Anne Snelgrove (South Swindon) (Lab): I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead, East and Washington, West (Mrs. Hodgson) on introducing the Bill. I am proud to support her Bill, which is a model of its kind. May I say how disappointed I am that the Press Gallery is not bursting at the seams? We in this House are criticised, rightly, when things go wrong. On days when we consider private Members’ Bills, many hon. Members promote Bills such as this one, which gain support across the House. They do noble things, yet the press are not present to listen. I understand that notable members of the Press Gallery have children with special needs, and it is a shame that the Bill will not reach the wider audience that it deserves. However, I am sure that we will do our best as individuals to ensure that it receives wide approbation in our constituencies.

My hon. Friend has worked tremendously hard to gain Government and Opposition support for her Bill. She has had many meetings, which she has enjoyed, to negotiate with Ministers and others. I shall use that model for my private Member’s Bill once the Government finally decide which Minister is responsible for it—after all, it was published only two months ago.

I have been involved in special educational needs since I was a volunteer assistant at a special school at the tender age of 16. It was as a result of that experience that I became interested in a career in education. As we used groundbreaking drama techniques and trust exercises with the young people, I also became interested in pursuing an educational drama career, which was quite unusual for someone from my school. It was tremendously inspiring and I remember that time well, even though it was many years ago. Since then, special educational needs training and teaching have come on in leaps and bounds, but we have still not done enough. People are still teaching in schools where the necessary information on the children that they are teaching is not gathered, and that teaching is not as good as it could be if we had the right information and could properly target in-house teacher training courses.

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Mark Williams: I share the hon. Lady’s enthusiasm for the Bill. We have talked a lot about the confidence of parents and children—it is at the core of the Bill—but teacher and staff confidence is an issue as well. I recollect what a challenge it is for a teacher who has had no professional development or initial teacher training whatever in the challenges of autism to be summoned to the head teacher’s office and told that a severely autistic child will join their class the next week. Does she agree that the issue relates to teacher and staff confidence as well as parents and children?

Anne Snelgrove: Absolutely. The Government are to be commended for increasing the number of teaching assistants working alongside teachers. If I had had a teaching assistant to work alongside me when I was teaching in middle and secondary schools, my teaching practice would have been so much better. It would have enabled me not just to cope but to teach all the children in my class to their full ability. Secondary school teachers in particular need the kind of help that the hon. Gentleman recommends, because they often miss out. The teacher training that they get is very much subject-based, not child-based. That is a generalisation—it is not so everywhere—but it is, unfortunately, true for many teachers.

Mrs. Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con): Does the hon. Lady share the concern of the organisation Xtraordinary People, which found in a recent survey of 1,000 parents of children with special educational needs that 70 per cent. of those children were not receiving learning support from a teaching assistant with training on dyslexia or any other special educational need?

Anne Snelgrove: I have not seen that survey, so I shall just make some general comments. I shall come to definitions in a moment; it is important that we unpick what we mean by dyslexia and special educational needs. I agree that teachers and teaching assistants should have training in those issues, and we need to look closely at whether dyslexia and other special educational needs are recognised in local authorities and teacher training institutions. That is why the Bill introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead, East and Washington, West is so important. Until we have the relevant information, we cannot come to definitions or concentrate on the gaps in initial and continuing teacher training provision.

Information is needed about all aspects of special educational needs. When we discuss the issue in this House, hon. Members, myself included, often use “special educational needs” as a blanket term to cover all sorts of disabilities, and sometimes even abilities, but it refers to many disparate conditions. It includes children with physical disabilities who may be academically able and those with severe or moderate learning difficulties who may be physically able. It is important that we start to consider better categories for use when we talk about the issue, as well as for use by local education authorities and in teaching.Although there is considerable overlap between the group of pupils with special educational needs and the group of disabled pupils, there are also children with a special educational need who are not disabled and vice
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versa. I understand that the universities of Bath and Bristol are conducting research, commissioned by the Department for Children, Schools and Families, on how pupils with special needs can be identified. I hope that the research will inform future policy. I agree with the hon. Member for South-West Norfolk (Mr. Fraser) on broadness and definitions of dyslexia. We need to make sure that we in the House know what we are talking about, but we should also tackle the educational establishment, parts of which still deny that the conditions that we are talking about exist. I was a member of that establishment for 18 years, and I was taken in by that argument at times. It is sometimes parroted by people in that establishment, but that is not thoughtful enough. We need to make sure that everybody is on board and accepts the definitions that the Government will, I hope, bring forward.

The current system does not identify separate learning difficulties; instead it chooses only to class them as either moderate or severe. Without accurate information of the kind that would be provided under my hon. Friend’s Bill, it is impossible to get a firm grip on the scale of the issue. Lumping two groups of pupils together, or any groups of pupils together, is simplistic, and it does the children a disservice. It means that we fall back on emotional arguments about educational provision, rather than looking at what is best for each child within the constraints of the system.

We cannot pretend that there will never be any constraints. Sometimes hon. Members make an impassioned argument for a particular type of provision, but it would result in so much funding being put into one area that there would be a disproportionate knock-on effect on educational funding for other children. We must be realistic. Throughout my involvement in education there has been debate about how much money and how big a proportion of the education budget should be spent on special needs. It is right that the debate should continue.

