Children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities

Question for Short Debate

Asked by

To ask His Majesty’s Government what plans they have to support children with special educational needs and disabilities.

My Lords, I am aware that there have been a number of debates and Questions about education provision recently. I am sure the Minister is also keenly aware of this, especially today. A common theme has emerged that the current provision for supporting children with educational needs and disabilities does not work, with rising numbers, a greater range of need and local authorities unable to fund support. What I find most concerning is that there is a lack of ambition for SEND children. Despite increased levels of funding and higher levels of identification, these are not leading to better educational attainment. We all agree that something must be done, and therefore I make no apologies for bringing this Question for Short Debate to the House to enable us to push the Government on what that something should be.

I refer to my interests as chief executive of Cerebral Palsy Scotland. Cerebral palsy is a good condition to consider in SEND provision. Everyone with CP is affected differently. It is an umbrella term, so the needs and abilities of people with CP will vary tremendously. Some children with complex CP will need intensive input that can be provided only by special schools, often outside the state sector. Even for these children, gaining an EHCP can be challenging and an adversarial process. Once their level of support has been agreed, it is very difficult to change, despite the potential for needs to change as they grow.

Many children with CP do well in mainstream settings. Cerebral palsy always affects mobility, so physical access and ease of moving around a school can become issues. One in two has a learning disability or sensory processing issues, and may also have other conditions such as epilepsy or autism, so there are challenges in identifying what the right support needs to be. I have had many conversations with adults with CP, some of whom attended special schools and some of whom attended mainstream schools. Some had experience of both. There is no right answer, as there are pros and cons for both, but, looking back, many of these adults did not have a positive experience of education in either setting. What illustrates the need for change most poignantly for me is that, too often, education for SEND children is about just getting through the system, from one placement to the next. No one, it seems, ever asks a disabled child what they want to be when they grow up.

In preparation for this debate, I spoke to many people, including staff at Treloar School and College in Hampshire, who provide an amazing education for some of the most profoundly complex physically disabled children. Their college students started a business venture called “Let Me In”, which offers accessibility audits to local businesses to help them improve access and employment opportunities for disabled people. It is the sort of initiative that positively illustrates the Gatsby benchmarks in action. I love it because, while Treloar takes children from the age of four, ambition and preparing students to lead meaningful adult lives, based on what children can do rather than what they cannot, are at the heart of everything from early years provision all the way up to its college students.

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Fraser of Craigmaddie, and I thank her for leading this debate in such a brilliant way.

My brief comments relate to the educational needs of children born prematurely and the challenges faced by parents and children in getting the system to help them. My comments are based solely on evidence received from many parents by the House of Lords Preterm Birth Committee, which I chaired.

Approximately 45,000 pre-term births occur annually in England. For most children who survive the neonatal period, the outcome is good, but for a significant number, particularly those born between 24 and 31 weeks’ gestation, while the incidence of physical disability is low, the most common outcome is a whole spectrum of cognitive impairment that extends into adulthood. Apart from poor hearing and sight, some children also suffer from epilepsy—and we have already heard of the problems that education has with children with epilepsy. Children born prematurely show problems with memory, attention and problem-solving, and social and emotional problems, withdrawn behaviour and communication difficulties. While some will need long-term healthcare, for most it is their educational needs that need greater attention and therefore consume more resources than healthcare does.

Entering school is a stressful time for children born prematurely and their parents—a flashpoint when the cognitive, social and emotional difficulties experienced by children emerge or become exacerbated. Many parents are worried that their child is not mature enough to enter school according to the cut-off point in age to start school. Children born prematurely are more likely to have special educational needs and learning difficulties than children born at term.

Parents reported a lack of understanding and awareness of the needs of children born prematurely and, therefore, a lack of support in educational settings. While the government guidance recognises the option of deferment to school entry, we heard many parents face bureaucratic hurdles and that there is a lack of understanding on the part of local authorities and schools of the educational needs of children born prematurely. Parents asked for help to make it easier to ask for deferring school entry and for schools to be aware of the birth history of the children, for example, by including the information on the school entry form. Parents who gave evidence were pleading for a way forward that recognises the educational needs of children born pre-term and the need of support from schools to take on board the views and experiences of parents, including options to defer entry.

