Children and Families Bill

Baroness Perry of Southwark Excerpts

Tuesday 7th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Perry of Southwark (Con)]

My Lords, I can imagine myself as a parent of a child with special educational needs; I have listened to the debate trying to put myself into that person’s shoes. I can imagine taking my child along to discuss with the local education authority what provision could be made and being told, “I am sorry that you may want this, that and the other, and your child may have that particular set of needs, but we’re meeting the minimum standards set down. They do not happen to suit your child, but I’m afraid they are all that we can afford”.

My noble friends Lady Eaton and Lord Storey passionately described the dangers of minimum standards and the stifling of any innovation or adaptability to the local needs of parents and their children. They also described the danger of saying, when money is tight, “We are sorry we can’t help those other parents and children, but we are meeting the minimum standards. That is the regulation, so that is all there is”. You do not encourage response to people’s needs or collaboration between a local authority and the parents and children in its region by regulation and by national minimum standards. You encourage it by leaving local authorities and parents free to talk together.

I note that the Bill carefully states that the comments received from parents and from the local community must be published every year. That is a strong system of accountability, and is much better than trotting out a bit of inspection from time to time and issuing that report. To coin a phrase, it seems a triple lock if parents’ comments about the provision that they receive from the local education authority, with their own deep and often tragic experience of children with special educational needs, must be published in a form that all can see. Local authorities will be required to respond to local needs, and it gets us away from this dreadful idea: “A minimum standard is all that we can afford and therefore, even if it does not suit your child, that is all that you will get”.

[Baroness Sharp of Guildford (LD)]

My Lords, I return to the introduction that the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, gave to Amendment 25E and the issue of accountability. Government Amendment 33C is good so far as it goes, but it puts the onus on parents and young people using the service to police the sufficiency of the local offer. Perhaps my noble friend the Minister could correct me if I were wrong, but so far as I know there is no obligation on local authorities to publish the findings of their own reviews, which, as was emphasised by the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, they are obliged to make under Clause 27. Therefore, there is not the obligation to proactively improve their services that might arise from looking at whether their own reviews were sufficient, and acting on that. That picks up the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, that there are ways and means whereby innovation comes organically and internally. Equally, she made the point that for most parents there is not the opportunity to move authorities: whether they like it or no, this is the authority that they have to work with.

Again, I pick up the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, that, when we are talking about special educational needs, we do not mean only the few who have statements and will have the EHC plans now—about 3% of pupils. Something like 15% of pupils are regarded as having special educational needs and are treated under school action and school action plus.

It is now the schools’ responsibility to meet the needs of these pupils. We shall be talking later about the training that is necessary for SENCOs, and so forth. Most schools rely very much indeed on local educational specialists being available. One of the problems with the situation at the moment is that if there is no follow-up on whether or not there is a sufficiency of provision, there is a great danger that local authorities, whose finances, as we know, are being squeezed at present, will not find it necessary to provide outside the needs of those who actually have EHC plans, and that specialists in language, communication and behaviour will not be available to schools for them to be able to recruit to help them with the problems that they meet.

So I am somewhat concerned. As I say, the government amendment is good so far as it goes, but it is unfortunate that it does not follow through to requiring action on the reviews that the local authorities themselves have to make of their own provision.