanently excluded from school for behaviour due to their condition, rather than malicious intent. Can the Minister assure the House of the Government’s commitment to addressing disproportionality?

Looked-after children also face particular issues in accessing SEND provision; this is referred to in the plan. As the Children’s Commissioner also highlighted, there are

“serious gaps in the Plan”.

She continued:

“Much of the Plan assumes that children will have familial support and does not consider how children in the care of the state will be represented and supported”.


References to looked-after children in this plan are limited. Can the Minister provide a timeline for when the work referred to in the plan to ensure that looked-after children get the best provision will be complete?

Finally, the plan sets out the aim of reducing the number of children with education, health and care plans. If this reduction is made through improving support in mainstream schools and getting better support in place early, it would be welcome. But the reduction must not be a means of reducing costs or making it even harder for children and young people to access support, and to access an education, health and care plan if required. How will the newly forming ICBs bring together health and education to support SEND children?

Parents, guardians, carers and, critically, children with special educational needs and disabilities are crying out for a more sustainable solution to the current patchwork of SEND provision. I had hoped this plan would be more ambitious in seeking to provide that. As yet, regrettably, I am still sceptical.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I should first declare my interests: I am president of the British Dyslexia Association and chairman of Microlink, which is an assisted tech company that works in the education sector. I also realised when preparing for this debate that I made my maiden speech almost 35 years ago on special educational needs.

When we look at the Statement, the most important bit is really where it says that:

“we know that the system has lost the confidence of parents and carers. We need to regain their trust by improving the support that is ordinarily available.”

That is the essence of it. We have a system that has got bogged down in legalese, buck-shifting and dodging. With the best of intentions, what was set up under the 2014 Act—I was involved in that, so I take a share of the blame—is not addressing need and is chasing itself around. The big beneficiaries of the education, health and care plans have been lawyers. The appeals procedure has become ridiculous, and I thank the Government for recognising that. There are also other structural changes.

A school is expected to have £6,000 to support a person going through. If you are planning a budget in a school, you actually have a disincentive to identify needs and get help and care through. That money could be far better spent on improving your staff structure to deal with the problems as they come through and on making sure the system can give support, particularly to those with commonly occurring conditions. Therefore, you would actually have something which means people do not go through the legal process of the plan, for the simple reason that a structure would be there to deal with it.

The best way to get high needs, if you have one of the commonly occurring conditions, is not to have them addressed for several years, so you are behind the curve, have not acquired the skills and have therefore got problems. It is also important to remember that, with the education system, you are only there for a fixed period of time. You are on a conveyor belt of acquiring skills to acquire more knowledge to pass exams. It should be more than that, but I am afraid that is the essence of it—and it has become more so of late.

I ask the Minister—I feel that she is a little bit like the poor infantry on this, but there we are, I am still going to shoot at her—if this is coming forward, how are we going to make sure that teachers are properly trained and have the support to intervene? We talk about better training here and about educational psychologists. An educational psychologist said to me in the all-party group on dyslexia, “We usually rely on people having failed for X number of years before we intervene.” Think about it: that is guaranteeing more failure. Are we going to get to something with better assessment and planning? There are tools in planning and screening tools available that can help with identification, but people need to train to be able to interpret results. Level 3 is not enough; they need to be at level 5 or level 7 to make these assessments. Are we going to passport this identification forward so that help can be accessed more quickly? That would be a huge change.

In the Commons, a great deal of attention was paid to special schools. I think 83 schools were promised—some now and some planned in future. Special schools, hopefully, should be for high-need pupils. They should not be for ordinary problems, or for people waiting to acquire high needs by failing. This was very common and many of the Government’s own supporters raised this. If you have got these special schools, how are you going to make sure people get the right one? Are you going to make sure that people can travel and that support—or indeed boarding arrangements—are there? Are you integrating them? How are you going to overcome certain education authorities or others saying, “No, we won’t send them there”—which is a very common thing in these processes when people are fighting forward. How will we start to address that? We need to know how the Government are going to use the private sector, which has been used in the past. These are questions which need to be answered.