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for securing this debate. One of the most rewarding pieces of work in which I was involved when I was on the staff of Lichfield Cathedral about 15 years ago was a partnership with a local school for pupils with SEND to create a bespoke multisensory tour involving water, incense, bells, holding crosses and even, judiciously, fire. At first, the cathedral guides were dubious, having been used to providing school visitors simply with a verbal commentary on the history and architecture of the building, but before long they were the ones advocating that the multisensory interactive components be incorporated into all our school visits. The result was a definite uplift in our overall educational offer—and I shall come back to that at the end, if I may.

The Church of England’s National Society for Education has set out a vision for a future curriculum that combines aspiration and equity to support the flourishing of all pupils. Three areas emerge as essential to this vision: first, investment in high capacity and integrated professional services; secondly, access to a broad curriculum for students with SEND; and, thirdly, the need for flexible metrics to evaluate effective teaching.

First, multiagency professional services must be properly funded to provide holistic support to children with SEND. I have in mind the fields of educational psychology, speech and language therapy, occupational therapy and child mental health, all of which have been in decline in recent years. We must ensure an equitable provision for every child, not a postcode lottery wholly reliant on the resources and capacities of overstretched local authorities.

Secondly, we must avoid the assumption that one single approach will suit all students with SEND. The challenges that some experience are cognitive, while others face physical, sensory and social communication barriers. The wide variety of needs and abilities demands in turn a varied curriculum but one that is nevertheless ambitious and in no way dilutes content for students with SEND.

My Lords, I too congratulate my noble friend on securing this debate and pay tribute to the fantastic work that she does as chief executive of Cerebral Palsy Scotland, in addition to her duties in your Lordships’ House. As someone who has spent time in state mainstream and special schools, and also a mainstream independent school, I completely agree with her about the urgent need to address the damaging culture of low aspiration.

My noble friend speaks with great authority; I speak, if not with authority, certainly with the experience of someone who has lived with a disability since birth and, more specifically, as someone who provides proof of the way a mainstream independent education can transform the life chances of a disabled child who does not come from a privileged background. My remarks this evening therefore focus on this crucial question: does the Government’s proposed extension of VAT to private schools support the 99,000 children with SEN and disabilities who do not have an EHCP? Clearly, it does not. Indeed, if the Government proceed as planned, I am afraid that they will begin next year—the 30th anniversary year of the Disability Discrimination Act, or DDA—by in effect discriminating against disabled children.

I had the privilege of working with Labour parliamentary giants such as the late, great, Lord Ashley of Stoke and Lord Morris of Manchester. Labour played a pivotal part in securing the DDA; it was as much to Labour’s credit as to the Major Government’s that the DDA became law. So I am bemused that this Labour Government should be about to mark such a disability rights milestone by failing to take these children’s SEN and disabilities into account and exempt them.

The Minister may say that these are tough choices. I have to say that that would be a wholly inadequate and insensitive response to these children and their families, which serves only to underline the extent to which the Government have lost sight of one simple fact: these are innocent, vulnerable, disabled children, whose education will, because of their disability, quite literally be—as it has been for me—their salvation.

My Lords, the Prime Minister has declared that 75% of five year-olds should have reached a good level of development. This is one of his key goals—I support that fully. I will refer exclusively to deaf children in these few minutes. Nearly 1 million people are born in the UK profoundly deaf. This gives us approximately 50,000 deaf children, as of today. Those children are nearly all put into normal classes, where they have no specialist teaching to help them speak, nor to understand what others are saying; yet speaking and comprehending what others are saying are the essential keys to these children reaching the good level of development to which the Prime Minister refers.

There are only 860 qualified teachers of speech therapy in Britain, so the lack of speech therapy is one of the key problems. Deaf children need to learn to speak in the same way as their family and classmates; and, equally, they need to be able to understand what others are saying. Yet there are 1.9 million children in the queue for speech therapy in the UK today. The likelihood of deaf children getting to the front of that queue is rather small. Deafness, of course, excludes children, not just from speaking and from understanding speech, but from other subjects as well. Even sports, for example, give deaf children problems with balance, since physical deafness means balance is also harmed.

There is another way and I ask the Minister to consider singing teaching. The strength of singing lies in its capacity to create correct articulation; language; the meaning of words and sentences; plus strengthening physical health through breathing and posture. Even better, social participation of all kinds comes when children are in a choir or taught singing individually. Singing and interacting with others through music is an important window out of the loneliness that is a direct result of the disability of deafness in children.

