Speech, Language and Communication Education

Sharon Hodgson Excerpts

Wednesday 19th June 2013 Westminster Hall

[Mrs Sharon Hodgson (Washington and Sunderland West) (Lab)]

It is as ever a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dobbin, just as it is to debate matters with the hon. Member for South Swindon (Mr Buckland) and the Minister, which is just as well given how many times we have done so over the past few months. I congratulate the hon. Member for South Swindon on securing the debate and for his comprehensive and passionate speech. He is becoming a real expert on the issues we are discussing, for which he is becoming the go-to Member in the House, and he is to be commended for that. We had some good-quality discussions on this area of policy when the three of us served on the Children and Families Bill, with other Members—no longer in their place—who also served on the Bill Committee.

Today’s debate allows us to go into further detail, with specific reference to children and young people with speech, language and communication needs. The topic—to be more specific, speech and language therapy—was the subject of the first parliamentary debate that I spoke in as a shadow Minister, way back in 2010. That debate, which was secured by the hon. Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard), who is present this morning, was oversubscribed, as he might remember, but we heard a lot of personal stories about the need for and the value of speech and language therapy, including from the hon. Gentleman and me.

I have a son who had speech therapy until the age of seven. Sadly, that therapy did not cease at seven because he was cured, but because we moved south to a London borough that decided his speech was within the normal realms. It was not, but that is what we call the postcode lottery, which we hope will be addressed to an extent by the local offers, especially if they are underpinned by a national framework, as we called for in Committee. I will return to that point in more detail.

Since I have been a Member of the House, there has been a small number of opportunities to debate and discuss this important topic, not least the excellent debate on the Floor of the House in the previous Parliament following the outstanding Bercow review into speech, language and communication needs. As we all agree, it was a seminal report on the situation throughout the country of children and young people with speech, language and communication needs and on the support, or lack of it, available to them. I am interested to hear an update from the Minister on where we are with regard to the recommendations made in the Bercow review and whether they have all been met or are under way. Once again, we have had an excellent debate, with a great deal of interest from Members in all parts of the House and some excellent contributions.

I am pleased that the hon. Member for South Swindon mentioned augmentative and alternative communication aids and equipment, because that area is often not discussed in the House, perhaps because it is so specialist. For the children, young people and adults who rely on such AAC equipment, however, it is fundamental to their lives and to the quality of their lives.

[Paul Maynard]

I recently had an Adjournment debate on that very subject, which was replied to by a Health Minister. Does the hon. Lady agree that part of the problem is the lack of clarity in Government about where AAC should sit? Should it be a Department of Health or a Department for Education priority?

[Mrs Hodgson]

The hon. Gentleman makes a valid point. As the name suggests, the education, health and care plans are a combination of education, health and social care. The Minister must be commended for his excellent work in that regard, to get the involvement of the Department of Health and that collaboration and cross-departmental working that in the past has been lacking, leading to confusion about whether AAC sits under Education or Health. I am sure that the Minister will respond to that point when he winds up. Under the new plans, I hope that things will become clearer, if only in the sense that the different parts of government work better together to meet the needs of the child or young person. The right hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) asked for assurances from the Minister that the new system will bring improvements and not make it more difficult for parents to access the support that their child needs. We all agree that that is what we want to see from the new system, which I hope will be the case.

Speech, language and communication needs are highly prevalent: more than 30% of those on school action plus schemes have been identified as having speech, language and communication needs, and around a quarter have statements. Only 44% of pupils with speech, language and communication needs achieve their expected progress in English; as we heard from the hon. Member for South Swindon, even fewer—35%—do so in maths by the end of their school life. Even by age 19, little more than half those young people have achieved level 2 qualifications, which means a C or above at GCSE. Obviously, fewer still go on to get A-levels: just one in five young people with speech, language and communication needs has achieved a level 3 qualification by the age of 19.

Shockingly, those statistics suggest that speech, language and communication needs hold back children and young people more than other special educational needs and disabilities that we might otherwise think have a bigger impact on educational outcomes. The proportion of children achieving level 3 qualifications is lower for those with speech, language and communication needs than for those with hearing or visual impairment, multi-sensory impairment, physical disability, autistic spectrum disorders and specific learning difficulties. Such statistics clearly indicate that we have a real problem with how we provide support for such children and young people. It is therefore little surprise that they are so over- represented in exclusions from school and the youth justice system—about 65% of young offenders have speech, language and communication difficulties, according to the Communication Trust.

