I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.

I begin by declaring an interest as an adviser to the board of the Priory Group, which owns a number of special schools around the country. However, much more importantly, because special schools are certainly not part of the thrust of my remarks today, I should like to make an appropriate expression of thanks. I thank the National Autistic Society for its inspiration, and co-operation with me, in getting us to where we are today. It took the lead in drafting the Bill, and I am thoroughly indebted to that fantastic and dedicated group of professionals. I also acknowledge the pioneering work of the Special Educational Consortium and of TreeHouse, which is both a school for children on the autistic spectrum and an established and renowned charity for people in that sector.

On Wednesday this week, I had a seminar, or round-table discussion, on the issues appertaining to my Bill, and I greatly profited from it. It was attended by experts in the field, including General Teaching Council representatives, Sir Alan Steer and a number of others. They have recognised expertise, are interested in the issues, broadly support what I seek to do and are anxious to add to the quality of the debate and the progress likely to be made.

In that sense, we are in a good position. We are also in a stronger position in conducting this debate by virtue of the fact that on a Friday, which is traditionally a constituency day, a significant number of colleagues are present. I am grateful to them. I should like at the outset to welcome the Under-Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, with whom, as well as with whose boss, the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, I have had discussions over recent weeks about the contents of my Bill. They have been thoroughly constructive and convivial exchanges, and I am grateful to her and to the right hon. Gentleman.

I am also grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), who shadows for my party on children’s issues, and about whom I was able to say at a meeting the other day, without exaggeration, that he has forgotten more about children’s issues and special educational needs provision than most of us knew in the first place. I welcome, too, the hon. Member for Rochdale (Paul Rowen), who I assume will speak from the Liberal Democrat Front Bench on this matter today.

The reason there are so many people here on a busy constituency Friday, as the hon. Gentleman points out, is that we recognise not only the importance of the matters covered in the Bill and the needs of the people to whom it is directed, but his own personal and long-standing commitment to making progress on these issues for the sake of the people whose needs the Bill seeks to meet.

That was an unsolicited tribute—something that one does not expect to hear often in our business. At a time when we are all held in quite the deepest imaginable public opprobrium, I can say only that I express heartfelt thanks to the hon. Gentleman; I appreciate his remarks. He and I work together across the party divide on many issues, of which this is one. I suspect that if we worked constructively and dispassionately, on a non-partisan basis, on more issues, more consistently and more often, we would, on the whole, be held in higher esteem by the mass of the electorate than currently we are.

I should like to set the scene, establish the background and underline the rationale behind the introduction of my Bill. Let me put some fairly straightforward facts on the record. Twenty per cent. of children of school age have special educational needs or disability, and 7 per cent. of the sector are specifically disabled. What concerns me about this category of children and young people is the relative paucity of the outcomes that they are currently able to achieve in their settings. I do not want to subject my colleagues to a litany of statistics, but I will favour the House with just a sprinkling so that people listening to our debate can better understand the present plight and the need for improvement.

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on his Bill—very welcome it is, too. I echo the comments of the hon. Member for Oxford, West and Abingdon (Dr. Harris). This is indeed an issue of cross-party support that brings us here at a difficult time.

The hon. Gentleman refers to 20 per cent. of our young people. Is that figure based on the number of children who have been identified through the systems that we have in place, or is it a best estimate of the real number of children with special educational needs?

My understanding is that the statistic reflects the current known reality. It is not a guess or a prognostication, or written on the back of a fag packet: it reflects the numbers of children with SEN in school at the moment. If the hon. Gentleman’s supposition is that the real figure might be higher, he could be right; if he has such intelligence, I am all ears.

I do indeed fear that the number of young people in our schools, and in pre-school, with special educational needs is far higher than the number that the hon. Gentleman suggests. I am afraid that the evidence is purely anecdotal. In the light of my experience in life, in previous work with a children’s charity, and what, as a constituency MP, I see happening in my local schools, I fear that the figure is much greater.

I am in no position to give any alternative estimate, let alone an authoritative one, but it seems to me that the hon. Gentleman is palpably on to something. My own study of special educational needs provision across the country includes the work that I undertook on speech and language services, in collaboration with the Government, between 2007 and 2008. In that period, I had 70 meetings across the country on the subject of the delivery of services, and I frequently encountered people who, spontaneously and independently of each other, said to me, “There are more children here who have a problem which took a long time to detect or which has still not been officially recognised, and for whom neither a label nor a provision has yet been made available.” That is tantamount to agreeing with the hon. Gentleman that my figure of 20 per cent. is overwhelmingly likely to be an underestimate. It is not a bad thing to err on the side of an underestimate, as long as one accompanies it with the helpful and welcome caveat that he issued. The situation that I am describing factually is very bad, but in all probability the true position is considerably worse.

I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend on bringing this Bill before the House. Like him, I have a child with special needs. I am aware of the importance of this issue, in which I have taken an interest since I was a school governor in south London. One of the observations that I have made, as a Member of Parliament and when I was a school governor, is that the statistics are far worse in areas of deprivation. In one school that I represented, more than 42 per cent. of the children had some form of special needs. Is that the sort of fact that my hon. Friend has seen in doing his analysis? He talks about a figure of 20 per cent., but the points that he makes in his Bill are perhaps most relevant in areas of deprivation and poverty.

Yes is the short answer to my hon. Friend. Like him, I have a child with special educational needs. My wife and I have a five-year-old son, Oliver, who has speech and language difficulties and has been diagnosed as exhibiting the characteristics of high-functioning autism. There is a degree of empathy between me and my hon. Friend on these issues, not least as a result of that shared experience.

It is certainly true that, as in so many other walks of life and features of public policy, the chances of getting justice are not equal. In short, and without wishing to exaggerate the point, I have found, going around the country, talking to people, hearing from people, and studying the evidence that people have submitted in writing, that the chances are that someone who is educated, articulate, middle class, willing to write a decent letter, capable of jousting with authority, and unperturbed by the prospect of having to appear in front of some sort of official forum or tribunal will probably get all, or much, of what their child needs, and in some cases they may even succeed in garnering additional provision, on the precautionary principle, beyond what their child is subsequently shown to have needed. Conversely—this is the logical corollary of that point—someone who is uneducated, inarticulate, incapable of writing a really good letter, petrified at the thought of jousting with authority, and wholly intimidated by the prospect of meeting officialdom in some sort of adversarial scenario will probably not get what their child needs.

I might add—I was struck by this as I went around the country visiting some very deprived communities—that we have to reckon with another factor apart from deprivation itself. One will meet families, sometimes run by single parents, sometimes not, in which the sheer plethora of problems with which the family head is daily confronted is such that although he or she adores the affected child, the fact of the child’s speech or language difficulty or other special educational need is not writ large in his or her priorities. That parent might have addiction problems, mental health problems or debt problems, they might suffer from a problem of domestic violence or marital relationship breakdown, or they might have issues of offending or reoffending. It is therefore incumbent on right hon. and hon. Members who are, by all accounts, relatively fortunate, to try to put ourselves in the position of, and to make effective provision for, those who are, frankly, very much less fortunate than we are.

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I give way to the hon. Gentleman, and then I really should like to make some progress with my background comments.

The hon. Gentleman is very kind, and I appreciate his giving way. He is being patient with me, and he is making an extremely good speech.

May I add to the litany of difficulties and problems? There is a perception among some parents of all social classes, backgrounds and wealth that there is a stigma attached to having a special educational needs statement. For some parents, loving as they are, and much as they care about their loved one and want the best for their child in some of the most horrendous circumstances imaginable, there is a bit of a stigma that makes them say to themselves, “I don’t want to put my child forward as needing a statement or extra support, because that will make them stand out.” Does the hon. Gentleman agree with me about that?

I agree entirely. I have come across a great many cases, not least in some disadvantaged communities, in which parents instinctively feel that they want their child to be in with everybody else for reasons of social acceptance. That sometimes causes them to understate the significance of their child’s problem. I entirely understand why they might think that way, but it is absolutely critical that people should not feel stigmatised or embarrassed about acknowledging their child’s particular difficulty, and even perhaps about having a label appended to it. That is the lever that will secure for the parent or parents the necessary support for their child. But yes, that is a problem, and one that we must work to overcome.

I said that 20 per cent. of children have special educational needs, and 7 per cent. of children in schools are disabled. We can examine the outcomes. According to the latest statistics that are available, those children manage to get five A* to C-grade GCSEs in only 14 per cent. of cases, whereas the figure for the rest of their age cohort—those who do not experience special educational needs or disability—is no less than 65 per cent. The children about whom I am speaking are nine times—I repeat, nine times—more likely to be permanently excluded from school, and 80 per cent. of children with learning difficulties have suffered bullying. In 2009, 75 per cent. of the children and young people in our pupil referral units, to the massive overhaul and improvement of which I know the Minister is committed, are those with special educational needs.

If we look at the end of the educational career journey, we see that 50 per cent. and more of disabled adults in this country are unemployed. Even that shocking and harrowing statistic blurs the reality that within it, there are significant variants on the theme depending on the particular condition from which an individual suffers. For example, the evidence shows that only somewhere between 12 and 15 per cent. of adults on the autistic spectrum end up in employment.

That is a massively serious situation, and it is a tribute to the Government that in response to the interim report of the Lamb review—Brian Lamb’s review of parental confidence in the special educational needs system—Ministers have announced funding of £31 million for pilot projects to improve expectations and outcomes for children with SEN and disability. I welcome that, but I argue that at least some of the contributory factors to the unsatisfactory outcomes from which those children suffer include issues that I address today in the Bill—a lack of sufficient expertise and training to cater to the needs of SEN and disability children; a frankly deficient inspection process, which often fails to identify the prevalence and nature of the special educational needs or disability of pupils in schools; and a relentless drive in some parts of the country for permanent exclusions from school, including of children with marked special educational needs and disability. I shall come to that in more detail later.

I say with all courtesy to the Minister that that situation is unsatisfactory and cannot go unchecked. There is scope for beneficial reform, and I look to the Minister today either to embrace the provisions of my Bill or to set out alternative means by which its objectives can and will be delivered.

I appreciate my hon. Friend’s patience in giving way. I understand the motives driving the points that he makes, but when it comes to the points in the Bill about training, I should like to mention two very good special educational needs schools in my constituency. Both Edith Borthwick school and Southview school do an excellent job and have excellent teachers who do a great job with the children in their care. Is his Bill driven towards special educational needs schools as well as mainstream schools, or are the latter his primary focus?

One of the things that I find most disappointing and disconcerting about the SEN debate is that all too often, whatever the intentions of its participants, it tends to boil down into a kind of ping-pong match in which the players are expected to be either the advocates of wholesale inclusion on the one hand or the supporters of special schools on the other.

The argument that I have sought consistently to make, when challenged as to the side of the argument upon which I fall, is that what I believe is necessary if we are effectively to cater to the needs of SEN and disability children across the country is a continuum of provision. We need mainstream schools, with support, to cater to the often quite modest and maybe temporary needs of some SEN children. We also need language units or other resourced provisions, attached to and forming part of mainstream schools, in which the appropriate designated children will spend a proportion of their time as part of their school experience, and we need special schools. We have to have that mix.

If my hon. Friend asks me towards which form of provision the Bill leans, I shall be candid with him and say that it does not lean in any one particular direction. I am trying, perhaps inadequately, to take a holistic view of the situation by asking what is the overall problem, and how we can lever in appropriate policies, mechanisms of support, streams of funding and demonstrations of Government priority to secure improvements, in the hope that those improvements for the sector and all the children in it will come about over a period.

As ever, the hon. Gentleman is making a powerful and passionate case, and as usual I find myself agreeing with him on almost every point.

While we are talking about statistics, can the hon. Gentleman tell the House how many of the 20 per cent. of children with special educational needs have a statement? Parents often come to me to discuss the challenges of obtaining a statement for their children. Further to that, when he conducted his inquiry, for which I know the Government were extremely grateful, did he find pockets of good or bad practice? Are there are areas of the country with higher and lower levels of SEN statements? What is his feeling about how statements are applied for and given across the country?

The answer to the hon. Lady, to whom I am grateful for her interest and her intervention, is that according to the current statistics approximately 3 per cent. of children have statements of special educational needs. I used the figure of 20 per cent. regarding who has such needs, so the bulk of the remainder is made up of children who are on either school action, which is a form of additional assistance for SEN children, or school action plus, which is a somewhat greater level of support. There are regional variations and county differences in the proportions of children with statements of SEN. It was not a principal focus of the inquiry that I undertook and I do not have statistics here today, but the hon. Lady will know that, on the whole, the Government are committed to a reduction in the incidence of statements, because they believe that it is important to usher in early support that will obviate the need for a statement. I confess that I think that having as an arbitrary target a reduction in the incidence of statements is not advisable, however, and I have had an honourable difference of opinion with the Government on that matter.

However, I think that, yes, there are differences and, if I may say so, there is some evidence—this goes back to my response to an earlier intervention—that educated, articulate middle-class people who lobby furiously for statements can enjoy fair success in obtaining them. On the other hand, there are some communities in the country where that culture of articulate agitation is either non-existent or very weakly established, and where, as a result, the incidence of statements is probably somewhat lower. The Minister may have a more authoritative survey of the issues with which she can favour the House, but I hope that that is an answer, at least in part, to what the hon. Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh) asked me.

I turn to the specific provisions of my Bill. Clause 1 would impose on local authorities a new duty to ensure sufficient training and expertise in their area to cater to the needs of special educational needs children and those with disabilities. It would require an amendment to the Education Act 1996, and the background to the clause can be quite simply stated: there is a need for additional training, because at the moment there is often too little of it or, in some cases, nothing taking place at all.

I shall invoke two sources of support for that thesis. First, there is a National Union of Teachers survey, in which members of the body, in response to questioning, gave some candid and illuminating replies. Some 44 per cent. of NUT respondents said that they were “not confident” teaching children on the autistic spectrum, and no fewer than 76 per cent.—more than three quarters of the respondents to the survey—cited the absence or lack of continuing professional development as a barrier to being able effectively to cater to the needs and interests of those children.

