Contribution
My Lords, no one stands to speak here or anywhere else about SEND without preparing for a social media barrage from one direction or another. But unless we can discuss the underlying problems and tensions openly and honestly, there can be little hope of getting to a better place than we are in at the moment.
From the parents’ point of view, some are happy, but others say that theoretical entitlements do not translate into the support they believe their child needs. From the schools’ perspective, they are loaded with enormous expectations and have inadequate resources to meet them. From the funders’ perspective, eye-watering amounts of money are already being spent on SEND.
If you do the sums, the average household in England already contributes £450 a year just for the cost of the high needs funding block, on top of the other money it contributes for education. Yet local authorities, and behind them the taxpayer, must meet almost unlimited demand from this large but finite resource, with few levers to direct that resource to the activities where it will make the most difference.
As my noble friend Lord Gove said in a previous group, the SEND category has expanded and diversified to an extraordinary degree in recent years. Among other things, I think we are mixing up the children who have conditions that will always affect their lives with those who really only need some catch-up teaching or some extra encouragement, and who should be able to lead unimpaired adult lives. They are really quite different things.
Clearly, this situation cannot go on, and that explains the raft of amendments relating to SEND proposed for insertion after Clause 62, as the Bill does not contain any direct proposals for SEND. In aggregate, what I take from these proposed amendments is a hope that if only we can find a few more ways to extend and push harder, everything will be better.
There are certainly ideas that deserve attention within these amendments. We do need a national body for SEND, but what we need is the SEND equivalent of NICE: a body that collates and, where necessary, commissions evidence of the effectiveness of and value for money of SEND interventions, and that determines which treatments can be paid for out of the public purse and which cannot be justified. Someone needs to set and hold that line.
We need better join-up between schools and youth justice services. The noble Lord, Lord Carlile, has an alternative educational plan for children involved with youth justice that parallels my noble friend Lord Nash’s amendment discussed in a previous group. We have already pushed identification and labelling to the point where they may be doing more harm than good to some children at the margins. Even though a label may feel reassuring, it can also do real harm if it lowers the child’s own expectations of what they can achieve, or their teacher’s expectations of them.
Neurodivergence is a term that has no clinical definition. In essence, it invites people who do not meet clinical criteria and thresholds to self-identify into services and funding streams intended for those who do meet those criteria. The definitions that float around for neurodivergence often sound like most young people’s adolescent experience. I suspect there are few of us who did not feel awkward, socially inept, and often just out of things in that period of life.
Good schools understand the adolescent experience and work to make a culture and framework in which teenagers have the structure and encouragement they need for most to succeed and emerge into adulthood without ever needing to be labelled as abnormal, and reserving specialist support for those who really need it.
The Government must take great care not to create incentives to segregate children within schools into SEND and non-SEND categories. With very few exceptions, children with rare physical needs need to learn the same things, and cognitive science shows us that they learn in the same way, though some may need the learning broken down into smaller steps with more repetition and reinforcement along the way. Most children with SEND will do the vast majority of their learning in their mainstream classrooms. Concentrating on getting that core classroom experience right for all children, with a strong, coherent, well-sequenced curriculum taught effectively, must come first, because doing this well minimises the number of children who come adrift, which is never a pleasant experience for the child, and it enables the expert SEND practitioners to concentrate on those who will always need their help. If, for example, we expect SEND funding to be spent on things that are specific to children with SEND, those mainstream classrooms will be neglected and starved of resource.
I look forward to the Government bringing forward their reform proposals for SEND and to proposing amendments in this vein in due course.