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	TX: 14.02.06 - Educating Children with Special Needs PRESENTERS: PETER WHITE AND LIZ BARCLAY
	Downloaded from www.bbc.co.uk/radio4 THE ATTACHED TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY. BARCLAY Hello and welcome. Today we give you the chance to contribute to a parliamentary report by the Education and Skills Select Committee on how we should educate children with disabilities or other special needs. It's the fourth in our series of editions of Call You and Yours which allow Radio 4 listeners to give evidence directly to those politicians who are currently considering details of public policy and helping to formulate our laws. WHITE We'll be dedicating the whole of the programme to the debate and the chairman of the Educational Skills Select Committee Barry Sheerman is with us throughout. Barry Sheerman, what do you see as the value of this exercise to you and the committee? SHEERMAN I think it's getting out from all the usual suspects, although we've had 200 written submissions and we're having a lot of oral evidence on this, it's really difficult to reach out to lots of parents, lots of families, lots of people who've been through special education, and this is a unique opportunity just to open up the select committee process to a much wider audience and we are a democracy, that's what we should be doing. WHITE I think we can promise you that you will hear from a number of parents throughout and many other people as well. Barry Sheerman will be with us throughout, thank you for the time being. BARCLAY Yesterday we heard from Baroness Warnock. Thirty years ago her committee recommended the policy of including children with special educational needs in mainstream schools. She no longer thinks that inclusion is right for all of them. WARNOCK I'm certainly in favour of as many people as possible being educated in the mainstream but there are some people for whom this simply does not work. Some children with special needs just cannot flourish in mainstream schools and I'm thinking particularly of children with emotional and behavioural problems, of fragile children who need an environment that they can feel at home in, not a huge big comprehensive school but a small school where they know everybody and everybody knows them. BARCLAY So Baroness Warnock has revised her views and she recently told the Education and Skills Select Committee that the system for assessing the needs of children and providing for those needs is terribly inadequate. Throughout the programme we'll be taking your calls and e-mails on the whole system of education for children with special educational needs and the advantages and disadvantages of being educated in mainstream or special schools. We'll be hearing from specialists and campaigners on the changes they'd like Mr Sheerman and his select committee members to recommend. WHITE And we'd particularly like to hear from parents of children who have special educational needs, teachers working in both mainstream and special schools and educationalists. You can call us on 08700 100 444, you can e-mail us via the website bbc.co.uk/radio4/youandyours or write to Broadcasting House, London W1A 1AA. All your thoughts whether broadcast today or whether they reach us later will be incorporated into our evidence for the committee. BARCLAY Special educational needs are defined in law as learning difficulties that give rise to a need for special educational provision. Special educational needs children include those who have significantly greater difficulty in learning than the majority of children of their age and children who have a disability that makes it difficult for them to access education. But while many children will have problems with reading, writing, spelling and mathematics, special needs are not necessarily a question of intelligence. Some children may have a learning difficulty such as dyslexia, while others may have a physical disability, so their special educational needs relate to access to education and the need for physical adaptations to school buildings like ramps. Barry Sheerman, one of the things that your committee is examining is the question of how special educational needs are defined, is that because you feel the law that, as I've just quoted it, is out of date? SHEERMAN In part and I have to preface my remarks by saying we're halfway through, that's why this programme is so timely, we're halfway through. I often say that we're taking evidence, at about halfway through the enquiry you start to get dangerous because you're asking the right questions. And we're doing this enquiry because we've been away from it for a very long time, in my five years of chairmanship never done special educational needs. And also of course Baroness Warnock's contribution made it even more important to do it now. So we're looking in the broad, it's fascinating because this is an area that raises so much more passion than almost anything else we've looked at, apart from last year's teaching children to read. The passions are tremendous and you can understand that and the passions are tremendous because there's a history in this country that special educational needs is a little box on its own, it isn't integrated, whole professions and trends in mainstream change but for a very long time special education has been in this little box of its own with special definitions of what is a special educational need and there are lots of people on the one hand who want to drag it into the mainstream - yes - so you assess it in the way any other child is assessed. On the other some people say no, no, the whole statementing process still gives a guarantee to parents, to children, that is very valuable and they don't want to give up. So you have these passionate views and we are sitting there trying to take the evidence and come to a balance and considered conclusion. BARCLAY You mentioned the word statementing, you said the whole statementing process, that process in itself is hugely complicated and presumably that's why the definition matters but can you just briefly explain what you mean by that? SHEERMAN Well the statemented process it goes back a very long time and many people think it's a wonderful process because a local authority will assess a child and the child may be assessed for a special need requirement from the school when it arrives or from parents, it came