Education for Young People with Disabilities (UK Aid)

Pat Glass Excerpts

Tuesday 28th October 2014 Westminster Hall

[Pat Glass (North West Durham) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Ceredigion (Mr Williams) on securing this excellent debate and on his contribution to it; there was little, if anything, that I disagreed with in what he had to say. It is a real shame that there are not more Members in this Chamber. I suspect that we are preaching to the faithful.

I will start by quoting from article 26 of the universal declaration of human rights, which the UK signed back in 1948. Back then, we said:

“Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory.”

So, 66 years ago we signed up to free primary education for all—not just for those in the developed world, or those who could afford it, or those who were not disabled, but all children. However, for many children, particularly those living in the developing world, that is as far away from becoming a reality as it was 66 years ago.

Even in countries where children get access to primary education, millions do not complete it, or else leave school with limited skills and poor levels of reading and writing because the quality of teaching is variable, to say the least. Women and girls fare poorly, with less than 50% of girls making it to secondary education in some African countries. Across the world, women make up almost two thirds of the 796 million adults without even the most basic literacy and numeracy skills.

Although those statistics in themselves are awful, as has already been pointed out, the children who fare worst in this situation are those with disabilities. The United Nations millennium development goals committed to providing universal, free primary education for all children by 2015, yet we are still short of 1.8 million teachers to deliver that, with 1 million needed in sub-Saharan Africa alone. That situation is unsatisfactory for everyone, but for disabled children and their families the picture is far worse. Disabled children are far more likely to be out of education than the general populace and, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett) said eloquently, a disabled girl has virtually no chance at all of going to school.

For those few disabled children who get access to education, what is provided is far from appropriate and in the vast majority of cases falls well short of meeting their educational needs. I was pleased that the hon. Member for Ceredigion spoke about physical access, which is part of the issue, but making education accessible in terms of access to the curriculum and an inclusive culture is as important—if not more so—as ramps, wider doors and so on.

The UN convention on the rights of persons with disabilities has forced some recognition of the rights of disabled people to be involved in their own development. It places an obligation on signatories, including the UK, to ensure that their overseas aid programmes include disabled people. However, the millennium development goals are largely silent on disabled learning, and so miss out a whole 15% of the world’s population. Data on this subject are not good—although I congratulate the Department for International Development on its recent work to improve data—but even from the poor data we have, it is estimated that disabled children make up one third of the out-of-school population across the world.

I want to set our debate in the context of what is happening to disabled children across the world. I do not think that we can afford to be smug about this issue in the UK. We require disabled children to attend school, but far too often we provide for disabled children by segregating them in special schools. In my experience, too many of those schools have low expectations of their pupils, and I say that as a supporter of special schools—I am a strong supporter of inclusion, but it must sit firmly on a foundation of good special schools. However, in my experience, even in 2014 too many of our special schools have low expectations of children with disabilities.

Even those countries that we consider progressive and enlightened often have a far worse record than we do. The hon. Member for Ceredigion mentioned that the UK is something of a beacon of good practice in this regard. I am a member of the Education Committee. Last year—or the year before; I am not sure—we travelled to Denmark. When I asked what percentage of children with disabilities there attended special schools, I was told it was 6% of the school population. I was amazed; in the UK, 1% of our children attend special schools. That means a huge number of children in this country are attending mainstream schools and having their needs met very well in those schools.

I never quite got the previous Secretary of State for Education to accept this point, but when we look at the PISA—the programme for international student assessment—tables we are not comparing like with like. In this country 1% of children with disabilities attend special schools, but 6% or more do so in some of the jurisdictions at the top of the PISA tables, and in countries such as Singapore or China disabled children never get access to mainstream schools at all.

On that trip to Denmark, we clearly looked shocked when we learned that fact, and officials were quick to tell us that they were going to do something about the situation because they recognised that it could not continue. I then asked how many children attending special schools in Denmark went on to university. Basically, the officials said it was none, as children from special schools went on to get Government pensions, by which they meant benefits. Although the situation is better in the developed world, when it comes to disabled children, none of us can afford to be smug.

Most disabled children in the developing world who manage to go to school face learning in segregated schools with very large class sizes, poor teaching from teachers with inadequate training and skills, and a lack of resources. We know that education is fundamental to reducing and ending poverty. Good quality, free education should be the right of every child, including every disabled child. More than anything else, education has the power to transform lives, and will help economic development and poverty relief, contribute to social stability and promote global health. We know that children whose mothers have received five years of education are 40% more likely to live beyond five years of age. That is as true for a disabled child as it is for every other child.

I call on DFID to introduce a disability strategy that gives disabled people full and inclusive access to its programmes, with clear baselines, milestones and success criteria. The strategy should make it easier to access funding for programmes that support disabled learning, and should make sure that all mainstream civil society organisations that DFID funds do the same. To do that, DFID must build a larger team of disability specialists, so that it can champion disability learning in its programmes, provide disability training for its own staff and even—here is a revolutionary idea—employ a few disabled staff in its programmes overseas.

I welcome the Government’s response and commitment to the report by the Select Committee on International Development. DFID has argued that a disability strategy is not the right approach and prefers to take a more holistic view in its social inclusion programme.

Before I came to Parliament in 2010, though not immediately before, I was the person who turned up in a school or local authority the week after a school had gone into special measures and the senior management team had gone. The two things I did immediately were: first, make friends with the secretaries, because they made life bearable; and secondly, put together a strategic plan with clear goals for what I would achieve and by when. I then measured periodically how far I had achieved those goals. The bottom line is that what gets measured gets done. Taking a holistic approach generally means faffing about a bit with nothing really changing. A strong framework setting out clear goals, milestones and success criteria, and measuring impact, is the only way to change things. Anything else is just nice warm words. Will the Minister be brave and ambitious today?

I started by quoting from article 26 of the universal declaration of human rights from way back in 1948. Sometimes it feels as though we had greater aspirations and hopes for our children and ourselves back in 1948. We were living in a time of austerity, and the UK was practically bankrupt and saddled with massive debts after fighting total war for five years, but we had ambitions for ourselves and our children. We created the NHS, a welfare system with a safety net for the poor and a free, compulsory education system for our children. We had a commitment to provide the same for others throughout the world. The Minister can be the new Clem Attlee. What better time to rediscover the same ambition, aspiration and courage we had in 1948, and to secure the universal free education for every child, including disabled children, that this country has promised to deliver, but has failed to for more than 60 years?