[Mr Buckland]

I am extremely grateful to the hon. Lady for those shocking statistics about 65% or more of young people in custody having such need. Is it not essential that we use the Children and Families Bill as an opportunity to reach in to those young people in custody, to rehabilitate them and to reduce the risk of reoffending? That is what it is all about.

[Mrs Hodgson]

The hon. Gentleman has made an excellent point, which we discussed at length in Committee and on Report. Noble lords will return to the issue in the other place, and Lord Ramsbotham will be seeking some commitment from the Government, specifically to amend or even scrap clause 69 of the Bill. The area is vital, and I am sure that we and others will return to it time and again until that figure of 65% comes down to a more representative level.

[Paul Maynard]

I am afraid that my point might be slightly political. Will the hon. Lady put some pressure on her Front Benchers about the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill? They are opposing abolition of the antisocial behaviour order—ASBOs trap many young people with speech and language needs in a cycle of breach that ends up in imprisonment—and its replacement with the injunction to prevent nuisance and annoyance or IPNA, which will enable a positive requirement to be imposed on the individual and might help to tackle some of the conditions. Will she have a discussion with her shadow Front-Bench team, please?

[Mrs Hodgson]

The hon. Gentleman has made his point, but I will not test the Chair during this debate by expanding on antisocial behaviour or on my discussions of the subject with Front-Bench colleagues. The hon. Gentleman has made his point, however, and it will have been heard by my colleagues.

That failure—all those young people being excluded and ending up in the youth justice system and then adult prisons—is a significant cost to the public purse, through lost productivity and taxes from children not reaching their potential, and the cost of welfare or of keeping the young person in youth justice or in the prison system, if it comes to that. Therefore, early intervention and getting the right support in place as soon as possible are important not only to the individual child or young person, but to the whole of society. That is why I pushed the Minister so hard, as did everyone who spoke on these matters during Committee consideration of the Bill, on the provisions that will be in place under the new system, and particularly on the role that early years settings and early years area special educational needs co-ordinators working across those settings will be expected to play.

The Minister resisted my calls for local authorities to have a duty to co-operate with private, voluntary and independent child care providers with regard to children in their settings whom they believe to have special educational needs, saying that he believed it would place a burden on those providers. However, as I have heard from such providers, the problem is that they are often completely ignored by local authorities when they try to refer a child for an assessment or some other form of help. That is the problem that I was trying to solve with an amendment. I hope that our noble colleagues can address it in more detail in the other place.

I would also like early years area SENCOs to be given a statutory role to ensure that PVI child care settings are given the support that they need to identify and adequately cater for such children. As we discussed in Committee, the draft code of practice includes a heading on that role, which I welcome, although there is no content yet. I am sure that the Minister and his officials are working on that now, so I would be grateful if he could tell us what progress has been made on developing that guidance since our discussion in March.

Obviously, the vast majority of children and young people with identified SLCNs do not qualify for a statement at present, and will not qualify for an education, health and care plan when the new system is rolled out. At present, their teachers and parents have school action and school action plus as a graduated response to meeting their needs, which will become a single SEN category under the new code of practice. We are still not sure exactly how that will look in practice, but the Minister assures us that the 1.4 million children on school action and school action plus will continue to be supported, and we must take him at his word.

Clearly, though, the level of support that children receive will owe much to the quality of the local offer in their area, which is why I have sought at every stage of the Children and Families Bill to strengthen the wording of the legislation on that issue. In particular, the Minister and I, along with the hon. Member for South Swindon, have had many debates about what standards we should expect from local offers in terms of provision and accountability. I am sure that such debates will rumble on as the Bill continues its passage through the other place.

I reiterate a point made in last week’s debate by the Chair of the Select Committee on Education, the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart). The success of this raft of reforms rests on getting local offers right. I do not believe that the Department for Education can afford to take the chance that 152 flowers will blossom if cash-strapped councils are left to their own devices.

Finally, teacher training is crucial in making every school a good school for children and young people with high-incidence SENs such as speech, language and communication needs; the hon. Member for South Swindon mentioned that as well. Every teacher is a teacher of children with speech, language and communication needs, but not every teacher knows how to be. Fewer than half of newly qualified teachers surveyed by Ofsted had good skills and knowledge of language development, and about one third did not have sufficient training to enable them to plan how to give such children extra help in the classroom. That is clearly not satisfactory.

Again, I feel that the Department for Education should be leading on that issue by requiring improvements to teacher training and continuing professional development so that every teacher has the skills needed to teach the class in front of them rather than just the subject. The Department is going in the opposite direction, saying that people do not need a teaching qualification to teach, or even to head a school in some instances. Labour Members restated our opposition to that idea this week.