I appreciate that the Government have started a process. I feel that there was enough information out there to have missed out some of this assessment, or perhaps to have got it done far more quickly. However, I have the Government to thank. They said we would be talking about this in September, but I have won a £5 bet because it is happening in March. We have got to get a little bit more speed and we know this. It has been a long time coming; many of these problems have already been established and everybody knows about them. I hope that the Minister can give us some guidance here, because we are not dealing with a new thing. We do not need to spend time looking at it. I hope the Government can go to the vast body of knowledge they have, give us a little bit more speed and tell us how they are going to meet these very well-established problems.

Education (Non-religious Philosophical Convictions) Bill [HL]

Lord Addington Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 3rd February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, this is one of those debates where you sit here and think, “What am I going to say?” Then there is the further problem of seeing that the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, is in front of you on the speakers’ list, and you know he is going to come in with something important. When he speaks in favour of what I can only describe as muscular Christianity, backs it up with Milton and says bring it on, it would be fairly churlish to go far from that line.

My noble friend’s Bill would help clarify this situation. If we ignore the spiritual elements of religion—described as superstition or something else—and consider it as a guide to how you live your life now, humanism fits in with that very well. There might be more of a problem with other worldviews, but they are all there. You could not teach humanism without knowing about the other religions, for the simple reason that—the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, got there first and said this earlier—many of them feed off each other. At their philosophical centre, they are all in agreement. When reading up on anything about religion, the thing that gets me is the number of times that they all agree with each other. We may fight wars about whether you pray on a certain day or in a certain way, but basically most of the philosophical actions are in agreement. So I hope that we can go along with the general thrust of what my noble friend is proposing in her Bill.

As the noble Lord, Lord Cashman, said, the Library briefing made it very clear that there is a direction of travel. My noble friend is not paddling upstream on this issue; we are already going that way. It might be possible to work this into the rest of the syllabus at the moment, but if it is not exact and clear, as the noble Lord, Lord Davies, pointed out, you will always get diversity.

Surely we require of people an understanding of what goes on around them, as understanding what other people think makes tolerance easier because you are less frightened of them. That is one of the primary directives of the Bill. Allowing somebody to understand that, if somebody disagrees with you, they are not, by definition, evil is probably the best we can hope for from this. If we look back to the various historical points when that has not happened, certainly from the 16th century onwards, and at the number of deaths, plots and prejudicial laws that have been based on that lack of understanding, we see that it is quite mind-boggling. If noble Lords ever wanted to feel guilty about something, look at history: all nations can drown in their own sins, if they have been playing at all.

I hope that this small change and the direction of travel in the Bill—if not this one then another, because Private Members’ Bills have a habit of getting chewed up by the system—will be embraced by the Government and future Governments. It is clearly where many people want to go. We can argue about statistics and whether you come from a Christian or non-religious background—you can do that for ever—but the fact is that there is a growing diversity of faith and philosophy in this country that dominates the way that people react and change. If we do not admit to that, we are fooling ourselves. If we do not make sure that people are taught from the earliest age how they can take that onboard, we are missing a trick and probably making all our lives more difficult.

I hope that the Minister, when she replies, will be able to tell us how that will be done and what the future guidance will be. I have a little sympathy with her, as I know that everybody wants their particular pet horse put into the curriculum, but this is one change we could make.

I look forward to what the Minister, and indeed the Opposition Front Bench, has to say, so that we can get an idea of how their thinking is going, because if we are not going to take this on board, this is not going away, and I would like to know how we are going to achieve the aims of the Bill, or at least some acceptance of them.

Vulnerable Teenagers

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 26th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, this is one of those debates—and I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong for tabling it—where, as you listen to it, you think, “Yep, we’ve been here before. We’ve done this before and heard it before.” What you have not heard is the current context. County lines and the emphasis on knife crime are the new twist. Anyone surprised that gangs are full of 14 year-olds has not been paying attention. If you go into any prison, you will find that the scholars are the ones who stayed in the education system until the age of 14; most were out of the system way before that. That has been a depressing fact for a long time.

