Schools: Well-being and Personal and Social Needs

Baroness Warnock Excerpts

Thursday 14th June 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Warnock]

My Lords, in July 2011 the Office for National Statistics published a paper called Measuring Children and Young People’s Well-being, which showed that the belief that they were doing well at school was a crucial factor in the sense that children from the age of eight upwards have of the quality of their own lives. Given the many hours that children spend at school, as we well know, that is not in the least surprising.

I am sure that your Lordships will agree that a good school is a happy school. More than that, if, at the crucial age of 14, we could adapt the school curriculum more to the wants and ambitions of the children than we do at present, in the manner advocated by the noble Lord, Lord Baker, who is no longer in his place, we would find that far more children than do at present had the peculiar satisfaction of believing that they could succeed and the feeling that they were doing something that was worth doing. Nothing could be more central to personal and social well-being than that kind of sense of the worthwhileness of what you are doing. The Minister should give even more attention, and I am sure that he is, to the plans for changing schools and changing the direction of the curriculum at the age of 14.

I agree entirely with, among other people, the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, that the early stages of school are crucial. I ask the Minister whether the Government could not, even now, rethink the connections between the needs that children have at this age. I know that we have been promised an end to the concept of the statement of educational need by 2013. I know that the multiple assessments and long delays to which children are now subjected are to be replaced by a single assessment that will culminate in an education, health and care plan.

That holds some promise. But, in my view, it also points to something further, and I would be grateful if the Minister could tell me what he thinks of this. As long ago as 2006, the House of Commons Select Committee on education published a report that was highly critical of the present structure and framework of special educational needs and urged the then Government to start again and radically rethink the concept of special needs. More recently, in 2010, Ofsted reported on the inflated numbers of children who were classified as having special educational needs, suggesting that, for various reasons of self-interest, schools were wrongly so designating children, and sometimes masking incompetent teaching with claims of special educational needs among the pupils.

As a way to reverse this expensive and ultimately futile and damaging trend, I suggest that the idea of special educational needs, as opposed to other needs, should be dropped altogether—at least for nursery and primary school years. Instead, we should conceive of the duty of the school as to meet the needs of the child without distinction, by whatever means are available, through the skills and the training of teachers, the vigilance of the head and the governors, and, in general, the ethos developed within the school. After all, for very young children, every experience is educational. For children who are disadvantaged and, above all, for children who come to school with a poor vocabulary and poor communication skills, the most crucial need is that they should be enabled to develop these skills and thus to learn. Of course there will emerge—and probably will already have emerged—children whose special needs include specialised teaching of one kind or another, children who are perhaps profoundly and multiply disabled, and children who genuinely prove to be dyslexic. These children will emerge and can have specialised teaching. The rest of the children do not need to be scrutinised to see whether they have special educational needs. They have special needs. They need to be taught to communicate, to play, and to take part in dancing, music and drama. All these things are highly educational, but are absolutely crucial to the development of the child, and to his or her feeling that he or she can succeed. This is where the happiness that can be generated by a school really lies: the feeling that you are doing something at which you can succeed. The main task of the first years of education must be to enable children both to succeed and to learn to believe that they can. This is the basis of enjoyment.

The concept of SEN was introduced into legislation in 1981, more than 30 years ago. The inquiry that preceded the 1981 Act had been expressly forbidden to take any account of social deprivation in its consideration of what were then known as “handicapped children”. This is now practically unbelievable but it was the case. Therefore, the concept of educational need seemed to be the only way of grouping children together when they required something beyond what most teachers provided. We have come an enormously long way since those days.

It is time for us to change our attitude to the function of schools, and to put right at the front the function of making children believe that they can succeed. We should not designate them as having special educational needs unless they have some specific, sometimes very profound, difficulty that needs a different kind of education altogether—perhaps different teachers with different skills. We should change not only our attitude but our vocabulary accordingly. Therefore, I ask the Minister whether the Government will, after all, consider a fresh start in this area, which should be completely divorced from party politics.