My Lords, I declare my interests as a former general secretary of the Independent Schools Council and the current president of the Independent Schools Association, one of the council’s constituent bodies, whose 690 members include many schools, most of them small, which excel in teaching and caring for children with special needs: schools which are loved and cherished by hard-working families of limited means up and down our land. They are far, far removed from the world of the large, expensive, independent schools, once known as public schools—a term that has now largely fallen into abeyance thanks to the current fashion for representing the independent sector as consisting of private schools.

A recent article on special needs provision stated that

“private schools have become part of the safety net for children”,

adding that the

“government should have recognised how the independent sector has become the backstop for a broken system”.

These words were written by a senior Labour Member of Parliament—long regarded as being on the left of the party—who has come to recognise the value of the wide and diverse provision for children with SEND in the independent sector, which has such a long tradition of excellence in this sphere. Almost 30% of independent schools are special needs schools.

Others too recognise the great importance of the independent sector in supplementing and reinforcing the state sector in this crucial area in a spirit of partnership: a principle fostered by the last Labour Government. A special needs co-ordinator who has worked at a state school for 40 years has written to tell me that “many private schools have been formed specifically to cater for special needs. They provide centres of excellence, often where there is a deficit regionally. Why risk losing them?”. It is a risk no Government should take but, sadly, this Government are taking it.

My Lords, I declare my interest as set out in the register. I thank my noble friend Lady Fraser of Craigmaddie for securing this important debate.

I make no apologies for the fact that my contribution is going to be based around the education tax. The Government’s impact assessment on levying VAT on private education noted that state schools have statutory duties to provide the correct level of support for SEN pupils. How do the Government propose to do this, given that many of the schools are in financial deficit with stretched resources? As I understand it, the £740 million announced two weeks ago will mostly be for buildings and accessibility in mainstream schools. But what about people with learning disabilities? Who will recruit and train the teachers? Where would we find the speech and language therapists, the occupational therapists and the educational psychologists?

What will happen to the large number of pupils with SEN and without EHCPs who attend private schools and who—I agree with my noble friend Lord Shinkwin—will no longer be able to afford the fees? Many of those pupils have migrated from the state sector for smaller class sizes and to avoid the overwhelming impact of noise and chaos in school corridors.

We are not talking about rich parents; we are talking about parents who can see the difference this makes to their children, and who have found a lack of individual support and teaching assistant capacity in the state sector. We are talking about families where both parents are working in order to pay the fees—parents who have made enormous sacrifices to create the best possible opportunities for their children.

An example of this is a school close to us in east Sussex, which both my daughters attended. It has a pupil on the autistic spectrum who does not have an EHCP. He also needs an individual learning assistant. His parents cannot afford the VAT and the assistant. They are having to pull their son out of the school where he has thrived. They are going to home-school him. They do not consider this a choice; they have no choice. All they want to do is what is best for their son.

My Lords, I declare my interests as set out in the register. I thank my noble friend Lady Fraser of Craigmaddie for this important debate. The current SEND system does not work. This is the third debate on SEND that I have been involved in in my short time in this House, and there seems to be a remarkable level of agreement on the issues and the solutions. There have been a number of task forces and consultations on this, also with a good degree of consensus on the issues and the solutions. The recent October NAO report made plain the issues we see in SEND: increasing expenditure and higher numbers but no consistent improvement in outcomes, and frustration for families, children and those working in the system.

The DfE spends more than £10.7 billion on SEND and a significant sum is spent by councils. We have 1.9 million pupils with SEND. EHCP numbers are up 140% since 2015, and 31% of SEND inspections in the past year or so noted widespread or systematic failings. The number of tribunals has gone up by 50% since 2018. Families lack confidence in the system. There is a shortage of specialist state school places, requiring councils to commission high-cost private placements. There is significant variation in access across the country and by the season of birth. On top of that, there is a major issue with school transport. The system is simply not financially viable, and councils risk going bust over this.

We need to change the system. There are multiple reports to this effect. We need to move from an adversarial to an inclusive system, with support available when it is needed and early assessment and diagnosis. We need to align incentives so that all parts of the system work together, with clear guidance on what level of support is available for a given need and moving away from the adversarial tribunals system. Ofsted needs to hold schools to account for their inclusivity and the support they give those with SEND. Those not with SEND also need the right level of support, but schools also need funding for these. We need more staff—various Members have mentioned educational psychologists, SENCOs and mental health and speech and language therapists.