Of course, if one were a cynic or just a hard taskmaster or taskmistress, one could very reasonably say, “Well, no person should be allowed to be judge in his own cause,” and that the simple fact that the NUT takes the view that it does, perhaps because it is lobbying for more training, money or courses, is not in itself conclusive. I accept that that view is not conclusive—although we should listen to it with respect—but let us add to the pot the fact that it was agreed with, and reinforced, in the seminal report of the then Select Committee on Education and Skills in 2006 under the distinguished chairmanship of the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr. Sheerman). His report on the special educational needs system, involving a Labour-dominated Committee, concluded that teachers were “struggling” to deliver to the needs of those children in the absence of adequate training or skills. The report underlined the belief that it was simply not reasonable to expect a hard-pressed work force to deliver on that subject unless it got the necessary support. So, there is a need. In so far as training is concerned, I am not very insistent in clause 1 on a particular approach; it is not dirigiste or dogmatic. It says to the Government, “You can come forward with regulations to specify the nature and quantity of the training that should be delivered, but it is important that training be delivered.”

In the discussion on training, I start by focusing on the subject of special educational needs co-ordinators, because those people are absolutely fundamental to the delivery of an effective SEN policy within the school environment. Let us just retrace steps and be fair. The Government’s position has been set out with crystal clarity. Ministers have said, “Yes, we recognise that more needs to be done, so from September 2009 all special educational needs co-ordinators must be qualified teachers,” which, shockingly, is not the case at the moment. Moreover, Ministers have said, “All new special educational needs co-ordinators”—that is to say, those who have been in post for under one year—“must be the beneficiaries of training programmes accredited by a training and development agency.”

To those propositions, I and other supporters and promoters of the Bill give a hearty two cheers, but I want the Government’s policy to be one to which the response is three cheers. There is a relatively small but important difference between the Government’s position and mine. I say to the Government that of course all SENCOs must be qualified teachers, but all SENCOs should be able to practise as SENCOs only if they have received the accredited training that the Government promise they will deliver to all new SENCOs. Otherwise, the situation is pretty simple and straightforward to assess: there will be large numbers of SENCOs who are not new but, equally, have absolutely no immediate plans to retire; they might work in the sector with children for another five, 10, 15 or 20 years, but they will not have received the requisite training that is rightly deemed appropriate for new entrants to the profession.

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Just before I give way to the hon. Lady, I underline the point that my colleagues and I believe that such training should be provided to all SENCOs. Moreover, we believe that all SENCOs should be part of the senior management of a school, influencing the culture, shaping the policies and capable at a high level of representing the interests of some vulnerable, marginalised and potentially excluded children.

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I have a feeling that the hon. Lady is itching to make an intervention.

Again, I should be very interested to hear about the hon. Gentleman’s experiences throughout the country. One difficulty that I have come across, particularly in rural areas, is that to get the statement parents battle and battle— and in some cases and in some areas to which he has referred, teachers battle, too. There might be 30 pupils in a class including two with special educational needs, and the situation can be very hard. They get the statement, but then they cannot get the staff to provide the additional support. I have heard that from teachers—that the school is not recruiting. Is it a widespread problem throughout the country?

It certainly is. That is a kindly intervention, because the hon. Lady thereby immediately prompts me to move to the second part of clause 1.

Will my hon. Friend give way? It is relevant to what he says.

I shall give way.

I appreciate very much what my hon. Friend says about the importance of SENCOs, and there has to be leadership among senior members of staff. However, I am curious to know whether he thinks that such leadership should go one step further. Does he think that in every school, one school governor, at least, should take ownership of special needs as an important issue, rather than it being just a general matter for which the governors do not take responsibility?

I am sympathetic to that view, because I tend to take the view that something that is everybody’s responsibility ends up being nobody’s responsibility at all, so the idea of a designated person who is in pursuit of improvement is attractive to me. I was going to go on to—

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Yes, okay. I give way once more to the hon. Gentleman.

The hon. Gentleman is being extremely kind and generous. Before he moves on, I should point out that one of my concerns about the role of SENCOs is when a SENCO in a school has a heap of other responsibilities and duties. What is his view on that? Does he feel that it is right and proper that a SENCO should have a range of other duties in the school, or should they be able to commit their time and energies to developing the school’s special educational needs programmes?

I am unenthusiastic about a SENCO having a wide range of other responsibilities because it seems to me that the challenge on the SEN front is so immediate, so dramatic and so important that he or she should be able to get with that. For example, even if the SENCO will not be subject to a full-blown accredited training course, the Minister knows that I have said that an alternative approach would be actively to promote the inclusion development programme materials among SENCOs who do not get the full training course. If that SENCO is working on that, that is an additional responsibility, but it will play to his or her advantage in taking forward special educational needs provision in the school. The idea that we can have a hybrid, whereby somebody can have responsibility for SEN for a quarter of their time and that the other three quarters can be devoted to something else, seems to be a triumph of optimism over reality.

I said that I wanted a duty placed upon local authorities to publish a plan 12 months after the enactment of the legislation, setting out how educational support services in their areas are to be delivered. Let me underline what I mean by that. I am talking about critical educational support services, including educational psychology, occupational therapy, physiotherapy, and speech and language therapy. I am a supporter of the Government’s quality standards for special educational needs support and outreach services—I know that that is a bit of a mouthful, but it is a key Government policy and it has merit. However, I am sorry that when, in the course of discussions with the Government, I have highlighted the fact that that provision is welcome but unfortunately not mandatory, Ministers have been disinclined to make those standards mandatory upon those who provide services for children or young people with special educational needs.

Will the Government look at ways of actively promoting those standards, describing them as best practice and incentivising areas to treat them as part and parcel of an authoritative approach to the issues? Even if they do not want to accept my clause 1 or—perish the thought—give my Bill a Second Reading today, Ministers might be able to say, “Yes, the hon. Gentleman’s got a good point about these specialist support services that are needed, and he’s right to draw attention to the quality standards and to call for their more vigorous promulgation. We will look to the children’s and young people’s plans as the appropriate route through which to take forward the commitment to the development and commissioning of the required quality work force to minister to children’s needs.”

Believe me, Mr. Deputy Speaker, there is a lot of cross-party support for the Bill, although I am sorry that more right hon. and hon. Members are not here. I can think of no more heartbreaking cases than those involving my constituents who are struggling to get proper support for children with autism, Asperger’s and other SEN—I think of Mrs. Debbie Kirby, who has fought so valiantly for her son, although I know that Rotherham council is doing its best. However, is not the problem that we have perhaps over-focused on delivering buildings in education—that is, on renovating them, building new ones and setting them up? I am proud of that achievement, but the next period in education must be about investing the money in people who can deal with the most vulnerable and weakest in our society, of whom children with SEN are the most important. I hope that this and any future Government will take that into consideration. However, I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on this excellent speech and on his excellent Bill.

I am extremely grateful to the right hon. Gentleman, and what is more, I agree with him. It must be acknowledged—certainly by me in retrospect—that the state of the buildings was pretty appalling. There was widespread dilapidation, which was not conducive to the best learning atmosphere. I well understand why that was a priority, but we now have a serious gap to fill. We have to focus on the improvement of provision, which does not mean just in SEN and thinking, “Oh well, let’s lob people into special schools.” The improvement of provision does not mean just that or even mainly that; rather, it means trying, as far as possible, to deliver within an inclusive environment for the majority of children, who can learn, achieve, make friends and fulfil their potential in such an environment, as long as they are the beneficiaries of the appropriate support.

Such educational support strategies are needed because there is a problem. I refer to the Audit Commission report of 2008, which was based on its survey of schools, which found that one quarter of schools were dissatisfied either with the clarity of the local special educational needs strategy in their areas or with the clarity of the way in which SEN funds were deployed in their communities. That is a pretty significant level of objection. At the risk of anorakishly referring to my experience again—although one’s own experience naturally informs one’s thinking on a subject—I cannot help but recall that when I undertook my review of speech and language services, I concluded that the system across the country was characterised by what I described as

“high variability and a lack of equity,”

the shorthand translation of which is that we currently have a postcode lottery.

In their enthusiastic response to my report, the Government have set out the means by which they intend to tackle that postcode lottery. However, at present, as I learned from the National Autistic Society in undertaking my review, we have a shocking situation in which only 55 per cent. of children on the autistic spectrum, for whom speech and language therapy is stipulated in their statements of special educational needs, actually receive that speech and language therapy. In a sense, that goes back both to the intervention by the right hon. Member for Rotherham (Mr. MacShane) and the helpful interjection by the hon. Member for Wakefield, when she talked about attempts to get support and statements in place, only then to find that the necessary professional expertise and person time required to cater to the needs of the children were simply not available. In a sense, that underlines the need for the educational support strategy.

The third feature of clause 1 is an attempt to improve teachers’ understanding and the children’s work force’s comprehension of special educational needs, more effectively thereby to be able to minister to children’s requirements. The Government could do a lot worse than to look back to “Removing Barriers to Achievement”, their special educational needs strategy of 2004. “Removing Barriers to Achievement” explicitly stated that every teacher should expect to teach children with special educational needs and would therefore require the training, skills and qualifications to do so. The truth of the matter, I am afraid, is that, all too often, that simply is not the case.

I referred a moment ago to an Audit Commission report, but let me say that, in the context of the problem of a deficit in teachers’ understanding of SEN, the public space is littered with a panoply of authoritative reports, which, independently of each other, reach much the same conclusion. I refer to a report by the Audit Commission from, I think, as long ago as 2002, to two reports by Ofsted, to the seminal report of the former Select Committee on Education and Skills, to which I referred earlier, and to the most recent, authoritative, well-received and expert report by Sir Alan Steer on behaviour. Each of those reports, independently of each other, concluded that understanding of SEN was inadequate, that there was a gap to be filled and that measures were required to do that.

I refer again to “Removing Barriers to Achievement”. In addition to trying to disseminate improved teacher training provision more widely at the primary and secondary levels, which the Minister envisages doing, let her reflect and then act upon the recommendation in “Removing Barriers to Achievement” that we adopt a tiered approach to the delivery of training. We should look at the work force in parts. There are those in the children’s work force who have contact with children, but who do not necessarily teach, who need a basic understanding of special educational needs and disability. There is a somewhat smaller proportion of people who require an in-depth knowledge of the issues and there is a smaller proportion still who should be expected to develop and acquire specialist expertise. All that is absolutely necessary if we are to make progress.

I turn now, the House will be relieved to know, to clause 2, which is on the subject of inspections. If we are to deliver a change, we need to amend the Education and Inspections Act 2006. It is my recommendation to the House that we should do so. What I am suggesting is that a specific duty should be placed upon Ofsted to consider the extent to which schools are meeting the needs of children with special educational needs and disability.

Ofsted has to have a lead role here, because Ofsted is the overarching inspection body that oversees all the local school inspection reports that take place. I am not at all satisfied at the moment that schools across the country are meeting those needs. There is good practice and there are some outstanding examples, but there is very much a patchwork of provision and gross disparities between the experience, commitment and outcomes achieved in some areas relative to others. What I would say is that since the adoption of a light-touch approach to inspection, which has its merits, there has been an unfortunate consequence for the SEN sector. In essence, that unfortunate consequence is this: because we are talking in most mainstream schools about minorities of children with special educational needs or disability, it is not always easy for an inspector to spot the fact of those difficulties in a brief visit. It is often even more difficult to spot and recognise the significance of those difficulties if they are wholly or partially hidden. I say to the Minister and to right hon. and hon. Members that they will be able to testify to the truth of the statement I make—that in respect of, for example, speech, language and communication difficulties, very often part of the problem of trying to tackle them is that those difficulties do not immediately present themselves.

People with a disability such as the loss of a limb, people sitting in a wheelchair or deprived of the power or sight or a person who is a selective mute face extreme difficulties, but they can readily be identified; people with speech and language difficulties, however, often go years before their difficulties are identified. If there is only a minority of children, if the problems are hidden, if the inspection is short or, as is now often the case, undertaken by only one inspector who is either unqualified in special educational needs or distinctly inexperienced in their observation, I say that that does not bode well for the likely quality or even the scale of the commentary that the inspector will make in the inspection report on the subject of SEN.

I therefore wish to say to the Minister, to whom I had the pleasure of speaking on this and other points yesterday, “let us be fair”. Since I announced my Bill and had conversations with her and her right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, I have been delighted to learn that the Secretary of State has written to Brian Lamb, who is undertaking the review of parental confidence in the SEN system, and asked him specifically to look at the question of the inspection framework, including the need to consider and report on whether either a legal or a regulatory change might be required in order to improve it or to suggest policy changes that he believes could deliver the same outcome.

That is welcome. My point to the Minister is that it would be even more welcome if, in her reply to me and other colleagues contributing to the debate, and without issuing any sort of blank cheque, which it would be unreasonable to expect of her, she were able nevertheless to say today that Ministers are minded to be heavily guided by the expert advice of Brian Lamb. It may be a legal change, it may be a regulatory change, it may be a policy change or it may be a capacity change that is required. I recognise that Eileen Visser and her colleagues at Ofsted are probably anxious about the implications of my proposed change not because they violently disagree with it intellectually or politically, but because they feel that there are resource constraints and limitations on their capacity that make it difficult to see how, with their existing staff complement, they can undertake inspections in a way that would satisfy the hon. Member for Buckingham. This hon. Member for Buckingham has absolutely no intention whatever of letting the matter drop and he will insist on it in every possible forum with relentless determination until he is satisfied that Ministers have taken on board the idea and responded effectively to it.

I would certainly like to add to those words of the hon. Member for Buckingham (John Bercow) that my hon. Friends will stand shoulder to shoulder with him on ensuring that this issue is not dropped. May I try to draw the hon. Gentleman a little further in expressing his opinion on these matters? Does he feel that when the Brian Lamb review is taken forward, a specialist SEN Ofsted should be undertaken, which might mean that instead of an inspector going into a school to carry out a normal or even a light-touch Ofsted inspection, a specialist SEN inspection is carried out from time to time whereby an inspector goes to a mainstream school solely to look at SEN provision?

The symbiotic relationship between the hon. Gentleman and me on these matters is becoming increasingly uncanny. He says “frightening” and I am inclined to say “frightening” too, and the Tory Whips who despaired of me a long time ago will probably find it equally frightening and alarming—it will add to their rather paranoid conspiracy theory of the world. The truth of the matter is that the hon. Gentleman makes an extremely good point. I am quite attracted by the idea.