from many directions. But there is a process by which a child is then assessed - how much special resource they need. And the criticism is that - and it's done on a scale, indeed the Cameron Report, interim report, suggests that it should be much more specific and 12 different categories of special need. There are others think that's the most dangerous way to go. So it is a complex area and of course it is also complex because you might be assessed to have a certain amount of special need but then the local authority, that's very largely given you your assessment, is the one that's got to give you the money. And people ask us in the enquiry - if you were in charge of the statement are you going to give a statement that really is about what is required, even if you know you can't afford to pay the bill? So that's the tension. BARCLAY And I think that will be something that we get calls on. I do want to go to the first caller who's Chris Ivory from Hants. Chris, what's your situation? IVORY Hello, I've got a six year old with Asperger's, he isn't statemented and basically he's a very intelligent little boy and he has a couple of antisocial behaviours which although aren't particularly a problem at the age of six they will become a problem later on. My experience of going through the system is that the main problem is there isn't a joined up system between health and education. And we've found that we've been batted between health and education to try and get some assessment and some help. Picking up on the point about funding. Personally I feel it's a funding issue because people don't want to pick up the tab, people don't particularly want to pick up some help. BARCLAY So just let me get this clear Chris. What you're saying is that your son has Asperger's but he doesn't have a statement saying that he has a special educational need and that he needs special educational provisions in school? IVORY Well it's more behavioural with him. So that does fall under the special educational needs. And my experience is that the SENCO is expected - that's the special education needs coordinator in the school - is expected to have an in depth knowledge of all the different special needs and there are lots and lots believe me. BARCLAY Chris, just let me put your points to Barry Sheerman. Barry, is it possible, first of all, to grapple with something that's so widely defined as this, I mean can you include children perhaps who are wheelchair users in the same category as children like Chris Ivory's son who has Asperger's? SHEERMAN It is immensely difficult, it is immensely difficult and the more I get information and I hear Chris giving that evidence, I've heard that so many times before, about how you get the joined up-ness between health and education and many other players. And of course in mainstream we have gone down the route of every child matters, with the five outcomes for every child, which listening to the evidence - and I have to say again - I'm halfway through - but listening to the evidence why don't all the five outcomes in every child matters, that we hope and aspire to for every child, why can't we decide on a child that has special educational needs in the context of those outcomes? And of course the whole thing about every child matters is it cuts across five or six departments of state and it says let's get rid of these and let's just look at the child's need. And what is the most difficult - and why it's so interesting to do this enquiry is because it's really at the cutting edge of how we sort that problem. If every child matters then every child with a special educational need matters most of all. IVORY Can I just add in there that also into that equation you need to function in the parents because at the moment parents are probably the least listened to part of the equation and for any partnership it needs to be equal weighting. BARCLAY Surely Barry parents known their children better. SHEERMAN That's true and I was with a group of heads and SENCOs in Huddersfield, my own constituency, only a couple of weeks ago and of course what they said is everyone - how do you get the balance? Should you only listen to the parent, should you listen to some expert psychologist, educational psychologist or should you take a very mature and experienced teacher or head who really know their children? So it's a very difficult one to grapple with. BARCLAY Well let me bring in Judith Heaton who's on the line from Nelson. Judith, what's your experience? HEATON Well I'm very grateful for once that Baroness Warnock, unlike most prominent people, has admitted that she was in error in many of the things which she proposed. I have wondered for some long time when special needs became totally absorbed by the learning difficulties lobby. Special needs meant people with special needs intellectually, musically, academically, as well as other things. And I don't see any provision for that being made. BARCLAY But part of the problem, Barry Sheerman, surely is that in the 30 years since Baroness Warnock had her committee and looked at this things have changed drastically and we've got to look at who should be included now in that special needs category if indeed there should be one. SHEERMAN Well that's right, well that's right. If you look at - if you see it from physical disability and you range through autism and Asperger's syndrome and dyslexia that is an enormous range and it does become very difficult for the expertise on the ground to make a decision. I have to make the point that a lot of people complain about centralism in education, this is the one area that is more localist and more locally determined by locally democratically elected local authorities than any other bit. So again it's very complex. Where you live does matter tremendously in terms of what service you get. BARCLAY Well you obviously have a very, very big problem to grapple with there and Barry thank you very much for the moment but please do stay with us. WHITE Now as we've already heard once it's been decided that a child does have a special educational need they may be entitled to a statement of their individual needs. Now this is a legal document drawn up by the local educational authority which outlines how that need should be met and which school they should go to where it will best be met. Yet much criticism has been levelled at the current statementing process, only yesterday on this