Autism and Learning Disability Training

Peter Gibson Excerpts

Tuesday 21st November 2023 Westminster Hall

[Peter Gibson (Darlington) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Vickers. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage) on leading this petitions debate. I put on the record my congratulations to the Minister, this being is my first opportunity to do so.

I thank the 171 members of the public from Darlington who signed the petition that led to today’s debate. Every single week in my surgery, it is almost guaranteed that at least one family will come to see me with concerns related to neurodiverse conditions. It could be that they are awaiting an assessment or there are difficulties with the relationship with the school, or it could be that there are challenges with accessing medications. Each and every one of those families is trying to do the best for their children, and seemingly having to battle for the best for their children.

The day after I was elected, I was stopped in the street by three mothers in Darlington town centre. One of them asked me what I was going to do to help their families with autistic children. I must confess to having known very little about autism at that time, so I resolved to find out more and do all I could to support them. That learning continues, and only last week I was pleased to attend the understanding autism training for parliamentarians organised by the National Autistic Society.

I established the Darlington autism forum for parents of autistic children, and have organised multiple roundtable meetings with our local mental health trust and parents. I have visited Daisy Chain, a local charity that provides help and support to families who face these challenges, as well as places such as the Mackenzie Thorpe Centre in Redcar, which is operated by the North East Autism Society, to see the amazing work that they do with children.

[Julian Smith]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on the work he is doing with families in his constituency. Does he agree that standing up for families who have autistic or neurodiverse kids—amazing kids they are supporting—can be really challenging? The parents are often judged by others on how they are handling very difficult situations, and they themselves need significant support.

[Peter Gibson]

My right hon. Friend makes an incredibly important point. We in this place are sent here to stand up for our constituents. In my view, there could be nobody more important than those families facing the battles of looking after an autistic child.

As a constituency MP, I have visited almost every school in Darlington; I have two left to go. My visits almost always involve a discussion about children with special educational needs and autism. It is clear that there are growing numbers in every single one of our schools, putting pressure on the staff, some of whom are not necessarily specialists in the conditions. I must single out Red Hall School in Darlington, which secured funding to expand and provide a social, emotional and mental health specialist centre called Strive. Red Hall and others are doing fantastic work in Darlington.

I was disappointed to learn through written parliamentary questions that the Department for Education holds no national records of the training that teachers undertake on the relevant conditions. I welcome the Government’s recent announcement of additional funding, particularly for the new 40-place school in Darlington, which will deliver special educational needs places. However, my primary concern is for the pupils who are already in our mainstream schools and the support that they need.

The assessment backlog is frankly a scandal, with families sometimes having to wait up to three years to be seen. I acknowledge that there is a range of help and support available while they are awaiting assessment, but getting children into the right school place, with the necessary specialists, is part of the solution. Staff need to be properly trained. The key has to be clearing the backlog of assessments. Today’s important debate provides an opportunity to put on the record my support for improved and expanded training on neurodiverse conditions for our hard-working teachers. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

--- Later in debate ---

[Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Vickers. I congratulate the hon. Member for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage) on securing this important debate, and I thank everybody who has signed petitions to push this issue forward.

I welcome Paula McGowan to Parliament today, and I thank her for all the work she has done in the name of her son, Oliver, to campaign for better training for staff in the NHS and social care who work with autistic people and people with learning disabilities. Oliver’s Campaign has made so much progress, and the way Paula has turned her unimaginable pain into action on behalf of other families is inspirational.

I thank all Members who have spoken in this very consensual debate. My hon. Friend the Member for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley) drew on her great experience and her long commitment to improving the lives of autistic people and people with learning disabilities. She highlighted clearly some of the concerns about current Government policy, expressed in the SEND and alternative provision improvement plan—in particular, the explicit objective of reducing the number of EHCPs.

The hon. Member for Darlington (Peter Gibson) spoke about the important work he is doing to support his constituents. He also spoke about the backlog of assessments, which is an issue in many parts of the country, and the lack of support for such children in mainstream schools.

The need for better training for education staff working with children and young people who are autistic or have a learning disability is clear. The presentation of children with autism doubled between 2015-16 and 2022-23, and the number of children with an education, health and care plan more than doubled for autistic children and was up by more than a third for other SEND diagnoses in the same period.