My response is this: I do not really mind how it is done. If it is done by more staff carrying out the inspection on the same day as the rest of the school is inspected, if there are sufficient staff and a sufficient allocation of staff time—and expert time—to consider the SEN children on the same day, that is fine. If it is argued, however, that it is too difficult to do that, by all means let us have a separate and dedicated inspection.

My main gripe about the present arrangements is that all too often the inspection is by way of giving a cursory glance at SEN provision in the school. I know that Ofsted has a duty to report to the Secretary of State about its overall view on education, including about catering to the needs of SEN and disabled children, but it seems to me that that is going to be very broad-brush unless copious reports from the local level are available. Unfortunately, they are often not. Anyone who has studied Ofsted inspection reports and looked at their special educational needs’ features can testify that more often than not the references to SEN are few and far between. There is often, as I say, a cursory approach—a perfunctory, box-ticking, “let us get it out of the way” sort of reference to those issues, almost as an optional extra or periodic afterthought. Up with that, as Churchill would have said, parents and others are increasingly not willing to put—and they are quite right to be dissatisfied and to insist that we improve the arrangements.

That leads me to clause 3, which focuses on the subject of permanent exclusions of children with special educational needs and disability. I know that there has been a litany of statistics in this debate, but for the avoidance of doubt, let me say that there is only one statistic that needs to be underlined because it is at the kernel of this debate: children with SEN or disability are no fewer than nine times more likely to be permanently excluded from school.

What my clause 3 says—and it is a breathtakingly reasonable clause from a breathtakingly reasonable Member of the House, as I hope the Minister will be quick to acknowledge—is that no child with SEN or disability should be permanently excluded from school until a review has been undertaken of

“the sufficiency and effectiveness of the reasonable adjustments”

that have been made under the Disability Discrimination Act in order to seek to continue to accommodate that pupil in school. Moreover, the clause says that in respect specifically of an SEN as opposed to a disabled pupil, the exclusion should not take place until the review has been undertaken of the special educational needs provision that is being made for that child. That seems to me to be entirely justified.

I should like to pursue that point further. I feel that any child who has been permanently excluded should be examined to ascertain whether the underlying reason for that permanent exclusion is a special educational need that has not been picked up and properly dealt with in the past. Does the hon. Gentleman agree?

I certainly agree. We know that all too often provision for SEN children tails off towards the end of primary school and descends into the dark abyss of nothingness at the start of secondary school. That does not always happen, and the Government are attempting to improve matters. As the Minister knows, my conclusion about speech and language was that resource was being front-loaded in the early years. I did not cavil at that, because it makes sense to intervene early, but I argued that that should not be to the exclusion or detriment of a necessary devotion of resource to children as they go through the later years of primary school and into secondary school.

The reality with which we must contend, however, is that there are large numbers of children getting to the end of primary school and going into secondary school whose need has still not been identified. That need, unaddressed, will cause a child to be anxious, stressed, depressed, unable to communicate, incapable of performing, disinclined to engage, and often inclined only to express his or her unspeakable frustration at what is judged to be bad behaviour and conduct that is undoubtedly, however inadvertent and blameless, disruptive.

In the field of special educational needs and disability, when talking about the behaviour agenda it is important not to conflate and confuse disability and disobedience, as I have regularly impressed on Ministers. I find it infuriating almost beyond endurance when some of the most low-grade, sub-standard, downmarket apologies for tabloid newspapers in this country, with their shrill, intolerant, bigoted political agendas, lambast people for behaving badly, and cruelly pick on children who might have done so but whose behaviour is occasioned and explained by either an undetected or unaddressed special educational need or disability. We must not get the two things confused.

I feel that the duty I propose is reasonable, but if the Minister does not like it, may I make another proposal? At the very least, the Government—who recognise in the national strategies that permanent exclusions are too high, and who want to reduce them—should challenge high-excluding authorities to explain why they are high-excluding, and to set out plans for reducing the incidence of those exclusions.

My other humble request of the Minister is that we get the guidance right. The guidance on exclusions has been revised a couple of times over the past two years, so a precedent has been set, and there is no earthly reason why we cannot tweak it again if necessary. I urge the Minister to comment today, and to follow up with further work, on strengthening the guidance on exclusions, so that it is manifestly clear and incapable of incomprehension. Schools must know what their duties are.

I have said nothing about fixed-term, unofficial or internal exclusions. However, those unofficial and internal exclusions that are taking place can almost certainly be regarded as illegal. When a school simply says to a pupil, “It would be better if you went home today in order to calm down,” it is shoving the issue away, abdicating responsibility and breaking the law in the process. Although there is not a completely comprehensive evidence base on the matter, the National Autistic Society, TreeHouse, the Special Educational Consortium and a number of organisations with which I deal almost daily, have large numbers of examples of such cases. We must move away from the idea of a permanent exclusion as a regular weapon and re-establish the proper notion that it is a mechanism of last resort to be applied if, and only if, all other potential and preferable avenues have been fully explored.

As the Minister will understand, my motivation in bringing forward the Bill is not an obsessive determination to see passed on to the statute book the Bercow Act. I entirely understand why right hon. and hon. Members who have never served as Ministers, and perhaps entertain no hope or prospect of doing so, might think it a satisfactory consolation prize to wave in front of their grandchildren in their dotage a statute which their efforts have managed to achieve. I could not give a flying flamingo about having a piece of legislation to my name on the statute book. My sole but passionate concern is to bring about an improvement in the quality of life for some of society’s most vulnerable, marginalised and excluded children, who can succeed with support but cannot without it.

The proposals I recommend in my three-clause Bill are right on three fronts. They are right in the name of decency and fairness to vulnerable, marginalised and potentially excluded children. They are right for the generality of children in the education system, with whom SEN children can interact to good effect if adequate provision is made for them, so they can be right in the name of educational and social togetherness. Above all, the measures I commend are right for the effective pursuit of the national interest of UK plc in an age in which a job for life is a relic of the past and the premium placed on knowledge, skills, qualifications and the ability to communicate is greater than it has ever been.

My Bill is relevant to the educational qualifications agenda, the acquisition of skills agenda, the fight against antisocial behaviour agenda, the public health agenda and the agenda of minimising the costs to our criminal justice system caused by people who languish on the scrapheap because a serious educational need or disability was not addressed, and they went off the rails, felt abandoned by society and took a damaging course as a consequence. We want to avoid all those undesirable consequences. We want to cater to everybody’s needs, maximise potential, tackle social exclusion, and facilitate the extension of opportunity that is right for both social justice and the economic efficiency of the country.

On that basis, I commend my Bill to the House, and look forward with eager anticipation to the contributions that might be made by other right hon. and hon. Members, and above all, to the Minister’s reply on behalf of the Government.

May I say what a pleasure it is to speak after the hon. Member for Buckingham (John Bercow) on this incredibly important subject? If I may, I will take the House on the journey from childhood to adulthood of children with special educational needs, and say why I think the Bill is so incredibly important.

While listening to the hon. Gentleman present his Bill, I was interested to hear things that I did not know about our Government’s policy. Obviously, I have not followed such issues as closely as he has. I am concerned about the target to reduce statements of special educational needs, which is perhaps a mistaken policy, for the following reasons.

Twenty years ago, premature babies born at 24, 26 and 28 weeks would not have survived the first six weeks of their lives. With improvements in medical technology, such children are now increasingly making it through the early years and into adulthood, and in many cases leading long and happy lives. However, we also know that many of those children will have single or multiple physical or learning disabilities. At a time when we are seeing an increase in the number of children born with such disabilities—children who in the past would not have made it from babyhood to childhood, let alone adulthood—the Government seem to be going against the trend, mistakenly in my view.

It is also the case that more older women are giving birth, more births are taking place by caesarean section, and more births involve the use of instruments. All those factors present a risk to the child. I do not think that people fully understand what happens when a child is born in difficult circumstances. It often does not become clear until much later in the child’s life. We are only at the beginning of finding out about the impact of bad treatment of children in the earliest stages of their lives on the way in which their neurological systems do or do not develop, and on the networks that are created in their brains.

We are seeing an increase in binge drinking not just among young people generally but, in particular, among young women. Another group of at-risk mothers are those who do not realise that they are pregnant, turn up at the hospital believing that they have appendicitis, and then discover that they are having a baby. I have met one such mother. These women do not alter their social behaviour as women tend to when they know that a baby is on the way, and are not able to take care of the child while it is in the womb. We are seeing an increase in the number of cases of foetal alcohol syndrome, which, in extreme cases, damages children’s facial characteristics. It may also be very difficult to spot that a child is carrying a learning disability alongside the physical damage that it suffered in utero.

What the hon. Lady is saying is very interesting. I recently visited a home for foetal alcohol-damaged children in Copenhagen, and I think that the condition could well be responsible for many more disabilities than has been acknowledged—some of which may have been attributed to autism, which displays similar characteristics. I feel that it merits a great deal more investigation.

I agree that we are dealing with a massive hidden problem. It is, in fact, the problem of maternal shame. We all want to do the best we can for our children. We all love our children. The possibility that something we did during pregnancy may have damaged our beautiful child, either at birth or at a later stage, is not something that most mothers—and fathers—I know would willingly contemplate.

I have dealt with the nature and scale of the birth-related problems. Let me now turn to the business of tracking a child’s subsequent development. There has been a huge increase in the number of children’s centres that can work sensitively and supportively with mother and baby in terms of early diagnosis and intervention. It is not a case of a child’s arriving at school at the age of five and there being “something wrong” with it, so that the situation becomes school versus mother. It is a case of a health visitor’s saying “Hmm. He is not sitting up quite as early as he should be”—or not walking, speaking or listening as early as he should be—and working with parents to help them to understand the nature of the damage that may have been caused.

Many people who are active in the foetal alcohol syndrome charity are adoptive parents. In the most extreme cases, the natural parents are alcoholics, their alcoholism has continued, and their children will go into care. It is the adoptive parents who are the champions and campaigners, and I fully understand the reasons for that.

Last week I visited a Sure Start centre in Lupset crescent on the Lupset estate. As the mother of a 19-month-old baby, I found myself becoming incredibly broody. I do not know why, but I think that it may be something to do with the smell of babies’ skin. I sat in a room with 20 fantastically beautiful babies, all under the age of one, with their mothers and fathers. It is a tribute to the staff at the centre that they have made fathers feel so welcome. I know that that is a hugely difficult thing to do. Looking after babies, playing with babies and reading to babies is related to what is still physiologically a maternal duty. Clearly, with the best will in the world, a partner cannot become involved in breastfeeding. However, the dads were in that room, playing with their children and discussing the adaptations that they had made to their homes to make them safer.

Sure Start centres are places where people can learn, in structured, flexible ways, about child safety and development, and benefit from the support of trained professionals who will ensure that any problems affecting their babies are picked up as early as possible.

A week or so ago, when the Government were opening the 3,000th Sure Start centre, I visited one of the three centres in my constituency. I, too, observed the fantastic work that is being done. Does my hon. Friend agree that there is almost a duty for staff, who, as she says, are highly qualified and dedicated, to flag up the earliest signs of autism when they appear? I know that there is speculation about how early those signs can be demonstrated, but should not a mechanism operate from the earliest years of a child’s development to ensure that staff are aware that that child may develop autistic tendencies?

I agree. Such conditions need to be spotted early. In the centre that I visited, a fully trained teacher was working with children aged under one. One might ask what on earth a trained teacher was doing in a room full of babies. The answer is “Here is someone who has worked in a school, someone who has observed child development and is an expert on it.” That teacher tells parents that they should read books to babies, which I must confess that I have completely failed to do. Tiny babies were lying on their backs being read stories by their parents, which is absolutely fantastic. It is the highest-quality child care service that we can possibly offer, and we should offer it to every child: to children on the Lupset estate, and to children in our poorest, lowest-income communities.

That brings me to my next point, which relates to babies with clear disabilities. A parent who is aware that a child is deaf or blind may be battling to get that child into a Sure Start children’s centre. If I had a child who was deaf or blind, I would certainly want it to go to one of those centres. Everyone knows that parents of disabled children have myriad hospital appointments with physiotherapists, or with speech and language therapists. If a parent wants to continue to work, it is much easier for the professionals to come to the child—although we have introduced the right for parents, particularly those whose children have disabilities, to work flexibly—than for the parent to be constantly leaving the workplace and taking the child to hospital. It may take half an hour to travel to the nursery, an hour to travel to the hospital, an hour to wait to see the professional and an hour to return the nursery. That is the day gone. Frankly, most employers are not prepared to put up with that.

The hon. Lady is making a very good speech, which is of interest to all Members. In the light of what she has just said about deaf children, does she agree with me that it is very disturbing that, according to the National Deaf Children’s Society, deaf children, who should not otherwise be educationally disadvantaged, were on current statistics 41 per cent. less likely to achieve five A* to C grades at GCSE? Does that not suggest that the absence or paucity of early intervention for deaf or hearing-impaired children has a very damaging consequence 10 or 12 years later?

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right, and there can be no excuse. Whenever we look into the causes of that, we always get into a debate about British sign language. It is, of course, right that a child who cannot speak or hear must be able to communicate, because otherwise the frustrations that the hon. Gentleman so eloquently described earlier in our debate are likely to come out. We are probably only at the beginning of understanding how deaf children learn. Deaf children have been warehoused in deaf children’s schools and they have not been expected to achieve—and, of course, if we do not expect a child to achieve and do not push them to do so, they do not achieve. The mainstreaming of deaf children into mainstream schools presents those schools with a huge number of challenges, and I will come to that shortly.

I was talking to a mother with a child in a mainstream school, and she said that there is a pupil who is deaf at that school so every child who attends the school has been learning sign language. They learned it for two years before the child came to the school, and they are all learning it now. She was genuinely mystified as to why every child in the school should learn British sign language when there was just one deaf child. The answer, of course, is that every other child in the school should be able to communicate with the deaf child. We have to turn this on its head and say, “It’s fantastic that your children are learning sign language.” It is a universal language, so often people do not need to understand the language that is being spoken to understand what is being said. Therefore, whenever these children go abroad to any country they will be able to make themselves understood. One only has to observe the Italians to understand the power of gesticulation in communicating across language boundaries. The Italians can always make themselves understood because they are completely uninhibited about gesture, whereas we are British and we keep our hands in our pockets or by our sides—except when we are holding our papers, as I am now—so we are not as good at communicating. I said to that parent, “This is a blessing for your children. It is fantastic and it will be of use throughout their lives.” It is also teaching them that communication is not just about oral communication; it is also about how we stand, use our hands and look at people. For a person who is deaf, a whole series of such means of communication have to be deployed.