programme we go back to Baroness Warnock who said the system was often more a statement of what the local authority could afford, rather than one of the child's actual needs. Now the number of children qualifying and defined as having special needs is far higher than was originally anticipated, with at least one in five children being regarded as having a special need. And there's also an enormous variation between local authorities across the board as far as statements are concerned, figures from the Department of Education say that there is a four fold difference in the proportion of pupils with statements in different local authorities. Well Mark Rogers is the special educational needs coordinator for Stockport local authority, he joins us. Why such a disparity Mark? ROGERS Well I think if you were listening to Barry Sheerman earlier he will have explained that this is the most locally determined set of arrangements that we've got in education and therefore the variation is entirely down to the fact that different local authorities take a different approach, albeit within a national framework. WHITE So what influences the difference of approach they make? ROGERS Well philosophical for example, so what I think and the policies that I promote in my local authority can distinguish Stockport from the principles and policies that perhaps other lead officers in other local authorities adopt. WHITE But surely there's an argument for saying, if it's written down in black and white that a child has special needs then no one can argue that those needs are there and there's a legal obligation, what's the argument for not having a statement? ROGERS Okay well, the argument for not having a statement, I wasn't sure that's what we were talking about, but again we need to talk about criteria, we need to talk about thresholds because we don't have a national set of criteria and thresholds for assessing and then statementing children, we have guidance, we have a framework and then local authorities interpret that. And I have to say they interpret it differently. WHITE Okay, also with us is David Rubain, who's a practising lawyer, specialising in disability issues. Does this disparity really matter David? RUBAIN To a certain extent I don't think it does. If you look at the overarching ... WHITE Why do we get so excited about it? RUBAIN I think because there are a variety of reasons why some authorities produce more or less statements than others. And some of them, if I may say so, are legitimate reasons, others are perhaps less so. And if I can just give an example. If you have an authority with a predominantly large number of traditional Victorian three-storey buildings, which are overall inaccessible to many disabled children, then those children are by definition going to need more help to access those - the provision there. Whereas if they live in - happen to live in an area where you have a modern single-storey accessible designed in accordance with part M of the building regulations building then some of those children who might otherwise have needed extra help through a statement won't need them because the environment will itself be accessible. So that is part of the reason. WHITE Of course it's not just about physical provision is it, the right education as well. RUBAIN That's correct. Then of course different areas reflect different local circumstances and we know that there's a correlation between, for example, emotional behavioural difficulties and poverty and other social indicators in that way. So where you have differences in types of provision in an area so you will have different numbers of children being statemented. WHITE Let's go to a caller on this: Alan Thomas is calling us from Birmingham. Alan, good afternoon. THOMAS Good afternoon. WHITE Yeah, what's the point you wanted to make? THOMAS Well three quick ones really. First of all, the statementing process is a closed process but the local authority really is prosecuting council, judge and jury. All the parents can do is make a written statement and then the decisions are made behind closed doors. WHITE You can go to a tribunal of course and be represented by someone like David Rubain. THOMAS Ah that's months and months down the line and it's very expensive, you're looking at £8-9,000. Now... WHITE Can I put that to Mark Rogers before you develop your other two points because it's important. Mark, you know Alan's saying parents don't have a say and by the time they do it's too late. ROGERS Well I'm sure that some parents feel that they haven't had a say but that's certainly not the way that most local authorities work. We've got very clear processes that involve parents from the outset and their advice is probably the most important piece of information that we can receive in this process. But I have to confess it's a bureaucratic process and I think parents will be at times confused, bamboozled and completely frustrated by the bureaucracy of this system. WHITE Can I just put to David, perhaps on Alan's behalf, I mean one of the things - other things Baroness Warnock said was that an enormous amount of money was wasted on the statementing system, contesting it, which should have been spent on children's education. RUBAIN I find this a puzzling view because in a sense the whole purpose of a statement, if it's properly carried out, is to take a specific view about the needs of a specific child and if that's done that will by necessity involve different people thinking with and about the child. And I don't know how you can do that without any level of bureaucracy. I accept that there may be too much bureaucracy in some cases but I'm not sure that the fact that there is bureaucracy is in and of itself wrong. WHITE Let me go back to Alan on this, I know you've got another couple of points, you'd have to make to us quite quickly but what's your reaction to that? THOMAS The problem is it's a funding issue, a lot of decisions made purely on the basis that the authority feels that it can't afford it and these decisions are made behind closed doors, so you don't know what decisions are made on educational grounds and what decisions are made on funding grounds. Secondly, local authorities have the power to force children on to schools regardless whether the school feels it can cope with those special needs or not and there are many children in schools that the schools themselves feel that they shouldn't