Education: Special Educational Needs

Lord Low of Dalston Excerpts

Thursday 21st October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Low of Dalston]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, whom I first met during a slightly fractious discussion—as such discussions are apt to be—of a report on special education by the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock. Like all other noble Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, on bringing forward this subject for debate this afternoon. She speaks with unique authority on these issues, and we all listen to what she has to say with the greatest respect, although I think that Ofsted points to solutions to the problems that it has identified which are slightly more humdrum and workaday than she suggests.

I take as my starting point the sentence in the coalition's programme for government which reads:

“We will improve diagnostic assessment for school children, prevent the unnecessary closure of special schools and remove the bias towards inclusion”.

Throughout most of its history, the field of special education has been bedevilled by dogma. For a long time, this asserted that disabled children could thrive only in special schools. For the past 20 or 30 years, however, the field has been blessedly free from such dogma. A settlement has been arrived at based on a mixed economy of provision, which acknowledges a decisive shift towards inclusion, with progressive re-engineering of the system to support inclusion as the goal, but with a place reserved for specialist provision for those whose needs cannot be met in the mainstream, either now or in future. This seems to me to get it about right, and is the position for which I have argued all of my adult life.

In other words, I think that there should be a bias towards inclusion, provided that the needs of the child can be met within a mainstream placement. Special schools can have a segregating effect and help to foster the perception that disabled children are different. Conversely, mainstream schools can help to normalise disability. Separate socialisation restricts the full development of disabled and non-disabled people alike. The education system can do much to remove the barriers of ignorance, prejudice, intolerance and misunderstanding that ultimately lead to discrimination and a refusal to accept disabled people as full members of the community.

There is a threat to that enlightened consensus posed by those who believe in what one might call total inclusion, with all disabled children being educated in mainstream schools and all special schools being closed. It is a substantial threat. Its thinking largely informs the education provisions in Article 24 of the recently adopted UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which was negotiated by the disabled elite, who are best able to cope with inclusion. Organisations representing blind, deaf and deaf-blind children—I declare my interest as being associated with several such organisations—had their work cut out to retain the option of specialist provision to meet their particular needs.

So where once opposition to an enlightened approach to the inclusion of disabled children came from the right, today it comes from the left. People sometimes ask me whether my views about inclusion have changed over the years, to which I reply, “No, but the emphasis may have needed to change”. Where once the advocates of moderate inclusion policies had to argue for the creation of inclusive options, today they may need to defend the retention of some specialist provision. Notwithstanding the challenge from those who believe in total inclusion, I believe that the enlightened consensus around moderate inclusion policies and a mixed economy of provision remains largely intact and that there is not a bias towards inclusion which goes beyond what is warranted and which needs to be removed.

I was once inclined to think that a bias towards inclusion which went too far might have been developing in education legislation when Section 316 of the Education Act 1996 was amended to remove consideration of the needs of the child as a safeguard against inappropriate inclusion, but I am now clear that the duty to educate children with special educational needs in mainstream schools does not apply if that is against the wishes of the parent. I therefore do not think that the legal framework needs to be altered, although it would probably be wise to retain the interpretive declaration entered by the previous Government, on ratifying the UN convention, to make clear that the UK general education system includes both mainstream and special schools, as well as the reservation to allow for circumstances where disabled children's needs may best be met through specialist provision some way from their home, meaning that they would need to be educated outside their local community, which is against the model of provision enjoined by the UN convention. The effect of these is to maintain the present policy and legislative framework regarding inclusion—what I have termed the enlightened consensus around moderate inclusion.

What of the Ofsted review? One of its conclusions—that schools should not identify pupils as having special educational needs when they simply need better teaching—chimes in rather well with the thinking of those who espouse a strongly inclusive approach. They focus attention on improving the learning experience for all children in such a way that those traditionally conceived of as having SEN are benefited, albeit indirectly rather than directly, by whole-school approaches.

For the rest, despite florid misinterpretations of Ofsted—to the effect that as many as half of children with SEN might be wrongly diagnosed as such—the review’s main conclusions seem eminently sensible. They reflect a growing consensus emerging from recent reports that the emphasis should be on working more smartly and in a better-targeted way to improve school practice, focusing on outcomes, quality of assessment and the effectiveness of additional support rather than on a major redesign of the system. There may be some overidentification at the school action stage—there almost certainly is, as the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, demonstrated—but that is not to say that there should not be a school action stage at all at which children are identified as needing additional support, ideally mobilised as early as possible. There may also be a need, as the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, suggested, to simplify the legislation, which has rather growed like Topsy, with some rationalisation of its SEN and disability discrimination components.