I know that myself, as somebody who wore hearing aids for seven or eight years, from my mid-20s to my early-30s. My experience, as someone who acquired a hearing disability, was that it is extremely challenging. I was working as a university lecturer, and I had to go to my boss and say, “I’ve got a real problem; I can’t hear what my students are telling me in the lecture halls.” It was beyond embarrassing to have to keep on asking people—sometimes two or three times—to repeat themselves. The university had to install—it had the support of the Department for Work and Pensions—a hearing loop so I could hear what was going on. In my work as a councillor, I was also unable to hear what was going on in the chamber, particularly because in local politics, as in national politics, things can sometimes get a little rowdy. I could not hear what was being said off-microphone when my hearing aid was switched to the loop system.

Unless someone has physically experienced the frustrations of not hearing, and the stigma, they cannot fully understand. Babies will pull hearing aids out of their ears because they are uncomfortable, but adults do not want to wear a hearing aid because they are concerned that it makes them look stupid. I confronted that stigma and prejudice myself. Wearing a hearing aid is not like wearing spectacles; there are no designer hearing aids. Armani does not make hearing aids; they just sit on the back of a person’s head and other people think they are not very clever. The challenge is to change that. As soon as someone puts on a hearing aid, their IQ goes down by 50 points in other people’s eyes. That is a huge problem, which we have to face up to. It is to do with our own internal prejudices. That is also why people in later life do not wish to wear hearing aids. There is a big issue to do with how we feel about disability, and it is incredibly important that we overcome the challenges before us.

I am greatly enjoying my hon. Friend’s speech, and I shall keep my intervention brief. Does she agree with me that the breaking down of such prejudice barriers is one of the many benefits brought about by the inclusion in the mainstream of pupils with special educational needs of any kind? It is good for the young person concerned to be in mainstream education—with the proper support for that—and it is also phenomenally good for other people around that to see that this is also normality.

I could not agree more. It is vital that we all understand that people are different. It is vital that children are not shoved off where we do not see them into special schools—as they were even just 20 or 30 years ago. Nobody ever emerged from them until they were 18, and then they went into special training workplaces. What we are doing on that issue is incredibly important. The Disability Discrimination Act 2005 has been very important, particularly in matters such as making schools wheelchair-accessible. Why should the fact that a child cannot use their legs mean that they are excluded from mainstream education? Education is for every child and every disabled child matters. I am glad that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families and my hon. Friend the Minister are making such huge inroads into addressing the issue of the place of disabled children in our society.

I was watching CBBC with my young children a month or so ago, and I was surprised to see that one of its presenters was a young woman who did not have a hand. She had her sleeve rolled up so that was obvious, and I was quite taken aback, but I was also very pleased. I said to my son, “That lady does not have a hand. What do you think about that?” He said, “Well, it’s a bit strange—and maybe a little bit scary.” That gave me the chance to say, “There’s nothing to be scared about if somebody doesn’t have a hand, Clem. Maybe she had a bad accident or was sick when she was very little, but she is just an ordinary person like you and me.” Seeing disability gives us the chance to do that. The importance of seeing disability on our television screens cannot be underestimated, and we should expect nothing less from our public service broadcaster than to show that. I was incredibly disappointed subsequently to read in the newspapers that there had been a series of complaints to the broadcaster about children being upset. I cannot understand why a parent watching with a child did not use that opportunity positively and proactively to talk about such issues with their very young child.

The hon. Lady is making a racy and intoxicating speech, which I am richly enjoying. As she knows because we co-operate on many matters, I very often agree with her, and I absolutely agree with her on this matter. May I put it to her that this is analogous to many other things in life? I was horrified by that narrow-minded and rather bigoted reaction from some parent viewers. If one keeps something in the closet, that implies that it is something that is somehow inferior, something of which to be ashamed and something that should not be allowed to be discussed in polite company. The opposite is in fact true; we should bring it out into the open and let children come to be aware that it is part of life. It is something to be accepted and welcomed, and the people who suffer from disabilities are just like the rest of us. We want to be their friends and to enjoy life with them, not to regard them as somehow some sort of oddity.

Once again, I thank the hon. Gentleman for his kind comments—that is the first time I have been called intoxicating in this Chamber, but I hope it will not be the last. [Interruption.] I could get used to this! I totally agree with his point, because hiding these things is part of a cultural reluctance to talk about them. If one had a disabled child 40 or 50 years ago, it was an issue of shame; people would give up their babies and send them off to homes to be looked after. Some of the stories coming out about the closure of the asylum institutions have involved people who would never be living in an institution these days; they would be living perfectly happy lives in supported communities. I welcome the cultural change and the culture of human rights that has taken a firm hold in this country, which plays to the nation’s very deep-rooted sense of justice and rights for all, and openness. I welcome the fact that the BBC took this courageous step—hats off to it for doing so—and good luck to that presenter in her future career.

I wish to talk a little about the Waterton junior and infants school in Wakefield, which serves the Lupset estate and is under consultation for closure. I visited it a couple of months ago, and when I talked to the teachers, I was struck by the situation there, because the school has a higher than average number of children with special educational statements. The Government need to examine what happens when local authorities consult on school closure programmes. In addition to the hon. Gentleman’s Bill, which talks about inspections, some further statutory guidance needs to be issued to local authorities on what happens to pupils with special educational needs in any closure programme and any transfer programme.

We know that when children with SEN form a relationship with their special educational needs co-ordinator of additional help or with a particular teacher, that relationship is vital and precious to their learning. In some cases, the help will carry on with the child throughout the school. As soon as the question of closure is raised in any school, we see the flight of staff, because understandably they will think, “Which school are the children going to transfer to? Will there be an opening for me? Will there be a vacancy for me?” They will make their own arrangements and start applying for other jobs. I cannot stress enough to the Minister how important the needs of pupils with SEN are and that in order for the transition to a new school to be made it is vital that those SEN helpers and assistants transfer with the children. Where an ordinary child is only just starting school, is six years old, has had one or two years at their school and is transferring to another, bigger school, where they perhaps do not know anybody—perhaps they are transferring with their class cohort or perhaps the other children have scattered to different schools—such a move is challenging. We must understand that for a child who has special educational needs not only does such a move involve the fear that can come with it, but they lose the person who helped them to do well in class and to keep up with the other children. That is of particular concern to parents in my constituency, so will the Minister respond to that in her speech? Perhaps she could also write to me, so that I can work with the school to ensure that if the authority does decide to close it, the process can be properly handled.

The hon. Gentleman has said that provision falls into a black hole in the teenage years, when children enter secondary school, and that is often the case. A lady who had two children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder came to my constituency surgery a month or two ago. One of the children was in a residential school and the other was at home with her. The issue was not so much about the support that he was getting in school—he was at an appropriate school for his needs—but that he was getting up two or three times in the night. She had a teenager, but in reality it was like dealing with a newborn baby—and it had been like that ever since he was a newborn baby. Those of us who have had children and remember those hectic early months of a child’s life, where one is in an intense period of parenting, getting up to answer 2 am, 4 am and 6 am calls and sacrificing one’s own sleep pattern, cannot begin to imagine what that lady was suffering over a period of 10, 12, 15 years with her son.

My hon. Friend’s comments flagged up in my mind a case of someone who came to see me a couple of years ago in one of my surgeries—this also draws on a point made by the hon. Member for Buckingham (John Bercow). Not only had the mother had that experience of getting up during the night with her teenage child year upon year, but during the day, when she might have tried to catch up on a few hours’ sleep, she was getting phone calls from the school to say, “Your child is being disruptive. Please come to take them home.” What is my hon. Friend’s view on that?

My view is that it is incredibly important that the local education authority works with social services to provide proper personalised support to those families. The point that I was about to make is that, in respect of children who have severe and complex needs, the local authority can often feel, “Well, they have got the statement and they are in the school. They are where they are. We have done that for them. Case closed.” The authority may feel that everything is tickety-boo, but the child’s needs do not stop after the eight hours of compulsory schooling; those needs carry on for the 18 hours when the child is at home and where their behaviour may be incredibly difficult. With the best will in the world, all the parenting classes in the world will not help a parent to deal with such a situation.

That brings me on to the point I wish to make about respite care for these children, in respect of which we need to reach a redefinition. Respite care is in very short supply across the country, and I know that the Government are looking at how we can further help carers. In looking at the needs and the life patterns of parents who are dealing with children with these complex needs and complex diagnoses, we need to consider how we make provision to give parents a night or two off. Just one or two good nights’ sleep can be a tonic and can help them face the future. That is a very important point, and I would like the Minister to think about how social services look at the care of these children.

Another constituent who came to my surgery was dealing with a very violent child of 10 or 11. She had rung her social services to say that the child was kicking, biting and punching her, only to be told, “Until you hit him, we will not intervene.” She thought, “Of course I am not going to hit him. He is my son. I love him, so I am not going to hit him. That is against everything I believe in.” She had contacted social services because she was in the very early stages of what was going to be almost an abusive domestic violence relationship. We are only at the beginning of our understanding of domestic violence. I have met female constituents in their sixties who have been beaten up by their 30-year-old sons. Those sons did not start beating their mothers when they were 30—the pattern started earlier. I met a woman in a refuge whose son had observed violence being perpetrated against her. It had been sanctioned in the home as he grew up and he felt able to continue with it.

My constituent’s case was not domestic violence, of course, but she was suffering injury and asking for help. Social services need to be able support parents in that situation and work with them to deal with challenging behaviour of that sort.

Bringing up a disabled child can be a very rewarding experience for a parent, but it can also be harrowing and debilitating, as the hon. Lady has described. In addition to the interface that parents need with education authorities and the health service, they also need to deal with the Department for Work and Pensions. Does she have a view on the importance of the non-means-tested benefit of disability living allowance? Of course the Government have a fiduciary responsibility to the taxpayer and must guard against fraud, but does she agree that it is a matter of concern that, even after being slimmed down, the application form for DLA is still 52 pages long? Nor is it solely a matter of box-ticking, because it requires a considerable narrative from applicants, which for people who may have SEN or disabilities themselves can be extraordinarily challenging.

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that interesting point and there is a problem with our definition of disability and what effect it has on people’s lives. For example, we pay higher rate disability benefits only to people with visual impairments, which shows how much further we have to go. Most people accept that if someone is blind, it is more difficult for them to find their way about, but I had a case recently in which a mother had applied for DLA on the grounds of her daughter’s deafness but the application had been rejected. I asked the Royal National Institute for Deaf People about this and it said that each case was considered individually. Charities need to give us better advice, but we also need better advice from the DWP. As a child gets older, we expect them to be able to go to school on their own. Perhaps they can walk to primary school at 10—in my case, I was seven, but times have changed—and go on a bus, with friends, to secondary school at 11. For the parent of a child with a disability, all bets are off. If the child has a physical disability, they will probably be eligible for school transport provided by the local authority, but in the case of a child with deafness, it is more of a judgment call about whether it matters that they cannot hear the traffic. Rather than let their child walk to school in those circumstances, and perhaps then get the telephone call that every parent dreads, most would prefer to play it safe and take the child to school safely right through to 18. That brings us back to the question of how parents can balance that with their working lives.

I mentioned ADHD and I wanted to stress the need for the interface with child and adolescent mental health services. Many children with behavioural issues are under the supervision of a psychiatrist, or on medication under such supervision. The silo problem then arises, with one approach from the school, another from health services and yet another from social services, and never the three shall speak. We need to join up the services for those children.

The hon. Gentleman said that children can fall into an abyss at age 11, but they face an utter void at 18. Most mental health trusts have no provision for adult ADHD services. In a way, the children we are debating today are privileged, because they are being taken into consideration, but when children turn 18, they are no longer eligible for child and adolescent mental health services. They become subject to the adult psychiatric service. I pay tribute to a constituent of mine who has attended my surgery several times and spoken very movingly about the challenges he has faced in acquiring an adult diagnosis and proper psychiatric support for his son. Through that parent’s diligence and persistence, Wakefield mental health services, together with Kirklees and Huddersfield, has set up its first ever adult ADHD service, starting from this April. As the hon. Gentleman knows, young people with ADHD are more likely not to be able to find a job and to get in trouble with the police. They often do not have a daily structure to their lives, because they are no longer in secondary education, and they no longer have proper medical supervision because they are now adults and, obviously, instantly better. That is clearly not the case, and the Government must look at that issue very seriously. We need to avoid having a postcode lottery, in which such services are a priority for some areas, which have a campaigning individual, but are ignored by health chiefs in other areas.

My final point is on dyslexia. Statistics from the Dyslexia Association suggest that many children with the condition are not diagnosed. In a two-form entry school, it is likely that there are at least two children with dyslexia in each year. The challenge that schools should be given is not to reduce the number of statements, but to identify those children with dyslexia as soon as possible. The experts say that there is a golden window for learning to read between the ages of five and three quarters and six and a half. If that opportunity is lost, and the child does not acquire the ability to read, they instantly start to fall behind. I pay tribute to what the Government have achieved through the Every Child a Reader, Every Child a Speaker and Every Child a Counter programmes, but dyslexia probably accounts for a significant percentage of underperformance. If we want to improve our GCSE results ever further—I want 100 per cent. of children to get five A-C grades, not 48 or 50 per cent. as at present—addressing the problem of dyslexia could lead to a step change in results and attainment. It is possibly the single most common undiagnosed or late-diagnosed learning disability, and it can have catastrophic consequences for children’s educational careers. If we believe that every child matters, we have to ensure that the children with the greatest difficulties are put first.

We come back to the issue of early identification and intervention—the elephant in the room—which underlines the centrality of the child health strategy and the child health promotion programme, and the importance of multidisciplinary teams kicking in at an early stage to identify difficulties. May I take this opportunity to suggest that attempts to establish the incidence of need will be assisted by the Special Educational Needs (Information) Act 2008, steered through the House by the hon. Member for Gateshead, East and Washington, West (Mrs. Hodgson)?