be there. WHITE Okay, I'm going to move on but thanks very much for making those. I want to go to Marie-Louise Johnson who's calling in Winchester, I think also on the aspect - an aspect of statements. Marie-Louise, do go ahead. JOHNSON Yes, hello. I'm a governor of a local special needs school and I also have my youngest child - has special needs and has a full statement. I'm very lucky because I had a diagnosis so that made it much, much easier to go through the statementing process, which in fact I feel is a very good one because you get opinions from all the people involved with the care of that child, be they an occupational therapist, a speech therapist, the teachers, whoever has close contact with the child as well as the parental input. And that whole bundle of reports is then sent off to the local authority. My feeling is however, that a lot of pressure is being brought to bear on local authorities by the government to integrate - this wonderful idea of inclusion, which Baroness Warnock brought up but realises now has huge problems. In that the standards needed to attain a full statement have been raised, so I'm extremely lucky because I have a diagnosis of my child, he's unable to speak and he's hypotonic which means he has low muscle tone, Angelman's Syndrome, so that's fine, it's an accepted condition. However, there are many, many conditions which do not have diagnoses and therefore the local authority relies purely on these reports that come in and they may deem that that child's statement, i.e. promise that funding will follow that child for whatever need he has, he or she has, can be assimilated through a mainstream school. So therefore that child might have two hours of speech therapy a week or two hours of occupational therapy a week and maybe an extra person will be funded to come into the school and be with that child ... WHITE And what are you saying is wrong with that? JOHNSON What is wrong with that? Well this can lead to huge problems because a child who's been boosted up by a special needs nursery has attained a certain level, has improved greatly in a special needs nursery, they are then put through the statementing system and it comes back that this child is much more capable than he or she really is because that child's been kept in an environment where he or she is given makaton, signing, everything - all the educational process has been geared specifically to that child. WHITE You're saying effectively that mainstreaming is perhaps being applied to children for whom it's not appropriate. We're going to come on perhaps to some of the principles behind inclusion in a moment but David Rubain, can I get your reaction to that? RUBAIN I think ... WHITE Because one of the arguments is inclusion is being a sort of god and everything is being sacrificed to the principle. RUBAIN I think it's very difficult to think about this in a short term perspective. I think if you look back 10, 20, 30 years ago in the arrangements which prevailed before - before we had the current legal framework, most disabled children were confined to some defective nether region where the extent of their identity was solely whatever their disability was. And to my mind inclusion has made a major contribution to bringing people in from the margins. I do accept that there are, in some instances today, there are - some disabled children just are not - it cannot work for them at the moment. But I do look at inclusion as a work in progress really and so whilst I would agree that it isn't the case that for all children at the moment effective provision can be made, I don't think that the principle of inclusion as such is wrong. WHITE Mark Rogers, quick comment on that, whether people are being driven, as it were, towards inclusion because it's the accepted solution. ROGERS Well I certainly think we've had a dogma around inclusion and unfortunately that dogma has confused inclusion with placement, in other words we've looked at it as trying to get as many children as we can into mainstream schools whereas it's actually about meeting children's needs. WHITE Let me go to Alison in Devon, quickly, Alison good afternoon. ALISON Hello good afternoon. WHITE You also have a point about statements? ALISON I do. I have a seven-year-old daughter who's severely deaf and she has a statement. We've tried both options - we've tried a specialist school with a hearing support centre attached to it and the problem we occurred - that occurred there was when the head teacher actually refused to have a piece of equipment fitted in my daughter's class, despite it being on her statement and it was going to be fully funded by the LEAs and it was backed up by DFES guidelines that it would be beneficial to her. And the LEA were actually powerless to act, to actually force the head to have this equipment, she said, no and that was it. So we moved to a mainstream school and obviously then you have to accept a far less - far smaller amount of provision. It's not based on need, it's based on capacity really - you've got one teacher at a desk covering 60 schools and obviously you're going to be limited with what you're going to get in speech and language therapy. And so the skills of the classroom assistant who is supporting your child in that mainstream becomes far more important because obviously they have to carry out the recommended programme on a weekly basis, on a day-to-day basis. WHITE Can I - I think we've got your drift on that, I'd like to put, first to Mark and then to David, there seems to be an awful lot of muddle about this and we're having people saying even when they get statements they're not necessarily enforced and that it goes to an enormous amount of complication before you can actually get that statement. Mark Rogers, you also have the ear of Barry Sheerman, perhaps you have had already, but I mean how do we - this is a muddle now isn't it? ROGERS It possibly is a muddle, it certainly sounds that some of your listeners think it's a muddle. WHITE And they're at the sharp end of it. ROGERS They're absolutely at the sharp end of it and sometimes they poke me with their sharp stick and I'm very receptive to what they're saying. Okay, if there is a muddle then it's entirely down to the fact that we have got this system which ends up by tying everything down to a piece of paper and what's in a piece of paper. Whereas we should be spending our time and our effort looking