I do not think there is anything radical in the report, but bringing it all together is the important point. A tick-box culture of support—saying, “Yes, we’ve done this”, “Is this the job of the education sector or should it be somewhere else?” or “Which bit of the education sector system has done what at what time?”—leads to the discovery that the person we excluded from school has decided they do not like the alternative provision at the pupil referral unit and has disappeared, and now our criminals have realised that that person is an excellent delivery system for narcotics. That is not too far off the Artful Dodger, for God’s sake.

We have to try to have a more coherent attitude to this issue. We as the political class have to say that the current Government seem to have acknowledged that the problem is there and are moving away from “Let’s be tough”. Every time that anyone in any department says, “We’re going to be tough and do something about this”, I get a cold shudder down my back because they usually then create a new problem. If you send people to prison, as the current Government have realised, either you end up having several bouts of offending before they come get of it, usually because they are getting too old and it tends to be a younger person’s game, or they stay in because they have committed more serious offences. Unless we can start to break that cycle by having a more coherent attitude across the piece, we are going to continue having the same problems.

I do not know if society is incapable of removing the problem altogether but we can certainly reduce it. There are a variety of actions that have been identified that help here. By supporting and helping voluntary organisations and activities—youth clubs and so on—the state can create the right environment. I must declare one of my little interests here: sport is the ultimate voluntary activity. When someone starts participating in a particular sport, they join a tribe, not a gang, which will embrace them with its own ways and bizarre rituals. I must declare that I am a Rugby Union player, but all sports have that element.

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)]

We all have our problems.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Addington (LD)]

True enough. The parliamentary team is playing again soon so the physiotherapist may well benefit.

These are groups that thrive on activity. Dance, music and so on all have a variation on this. When it comes to support—I have said this before so I might as well do so again—Governments here are very lucky because most sports clubs have a tradition of not being that involved with the state. We tend to do it ourselves, unlike in France where you would play at the stade municipal, or in Germany where, as I have said many times, when the FA says to its German colleagues, “How much do you spend on supporting pitches?”, the response is, “Oh, we don’t do that; it’s a local government job.”

As we got there first, sporting structures in Great Britain tend to have acquired grounds, status and the ability to maintain themselves, but I hope we will hear something in the near future about how the Government will support these structures because all sports have a problem with retention. They need to get people to play not just as children but as adults because there is always a problem with that: people tell me, “We have lots of children joining”, and I say, “Great, but unless you get them to play as adults then you have no coaches, no long-term interaction and no investment back into society.” I hope that the Minister will let us know what the Government’s strategy is for maintaining these ultimately volunteer groups.

The same strategy that works for them, by the way, will also be very helpful to all the other creative things—arts and drama, et cetera. If the Minister were prepared to tell us how they are prepared to do something really useful, such as teaching somebody how to be a treasurer or secretary of a voluntary group, they would help all these groups and every small branch of a charity. That is the last of my little rant on that subject.

There are the educational problems. The noble Baroness must have been expecting this, but how are we going to spot those who are failing earlier and intervene better? We have heard about the special educational needs review, which we have been expecting since September. We will now not have it in January, which was the last thing we heard, but “early in this year”. I have got a fiver on March. I do not know whether I will win that bet—I am quite prepared to lose it, if we have it slightly earlier—but we have been waiting a long time. The 20% failure rate to achieve anything really measurable at school is not a surprise. It is also a consistent figure. The social factor or the fact that these people do not find acquiring knowledge that easy must be the consistent things here.

As president of the British Dyslexia Association—I am dyslexic myself—I say that some people cannot learn to do something that most people, let us face it, pick up comparatively easily. You can argue about what the best system is for reading, which the support system is best for reading, learning et cetera. Most people pick that up fairly easily and we have designed the systems to be fairly easy to pick up, which is why we use them. If you are not doing that, you need other interventions. These problems are combined with poverty and the lack of support because when it comes to special educational needs, guess what? The people who get the help are those who have the type of parents who go out there and drag it out of the system. Once again, I must declare an interest as having had, shall we say, one of those behind me.

