Hansard 7 July 2010:

Q7. [6252] Mr Robert Buckland (South Swindon) (Con): Will my right hon. Friend give an assurance that all new academies that will be set up will be obliged to accept children with special educational needs?

The Prime Minister: I can absolutely give my hon. Friend that assurance. Academies will be required to ensure that pupils with special educational needs are admitted on the same basis as other schools. Children with special educational needs have special needs, and a compassionate, decent and tolerant country will ensure that they get the help, support, education and love that they need. (my underlining)

Do these words reassure you? Do they ring true in the real world outside Parliament? Do they ring true in the classrooms of real world outside cloistered academia?

You may possibly be reassured by them if you go along with one academic, whose blushes I spare by not naming him. Joan Errington, the English teacher, quotes an actual article he wrote arguing the case for Inclusion.

JOAN ERRINGTON I read an article recently by one of our clever, clever guys – far too many of them in education, and too clever by half for our own good, if you ask me. He said – children with special needs come in tens, scores, even hundreds, not one by one. He said you’ve got to give up the individualised approach, give up the individualised approach. Would you believe it?

MARGARET WILLIAMSON Yes, I am afraid that some academics just don’t understand, and of course they go on to teach their students the error of their ways. Their students then have to repeat those errors to pass their exams. Ugh.

JOAN ERRINGTON I wrote a letter to the paper saying that he should teach kids in special schools like ours not teach about them.

As chair of governors of a special school for over 10 years I saw the staff’s commitment to the school’s mission statement, “Whole School – Whole Child”. I saw that you couldn’t just feed all children with special needs into one vast educational Mix Master.

The Prologue

“Care, and take care” is the underlying message within the play. I am not sure that everyone does. Far too many people don’t. It would be much better if everyone talked about children with very different special educational needs, because that is the way it is. The needs are not all the same. And children are not all the same either.

When you reach the end of the play, reflect for a moment on just how many different kinds of need there are – physical disabilities and psychological ones and, separate from that, but often in addition to that, learning difficulties as well, some designated profound.

So the other thing to reflect upon when you reach the end of the play is that, in fairness to everyone, it is just as important for the system to be sensitive to the individual needs of children as it is to plan for a more equal, more harmonious society. With proper accounting it should cost no more.

***

Today classrooms are populated by far too many bully boys and girls. Teachers may have too little time and sometimes too little training as well. Supply teachers are here today and gone tomorrow. Teaching assistants don’t always know how to stretch children in the way that trained teachers do and, in many cases, do not improve attainment. Ironically they can create a sense of exclusion in an inclusive environment, stigmatising pupils in the process. Teachers are not always trained to relate to them. Thousands more teaching assistants have come on stream since 1997, quite a number of them supporting children with special needs7. Did anyone anticipate this – and calculate the cost? In addition, there are too few therapists and money is still short. But then the policy of Inclusion was never properly costed by anyone in the first place. Thus, cost benefit analysis is a totally alien concept.

Author’s Note

Brighouse School caters for children who have physical disabilities and learning difficulties associated with them. There are very many of these disabilities. They include cerebral palsy, spina bifida with hydrocephalus, cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, rheumatoid arthritis, heart conditions, osteoagenesis imperfecta, Crohn’s disease, epilepsy and neurological disorders. There are also victims of road traffic and other accidents. This is the world of burns and fractures. There are sub-divisions of each disability.

But there are also many other quite different needs and other special schools cater for them, some with a national name and a national reputation. There are children with profound and multiple learning difficulties PMLD, emotional and behavioural difficulties EBD, with hearing problems, speech or sight impairment, sometimes total. There is also dyslexia, dyspraxia and autism. In other words, think of a fruit shop. There are apples, pears, peaches, grapes, bananas and so on. With apples alone, there are coxes, bramleys, and golden delicious et cetera. It’s the same thing with SEN. There are about 400,000 children with learning difficulties of one sort or another.

These children need highly trained, dedicated teachers, carers and therapists, including a school nurse, physio’s, speech and language therapists, art and music therapists and psychologists all of them with the time, the patience and the expertise to give them the one chance that they have to find their place in the world. And now, facilitating Inclusion, there is an army of teaching assistants as well.

I need hardly remind you that times have changed. In 2002 when the play takes place the Mandarin, James Harrington, says “My motto is that money is where it needs to be.” Today, Mandarins are more inclined to say that money isn’t where it needs to be.

Now read again the answer that the Prime Minister gave. I repeat the question. “Do these words reassure you?”

Let me remind you what the Law states that Society must provide:

Clause 1 (3), 2001 SEN Act: ‘If a statement is maintained under section 324 for the child, he must be educated in a mainstream school unless that is incompatible with – (a) the wishes of his parent, or (b) the provision of efficient education for other children.’

Catchpole v Buckingham County Council and another, The Times Law Reports on 18 March 1999, Lord Justice Thorpe said “the local education authority had a duty to ensure that a child with special education needs was placed at a school that was appropriate. It was not enough for the school to be merely adequate.”

Phelps v Hillingdon Borough Council, Anderton v Clwyd County Council, Gower v Bromley London Borough Council and Jarvis v Hampshire Country Council. Times Law Reports, July 28,2000. The House of Lords ruled that LEA’s duty of care required them to ” have to take reasonable care of their health and safety including the monitoring of their needs and performance.”

By the way, you don’t need to ask this question of the Prime Minister, but you may ask yourself, why those Local Authorities spent good money inviting Judges to say that they should not have these responsibilities.

But here are some questions someone might care to put to the Prime Minister.

1. Yes, Academies will admit children with special needs, but will they provide education that is appropriate to the needs of children with special needs? Will they have ring-fenced funding? Will trained professionals be around with time to give them? And will this be done without prejudicing the rights of children without special needs to receive education that is appropriate to them?

2. Will other mainstream schools in a period of austerity be able to meet those needs?

3. And the question those wedded to the dogma of Inclusion never think about asking, do they? If parents find that the needs of their children are not being met in mainstream schools and want to assert their statutory right to opt out of them, will there be special schools around that can provide that “appropriate” provision that they can opt into?

Read Death of a Nightingale or, better still, plan to come to the New End Theatre in Hampstead in March. You may find that you agree with Eileen Winterton, the chair of governors when she says:” You can’t turn the clock back. You just can’t. We don’t need an old clock. We need a brand new compass.”

<

<

<

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 11th, 2010 at 3:08 am and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.