The hon. Gentleman is right to draw our attention to my hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead, East and Washington, West (Mrs. Hodgson), who has been passionate in her pursuit of this cause.

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on the Bill. Will the Minister consider SEN as part of the scorecard system for schools inspection? That is an absolutely key part of the identification of children with SEN. Often, SEN provision for the kids at the so-called best and highest-performing schools is weakest, and the needs of those children can be forgotten in the rush to the key stage 2 100 per cent. golden target. Will the Minister consider incorporating SEN diagnosis and catch-up into Ofsted’s scorecard approach? I commend the hon. Gentleman on his initiative.

May I first, in this era of heightened precaution, declare my entry in the Register of Members’ Interests and my interest as a vice-chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on autism, a subject which features large in the debate?

As my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (John Bercow) said, the attendance today is perhaps unfortunate. I hope that it represents the fact that many of our honourable colleagues are out on the stump for the impending elections, if not attending to media interviews on their financial affairs. However, the attendance does not belie any lack of interest in this very important subject, which is relevant to every hon. Member.

The contributions thus far have been extremely heavyweight. We have all been intoxicated, as we have been asked to say, by the contribution of the hon. Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh)—and we mean that in a way that is, I believe, permissible in parliamentary language. She made a very wide-ranging speech, with great detail, which extended from foetal alcohol syndrome, in which I have a particular interest, to the Lupset centre in her constituency, the art of Italian gesticulations, the stigma of deafness and dyslexia, and an awful lot besides.

It is refreshing to return to a very important, weighty subject following some of the distractions of the past week—it is the kind of subject that our constituents send us to this place to deal with. As my hon. Friend said, at least one in five children—the official figure—is classified as having a special educational need at school. He did not, however, say that that number has actually doubled in the past 20 years, and that at least 1.65 million children in this country are affected. An awful lot of our constituents give much more of a flying flamingo for this subject than for others, as does my hon. Friend. He has enormous form in this area, for which the House will be duly grateful.

We welcome the Bill because it contains some important measures to address what most of us will acknowledge is the woefully inadequate SEN provision across the United Kingdom. We would support the Bill’s progress to Committee for proper scrutiny. One would hope that the Government could adopt part of the legislation, or at least incorporate it into regulations and guidance, certainly given the height of reasonableness of the Bill to which my hon. Friend referred. We cannot justify continuing to sweep such problems under the carpet and to attribute them to bad behaviour or other social ills. The matter needs to be tackled head on once and for all.

As well as my hon. Friend’s good work, not least the review that the Secretary of State commissioned of him, and the Special Educational Needs (Information) Act 2008, which was promoted by the hon. Member for Gateshead, East and Washington, West (Mrs. Hodgson), we have the Autism Bill, courtesy of my hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs. Gillan), which is in Committee. Special educational needs are topical at the moment—and not before time.

As several hon. Members have said, someone needs to take responsibility. Too often in SEN, the buck does not seem to stop with someone who is in a position to do something about it. I have referred to that as a vicious triangle. All hon. Members have had anxious parents come to see us about their battle to get a statement of SEN or special support for their children at school. We have then been told by the school or education department, “It’s not to do with us, it’s to do with health or the primary care trust,” which is often the case when it comes to speech and language therapists. We then go to health bodies only to be told, “Oh no, it’s not us, you need social services/children’s services.” That vicious triangle does not address the problem—the problem does not go away simply because of such frantic buck-passing.

My very first case following my election 12 years ago was that of a young teenage boy who had had a quite late diagnosis of Asperger’s. The problem was being pushed from pillar to post in trying to get support for that child. In the end, it was almost literally a case of banging the heads together of the representatives of social services, and health and education services, to get them round a table. After a lot of stress, hassle and hard work, we got them jointly to fund a pot of money to provide a package of support for the child. What an ordeal that was, not only for those like me who came to it late, but for the child’s parents over too many years. How much better it would have been if the problem had been picked up earlier and if support had been offered earlier, rather than the great treasure hunt of parents having to try to find support with a minimum of help and information.

Many problems affect SEN, and I want to touch on a few of them. On assessment—this goes for SEN and particularly speech and language needs—too many parents tell us that they have encountered substantial difficulties with school-related assessments and provision. They mention two important problems. First, when a pre-school child has been identified as needing help, adequate SALT—speech and language therapy—assistance is often not available. When no identification has been possible pre-school, assessment and help is often difficult to obtain and slow in coming, if it comes at all.

Secondly, in special schools where children have serious language disorders or where language problems are part of a child’s wider spectrum of special needs, parents too often find that the statementing process is too adversarial and drawn out. In too many cases, after considerable expenditure of time and money, it can result in little or no help for their children. The Conservatives believe that the system needs to be streamlined, easier for parents to navigate and less adversarial.

My hon. Friend is as ever making a compelling case. In the light of what he has just said, would he take the opportunity to reiterate that, given the in-built conflict of interest in local education authorities, there is much to be said for the argument that we have been making for some time for a clean separation of the assessment of need from the funding of provision?

I entirely agree, and I shall outline in a little more detail some proposals that we would like to put more teeth into provision—to go much further than my hon. Friend’s reasonable Bill.

We all face the problem of joined-up action. Responsibilities for various aspects of SEN are vested in schools, children’s centres, primary care trusts and local authority departments, but parents and teachers report that too often children’s needs are not met because of inadequate liaison among those bodies. The teaching staff in too many schools have little or no expertise in recognising that speech and language intervention, for example, is needed. Too often, after a child has been assessed as requiring help by a speech and language therapist, usually employed by a primary care trust, the local authority can take months to reassess the case for funding purposes. Even then, it will not always make resources available via a statement or through additional School Action Plus funding.

I have just had an appalling case of a child who was clearly in need of a specialist statement of support. The articulate, middle-class parents clearly knew what their child required and worked closely with the school, which had clearly acknowledged the problem, but they could not get a proper statement. It was delayed again and again. The local authority prevaricated and tried to make out that the need was substantially less than the experts said it was. The parents had to commission their own assessment, at no little expense. They then commissioned and paid for their own speech and language therapy specialist to work in the school, with the acquiescence of the school.

At long last, after the intervention of myself and others, we have finally got an admission that the parents and the school had been right all along. We have now achieved the publication of a statement showing the extremity of that child’s problems and what needs to be done about them. Actually, to give it its due, the local authority has now agreed to refund the money that the parents had to spend on employing their own therapist in the school. How much better would it have been if that could all have been agreed at the outset, and if the parents had not had to go through that constant battle, that war of attrition. Many parents are unable to see such battles through to the end, simply because they do not have the resources, the nous or the strength of character to pursue them on behalf of their children.

The hon. Gentleman is making an interesting case. He has demonstrated that some children are less equal than others and, even within the subset of the less equal children, there are inequalities. Rich parents can afford private psychologists’ statements, but paying £1,000 for such a statement is certainly out of the reach of the majority of my constituents. Does he agree that we need to ensure that we do not end up with a two-tier system in special educational needs, in which the better off and the middle classes can obtain the services, while the rest get left behind?

The hon. Lady makes a valid point. These cases can be an enormous financial and emotional drain on the parents, whether they are slightly better-off middle-class people or not.

What I resent more than anything is the culture of brinkmanship in certain local authority education departments. They wait and see just how far they can push it before the parents drop their quest. I have had cases in which the local authority has dropped a case the day before it was to go before a tribunal, at which the cards were clearly going to be stacked in favour of the parents. That demonstrates the weakness of the local authority’s case all along.

My hon. Friend is right; that culture of brinkmanship is widespread. Does he acknowledge that, when such an approach is adopted, a lot of money is wasted? That money is wasted either directly, by the authority making payments, or simply through the waste of the expensive time of its own professional in-house staff, who could have been better deployed concentrating on the appropriate priorities rather than fighting hopeless battles.

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. We must consider not only the cost of the in-house staff but the even greater cost of the external legal specialists who are employed by the local authority to fight the cases against these poor, unsuspecting parents. A enormous amount of money is wasted: witness the huge number of appeals—not just one or two—that are upheld in favour of the parents. That shows that the parents have a very strong case in an awful lot of those situations.

I also want to talk about inclusion, to which I shall return, and about teacher training. We believe that, because speech and language development is the foundation of all education, all initial teacher training should include the teaching of some basic skills in identifying problems in this area. At the moment, such modules are all but unobtainable. In-service teacher training for speech and language special needs should also be more widely available, and schools should be encouraged to have at least one member of staff trained in that way. That goes to the heart of the first clause of the Bill.

There is also evidence that, although an adequate number of speech and language therapists are being trained, there are not enough posts available for them. They therefore seek other employment and can often be lost to the profession. That is an obvious waste of resources, but this dysfunction could be remedied if recommendations that we have made on assessment and funding were to be accepted. I shall come back to that shortly.

My hon. Friend referred to the “dark abyss of nothingness” in relation to secondary-level provision. There is certainly evidence that many secondary school pupils, as well as those in further education, find it difficult, if not impossible, to access appropriate speech and language therapy. Best practice really needs to include better transition arrangements when a child with a special educational need moves up to secondary school and then on to further education. At the moment, such arrangements simply do not exist.

A further problem exists with information transparency and accountability. Evidence suggests that many parents of children with special educational needs often feel that they have been left without much understanding of their child’s needs and of how they can assist. Best practice should ensure that proper feedback and assistance are given to parents. That aim was also part of the Bill introduced by the hon. Member for Gateshead, East and Washington, West last year.

Best practice should also include better support for carers from the relevant agencies. We support moves to encourage schools to publish more transparent information about their record, and about their facilities for SEN pupils, which could form part of the Ofsted inspection process. That relates to the second clause of my hon. Friend’s Bill. It is particularly relevant to the problems with joined-up thinking that have already been highlighted.

My hon. Friend has given the House many worrying statistics. He said that 40 per cent. of children with autism were bullied at school. In surveys of staff at schools, many readily admit that they are ill prepared to give proper support to children with special educational needs. Teachers acknowledge that they are struggling. My hon. Friend has alluded to the poor educational achievement by too many children with special educational needs, but I do not think that he mentioned that 75 per cent. of children in pupil referral units had special educational needs. That is another moot point.

It is absolutely right that we take this problem seriously. It is a false economy not to do so. Further figures show that disabled adults are half as likely to be in employment as people without a disability. Only 15 per cent. of adults with autism are likely to be in full-time paid employment. It is essential—and, of course, absolutely right—that we get early detection, early intervention and early provision absolutely right, as the Bill seeks to do.

As hon. Members have said, we are not just talking about learning disabilities. The word “disability” appears in the title of the Bill, and it covers not only physical disabilities but mental illnesses, whose treatment is very much a Cinderella service. The hon. Member for Wakefield mentioned children and adolescent mental health services—CAMHS—in this context.

The hon. Lady and my hon. Friend touched on the subject of deaf children. The National Deaf Children’s Society has said that deaf children are 41 per cent. less likely to achieve five GCSEs, and that 28 per cent. fail to achieve level 3 at key stage 2 English, compared with just 6 per cent. of all children. More than 80 per cent. of deaf children attend mainstream schools, but an NDCS survey for the “Must Do Better” report on the educational underachievement of deaf children found that one in four parents felt that the deaf awareness of their child’s teacher was not good. This is all about proper communication with staff and between schools and teachers.

The crazy thing is that none of that is new; this has been going on for far too long. We had more reports this year. The report back in February from Sir Alan Steer on behaviour in schools urged action to tackle the disproportionate exclusion of children with special educational needs. We need to think a lot more smartly about how we exclude children from school and, more importantly, about what they go on to outside the school if they are excluded.

My hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham also mentioned the excellent preliminary findings in the inquiry by Brian Lamb, who made a number of recommendations, including

“SEN and disability training for all school improvement partners working in mainstream schools”;

that

“Ofsted’s parent questionnaires should include questions for parents of SEN and disabled pupils”;

and that

“Local authority websites should include SEN policies and disability equality schemes for all schools in their area.”

Brian Lamb also highlighted the fact that too much bureaucracy is associated with SEN and recommended the scrapping of the obligation on schools to produce so many policies relating to SEN provision.

We are in danger of not being able to see the wood for the trees. A lot has gone on, but the quality of the outcomes leaves a lot to be desired.

There is a lot going on, and we need to be clear that it is all co-ordinated and inclined to be self-reinforcing. If it ends up going in different directions, that will be very damaging. Does my hon. Friend recall that I called for a strengthening of the guidance on exclusions? It has been changed a couple of times over the past couple of years, so there is no reason why it should not be tweaked a third time. Does he agree that the attendance and behaviour partnerships on which the Government intend to issue guidance later this year are of the essence? That guidance must be consistent with the other guidance and perhaps it would be helpful if the consultation on it could extend to interested right hon. and hon. Members.

That is a very fair point; I absolutely endorse it.

More legislation and regulation are not always the answer. We require the right legislation and regulation, and for them to be appropriate and effective. I fear that a lot of what this Government have done over recent years has been about piling regulation on regulation, which has completely queered the pitch in this case. The benchmark of whether it is right or not must be the quality of the outcomes for the children whom it is meant to help and support, and whom it too often does not.

The other point from Brian Lamb, which endorses clause 2, is about inspections, which

“frequently ignore the experiences of children with SEN, so any problems remain unheard and unrecognised. As a result, children with autism often struggle to reach their potential.”

There are also concerns that a survey found that a third of secondary schools in England are not ready for the new regulations on provision for SEN pupils that are due to come into effect from September of this year, whereby all SENCOs will need a formal teaching qualification and to receive additional training. I certainly support those measures, but the Association of School and College Leaders and other teaching groups have warned that many schools are not ready or already run alternative arrangements, which work well and will have to be dismantled. We need a degree of flexibility where there are already examples of best practice. That links to clause 1 of my hon. Friend’s Bill.

The Times Educational Supplement reported last month that thousands of SEN teachers are at risk of having their pay cut under proposals to overhaul allowances. Teachers who work predominately with SEN pupils qualify for an extra payment of more than £1,900 per annum, but the minimum allowance could be cut to £1,000 if the Government approve new recommendations. All these new regulations, all this new guidance and all the new legislation will not have an effect if we do not have the people in place at the sharp end who can deliver the services and support that we all agree these children need. We must make sure that the professional teaching staff are there, are on side and are signed up to the changes that we all want to see.