at children, looking at their needs and ensuring we've got staff who are capable of meeting those needs. We're spending too much time on the wrong thing. WHITE Same for you - short of unpicking every individual case, it would be quite for lawyers but not for everyone else, what do we do? RUBAIN I'm sorry to hear about the difficulties from the caller and one thing that we haven't mentioned is that we do now also have anti-discrimination legislation for disabled children in schools and although obviously I don't know very much about the detail from what the lady says it sounds to me like there may be something she can do it about in that regard. I accept that there are complexities and difficulties around statements but I'm a fan of statements for one main reason which is that unlike most areas of if you like social welfare law, law which looks to ameliorate the effect of marginalised people, statements, if they're properly drafted, guarantee effective provision and that can be a transforming experience. WHITE Okay, must stop you there. David Rubain, Mark Rogers, thank you very much indeed, we will take more calls from you in the second half of the programme. BARCLAY The time is 12.31, you're listening to You and Yours on Radio 4 with Peter White and Liz Barclay. Today we're giving you the chance to help influence future government policy on how we should educate children with disabilities and other special needs. Over the next half hour we'd like your views on whether those children should be educated in mainstream education and on what the rule is for special schools. You can submit your evidence by calling us on 08700 100 444 or e-mail through the website, that's bbc.co.uk/radio4/youandyours. Should most children with special educational needs be educated in mainstream schools and what role should special schools play? We'd like to hear your views and experiences. In 2004 an Ofsted Report showed that new laws, passed three years earlier to make schools more inclusive, hadn't worked and blamed teachers' attitudes. Barry Sheerman, the chair of the Education and Skills Select Committee is still with us. Barry Sheerman, there's no absolute policy that says inclusion is a must, so what exactly is the current policy on who and who - who should and who shouldn't be educated in mainstream schools? SHEERMAN Current policy is, as many people said this morning, is decided locally. And there are some very interesting conundrums here. When we were looking at the new schools white paper and we were looking at admissions last year in the select committee, there are schools that seemed very reluctant and very able to stop children with special educational needs coming in to that school. And so there's an unfairness about the system from the very beginning. BARCLAY Would you say that the attitude then of teachers is a reason why fewer children than expected go to mainstream schools? SHEERMAN No I don't think it is, I think it's a whole mixture - as we've said this is locally determined, it depends upon the attitude of the schools, now it's very often the leadership of the schools ... BARCLAY And not the teachers necessarily. SHEERMAN And admissions forums and the admissions capability at the school. We do know there are some schools - you see if we're to go a little deeper there is one bit of the government that all the time is going for personalisation - every child matters - and individualisation of education, which is really good stuff. On the other there's another bit that's about targets and outcomes and there's also the notice that this is how well we've done in exams this year. And if that's the case there's one bit saying we want this good treatment - individualise for every child - there's another bit that says do we want a child who's going to drag our ratings down in this school? And so it's a very interesting balance about whether schools are totally open to children with special educational needs, do they get the real rich variety of choice that any other child would get? BARCLAY And what about the role of special schools and when we're talking about special schools, what kinds of special schools? SHEERMAN Well I have to now revert to - I hope I'm not going to get criticism for this, about being tentative because I don't want to be hard and fast because I'm still learning and I'm still listening and that's the importance of this session today. But the more I hear evidence - I'm interested in the fact that we've got a lot of parents out there, some of them come to my advice service, and say I want my child that's got special needs, I want my child - it's got to be in a special school, I'm not going to book anything else but a special school environment. And the next group of parents, sometimes on the same evening will come in, and say I've got a child with special needs, I do not want some sort of reputation for having been to a special school, I want them in inclusion. So you know it's a very difficult balance here isn't it. The fact of the matter is the more evidence we take the more I listen to people saying actually if you on one campus have an educational setting where part is a special school setting and part of it is mainstream and a child one morning might be in one bit of that school and - I find that kind of interesting but that depends on modern buildings and a good campus and cooperation between staff and heads. BARCLAY So it's not just about getting the balance of your committee right, it's about getting the balance of the educationa system right. SHEERMAN Absolutely. BARCLAY Barry Sheerman, thank you and we'll hear from you again a bit later. WHITE Now also with us is John Bangs, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers and Micheline Mason, who's director of the Alliance for Inclusive Education and the parent of a daughter who had special needs. They're here to discuss your views and experiences, so do call us 08700 100 444, calls won't cost more than 32 pence. Let me just take a few calls first on this whole issue of inclusion. First Audrey - Audrey Brent from London. Hello Audrey. BRENT Hello. WHITE Yeah what was the point you wanted to make? BRENT Well I work as a special needs teacher, I'm go in to comprehensive secondary school and well there are loads and loads of problems I think with the whole system. In the borough where I work in particular this last academic year the provision of statements for all children