Despite the large real-term increases in special needs funding in the past 10 years, there will never be enough to satisfy every single parent’s wishes for their children, whatever the colour of the Government. We must be realistic about that. Some special needs places are extremely expensive. One case that I dealt with involved an outside placement costing £96,000 a year. The local authority had to balance the needs of that one child and the child’s family with the needs of all other special needs children in our town, including those in mainstream schools—a difficult task.

Kelvin Hopkins (Luton, North) (Lab): I agree strongly with what my hon. Friend says. Does she agree that if a child has particularly large expenses, those expenses should be centrally funded, because there might be a disproportionate number of such needs in one authority and none in another?

Anne Snelgrove: I find that an intriguing way forward, particularly as I represent a small unitary authority—as does my hon. Friend, I believe. I would certainly give full consideration to that view, and hope to have discussions with him after the debate.

I want to refer to Baroness Warnock, for whom I have great admiration, although she represents another party. In my teacher training, I spent some time
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considering her 1978 report, which stated that 20 per cent. of children have special needs. She included children in mainstream schools in that figure. I listened with interest when my hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead, East and Washington, West said that there were 1.6 million children with special needs in this country. Baroness Warnock promoted inclusion, but she has since issued a pamphlet refuting it. It was always the case that some children with special needs were in mainstream schools and others were in special schools. The problem was not solely about where education took place; it was also about its quality. In 1978, some children with special needs were in special schools but not receiving appropriate education that stretched them, and others were in units in ordinary secondary schools and also did not receive the appropriate education. We in the House have to be brave enough to say that we need to look at the needs of the child, rather than the needs of the institution. I do not advocate closing special schools for the sake of closing special schools. I advocate doing what is right for the child.

Mr. Mark Harper (Forest of Dean) (Con): I want to convey a small point of information. Baroness Warnock is a Cross Bencher, not a representative of “another party”. I am pleased that the hon. Lady welcomes Baroness Warnock’s publication of her new views on special educational needs.

Anne Snelgrove: I thank the hon. Gentleman for his correction and apologise to Baroness Warnock—I must have inferred from her comments that she was a member of another party.

The Warnock report rightly challenged many assumptions, especially prejudice about the potential of children with special needs. My hon. Friend the Member for Worsley (Barbara Keeley) identified very well the gap in attainment for children with hearing difficulties and deaf children. It is 24 per cent. at GCSE level, which is incredible. I suspect that it is the same for other disabilities such as blindness and it is shaming that we have not examined the matter adequately in the House. My hon. Friend is right to focus on that.

Thirty years after the Warnock report, we still need to challenge assumptions. Many of the children whom we are considering need and deserve a properly resourced place in a mainstream school. Many deaf children would be better off being stretched educationally in a mainstream school, but with properly trained secondary school teachers, as other hon. Members have said. They do not need a return to the prejudice and second-rate provision of the 1970s that Warnock identified. The system that I advocate is based on the needs of the child, not the assumption that mainstream provision is always wrong and special needs schools are always right. It clearly depends on collecting and analysing the correct data—that is why the Bill is crucial. It seems like a small point, but it is a huge matter. We should be able to base our actions on the right information.

The education of all children in my constituency concerns me greatly and I believe that the measure will be the gateway to improvements that are necessary to continue the trend of improvement that we have experienced in the past 10 years. It is important that
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special educational needs policy is allowed to develop and that best practice is allowed to flow from that. The Bill will be the oxygen to invigorate the process.

Like my hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead, East and Washington, West, I am frustrated when I submit a parliamentary question and receive the response, “This information is not collected centrally.” It is disappointing to hon. Members and our constituents. I look forward to tabling questions in future and receiving full and correct information from the Department.

The case for collecting information on the specialist support for children with dyslexia is even more compelling. My hon. Friend and I belong to the all-party group on dyslexia and specific learning difficulties. We know the despair of some of the parents and professionals involved. They are often condemned as fanciful in their belief that dyslexia exists and they are frustrated and angry about that. However, those campaigners need access to the facts. That will enable us all to assess where local authorities are best meeting the identified needs of the children and end the current postcode lottery of provision.

My local authority has a good record on dyslexia, despite being small. However, the information for parents is not there because it is not collected centrally. Some of my local parents are frustrated in that they feel, when they compare the provision for their child with that in other local authorities, that the provision for their child is not adequate. It is impossible, as a Member of Parliament, to say whether that is true because we are not collecting the data. Sometimes, parents feel guilty and blame for not fighting hard enough for their child, and we cannot tell them whether that is correct. Again, we fall back on emotion rather than on what is right for the child.

The Bill strengthens the Secretary of State’s power to collect information and will assist in improving outcomes for children with special educational needs. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Worsley, I am pleased that the National Deaf Children’s Society is supporting the Bill. Dyslexia Action also supports the measure. That is important to me and my hon. Friends.

A big question for parents, teachers, schools and organisations such as Dyslexia Action is the lack of specific information about what is happening to special education in schools. The Bill demands transparency for that complex provision, which is often frustratingly patchy—good in some places, bad in others. I am pleased that Ofsted will examine SEN provision in its review in 2009. We hope that schools and local authorities will be more accountable for detailing the specific provision that is on offer. I hope that the Bill will be law by 2009 so that it informs the Ofsted report.