I want to finish by discussing some of the proposals that my party produced, with the help of Sir Robert Balchin, in the second report of the Commission on Special Needs in Education back in 2007. They are relevant to the Bill and, in fact, go further than it. In that report, we proposed root-and-branch reform of the system, from the assessment of children to the provision of services.

That returns me to the point on which my hon. Friend just challenged me. At the moment, local authorities are the assessors of a child’s need and are responsible for arranging provision for that need and for funding it. That treble responsibility has led local authorities gradually to reduce the number of statements issued, clearly so as to save money. Over the past 10 years, the number of children for whom a statement of SEN was made has changed. Back in 1997, the figure was 35,650, yet in 2006 the figure had reduced substantially—by a third—to some 22,600. The number of tribunals over that period went up sharply, by some 40 per cent., with a large number of parents winning their appeals to tribunals. The problem has not gone away. There are fewer statements, but there is clearly still a big problem. Parents are less satisfied with the support that they receive and therefore have to go to a tribunal to try to get a better deal for their children. As a result, the number of statements issued over the past 10 years has fallen by a third and there is greater dissatisfaction about whether children are getting the appropriate support that they need.

We think that there is a case for separating the powers of the local authority and handing the responsibility for assessment to independent professionals. One of our commission’s key recommendations was that statements should be replaced by special needs profiles drawn up by profile assessors, who will be educational psychologists and other such professionals. The profiles would be cumulative and subject to regular review, ensuring that continued assessment and provision could be as dynamic as the child’s needs, because, of course, situations change. A child does not have a static special educational need that requires the same support, or the same level of support, all the way through that child’s school career. In recognising that early intervention is crucial, the commission also urged that special needs profiles should be created as early in a child’s life as possible.

The profiles would allocate the child to one of a number of support categories, as is the case in the United States, Canada and much of Europe. Each level of support would then legally attract a certain amount of funding, which the pupil would carry to a mainstream or special school. Parents would be able to negotiate with any mainstream or special school for a place, irrespective of the local authority area in which they lived. To avoid the stress of tribunals, which I have already mentioned, we also want to see a special needs mediation scheme to try to establish the best approach for a child by agreement rather than by conflict, adversarialism and brinkmanship.

Another proposal was that special schools, under a rolling programme, should be given special academy status, providing considerable greater freedoms to develop as their professional requirements suggest and to expand pupil numbers. That follows on from the recent announcements on the inclusion of primary schools in the academy programme.

The whole new system that we have proposed will lead to inclusion where parents want it. In some areas, some types of inclusion have long proved a great success. Many children with sight and hearing impediments, for example, benefit enormously from integration, as we have already mentioned, as do children with physical disabilities. We should not skirt over the enormous social benefits to all children who have been taught alongside them. That is the sort of common-sense premise from which inclusion was first born.

The reasonable assumption is that those capable of participating in mainstream education should be able to do so, regardless of their disability. However, that moderate and sensible belief was hijacked in the late 1990s and skewed into a rather hard-line ideology. Baroness Warnock, whose 1978 report on special educational needs caused the enshrining of the policy of inclusion in the Education Act 1981, has herself recently denounced inclusion as having gone too far. She has recognised that it has condemned many children with highly complex and sensitive needs to an all too restrictive mainstream schooling.

We should also know that, across the board, parents’ confidence in mainstream education has wavered since 1997. As is well known, since then the number of children attending independent schools has risen by more than 11 per cent.—that was certainly the case before the recent effects of the recession. More and more parents have scrimped and saved to be able to afford school fees and to opt out of the state system. What is less well known is that 83 per cent. of that new intake have had special educational needs. That damning indictment shows how parents feel about SEN provision in too many maintained schools. We need to restore confidence in the system, and that means making it more precise and fairer, and honing it to the needs of parents and children.

What is the source of the statistic that 83 per cent. of the children who have gone to private schools in the past 12 years have had special educational needs? Where did that information come from—from the private schools or the parents? Who collected that information?

I cannot give the exact reference here, but I think that the hon. Lady will find it in the Bow Group report, “SEN: The Truth about Inclusion”, which was produced last year. A lot of interesting research data were collected as part of the report.

If we make more money follow the child, we put parents in the driving seat. However, doing so will achieve more than that: it will encourage other forms of inclusion. As appropriate funding accompanies a child’s needs, schools will be able to use the additional cash to develop specialist units on site. That means that in some lessons, children with particular needs can be taught with others who share the same difficulties, and in others they can muck in with the rest of their year group. Crucially, SEN children will be allowed to socialise together, particularly in break time and extended school time, and also to take part in the whole school community with other children. Such a system will work for some schools and some children. For others, however, special schools will always be a better option.

For children who feel stigmatised or withdrawn, a period in a special school may be necessary, just as it would be for children with severe difficulties. These are complex and personal issues, which is why parents must be in a position to make the decisions that they think right for their children. That means ensuring that special schools are there to be chosen. However, the trouble is that since 1997 more than 9,000 special school places have been lost, and with them has gone expert provision for children in great need.

In 2008, there were 174 fewer special schools than in 1997; one in seven special schools has been lost. That links directly to clause 3. Between 7 and 9 per cent. of all permanent exclusions from mainstream schools are given to pupils with a statement of special educational needs—pupils disproportionately represented in the pupil referral unit system. If more of those pupils had been given the option of going to special schools, more would undoubtedly have been given more appropriate provision. That would have meant that fewer would have been excluded in the first place.

We need to look at the issue flexibly; what is appropriate for each individual child is a matter of horses for courses. What we suggest does not mean that inclusion does not work, just that we need a system that is more responsive to the needs of children and their parents’ judgment. We want an education system that offers parents real choice to decide what is best for their children, and there should be an end to inclusion “come what may”, in favour of getting a balance. We need to think more smartly about exclusion. We need to make sure that we give back powers to heads and teachers to deal with genuinely disobedient, disruptive or violent children and that SEN children are given every opportunity to succeed, so that they do not become just another exclusion statistic, having failed at school because of the absence of the suitable and appropriate provision to which they are entitled.

In conclusion, I should say that at the moment the whole system is too cumbersome, bureaucratic and stressful—and often too costly, with the money going to the wrong targets. Parents coping with SEN children are already under a lot of pressure; they need help, advice and support, not barriers constantly being put in their way, wearing them down. They do not need to be made to go through lots of hoops or to be threatened with adversarial hearings. They should not have to fight all the way for what is rightfully for them and their children. As my hon. Friend said, too often it is the more articulate, middle-class parents who stand any chance of fending their way through this complicated and stressful system. In some parts of the country, there are examples of a much more user-friendly system working in certain schools and local authority areas, but in too many the reverse is true, and it is still far too much of a postcode lottery.

I hope that the Bill will be able to address some of these problems. First, we need better training of teachers so that they can identify the problem and intervene earlier, and carry more professional clout in securing the appropriate support and being part of the decision and policy-making process, as my hon. Friend mentioned. Secondly, we need to ensure that SEN provision is a standard component of Ofsted reports, in the same way that standards of teaching, examination results and the welfare of children in the care of schools are an integral part of Ofsted inspections. Thirdly, we need to tackle, as the Bill endeavours to do in an interesting way, the conveyor belt of raw exclusion, whereby children are simply excluded without proper regard to how they can be properly picked up on outside the school. That is no one’s interests, notwithstanding the fact that we need to ensure that teachers’ and heads’ authority and powers, which are being stripped away far too much, are given back to them.

The Bill puts forward some perfectly reasonable proposals in a not overly prescriptive way. As such, I hope that the Government will respond to it favourably and positively. I hope that there will be the opportunity to scrutinise its proposals in more detail in Committee, and on that basis I very much wish it well.

I am grateful to the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) for his contribution to this excellent debate. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh) on her racy and intoxicating contribution. The hon. Member for Buckingham (John Bercow) made an excellent speech delivered with passion, knowledge and a commitment to do what is absolutely right and in the best interests of not only his own constituents but those of every Member of this House. I very much congratulate him on introducing the Bill.

It is also important to give credit to the Government, as indeed the hon. Member for Buckingham did, for the work that has gone on since 1997. There have been huge achievements and leaps forward on this and other matters relating to the best interests of our young people, whether it is the 3,000 Sure Start children’s centres, the additional teaching support or the extra money that is going into the school system. We need to give credit for what has happened so far, with a little bit of extra push, encouragement and gentle guidance to ensure that that work is built on for the future.

I pay tribute to North Staffordshire Asperger/Autism Association, which does fantastic work in and around Stoke-on-Trent and north Staffordshire more widely, as well as in south Cheshire. It promotes and highlights the issue and supports, helps and works not only with people who are on the autistic spectrum but the carers, families and support groups around those people.

Before turning to the Bill, I want briefly to pick up on a couple of points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield. First, she raised the issue of reading to babies. I am delighted to know that, on a widespread basis, not only babies but unborn babies are being read to, as parents are being encouraged to read to the child in the womb. That sets the right standard for the future. If parents get into such habits from the earliest possible moment, that must be to the good.

I thank my hon. Friend for his kind comments. Of course, as public speakers we all learn from the master of the Chamber—the hon. Member for Buckingham, who made such an eloquent speech.

On reading to babies, I am beginning to feel that I have failed completely in my duties as a mother in not having read to either of my children while they were in the womb. I hope that we can reassure prospective parents throughout the country that people have grown up perfectly well without that. However, if the research that is going on into child, baby and foetal development—it is cutting-edge, incredibly important stuff—shows that that is what should be happening, we need to be getting the message out there.

Will my hon. Friend pay tribute to Booktrust? After conducting research showing that a significant percentage of children grew up in a household that had fewer than three books, it has ensured through a programme of distributing books at 18 months, with check-ups at three and five years, that more children are growing up in a household that has at least six books.

I fully agree with my hon. Friend’s comments. I did not wish to give the impression that parents must read to their unborn children, but that sets the right tone.

We are exploring an extremely important theme, as I am sure you would readily testify, Mr. Deputy Speaker, as a man of enormous experience. May I say to the hon. Gentleman that since my children came out of their mother’s womb, I have not only frequently read to them but more frequently been accused of speechifying at them?

All I can say is that is that the hon. Gentleman’s children must be blessed to hear on a regular basis the words of wisdom that emerge from him. I am sure that they will grow to be well-developed young people through the experience that they gain from that.

And I bet he doesn’t take interventions from them.

The hon. Gentleman suggests that they should intervene themselves; I am sure that they will soon learn to do so.

While we are talking about recollections from the womb, may I ask my hon. Friend whether he is aware that Samuel Beckett once said that his earliest memory was from the womb, from a conversation when his mother went to a dinner party in Dublin? When asked what it was like, he said, “Oh, terribly bourgeois and boring.”

I think that I shall draw a curtain around this particular aspect of the debate, save to say, if I may make so bold, that I am sure an extremely good source of reading for both prenatal and postnatal children would be some of the excellent books that you have penned, Mr. Deputy Speaker.

To return to the points that my hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield made, what concerns me about appointments is not only that they are often held during the day in the case of children who are identified as having special educational needs. We must also consider prenatal appointments, and we need to examine much more closely the availability of time slots both for parents whose children have special educational needs and for those who have yet to have their children. A working mother, for example, has to take time out of her working day to attend appointments, whether they are formal, part of a support network, or a way of engaging with their small children later on. There needs to be a much better look at how we structure appointments, so that they are held not for the benefit of the staff but for the benefit of service users.

My hon. Friend made very well an important point about violence. A case came to me, as a constituency MP, involving a parent of teenage child who had, in their earliest years, exhibited violent behaviour as a result of their special needs, which had never been formally picked up on and assessed. When the child was small it could be controlled, contained and dealt with, but as they got older and moved through the teenage years, there came the stage that my hon. Friend talked about. My constituent was effectively being beaten by an older teenage child. I understand that the response from the authorities, in the wider sense of the word, was, “Well, you’d better report it to the police.” That is not what we want. We need to ensure that parents, and especially the young person concerned, get help and support, rather than involve the criminal system. That seems completely against what we should be looking to do, which is encourage people to come forward and ask for help and support. Thankfully, that situation has been satisfactorily resolved, but it flags up an important issue about violence and what happens around it.

The target to reduce the number of statements has been mentioned several times today, but therein lies very dangerous ground, because, sadly, many local authorities throughout the country are already reluctant to investigate the route of statementing. If there were something behind which they could hide and say, “Well, it is a Government target that we do not have as many statements,” I suspect and fear that some of the less progressive and less well-meaning authorities would use it as a fig leaf to mask their inaction and the great difficulty that some parents have in entering the statementing process itself. My local authority in Stoke-on-Trent has a good record on the time that it takes to process a statement, but I am yet to be convinced that it even scratches the surface in respect of those young people who need to be statemented.

I shall now deal with the issue of stigma. I have had many experiences, with constituents and in previous occupations, of the positive and negative impacts of stigma. For example, when I was a councillor in the city of Birmingham, I was also on the governing body of a primary school, and we had an application for a child with a sight impairment. He wanted to go to the school and his parents were very keen for him to go, but because of his sight problems, involving difficulties in very bright light and with finding his way around, there was a concern on the governing body about whether the school would be able to cater for him. We successfully made sure that the school would be able to accommodate and welcome that young person, however, and the school benefited hugely from the experience.

That young person entered a school with a warm and wonderful atmosphere. It was, and I believe still is, a very good school, and the interaction of the other pupils with that visually impaired pupil was superb. They learned so much and became more understanding and accommodating of somebody whose life experiences were outwith their own; and the adaptations and amendments that were required were straightforward and simple. A little bit of drive and forethought enabled the school to become accessible to someone with a visual impairment, and that is brilliant.

More recently, I visited a primary school in my constituency—I am blessed with some absolutely excellent primary schools throughout my constituency—that has a pupil with Down’s syndrome. I have known her through her family for a year or two, and she is a wonderful pupil. When I visited, a cooking session was taking place, and some pupils had been taken to it. Each week, there is great competition to be picked to take part in that Friday lunchtime session, and as I walked down the corridor, I saw that the pupils were in a small kitchen making cakes. That was of great interest to me, given my sylph-like figure. The children were resplendent in chefs hats and outfits, we spoke, the head teacher showed me around, we talked with staff and, as we left and started to walk down to the next class to continue our tour of the school, the young lady in question, Nadia, who I am sure will forgive me for mentioning her name, emerged into the corridor. She had been learning French, and with a swoop of her arm—a gesture—she said, “Bonjour!” For me, that typifies both the properly supported integration of children with special educational needs, which is what we should be driving for, and how we should aim to ensure not only that every child matters, but that every disabled child matters, so that everybody is given the opportunity to grow their unique talents.

