Autism

Penny Mordaunt Excerpts

Tuesday 20th November 2012 Commons Chamber

[Penny Mordaunt (Portsmouth North) (Con)]

I, too, wish to pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for South Swindon (Mr Buckland), who has been a champion for people with autism and their families. I thank him for the opportunity he has given us to raise issues of great importance to our constituents. His debate is timely, not just because of the anniversary mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes), but because the Palace of Westminster is being visited today by PAWS—Parents Autism Workshops and Support—which was set up by Dogs for the Disabled to bring together parents and carers of children with autism to share their experiences and explore the helping potential that a dog might have within their family. I pay tribute to its work and to the work of all the volunteers, whether they be bipeds or quadrupeds.

High special educational needs are well catered for in my area, but middle to low need provision is much more patchy. Autism, Asperger’s, pragmatic language disorders and dyslexia make up a huge amount of my casework. I have huge admiration for the parents who come to my surgeries and are fighting for their children against a system that sets their kids up repeatedly to fail before any help is at hand. The daughter of my hon. Friend the Member for South Swindon is lucky to have him as her dad, as we all know that he has skills and is able to make the case against a local authority or other agency. Many of the parents we deal with are not similarly equipped, so it is great that we are speaking up for them.

Let me touch on some of the main challenges that parents present to me in my surgeries, many of them echoed in previous speeches. The first is getting a statement. It takes a huge amount of time, as the process is not synchronised with the school year or other events going on in the child’s life. We need a much more pragmatic and flexible approach to the evidence we gather. The process of getting a statement sometimes seems to be an excuse for doing nothing in the meantime. Considering that it can take 12 months or more in some cases, I think that is a scandal.

Secondly, there is a huge lack of information for parents out there. Local education authorities are supposed to publicise provision regardless of the sector in which it sits, but they certainly do not do that in all cases. Often parents who are trying to establish what are the best options for their child will receive a letter from the LEA saying merely that their needs will be taken care of by school action plus. When they try to find out what that actually means—what practical stuff will be done, by whom and where—the only words that keep being sent back to them are “school action plus”.

Parents do not have enough clout. It does not matter what a tribunal says or whether they win an appeal, because too many local education authorities are still refusing to act. They have no say in budgets, and we have already discussed at length the problems of transition post-16 and post-18. This is not just a nightmare for the children and their families; it is also a really poor use of the education budget. A young boy in my constituency who should now be in his GCSE year has never obtained a secondary school place. A travel grant would have sorted that out, and it would have been peanuts in comparison with the cost of the interventions that will have to be made in that young man’s life further down the road.

My office has done a lot of work on cost. When we were fighting to get children the school places that they needed—we dealt with many cases—we set up a bursary scheme, thanks to the generosity of some local charities and London livery companies. In one case, we paid for the first two years of a young girl’s secondary school education. We worked out that there was an £180 difference between the per-pupil cost of sending her to the mainstream school to which the LEA wanted to send her for the remaining three years of her education and the cost of sending her to the independent school, which was the only school in the area that could cater for her special educational needs. That is a scandal in itself, but we then submitted a freedom of information request which established that the amount that the LEA had spent on the legal fees and officer time involved in the fight against sending the girl to the school to which her parents had wanted to send her outweighed the cost of sending her there in the first place many times over.

I am very pleased about the reforms that the Government are introducing. They address all the points that I have raised, they are long overdue, and I am sure that they will resolve many cases. However, I am still sceptical, and I hope that the Minister will understand why. I am not sure that we shall be able to get all LEAs to act, and to embrace those reforms. We know from our experience with the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence in the field of health care that the setting out of a clear vision of what people should have, and a constitution that enshrines what they are entitled to, is no guarantee that they will actually get it.

Perhaps the Minister will say whether he would be interested in looking at some of the cases with which I have been dealing. I think that they are very enlightening. Perhaps he will also say whether, if the education reforms are ignored, he will boot some of the LEAs up the backside when they consistently fail to do the right thing by our children.