Children and Families Bill

Tony Baldry Excerpts

Monday 25th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Jesse Norman (Hereford and South Herefordshire) (Con)]

The Children and Families Bill is a hugely important piece of legislation, and a huge tribute to the Secretary of State; to the Under-Secretary of State for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mr Timpson); to his predecessor, my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton); and to other Ministers. It says a lot that the Bill has been every bit as much a priority for them as all the other major reforms launched by the Department for Education since 2010. That is all the more important given that it has been subject to considerable pre-legislative scrutiny and consultation.

My interest in the Bill lies in the area of special needs education—an area in which my county of Herefordshire has, despite very low levels of public funding, built a significant body of expertise owing to excellent school leadership, teaching and parental engagement. I refer to schools in my constituency such as Blackmarston primary school and Barrs Court secondary school, both of which do extraordinary work with disabled young people, and both of which have coped magnificently with the need for expansion as numbers have grown. One of my early experiences as a candidate—I was not even an MP —was of being pressed into service at Barrs Court school in an “X Factor” competition, complete with sunglasses and shoulder-length red wig. It was frightening to me but a source of hilarity to those watching.

[Sir Tony Baldry (Banbury) (Con)]

You should put it on YouTube.

[Jesse Norman]

I will resist that temptation.

The schools that I have mentioned and others will welcome the Bill’s insistence that the new education, health and care plans must be effective for young people all the way up to 25 years old. I specifically want to single out the work of Richard Aird, newly OBE and head of Barrs Court school, and of Alison Sheppard on behalf of parents in the county in pushing hard for proper further education for disabled young people in Herefordshire. Why should a young person with special needs be treated any worse than one without?

I welcome the new duty on local authorities to set out a local offer of suitable schools and institutions for each individual with special needs, but I want to draw the attention of the House and of Ministers to the fact that this carries with it a risk that the new duty will be interpreted in a purely local and parochial way, cutting out national providers with specialist expertise in particular areas. In Hereford, the Royal National College, for example, has superb facilities for the blind and partially sighted and is dedicated both to the skills of learning and of living. It combines these with a track record of innovation over several decades, ranging from special new Braille technologies to flexible learning methods for the visually impaired to the development of blind football and other sports at an international level. If any Member of the House has not seen a blind football match, I strongly encourage them to do so. It is a magnificent sport and full of extraordinary skill.

No local provider could match the Royal National College for expertise and deep understanding of the highly complex special needs associated with visual impairment. The students’ experience bears this out. I think of the student at the RNC with a passion for information technology who arrived, having been bullied for having a teaching assistant and special support at a mainstream school. He took his GCSEs three times and struggled to do a standard IT course because of his visual impairment. After two years not in employment, education or training, he was finally referred to the RNC by the local Jobcentre Plus. He now takes specialist IT training for the visually impaired and courses in art, and is back on track for the IT career he always dreamed of. I invite the Minister to meet me and the Royal National College to discuss its expertise and these issues in more detail.

In closing, let me say that there appears to me to be a straightforward solution to the problem of parochial local offers. This is to require that local authorities include national specialist providers as well as regional and local ones in those local offers. This has three benefits: it maximises choice, promotes competition and preserves the national providers’ deep reservoirs of skill and expertise. It also perfectly fits with the Bill’s distinctively Conservative emphasis on excellence and institution building. I ask Ministers to give this idea their close consideration as the Bill progresses.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Tony Baldry (Banbury) (Con)]

This huge and important Bill intends to improve services for vulnerable children and to support strong families. It intends to reform the systems for adoption, looked-after children, family justice and special educational needs—my comments will focus on special educational needs.

As a constituency Member of Parliament for three decades, I have too often met parents who have felt that they have had to battle for the support they need. They have been passed from pillar to post, and bureaucracy and frustration have faced them at every step. Being a constituency MP and hopefully helping people is a great privilege. For example, I was grateful to the parents of a 19-year-old son and 16-year-old daughter who both had Asperger’s syndrome. The parents recently wrote to me that

“after years spent battling with LEA and schools to get some SEN support for our son and daughter, it wasn’t until your personal intervention Sir Tony that we were actually listened to. As a result, our daughter was successfully placed in a specialist school near Oxford and today is Head Girl. It was sadly too late for our son and the damage has been immense”.