As I mentioned, children without statements have even greater challenges than children who have been statemented. From what I have seen in the primary schools in my constituency and from my previous experience, I am concerned about some children who have not been statemented or not been through the system of identifying what extra support and resources they need. Often, such children are quite rightly given support, but in a school environment where the head teacher, the senior management or perhaps even the class teacher have recognised the need for additional support, sometimes it falls to a worker in that school—be it a teacher or a welfare assistant—to support additional children who perhaps have additional needs.

That misses the point. It is right that those children should have that support, but it should be given properly and in a way that ensures that their needs are properly assessed. Perhaps I can bring to my hon. Friend the Minister’s attention the need for a piece of work to be done whereby schools can be audited to find out how many of their children receive informal additional support, but have not been statemented. That might give us a much more accurate figure than the one that the hon. Member for Buckingham talked about at the start of his speech.

Clause 1(2) states:

“It shall be the duty of local authorities in England to ensure that all teaching staff employed in schools have sufficient training and expertise to provide an appropriate education”.

We also need to ensure not only that teaching and non-teaching staff have the additional training and expertise to provide education for pupils with SEN, but that they have the ability to recognise pupils with SEN. All too often, the stereotypical view of a teacher in a primary school is of someone in a classroom with perhaps 30 demanding, curious and questioning pupils. With the best will in the world, unless that teacher or other members of staff, be they teaching or non-teaching staff, have the training to spot things and say, “That pupil responded in an interesting way in that lesson—we should find out whether there is something that we should identify” or “That pupil there seems to be constantly withdrawn and seems never to want to engage,” there will be another hurdle in giving our young people the additional support that they need.

Not only should we ensure that staff—not just teaching staff, but non-teaching staff—have sufficient training and expertise to provide an appropriate education; we should ensure that they have the training to recognise when a pupil is demonstrating signs of special educational need. The other issue is ensuring that our schools up and down the country have enough trained staff—enough welfare assistants and teaching staff—to provide the proper level of education, whether it be formal education in a classroom setting or even just education in basic life skills and engaging in positive play in the playground.

That reminds me that one key group of staff in many schools is the dinner supervision staff, whether they are on the catering side or working in support of it. When children are out playing at lunchtime, often the lunchtime supervisory staff also need the training and expertise to know how to deal with, assess and sometimes—dare I say it—cope with the demands of a child with special educational needs. We have some fantastic staff up and down the country. Indeed, the lunchtime supervisory staff and catering staff I have met on the rounds of the various schools in my constituency have always demonstrated the highest level of commitment to the children in their care, but it helps and rewards them more if they are given support and training.

The hon. Gentleman has just made an extremely astute observation about the lunchtime period and the need for high-quality staff to be visible and active during it. That is of the essence. Does he agree that these two other examples of why it is necessary to have good provision during lunch time are relevant: first, a child with SEN—one on the autistic spectrum, for example—might find independent play very difficult; and, secondly, that child might find the extremely noisy atmosphere of the playground very disconcerting or perhaps even frightening?

I am grateful for that intervention, in which the hon. Gentleman raised some excellent points. I think that he used the word “symbiotic” earlier to describe the relationship between our separate contributions, which must be very worrying to the Whips on both sides of the House.

Other Members wish to speak, so I shall move on to make a couple of further points. Since before I entered Parliament, I have been concerned about pre-school identification. If the Bill goes into Committee, I would like to see it amended to incorporate some provisions about that problem. I am aware of the “Son-Rise” programme, through which pre-school children on the autistic spectrum can really benefit from receiving help long before they get into the school system.

Clause 1 deals with schools, and an important issue is the definition of such beyond just primary and secondary schools. For nursery and early-years provision, the requirement to have staff who know and understand what to look for across the whole range of SEN and other forms of disability—including deafness, for example, which my hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield talked about—is crucial. There is a profound need to ensure that young people are identified and assessed at the earliest possible opportunity and then given all the support they need and deserve. It would be helpful if we could widen the Bill to include nursery provision and, ideally, provision at an even earlier age. Perhaps the Minister could speak to her opposite numbers in the Department of Health to discuss how a much more widespread and wide-ranging programme of early identification could be brought about. We could perhaps work towards a position where statements were issued long before a child reached primary school.

Let me move on to the other end of the problem, so to speak, by which I mean adults who may have gone right through their education without ever being assessed or given appropriate support and the opportunities it could have provided. I have a couple of quick points. First, I urge the Government to undertake some form of audit of people who were never assessed and never given support in order to establish whether any common pattern can be discerned in respect of where they lived, who their local GP was, which primary and secondary schools they went to and so forth. In other words, we need to work back to discover the opportunities missed for getting these people assessed, statemented and provided with the support they needed. I urge the Minister to discuss with her ministerial colleagues the possibility of providing such a reverse audit—not to lay blame, but to ensure that we correct the problem in the future.

Until recently, my constituency was home to the Hamilton centre for adults with special educational needs. Sadly, the centre has now closed, with the service re-provided in Shelton in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent, Central (Mark Fisher). I support and help carers of a group of adults who believe that the services provided by the Hamilton centre were the most appropriate for them. Although Stoke-on-Trent city council has been good at explaining its decision on the alternative provision, with the best will in the world, it has missed the point because, as the hon. Member for Buckingham said, a range of services is needed, and for some people the Hamilton centre offers the right service. It might not be the right service in the view of social workers or some eminent professionals, but it is in the opinion of individuals and their carers. Therefore, we need to ensure that it is provided as part of a suite of services.

I agree with the extremely good argument that SENCOs should be senior members of staff. At the highest levels of governance of a school, a SENCO should be saying, “Come on, folks, this service needs to be improved,” or, “We should be celebrating what we are doing. This is really good provision.” Unless SENCOs are at the highest level of governance, they will not have the necessary clout to make changes when appropriate.

I have a few concerns—perhaps this is where the symbiotic relationship will fall down—about the need for SENCOs to be qualified teachers. Up and down the country, there are SENCOs who have done a superb job at the highest level without having a formal teaching qualification. I will avoid the obvious metaphor, but we are in danger of losing the skills and ability of some very good SENCOs who, for whatever reason, are not able or willing to go through the qualification process to become teachers. I urge my hon. Friend the Minister, with whom I have discussed the issue recently, to examine the case of those SENCOs who do a superb job but are not in a position to qualify as a teacher either because of age or personal circumstances.

In an intervention, I expressed concern about other duties. Given how important it is that SENCOs do their job to the fullest of their ability, that their training is constantly updated, and that their continuing professional development is maintained to the highest standards, stretching them in myriad other directions and challenging and questioning how every hour of their time is spent is a problem. I urge my hon. Friend the Minister to consider how schools use their SENCOs, and what other duties those schools impose on those staff.

Proposed new section 14B(5) states:

“Any regulations made under subsection (4) must in particular specify a requirement for every member of staff appointed as Special Educational Needs Co-ordinator to have training in special educational needs and disability, including autism.”

Later, in the interpretation clause, the meaning of “autism” is clarified, but, on a minor point, I wonder whether the proposed new section should include a more explicit reference to autistic spectrum disorder.

I do not know whether I am alone in this view, but I think that perhaps Ofsted inspections should take place without notice. I know that changes have been made to the arrangements, but I think that rather than a school’s being given a week or a month’s notice of an inspection, it might be better for an inspector to turn up at lunchtime on a wet Wednesday and to say “Hello there—I am your Ofsted inspector and I have come to carry out an inspection.”

There are a number of problems with Ofsted, but one of them is the flurry of activity that takes place before an inspection to ensure that staff understand what the policy requires and are present to discuss it. I think that we may be creating a false idea of what happens during an Ofsted inspection. I must choose my words carefully here, but in years gone by it was said that members of the royal family believed that coal was white because it was always whitewashed. We are encouraging school staff to run around like mad things preparing themselves for an inspection, when it would be better to have a shapshot of what really happens at lunchtime on that wet Wednesday when the inspector calls unannounced.

We should also bear in mind the huge stress to which we subject staff in the run-up to an Ofsted inspection. It would be much better for them to know that the inspector will see them warts and all than to feel that they must be on their best behaviour as he or she observes them giving a lesson. We should take a bit of the pressure off them, so that they need not spend a month in a heightened state of frenzy.

I urge my hon. Friend the Minister to consider introducing SEN inspections. Specialist Ofsted inspectors would visit schools around the country simply looking at SEN provision and at pupils. They would have been trained to be able to identify pupils who had not been statemented but should have been, and the school staff could use that as a resource. If they expressed concern about, say, three or four children who had not been statemented, the inspector, or inspection team, might respond supportively by expressing surprise that the authority had not granted statements. Inspectors would be able to bring specialist knowledge to bear and to say “Best practice at the moment is to do something slightly different”, or, alternatively, “What you are doing here is best practice, and we will ensure that it is spread when we carry out further specialist inspections.”

The issue of exclusions concerns me greatly, for several reasons. We routinely exclude young people from schools when their only crime has been to have a special educational need which may manifest itself in violent behaviour in the classroom or in disobedience. That is not the problem, however. The problem is the underlying one of a special educational need that may never have been picked up. At a certain point after primary school and the early years of secondary education, frustration or one of a host of other possible triggers may cause young people with special educational needs to demonstrate behaviour that is more exaggerated. They may have managed to lose themselves in the big school until that point, but something then happens that causes them to stand out. That may lead to exclusion, although the only crime that such young people have committed is having a need that has not been recognised or met.

I should like to see a review—rather like a backwards audit—of people who have passed through the entire education system without having ever been statemented. I should also like to see an audit of exclusions to establish how many involve young people who have never been statemented but should have been. Such problems ought to be picked up early, although some young people may not demonstrate the behaviour that draws them to the attention of the school authorities and leads to an exclusion until the last year of their schooling. By that time, in some senses it is too late, but it should not be. As has been said, there is a void and an abyss: a child reaches school-leaving age and is abandoned. We need to make sure that we identify the problems as soon as possible.

I am also concerned about informal exclusions, when, for example, a parent might be told: “The Ofsted inspectors are due in on Monday. You’ve been talking about taking your young one for a few days away; doing that next week would be a really good idea.” Alternatively, a parent might receive a telephone call in the morning to be told: “We think it would be a good idea if you took your child home for lunch and then they come back in tomorrow.” Although they are illegal, such informal exclusions happen time and again.

I am glad that the hon. Gentleman is giving proper scrutiny to the exclusions issue, and in particular informal and unofficial exclusions, which I agree are illegal. Is it not particularly galling, and an indictment of the schools that do it, that some schools exclude SEN and disabled children on sports day, or from visits to a theatre or a holiday camp, or, perhaps, when the school is to receive what it considers to be very important visitors? Is it not intolerable that a school might exclude such a child out of a crude sense of administrative convenience, or from a desire to avoid embarrassment?

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. It is worse than intolerable; it is absolutely disgraceful—even diabolical. To return to the point about Nadia and her flurry of “bonjours”, it adds to a school if children with special educational needs are at the very heart of what it does, because that shows the quality of its care. When I visit schools, it is often the little things—I hesitate to use that phrase as it might be misunderstood—that say so much. How a school helps and supports the most vulnerable members of our society speaks volumes about the quality of the school itself.

An issue connected with speech and language was brought to my attention by some dedicated health workers in my constituency. It is to do with soothers—dummies as they were called in my day. [Interruption.] I am guided by my hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh) that “soothers” is an American term, but it is the term that was used when the matter was raised with me. I gather that the cheapest—and therefore probably the most widely available, and the most accessible to parents on low incomes—dummies or soothers harm the early development of speech in young children, compared with the most expensive ones, which do not cause that harm. The huge raft of ongoing work on that needs to be driven forward.

The issue is not only to do with how dummies or soothers can impact on the language development of a child. If anyone sees a four-year-old sitting in a pushchair with a dummy in their mouth, it is obvious that they should not have it, but parents might need more guidance in respect of younger children who are about to cry, perhaps, or are very hungry or tired, and who need or want their dummy as a comfort. The sucking of dummies can also have dental implications for children as the milk teeth come through. I have spoken to dentists who have told me about a dummy arc that that they can spot occurring in a child’s mouth. Does my hon. Friend agree that children’s centres and Sure Start centres should be working with parents, and giving them clear guidelines? I sometimes think that health professionals worry about giving parents clearer instructions.

My hon. Friend makes her point well, almost to the extent that I need not comment further—but I shall, if I may. She is right about the issues associated with the dental impact of soothers. We must be slightly careful to ensure that parents who are sitting at home watching this debate are not fearful of doing almost anything, having listened to what we have said. The vast majority of parents love, care for and want to do what is right for their children, and would be horrified to learn that what they think is doing the right thing for their children—giving them a soother—is having an adverse effect on them. She is right to say that Sure Start centres are very well placed to help, but primary schools can be too. A parent of a child who is in primary school may well have another child of pre-primary school age, so that is another route by which parents can be educated about why certain types of soother are less appropriate than others and why others are more appropriate. By that means, we can ensure that something is done to address a speech and language problem that is easily solvable, so that the resources and support can be concentrated on other problems, rather than on children whose difficulty is not simply down to being given the wrong sort of soother. I ask the Minister to speak to her colleagues in the Department of Health to see what be done about the use of soothers.

In conclusion, let us consider the transition from primary to secondary school. That involves the handover of responsibility and the huge gulf faced by a child who has grown up in the warm, comforting and supportive environment of a primary school and is then suddenly let loose in a high school, where the vast majority of children are bigger, brasher and more menacing—whether or not that is their intention—than that small child who has come up from primary school. We need to do a lot more to manage that transition, which could involve a system of supporting not only children with SEN, but all children who move from primary to secondary school.