That said, I hope that the Minister, outside the Children and Families Bill process, will consider our calls to make such improvements to the quality of the work force. He has made a lot of improvements to the Bill during his relatively short time in office, for which Members from all parties are grateful. During his remaining time in post, however long or short it may be, I hope that he will continue to listen to the concerns of parents and practitioners and take the actions needed to ensure that the unacceptable outcomes for children and young people with SLCNs that the hon. Member for South Swindon and I described will be improved in the years to come.

[Jim Dobbin (in the Chair)]

I am sure that the Minister will take this opportunity to stay in place.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Timpson]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. He will know—as do I, from my family’s experience of fostering many children—that some manifestations of the inability to communicate result in outbursts of anger. I have spoken before, on one occasion, about when someone who appeared to be, on the surface, a quiet, unassuming young man ended up smashing every single pane in my Dad’s greenhouse, because he did not know how else to communicate his anger, frustration and worry about what had happened to him in the past. I am very alive to that fact, which is why I am determined that we make progress in that important area.

I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard)—I am looking forward to coming to his working group later today on speech, language and communication needs—on the importance of ensuring that children and young people who need specialised communication aids have access to them. I know that he has raised that vociferously on a number of occasions, including in Prime Minister’s questions, in which the Prime Minister was clear that he wanted to help bring about the important changes that my hon. Friend wants.

My hon. Friend made the point about whether the interest in Government in the issue lies in health or education. The best answer I can give is that it is in both, which is why, in both those Departments, there is a strong interest from Ministers, who work not only individually, but collectively. I have met the Minister of State, Department of Health, who has responsibility for care, on a number of occasions to discuss that and other matters that transcend the Children and Families Bill, to ensure that we are moving in the right direction and in a way that will bring about the best results.

For lower-level alternative and augmentative communication needs, it will be up to health commissioners and their local authority partners to work together—we should lead by example by doing that in national Government—to ensure that the right services are in place locally to meet the needs of the population, and to reflect those services in the local offer. Highly specialist services needed by only a very small number of children will be commissioned centrally by NHS England, as my hon. Friend will know.

Prior to 1 April this year, there was no national commissioning of AAC services. There was no standard or nationally consistent definition of the services that were the commissioning and funding responsibility of the NHS. As a result, there was variation in organisations and in the commissioning and funding of specialised AAC services, and inequitable access to such services. A key priority must be to ensure that commissioning arrangements for specialised services are placed on a much more robust and equitable footing across England. That is currently being undertaken by NHS England’s area teams.

Work is under way to establish the required baseline for AAC services. Area teams are working with colleagues in clinical commissioning groups to identify the value of contracts for communication aids. My hon. Friend the Member for South Swindon mentioned the work of the former communication champion, Jean Gross, whose 2010 report suggested that a national budget of £14 million was required for 2012 to 2014 to bring the required baseline into effect. Working with experts on its AAC sub-group, NHS England will be looking at the report’s assumptions and other available data. We need to be clear that the progress on AAC has to be fulfilled to a degree that ensures the greatest level of equitable access that we can achieve. The development of the national commissioning of those services provides an opportunity to have much more consistency. I hope that that will be an important step forward.

One reason why I am pleased to support my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys in trying to improve the situation is that I saw for myself, on my visit to Springfield school in Crewe, some of the incredible aids that are now available. Those are quickly coming on stream all the time. I was given a number of demonstrations involving buttons and click mouses, and I was also told about gaze technology—I confess that I cannot remember the exact phraseology, but that is the term that I have decided to use—in which the length of time a person keeps their eyes fixed on the screen determines their command to the device. That is an astonishing way of providing anyone, whatever their level of communication, with an opportunity to communicate.

As the technology advances, some of the costs of the technology, certainly in the early stages, prove quite significant, so we need to think carefully about how we ensure, as my hon. Friend rightly said, that the equipment can still benefit the individual as they move on from compulsory education and, we hope, make the transition to a fulfilling adult life.

[Mrs Hodgson]

There was recently a reception, which some hon. Members may have gone to, about the gaming industry. One company there, SpecialEffect, is developing some of this eye-movement technology. It works in the gaming industry, but also on the educational opportunities provided by that technology. A lot of people may think that gaming is not necessary, but this is a very important move, with regard to cohesion, and young people feeling included in society, and able to play games and take part in other online activities in the same way that their peers can. The cost of the technology could be prohibitive, so I am pleased that the Minister is aware of it and has availed himself of it. I hope that we can ensure that where these technologies can help children with their education and the social aspects of their life, they will not be deemed too prohibitively expensive all the time.