They went on to ask:

“how will the County Council work to ensure that Government proposals to reform the SEN systems are implemented and that our children get the right levels of support to get the education they deserve”?

Hon. Members agree that it should not be necessary for parents to feel constantly that they have to battle the system, and/or that the only way they will make progress is by enlisting the help of their Member of Parliament. Everyone welcomes the fact that the Government want to put in place a radically different system to support better life outcomes for young people, and to give parents confidence by giving them more control and transferring power to professionals on the front line and in local communities. It is good news that the Government clearly want to bring about better life outcomes for young people from birth to adulthood by helping professionals to identify and meet children’s needs early; by ensuring that health services and early education in child care are accessible to all children, and that those services work in partnership with parents to give each child support to fill their potential; and by joining up education, health and social care to provide families with the package of support that reflects all their needs. But there are still many questions, to which I am not sure that I yet have all the answers—and actually in this regard I see myself just as a typical constituency MP wanting to make sure that I can give help, support and appropriate advice to any parent who comes to see me with questions or concerns.

I do not expect the Minister to have time in his winding-up speech to respond to all my questions, but I hope that he might in due course write to me. Who will be responsible for ensuring that parents understand the process of the combined education, health and care plan? How will schools prepare themselves for when parents are much more in control of the SEN budgets? What will happen to those children who do not quality for the EHCP and those children whose difficulties are often not diagnosed until later on in their school life? Among the health and social service professionals needed in some instances to support children with special educational needs are educational psychologists and speech and language therapists. Do we have enough and how do parents access them? Are we sure we are giving teachers adequate training to teach children with a whole range of conditions, particularly those on a wide scale such as autism? How can we ensure a more consistent approach is taken across all local education authorities? How do we improve the transition from primary to secondary education? How do we improve the selection and training of special educational need co-ordinators in schools?

Parents of children with special educational needs raise two further issues with me. First, they feel all too often that their children are being bullied at school. I hope that we can do more to explain to students, perhaps in year 7, about the various neurological disorders and other disabilities that they might find among school friends, which I hope would then reduce bullying by increasing understanding.

The other concern is the number of exclusions of children with special educational needs. I think I am correct in saying that pupils with a statement of special educational needs are at present nine times more likely to receive a permanent exclusion than those without. Of course, SEN is not some sort of label that can be used to excuse bad or unruly behaviour in schools, but I would have thought it sensible that, if it was thought appropriate for any child to have either a temporary or, in particular, a permanent exclusion, very serious thought be given to whether that child has special educational needs and whether those needs are being properly met.

Many parents are concerned about what happens to their children when they leave school. As one parent put it to me:

“What is the vision for the future for our children to be able to live productive, independent and supported lives when currently post-18, there seems to be little more than part-time college courses for their continued education and properly supported residential places to enable independence and learning of life skills are all out of county”.

I support the notion that parents should be given greater choice, but they must also have the choice of being able to send their children to specialist schools—depending on their needs and disability—such as the National Star College, or the Royal National College for the Blind.

There is a specific issue in respect of Oxfordshire, simply because when the Learning and Skills Council was created and the SEN block grant was first established, there were no post-16 places in maintained special schools in Oxfordshire. As a consequence, no funds were included in the SEN block grant. This is an issue on which I know that Oxfordshire county council has written in detail to officials in the Department for Education and, in anticipation of today’s debate, I have also written to Ministers. What Oxfordshire is requesting is that the Education Funding Agency treats Oxfordshire in a way that is broadly consistent with other local authorities.

Finally, as co-chair of the all-party group for carers, I want to echo the hopes expressed by hon. Members on both sides of the House that in Committee Ministers will think about whether provision can be made in the Bill for young carers to mirror the provision for adult carers in other legislation. Young carers are a very vulnerable group. Otherwise, this is an excellent Bill, and the Government are to be congratulated on introducing such a huge and encompassing Bill that will do so much to help vulnerable children.