has been reduced to a maximum of an hour a week, we used to have some having two - two and a half hours a week, now every child has an hour a week or the most they get is an hour a week, some children are only allocated five hours a term. WHITE So are you criticising the system or are you criticising the level of resources allocated to it? BRENT Well I'm criticising both really. I mean at the moment the point that I was making there was the resources that are available because it's just virtually impossible to take a child say in year 8 or year 9 or even year 10, I've got two children in year 10 - dyslexic children with the reading age of around about 8 who are expected to do GCSEs, including English, when they can just about manage to read a simple text, and to do very much with them in one hour - one hour a week. WHITE You're feeling you're being asked to do an impossible task. Let me go to Tim Evans in Cornwall. Tim, good afternoon. EVANS Hello. WHITE Yeah, what - you too are concerned I think about how inclusion is working anyway. EVANS Yeah I worked in special education in special schools and in secondary schools for 25 years and my experience is that a lot of teachers try really hard and a lot of schools do a good job but for a lot of children they're being failed very badly in schools, simply because the structures are not suitable for what they need. And I'm glad that Baroness Warnock's changed her mind but a lot of special schools have disappeared, so it's no good saying a parent can opt for provision if it's not there. WHITE But having said that, you know, people felt very strongly, at the time of the report, it wasn't just Baroness Warnock and her committee, there was a strong feeling that we should move to inclusion on purely, if you like, human rights, philosophical grounds. EVANS And quite rightly so with a lot of children. You've got to remember that you're painting a broad spectrum here. Those children with intellectual problems - children who are brain damaged - dyslexic children they all ... WHITE Well that's the point - is it too broad to apply the same system? EVANS When you go into a hospital that didn't define what was wrong with you, you wouldn't take a treatment from a specialist in something you weren't suffering from. And I think in education there's a lot of people made their careers on the inclusion agenda and in the meantime a lot of skills have disappeared. I'm probably the last generation of people who actually worked in schools for moderate learning difficulties and in those schools you had to have worked for five years before you could teach in one, a lot of people had extra qualifications, that expertise has gone now. WHITE So you're saying that specialisms have been lost? EVANS They have, in fact in secondary schools now a lot of children with learning difficulties spend their time with learning support assistants. WHITE Okay, I want to go to Miriam Khan in London. Miriam, good afternoon. KHAN Hello, good afternoon. Yes we have a five-year-old son who has Down's Syndrome and he's in a mainstream primary school which actually is hugely supportive and has been great for us in terms of the teaching staff and the SENCO. However, we have a constant battle with our LEA and local health authority with regards to the provision, particularly in relation to speech and language therapy. I agree with the caller - the first caller that you had, Chris I think her name was - that mentioned that there should be a closer link between health and education. If I could give you sort of an example ... WHITE A quick one if you would. KHAN ... of our experience. Our son was given speech and language therapy once a week, we were supposed to have an interim review last month, which didn't actually happen. The health authority haven't actually decided to cut back this, however - or rather the LEA haven't decided to cut this back but the health authority has, saying they're putting out son on a standard package which is twice a term, which we can see doesn't actually link at all to his needs whatsoever. And unfortunately it means that the LSA and the school are having to shoulder the responsibility. So it's not based on what is the child's need but actually what can be afforded by the LEA really, at the end of the day. WHITE Miriam, thank you very much. I want to go to our guests. Micheline Mason, director of the Alliance for Inclusive Education, you must be really rather depressed by this because we're not select - these are the way these calls are coming in and when we've had phone-ins on this before. You battled for inclusion and what people are saying is a. it's been stretched too far and b. it can't be - it's not being afforded. MASON Yeah, you want me to come in to that? WHITE Yeah I do. MASON Well really if I'm going to comment on that I really have to step back. I don't think this argument about inclusion or not can be understood or won by picking at the details of what's going right or wrong in any individual school or even authority. The issue really is to go back to what Barry Sheerman was saying that yes he finds two sets of ideologies at work - one group of parents that want specialism, they want what we would call a medical model - they want therapy, they want something that's going to focus on the child's impairments. There's another group of people who want their child to be brought into common life, to have friends, to be part of the mainstream community. They're two different ideologies. One of them is ... WHITE Can I just say a lot of people are just saying my child's not having a very good education, forget the philosophy, forget the dogma, my child is not getting educated properly. MASON Okay. Disabled children have never been educated properly. They weren't educated properly in special schools and you know this idea that it was wonderful, that they get what they need in segregated schools, is such nonsense, there is not a scrap of evidence to show that. And the evidence is what happens afterwards which is that most people who've been educated separately until 18 or 19 remain in some form of separate provision for the rest of their lives, that we build a divided community as adults. And the argument is about how do we value disabled children? It doesn't matter where they are - if they're on the street, they're at home ... WHITE Are we trying to stretch the term disabled people, I mean you are a physically disabled