[Mr Timpson]

The hon. Lady is a great advocate of the role that information technology can play in the lives of many children and young people with special educational needs. That even led to her persuading me, in Committee, to include elements relating to IT in the code of practice. This is another example of where we have the chance to widen the opportunities for many young people with speech, language and communication needs who, not many years ago, would not have had any of that at their disposal. Yes, there will be costs that must be taken into account, but with some of the new commissioning arrangements that are coming on board, including the joint commissioning in the Bill, and with personal budgets, there is a raft of ways in which, with the right support, many families can start to consider that as a reality, rather than a pipe dream. It is incumbent on all of us to think carefully about how we can help them to achieve exactly that.

I want to touch on an important issue that my hon. Friends the Members for Mid Dorset and North Poole, and for South Swindon, touched on—the Ofqual consultation proposal not to assess formally speaking and listening skills at GCSE. Clearly, pupils need speaking skills for their future progression, and employers value good communication skills and want them to be taught. The subject content of the new English language GCSE will strengthen the requirement to teach pupils how to become more confident in using spoken language in formal settings. The key point is how speaking skills are taught. Often, we dwell on the subject matter, rather than how that will be put across and absorbed by each individual child in such a way that it will endure. We do not want it to be just an exercise in process.

Improvements to the new national curriculum key stage 2 and 3 programmes of study for English will result in students being better prepared for the start of their GCSE courses. We do not want to undermine the robust standard of this subject by including assessments that cannot be externally validated, and that is reflected in Ofqual’s proposals. We have consulted organisations representing students with special educational needs as part of the equality analysis that we published in March. Overall, we believe that the benefit to all students will be positive. Students will follow more robust and challenging GCSE courses that will have real value for their future progression to further education and employment. Those with special educational needs can, through the Equality Act 2010, be supported in their exams through reasonable adjustments, such as extra time or supervised rest breaks. Ofqual, as the independent regulator, will monitor access arrangements and reasonable adjustments as the reformed GCSEs are introduced.

The consultation is still open. I know that the Communication Trust and others have submitted their own reflections on the proposals, and I have no doubt that Ofqual will take those reflections extremely seriously. We shall have to wait for the outcome of the consultation to see what steps are to be taken next, but it is important that Members of the House have the opportunity, both through the consultation and through the debate today, to make their feelings known, so that every angle is properly considered when understanding the ramifications of any changes on which Ofqual is consulting.

The changes that we are making in relation to special educational needs through the Children and Families Bill and through the 20 pathfinders across 31 local authorities are a key feature of our determination to ensure that all vulnerable children, whatever their background, have the chance to reach their full potential, not just in their education but in their wider life socially, culturally and otherwise. It is encouraging that we have reached the halfway point of the Bill’s passage and there is strong consensus on much of what it is designed to achieve and how we are going about that.

We are not talking about a small cohort of children in our country. We are talking about a significant number of children, and as my hon. Friend the Member for South Swindon rightly pointed out on a number of occasions, we have a duty to ensure that they have every opportunity to reach their goals, academic or otherwise, that we would want for our own children. I know that as the Bill moves on, many Members here and in the other place will want to continue this dialogue, which has been extremely constructive to date, to ensure that we meet our responsibilities in Parliament to provide the best possible framework for the local agencies that are working so hard on the ground, in the public, private and voluntary sectors, to help to bring about these important changes. I am confident that we have set our stall out in a way that will drive reform and bring about the culture change that we all want and that, as a consequence, many children and families will feel that rather than the system working against them, it is much more on their side.

We are already starting to see, in some of the evaluation of the work that the pathfinders are doing, reports from parents who are starting to feel more included. They are being properly consulted. They are seeing changes in attitude, particularly in the health service, towards their involvement in not just the assessment process, but the delivery of services. The building blocks are starting to be put in place. Some of the relationships are starting to be recalibrated and are starting to mesh; my hon. Friend the Member for South Swindon said that was happening already in his constituency.

We still have a huge amount of work to do. We are under no illusions about the fact that it will be a monumental task for all of us to ensure that this is a lasting and fulfilling change for many families, but the signs are encouraging, and I look forward to working with hon. Members on both sides of the House to continue to do all that we can to ensure that these important reforms really do hit the mark.