Unless we get a better idea of how early you should intervene to identify and support somebody, that person, while in the school system—that huge, dominant chunk of your early life—will be told they are failing. It is quite a logical process to remove yourself from something you are failing at and get out of it. It might even be a sign of intelligence to get out of there, so I hope the Minister will give us some more hints about how this review is going to take place or at least some assurances about the amount of effort that will go behind it because that 20% failure rate will still be there.

Another interest of mine is that everybody’s standard computer will read a document to you. It also has a software package so that you can talk to it and it will write for you. Every one of your Lordships has that: every mobile phone has it as well. How are we working that into the system? How are we helping someone to get through if they have trouble sitting down and studying in the classroom? How are we identifying the person who does not? The male of the species is the bigger offender here. Girls in classrooms tend to try to hide and disappear; boys kick off and get excluded. That rule of thumb is one reason why we did not identify as many girls as boys in the past. We all thought there was an imbalance between the two in frequency; we are now discovering that they are much more even.

I hope that the Minister will comment on consistency of approach and that the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, will talk on behalf of a group who regard themselves, shall we say, as the Government in waiting. If I were looking at the polls, I would think that it would not be an unreasonable expectation—though it ain’t over yet, as we all know—so, between the two of them, perhaps they could say what consistencies they would take from each other. It is about getting some consistency in these approaches. Wonderful schemes do not often work if it is about being tough, or being new or different. Usually, it is about a consensus of approach being maintained over a few years so that we stand a chance of making a real impression on these problems.

As I said, this may be a new manifestation of them, but all the problems are consistent. We have heard all these things before about ethnic diversity and how certain groups are not being reached for cultural reasons. We need some form of consistency because otherwise we will be back here in a decade having the same sort of debate again with the same sort of report—but having a slightly new thing to latch it on to, which the papers have been telling us is the end of society. It is not. It is just another group of people with their lives ruined.

Secondary Schools: Autistic Pupils

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 26th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I would be grateful if my noble friend could share details of these cases, so that we make sure we understand them properly. The House will be aware that a diagnosis of autism needs to be a medical diagnosis. We will publish our improvement plan for provision for children with special educational needs. That will clearly cover how we want EHCPs to work better in future; it will be before the House shortly.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for the Answer she gave earlier and remind the House of my interests in the general field of special educational needs. Does she agree that if you are determined to get a medical diagnosis, you are slowing down the process of recognition and help? If we get teachers better trained to give a suspicion—it might be just a suspicion—or some knowledge about the autistic field, we will have a chance of getting better help. If noble Lords think that does not have an effect, look at the numbers of autistic people identified in the prison system.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The noble Lord raises two connected issues. Formal diagnosis of autism in this country needs to be done by a medical professional—a doctor. The noble Lord is absolutely right; that does not need to slow down interventions to support a child where there is apparently autism, even before it is confirmed. The Government announced a contract with a number of leading charities in this area to provide universal training across the teaching workforce in both schools and FE, and 60,000 people have been trained so far since April 2022.

Schools: Artificial Intelligence Software

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 19th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

This whole area throws up enormous issues in terms of copyright and intellectual property, of which this is one example. I know that colleagues in the Office for Artificial Intelligence are considering these issues in detail.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

Will the Minister take the time to make sure that people understand the difference between the various types of technology and particularly assistive technology? Assistive technology may be something that some people need for life, not just through their education, and they should probably start using it earlier than we do. Will the Government make sure that teachers and educationalists know the difference?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I suggest that teachers and educationalists do know the difference. The big change that we are seeing is the development of these LLMs—large language models—and other types of AI. However, I think that particularly for people with special educational needs, whether children or adults, this could really unlock their education in a way we have not seen previously.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I am not sure of the link to the Question unless the noble Lord is suggesting that at some point a chatbot might replace our Scottish colleagues.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I take advantage of this moment to remind the House of my interests, which I should have declared.