person with no other kinds of - well you may have other problems but you know what I mean. Is this - has this been, as it were, looked at from the point of view of physical disabilities and perhaps it's now extended to groups of people that it can't encompass? MASON I've seen wonderful examples of inclusion for every type and level of impairment that exists, I've seen it work, the parents of those children belong to my organisation and fought for it. Those young people are growing up, they're living a kind of life that was not possible for the previous generation of young people, it includes children with severe and complex learning difficulties, children that are dying, children who ... WHITE So you're still, if you like, an absolute inclusionist, you think ...? MASON I'm an absolute inclusionist and I become more and more so the more I see it happen. WHITE John Bangs, from a teacher's point of view, would you see this? BANGS Well I'm not an absolute inclusionist and the NUT has maintained a consistent line since Baroness Warnock's report in 1978 and that is it's got to be about educational provision. And I was very interested to hear Barry's comments about provision being locally influenced, which is of course true, but actually there is a much greater influence and that's where government policy is going as well. And I have to say there have been twists and turns. The original Green Paper from the government was a very strong inclusion document, the latest strategy from the government actually sees a continuing role for special schools, quite rightly, within the wide range of provision. And our position has always been you should have a wide range of provision for a wide range of need and the money should be in the right place at the right time and children's needs can be met. The issue must be not about ideology, it must be about meeting children's needs and that's, as I say, been our consistent position. WHITE Okay, let's go to some e-mails from Liz. BARCLAY Yes Peter I'd just like to pick up on behalf of our e-mailers on a couple of points that have been made there. Janet Duggan says that we're expecting a round peg to fit into a square hole because she says there are different pupils who learn at different rates and in different ways and we expect all children to learn in the same way, which is lunacy. But she says that class sizes are too big - if class sizes were reduced to say 15 and the teachers were given substantial training in how to deal with the various disabilities you could well be taking the first step to an adequate schooling system. John is that ...? BANGS Absolutely and in fact actually I was going to say this, we'll present evidence to Barry when the teacher organisations meet him at the beginning of March. The government is about to withdraw a very helpful circular called Circular 1190, which actually looks at smaller class sizes and smaller group sizes for teachers and for support staff and the numbers of pupils which should be with those teachers and support staff in mainstream schools. It's a helpful circular and it's going to be withdrawn. And what our members consistently tell us is that what they need in the mainstream classroom with children with disabilities or learning difficulties is radically reduced class sizes, I couldn't agree more. BARCLAY And just to pick up on the point that Madeleine made - sorry Micheline made - Susanne Walker says: What happens to these children when they're 16? She says she teaches a foundation course for students who haven't done well in their GCSEs at a college in Norfolk, the trouble is that the course is very difficult for the college to run because many of these children have complex special needs but there's no funding to provide extra learning support to help them once they are 16. What happens, do we just simply forget that there is another process probably required after the age of 16 Micheline? MASON Well the whole thing about inclusion is that it's thinking about creating a different kind of society which plans for the diversity of people who live in it. So if we're talking about what happens at 16 it's because there has been no thinking, preplanning, within the mainstream for how young disabled people are going to be welcomed and accommodated because the history has already taught them that those people are going somewhere else, don't belong, live in some special separate entity, so there's been no thought about it. So everything's got to change, it isn't only schools, it's everything thereafter. BARCLAY Yes let's go back to the calls. WHITE Wendy Wilding calling from Gloucester. Wendy, good afternoon. WILDING Good afternoon. Well first of all I'd like to - I mean what I think has to be distinguished, so many people with physical disabilities are singing the praises of inclusion and probably rightly so because they've got a good brain and they're not struggling, all right they're struggling physically but they're not struggling mentally to keep up. So you always find this - David Blunkett was another example, he was dead against special schools for the same reason. WHITE He also had fairly bad experiences at special schools I should say. WILDING I know, but I can understand how he felt anyway because he's been very bright, I mean a special school is not the place anyway, I understand that. But I don't - I really don't think that people - if you say about disabilities people straightaway think of wheelchairs, they don't think about children - children with moderate learning difficulties, like my son had, he went to hell and back in a mainstream school up until the age of 11. I'd been fighting and fighting and fighting and eventually I got him to special school. But another thing about the statement - I think statements - I think children should be assessed by an outside agency, I don't think they should be assessed by the LEA because they've ... WHITE Okay, forgive me if I don't go on to that other point because you raise an interesting point there and I won't put that to Micheline because I think I already have. But I want to John Hails in County Durham. John, good afternoon. HAILS Hi how are you doing? WHITE I'm fine. Your experience is different again I think. HAILS Yeah absolutely. Our daughter, Charlotte, has Down's Syndrome, quite a severe disability, doesn't use verbal communication and we insisted that Charlotte was put into a mainstream school. And she had, up