When my oldest daughter was in primary school, she had a friend I will call Paul. Paul was autistic and high functioning: he could do really well at school if his social and emotional needs were properly met. What I witnessed over the seven years of Paul’s primary school journey was the extremely high extent to which his whole experience at school was determined by his teacher’s understanding of his social and emotional needs. In a school year when the teacher understood that Paul would become extremely anxious if there was a change in routine or if things had not been properly explained to him and took steps to avoid that happening, Paul flourished at school. But in a school year when the teacher did not understand Paul’s needs as an autistic person and treated him simply as a badly behaved child, his mum could be called to the school multiple times in the same week to collect him early. He became more and more anxious about going to school, and the whole year became a disaster.

Many schools and colleges work really hard to ensure their staff are well equipped to work with children and young people who are autistic or have a learning disability, and there is a lot of really good practice. I pay tribute to the incredibly dedicated workforce that provides specialist support to children and young people with autism and learning disabilities, and helps to make school a place where they feel safe and understood. In the absence of leadership and resources from the Government, parents all too often face a postcode lottery.

Paul’s story is being repeated in education settings across the country, and that is borne out in the persistent absence figures. Persistent absence from school is shockingly high across the board at present—22.5% of children missed 10% or more days of school in 2021-22—but it is significantly higher for autistic children, at 32%, and even higher for children with a SEND statement or EHCP, at 36.9%. That is a shocking and completely unacceptable situation. Day to day, it means that thousands of pupils are not having their needs met by mainstream schools, but that is little wonder given that the teacher training and continuous professional development curriculum has not developed to keep pace with the rising presentation of autism and SEND needs. We are simply not equipping teachers to meet the needs of every child in their classrooms. Although some teacher training courses offer the opportunity for students to develop further skills for working with pupils with SEND and autism, this is not consistent, and it is entirely possible to qualify as a teacher and start work in a school with only the most cursory knowledge, which is not supplemented or reinforced by further training or CPD.

Schools across the country are struggling to recruit special educational needs co-ordinators and SEND teachers, and there is a national shortage of educational psychologists working in the state sector. We cannot debate the need for autism and learning disability training for education staff without mentioning the wider context of the system of SEND support, which is almost completely broken. Parents across the country have to battle for the support their children need, and the resourcing pressures on local authorities are causing councils to refuse to fund EHCPs and forcing parents to go to tribunal, where 96% of them win.

The neglect of the SEND system over the past 13 years has been a shocking failure of successive Conservative-led Governments. A Labour Government would act to address the problems. Equipping education staff to understand and meet the needs of autistic children and children with learning disabilities is an essential step towards building an inclusive mainstream.

[Peter Gibson]

I am interested in hearing what the Labour party would do were it in government. Could the hon. Lady outline what it would do differently to tackle the challenges of recruitment that the sector faces?

[Helen Hayes]

I am just about to move on to exactly that. We would ensure that more children can have their needs met and be part of a school community close to where they live. Labour would use the funding from ending the tax breaks currently enjoyed by private schools to recruit 6,500 new teachers, including SEND specialists, thereby alleviating the current pressures on teaching staff and ensuring that teachers have time for the pupils in their classrooms. We would introduce a teacher training entitlement—an annual entitlement to CPD that could be used to increase expertise in autism and SEND. We would ensure that there is mental health support in every school across the country, and we would change the wider context in which schools are setting their priorities by reforming the Ofsted inspection framework to make inclusion part of our vision for what it means to be a good school. Inclusion would be part of the report card for schools, which, under Labour, would replace the single-word Ofsted judgment.

[Peter Gibson]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Helen Hayes]

I will not. I need to finish so that the Minister can come in and there is time for the hon. Member for Gosport to wind up afterwards.

We want to see an increased focus on SEND within initial teacher training and the early career framework, and we will work with leading academic institutions, Teach First and others to ensure that all trainee teachers are routinely equipped to work with children with autism and special educational needs and disabilities. Establishing an inclusive mainstream where as many children as possible can thrive is the first step in reforming the system of SEND support, which has become broken and adversarial on the Government’s watch. A Labour Government will deliver the support that is so urgently needed.

The hon. Member for Darlington mentioned the recruitment and retention crisis. We recruit and retain staff in any part of the public sector when we work from the centre of Government to make their working environment tolerable and to relieve the day-to-day pressures they are under. The measures I have outlined today—there is more to talk about—will start the work of repairing this part of our public services, which is so important and so vital for some of the most vulnerable children, but also for some of the most special and talented children across our country.