Education Psychology

Philip Hollobone Excerpts

Monday 18th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Annette Brooke]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. I think the uncertainty that he speaks of is what is causing the greatest concern, because not being sure exactly what their professional future might be like acts as a great deterrent to people entering a profession.

Something that the Green Paper on special educational needs is likely to consider is whether educational psychologists give independent advice, as they are employed by local authorities. Psychological assessment could be provided by educational psychologists in a number of ways, be it within or outside a local authority, but the bottom line is that we will still need educational psychologists. I do not understand the freeze; I hope that we will hear some further points about that.

For the past year, there has been a considerable shortfall in the moneys collected by the CWDC from subscriptions from local authorities. The CWDC has set up a working party to look at ways of ensuring stability and sustainability in funding. The CWDC consultant reported a number of options, with the most favoured being the reinstatement of the top-slice. The cost of training 372 new educational psychologists, with one third qualifying each year, is in the region of £9 million to £12 million per year. An option put forward by pressure groups is a move to central funding. I understand that this would be comparable to the funding arrangements for clinical psychologists who have their training funded centrally. Educational psychology is a smaller profession than clinical psychology.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Annette Brooke]

I will, but this will have to be the last intervention, given the time.

[Mr Hollobone]

Has my hon. Friend received an explanation from Her Majesty’s Government as to why educational psychology is being treated differently from clinical psychology? If some front-line service professionals are having guaranteed funding, why should the situation be different for educational psychologists?

[Annette Brooke]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, and I hope that the Minister will be able to address that point. The funding problems are threatening numbers, and that has implications for work force levels and the ability of local authorities to deliver all statutory responsibilities for the safeguarding, well-being and education of their children and young people. If an educational psychologist’s work was restricted only to statutory assessment and reactive casework in order to maintain quality of service delivery, the capacity of staff to be involved in equally vital, but non-statutory, preventive work would be reduced. That would preclude proactive work with children, teachers, all the professionals who work within children’s services and parents to maximise the chances of successful outcomes from early intervention—the type of work that, in turn, might mitigate the need for such high levels of statutory assessment in the first place.

Further concerns emerged during the passage of the Academies Act 2010, particularly as insufficient time was available in the House of Commons to discuss in full certain issues pertaining to special educational needs. I tabled an amendment to try to have discussion on the subject but, unfortunately, there was no time to debate it, and that was one reason why I wanted to secure this debate. One presumes that as more schools become academies or free schools, less money will be retained by local authorities. In the past, they retained a considerable proportion of the budget allocated to schools in their area in order to pay for a variety of important services, including monitoring special educational needs provision, SEN assessment and co-ordination, and educational psychology services. There are concerns about the amount of money able to be retained by local authorities to continue to meet their statutory responsibility for all vulnerable children, both within and outside the local academies.

What guidance will the Department for Education be giving to academies and other schools with commissioning powers on the need to provide pupils and staff with access to educational psychology services? Will the Minister clarify what responsibilities local authorities will have for meeting the needs of children within academy settings? My amendment asked for monitoring and a report back on funding for SEN within three months of the enactment of the 2010 Act, one of the purposes being to pick up early signs of any problems with the local authority funding of educational services. Indeed, the Special Educational Consortium believes that the expanded academy programme must be monitored to ensure that children with SEN and disabilities do not experience further delays in accessing the services of educational psychologists. I want confirmation that funding for educational psychologists will not be delegated to academies, and I would further appreciate a commitment from the Minister that monitoring the impact of the expanding academy programme on all local authority SEN services will be a priority for the Government.

The central state funding of training is critical, given the specialisation and the relatively small size of the professional group. It is national legislation that sets the requirement for independent professional specialist assessment to adjudicate between school and parental perspectives and interests, and it is therefore a matter for the national Government to make this process possible by supplying the high-level specialist knowledge and skills to fulfil that role. Where there is a statutory requirement for assessment, the training to make it possible needs central national funding. I therefore urge the Government to look again at how educational psychology training is funded.

I also want to share with the Minister and the many hon. Members who are here tonight the importance of this topic. There is an urgent need for clarity on the arrangements that will be in place to support training in 2011. Surely the Department will not risk the supply of educational psychologists drying up. The freeze on recruitment for training is on the CDWC website for any potential educational psychologist to see. What kind of message does that send out? There is an urgent need to look again at the voluntary and unsustainable nature of current funding, to ensure that national funds are made available to train and maintain good levels of educational psychologists. The country wants and needs educational psychologists, yet the current funding arrangements and the decision to delay recruitment place the future provision of educational psychologists in serious jeopardy.