until she was 11, a very, very good experience of mainstream school as a very severely disabled young person and had a very good education - reading and writing - her education was right around her. And then when she came to the age of 11 the powers that be insisted that she had to go into a special school. And at that point our family just wasn't able to fight those sort of battles that families with special needs kids have to fight at regular intervals. And so Charlotte went into a special school and - I mean the way that I describe it is that the special school system is anything but special and Charlotte's education almost stopped. She began to develop very bizarre behaviour patterns, which were learnt from other kids in the school and became very, very anxious and ended up developing mental health problems to the extent that we had to take Charlotte out of school. WHITE Okay, so you're very much - a different experience. I want to go to Christopher Robertson in Birmingham. Christopher, good afternoon. ROBERTSON Good afternoon Peter. WHITE Your view about the way the system's working. ROBERTSON I want to make one clear point. The first, and this is, that 1.6 million children with special educational needs are educated in mainstream and only a 100,000 in special schools. So inclusion is already happening. But there's been an alarming development in recent months when we have learnt that the Department for Education and Skills has stated quite clearly that it doesn't accept the view that every school should have a SENCO who is a qualified teacher. So we've seen this removal of a professional role that is absolutely essential to the furthering of this sector of special educational needs practice in mainstream schools. WHITE So you mean there isn't help there for teaching. John Bangs, would you confirm that? BANGS Well I think that's the case and in fact actually that view about SENCOs and there's nothing in the code of practice which defines SENCOs as I remember it as qualified teachers, has been gathering pace. We believe SENCOs should be, that's special educational needs coordinators, and they're really important, powerful people, should be qualified teachers. And I'd like to say something else actually ... WHITE A quicky if you would. BANGS Sure. What we do have is a confusion about the nature of support in mainstream schools that does need to be cleared up. Support staff, for example, are actually being given roles that they're not being trained to in terms of supporting children with statements, they're almost velcroed to individual pupils but actually what they're not getting is the kind of very high quality input in quite a lot of cases. And I believe that's an issue that the select committee must look at. WHITE I want to squeeze a quick comment from Lucy Trent in Aberystwyth, Lucy, good afternoon. TRENT Good afternoon. WHITE Yeah could you be quick but do make it? TRENT Certainly. I'm a teacher, a mature teacher, who recently trained and all the time that I've been working in state school I have found that mixed ability classes including people with emotional and behavioural difficulties, as well as physical and Asperger's, have disrupted my teaching to the extent that the people who are in inverted commas "normal" are finding it very difficult to keep up with the school curriculum because I have to spend so much time sorting out children with behavioural and emotional difficulties. WHITE Okay, Lucy I'm going to stop you there because the point's clear. I want to take one last e-mail from Liz. BARCLAY We've got quite a few people who would love to get their point of view in. Catherine Lee says her daughter is registered blind in a mainstream education which in our view after seven years isn't working, the LEA of course takes a different view and they've been trying for two years to get her into a special school. There's one - one rather special one here from Caldine McNaulty, I think it is, and she says my sister is eight and has Down's Syndrome, to us she's just a kid her needs to go to school, I never realised until she came along just how little understanding people have about special needs, how the kids vary and what support they need and how this changes with age. Some kids with autism need quiet schools with routine and facilities that don't hurt their senses, children with Down's Syndrome, like my sister, do better at primary mainstream but with specialist support. They're all different - professionals don't seem to get that and we have to suffer for it. My sister, she says, loves her school, the kids love her but sometimes the teachers find it hard to see her and not the disability. I love my little sister, I wish people could see what I see, even though she's a pest, particularly when she goes into my room and uses my make-up. So I think that's a very valid final point. WHITE Okay, so that's about seeing the person and not a label. Barry Sheerman, just finally, chair of the committee you've been sitting listening to this - all this, what have you taken from it and maybe what might you have got that you wouldn't necessarily have got in committee? SHEERMAN I think it's been a wonderful learning experience for me, it's wonderful for a politician to have to sit here and listen to people. You have called me to speak on occasion. But it's been wonderful, the rich variety, what people want I'm sure they don't want labels, they don't want structures, they just want that high quality individual attention and the right kind and as John said small class sizes for particular needs. And the boundaries between - this seems to me - the more I listen to the evidence this morning we've got to look at these walls that we've erected around special education and just talk about high quality delivery, both in terms of the quality of the teaching and the quality of the environment. WHITE May I stop you there. Liz finally. BARCLAY Well that's it from us for today but don't forget that you can continue to give us your ideas on our website or by post and we promise that we will pass them on to Barry Sheerman and the select committee for consideration. And if you're interested there are more features on education, today on Radio 4 you can tune into the Learning Curve at half past four. Back to the Transcripts homepage Back to the You and Yours homepage The BBC is not responsible for external websites

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