Childcare

Lord Addington Excerpts

Tuesday 17th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I thank the noble Baroness for her question; the issue is very important and, as the noble Baroness knows, extremely complicated. We announced in July a number of measures that are under review to try to improve the supply of childcare and bring down the costs. My honourable friend the Minister for Children and Families is considering all of these actively at the moment.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, can the Minister confirm that the idea of upping the ratio of children to childcare staff has been removed from the table—and that going up to five three to four year-olds per member of staff, as has been suggested and is happening in Scotland, will not happen here? Lowering the quality of care will not help anyone.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I would say to the noble Lord, first, that nothing is yet off the table. As I just said, my honourable friend the Minister for Children and Families is considering all options. I am not aware of any research or evidence showing that quality is deteriorating; indeed, our childcare ratios are among the lowest in Europe.

Oak National Academy

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 12th January 2023 Grand Committee

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, we must thank the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, for drawing the issue to our attention. I do not think that half of us would have known that this was going on had it not been for a couple of the interventions he has made. It is probably a case for the use of Parliament.

This is a very odd one. Initially, I looked at the debate and said, “Yeah, online teaching—great. Wonderful. Online tools and technology—let’s use them”. I remind the Committee of my interests in those fields. However, I suddenly thought, “If the private sector is doing this, why are we intervening?” Is it because we are saving a lot of money? It does not really seem that the case for that has been made so let us hear it. Let us hear whether we are creating money to give extra resources to classrooms because that would be a case for it. If we are damaging one of our commercial sectors—there seems to be a well-argued fear, shall we say, that this could be happening—let us hear what the Government are going to do to mitigate that.

For instance, are we going to go to the publishing sector and say, “You have the contracts to make sure that the Oak academy is up to date”? If you want to make sure that something works, you have to keep monitoring it. Have we established that relationship? Is it going to happen? Are we going to make sure that we have some incentive for people to carry on writing new material that is relevant and keeps up to date with developments? Look at the textbooks from 10 years ago and take a field such as archaeology. We all know now that the hippies were turning up at the wrong time for their big party and that it should have been in mid-winter. This is because scientists and archaeologists have gone out there and had a look. So all those primary school projects got it wrong. How do we get in and make sure that things are happening? Maintenance is a big issue here. If that supplier and incentive have been removed, you may well damage the quality of education in the medium term.

Also, when it comes to supporting classrooms, a basic model may be acceptable but how on earth, with the variability of a classroom’s components, can a standard model ever be anything other than the briefest of guides? I have made it a mission of my own to mention special educational needs on every occasion until the Government tell us when that review will be published. January was the target; there is not much of that left. If you have a higher percentage than average in one class, you will need a different plan and, if it is different types of special educational need or there is one dominant pupil, you will need a different plan. If you have different levels of ability and interest in that class, you will need a different plan. You need variation; there is only so much benefit to be taken from that. I hope the Minister will take this opportunity to let us know exactly what the Government think they will get out of this.

When you have the free market being defended by the Labour and the Conservative Benches, and greater government control being spread around the House, something is wrong—or very right. Let us get an idea. The Government have to give us some answers on value for money and how they will refresh this. Will they give us some answers on both those points? I hope I can go away slightly more comfortable about the answer and the situation when we come back. Let us see.

Initial Teacher Training Providers

Lord Addington Excerpts

Monday 5th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The Government take bursaries very seriously and we review bursaries each year. Amounts granted in 2021-22 took account of the extraordinary circumstances of Covid, but we are increasing bursaries in 2022-23 and in 2023-24 similar to the levels offered pre-pandemic.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, if we have a problem with training people for initial teacher training then the review of special educational needs will put extra pressure on them, because they will have to be able to deal with problems that historically they are regarded as being underprepared for. What will be the result of the review?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I cannot prejudge, but it is only a few weeks away that we will be able to discuss the results of the review. Clearly the Government initiated the review because they take seriously issues for children with special educational needs and disabilities.