Perhaps we could have a system whereby some primary teachers move through for a term, in order to carry on working in a classroom environment with those primary children who are making the transition, particularly the children with SEN. It is a good point at which to tell some children that it is time for them to have new experiences and to have somebody new working with them. It is perhaps an opportunity for them to move to another stage of their development by having a new support worker. For other children, a support worker needs to move through to ensure that the stresses of moving schools and of changing support worker are both being managed. Again, the matter needs to be looked at with a fresh pair of eyes to ensure that the range of children who are making the transition from primary to secondary education—not just children with SEN—have that support.

This morning’s debate has been extremely good, and I congratulate the hon. Member for Buckingham on introducing the Bill. He commands great authority in this House on this matter. I believe I speak for colleagues on both sides of this House when I say that we look to him as one of the specialists in this subject. I congratulate all those who have spoken this morning, and indeed, all those who are yet to speak, on a matter that should be on the front pages of our newspapers, not just consigned—I say this with the greatest respect—to the work of the Hansard reporters.

I also wish to begin by congratulating the hon. Member for Buckingham (John Bercow) on the Bill. Like all the best private Members’ Bills, it sets out a clear framework and set of principles on which we can build. He has built up an enviable reputation in this area, and it is a pleasure to be able to support him. I also pay tribute to the other hon. Members who have spoken this morning. It has been an excellent debate, showing that the House of Commons can be at its best when we deal with issues on which there is a high level of consensus about how we can make progress. Like other hon. Members, I hope that, if we are not able to secure a Second Reading today, the Government will take on board many of the excellent suggestions in the Bill.

I speak with some experience on this matter, because before my election I was a secondary school teacher for 28 years, mainly in inner-city schools. For 15 of those years, I was the deputy head of a secondary school in Bradford. My experience at Yorkshire Martyrs college has coloured my understanding of special educational needs, because among its many strengths the school had an enviable reputation in Bradford for its work with children with special educational needs. One of the main lessons that I learned there is that it is not only students with a statement who have special educational needs. As other hon. Members have pointed out, up to one fifth of all school pupils have a special educational need of one kind or another. As the hon. Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh) said, the number of children on, for example, the autism spectrum has increased, as medical advances have improved diagnosis.

Against that background, it can be a daunting task for teachers in large schools with many pupils to ensure that the needs of every child are met. I know that that is the goal of all teachers, and we should not get hooked up concentrating only on those children with statements. Indeed, those children with statements are usually best provided for, and the problem is those who fall in the middle. They may have a support plan, but resources are often not made available. There is another postcode lottery when it comes to the level of support and provision made available for pupils by schools and local authorities. Clause 1 would begin to address that problem. I know that the Government’s code of practice sets out a clear process that schools and teachers have to adopt if they are to meet everyone’s needs, but it is a sad fact that that does not happen.

I know that teacher training now includes instruction on special educational needs provision, and how to identify that need, but many teachers never had that training. My school had a good record of such provision, but training is an ongoing process. I had a pupil with Asperger’s syndrome in my class a few years ago, and I needed appropriate training so that I could help him get the best out of his education. I was lucky: I had a fellow deputy head who could help. Incidentally, in my experience it can work best if schools have a deputy head who understands and has been trained in special educational needs and a SENCO, who does not always need to be part of the senior management. Margaret Christie, the deputy head, was assiduous in ensuring that all members of staff received the appropriate training when a need was identified.

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way and for his generous remarks about my own little efforts.

As we have this morning focused, among other matters, on teachers’ understanding—or lack of understanding—of the significance of special educational needs, does the hon. Gentleman agree, having just referred to Asperger’s syndrome, that it is profoundly unsatisfactory in 2009 that one can come across, as I did courtesy of TreeHouse recently, a quote from a teacher to a parent of an Asperger’s child, to wit: “I don’t believe in Asperger’s syndrome”? It is not a matter of belief, but of the established fact of the condition and how to cater to it.

I agree entirely with the hon. Gentleman; the condition is established. A few months ago, one hon. Member made a similar comment about dyslexia. Such expressions of ignorance do not deal with the problem. It is not our job or a teacher’s job to decide what is or is not a special need; rather, it is our job to respond to such needs.

I built a very close relationship with the mother of the young man to whom I referred. She worked as a support assistant nearby and would often come along and assist. By the time that young man left my school, he was happy and making progress. I felt that my school had done an excellent job in supporting him. The big problem is that that does not happen in every case. Sometimes, the relentless pursuit of exam results and improved gradings means that some teachers and some schools decide that certain individuals are not going to contribute to their school’s success and, unfortunately, they are asked to go elsewhere. That is wrong.

Clause 1 concentrates on training. It would make training provision a duty and a responsibility. Rightly, the clause mentions those with special educational needs and disabilities, and not only those who are statemented. We need to be able to cater for the whole range. The requirement in the clause for local authorities to publish plans for how they are going to meet those needs would go a long way towards dealing with some of the postcode lottery issues.

Any parent whose child has a special educational need going into school is presented with a vast panoply of bodies that they have to consult and with which they must involve themselves. Finding the support and help that they need can be a maze. Whether they should deal with the local PCT, education psychologists or the school itself is not clear. We all have a duty—the Bill does not prescribe it, but it does set out a means—to ensure that the process is signposted. The support and help that is given to parents needs to be clear so that they can get the help that they need.

My sister has two dyslexic boys. I remember the problems she experienced when they were in primary school. The local authority refused to arrange a test so that the boys’ dyslexia could be established. In fact, because she was able to do so, she paid for a dyslexia society to undertake the test, which was the only way for her to get that support. She is an articulate, very determined woman who does not take no for an answer. I am concerned that many parents do not get the support that they need, not because they do not want to push the door, but because they do not know how to push in the right direction to get what they need. Requiring local authorities to publish plans to say what will be available will go a long way. It would reinforce the Government’s statutory code of practice for special needs, which is already established. I very much welcome that proposal.

The hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent, South (Mr. Flello) mentioned special educational needs co-ordinators—SENCOs. They do not necessarily have to be qualified teachers. We had one in my school who was not, and she was excellent. She was widely respected in the school and did an excellent job in supporting all of us in delivering that particular service. It is right that all SENCOs should have training and, to back up what the hon. Member for Buckingham said, that someone at senior management level in the school should have responsibility for this area, and that they too should have training. That was the case in my school. We had a deputy with special training, and a SENCO. The deputy provided the support at senior management level to ensure that what was needed was actually provided.

The Government have decided this year to abolish key stage 2 tests. That provides them with a golden opportunity to use the resources that have been freed up to provide a statutory assessment for all pupils at the age of five. That is certainly my party’s policy. Rather than parents having to fight their way through a maze of different people and organisations to get an assessment, we would provide one for all young people as of right, using the resources that have been freed. That would take us a good way forward.

I agree with the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) about the separation of the assessment and the provision of statements. There is often a conflict in local authorities between the available resources and the statementing process. A separation of the two functions—so that the people providing the assessment were not also the people who had to provide the funding for the statement—would help parents and pupils to get what they were entitled to. That separation is long overdue, and its implementation is certainly my party’s policy.

I support the clause requiring the management of special needs to be an integral part of a successful Ofsted appraisal. During the passage of the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill, the Schools Minister said that it was highly unlikely that a school would get a good Ofsted rating if that provision for special needs was not of equal standing. The provision in the hon. Gentleman’s Bill puts beyond doubt that that provision should form an integral part of any successful Ofsted. This would make it clear to all schools that such provision was as important as successful exam results, as relationships with parents and as how the school is managed. I believe that that is the right way to go.

Clause 3 deals with permanent exclusions. My experience is that they represent a failure of the system to provide an education. If the process is working properly, some other provision can be made long before resorting to such a measure. At my school, we had to admit on many occasions that what we were able to provide for a young person did not meet their needs. We therefore made alternative provision, often using the school’s resources to buy in expertise or to buy time elsewhere. I find it hugely tragic that a third of all statemented pupils have had a permanent exclusion. There is clearly something wrong with the system and, as the hon. Member for Buckingham has said, a statemented child is nine times more likely to be excluded, which illustrates that something is going on in the system that is not meeting the young person’s needs. Although the numbers are low—780 in the last year for which figures are available—that is 780 permanent exclusions too many. Beneath that, there will probably be a much larger number of fixed-term exclusions, which in all probability will have built up to lead to that permanent exclusion. My experience of the best schools is that before someone ever gets to that position, something has happened lower down. If the Bill is considered further, I think that that should be explored.

I was lucky in the sense that our governors always took a much stronger interest in exclusions, whether they were fixed term or permanent, and before they would agree with any exclusion for anybody who presented with a special need—not necessarily just a statement—we had to be able to demonstrate that every other avenue had been explored. Sadly, that is sometimes not the case.

In conclusion, I welcome the Bill. I am delighted that the hon. Member for Buckingham has promoted it. It will strengthen the system. It sets a framework in place from which we can build and it is not too prescriptive—in my view, that is the best way. It builds on what the Government have already done and provides a framework from which we can move forward to ensure that we get the best out of all our young people. As the Government have rightly said, every child matters. In this case, we should say that every child with special needs and every disabled child matters as much as every other child. I welcome and support the Bill.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Buckingham (John Bercow) on both his success in the ballot and his speech introducing the Bill. He displayed his customary eloquence and clarity, which was all the more admirable as his speech was made without notes, and he once again demonstrated that he is a consummate parliamentarian.

This has been a very important debate, and one that I and all hon. Members present take very seriously. Although it is unfortunate that there are not as many Members in the Chamber as might have wished to be present, I am sure that they were with us in spirit as they were out campaigning on the doorsteps. I know that this issue exercises the minds of every Member.

We have had an interesting debate. My hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh) is not here, but I also pay tribute to her racy and intoxicating contribution. I am sure that she will not live that description down. The hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), who speaks for the Conservatives, demonstrated his experience in this field, not least as a vice-chairman of the all-party autism group. My hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent, South (Mr. Flello) took early intervention to a new level—not only before children are born but before they are even conceived. Finally, the hon. Member for Rochdale (Paul Rowen) brought his many years of experience as a teacher to bear in his informed remarks.

Let me return to the hon. Member for Buckingham, the promoter of the Bill. I know that the welfare of children with special educational needs and disabilities is close to his heart. He has always demonstrated a genuine concern for their best interests in ensuring that the provision in place offers the most effective support. He has a distinguished history in that respect, which is why my right hon. Friends the Secretaries of State for Children, Schools and Families and for Health invited him in September 2007 to undertake a review of services for children and young people with speech, language and communication needs, which has been referred to during the debate.

In July 2008, the hon. Gentleman produced an excellent report, clearly identifying where services needed to improve to suit the requirements of children with speech, language and communication needs. We were delighted to be able to accept his recommendations in full in our “Better Communication” action plan, published in December 2008.

We are making good progress on the hon. Gentleman’s recommendations. Among other activities outlined in the action plan, we are currently inviting local commissioners to apply to become communication needs commissioning pathfinders. Furthermore, we are tendering for the management of an unprecedented £1.5 million communication needs research programme and for support arrangements for the communication champion and communication council. The work of the champion and council will culminate in the national year of speech, language and communication in 2011-12.

I thank the Minister for giving way. I apologise for coming to the debate so late; my new grandchild was born last night, and it meant that I had to look after the other one this morning.

Is the Minister aware of that category of children who do not count as special needs children because they have high-functioning autism or Asperger’s? They can carry out tasks in class, but their communication and relationship skills are very weak and often leave them alienated. They do not count as special needs children because they do not have learning difficulties; they do not count as being in need of mental health support, because they do not have mental health disabilities. They are a sort of lost group—but a very significant one.

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention and congratulate her on the birth of her grandchild. She was not here for the earlier part of the debate, but I am sure that she will immediately be starting to read to her grandchild; we have heard how important that is. My first grandchild was born on Christmas day, and I have been continually reading to him, having taken the advice of my hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield.

Archibald?

His name is Archie.

To come back to the point made by the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Susan Kramer), I should say that we recognise the needs of children across the autistic spectrum disorder condition. We have been working with the National Autistic Society on developing the materials that we need for training. I will come to that later in my speech.

As I said, the concerns raised today are shared by many; that is why I thank all Members who have contributed to this debate. I also thank the National Autistic Society for raising many of the issues. Meeting the needs of children with autism is an important priority for the Government. I am pleased that we have been able to debate the issues of children with autism during the passage of the Autism Bill, which was introduced by the hon. Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs. Gillan). The hon. Member for Buckingham takes a keen interest in autism, and I am sure that all Members are now aware that on Wednesday the hon. Lady’s private Member’s Bill concluded its Committee stage in the Commons.

The Autism Bill now focuses on adults with autism and the Department of Health’s adult autism strategy. It has the support of both sides of the House and will bring significant benefits to adults with the condition. The National Autistic Society is happy with the Autism Bill’s new focus on adults, as it recognises what we are already doing to improve provision for children with autism. That includes the in-service, online and DVD training materials on autism for early-years providers and teachers, which we published last month as part of our inclusion development programme.

Planning is an important element in improving services for children with autism. During discussions on the Autism Bill, I committed to including in draft guidance for children’s trust boards, in relation to children’s and young person’s plans, specific wording on autism within the wording that encompasses all children with special educational needs and disabilities.

I am sorry that my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent, South has had to leave; he has a surgery with his constituents this afternoon. He raised a point about the classification of autistic spectrum disorder. I wanted to assure him that we have taken that on board and will consult with the National Autistic Society on the phrasing in the guidance, to make sure that we do not miss out anybody within that spectrum disorder. Following Royal Assent, we will consult on the guidance for the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill, with the aim of formal publication of the guidance in March 2010. As I said, I gave a commitment to the hon. Member for Chesham and Amersham that we will consult the National Autistic Society on the wording of that guidance.

On transition, I should say that, in a letter ahead of the Second Reading debate on the Autism Bill, the Minister of State, Department of Health, my hon. Friend the Member for Corby (Phil Hope) and I reaffirmed to all Members that we would devote £200,000 of the £19 million transition support programme to research on the transitions to adulthood of young people with autism. That brings me to the point about joint working between DCSF and the Department of Health, which has been raised by several Members. Since being in post, my hon. Friend the Minister responsible for disabled people and I have pledged to work together to bridge that transition gap. We also announced in the letter that we would increase the funding that DCSF gives to the Autism Education Trust from £320,000 in the last financial year to £500,000 this year to help it, in collaboration with the DCSF-DH commissioning support programme, to work with local authorities and primary care trusts to improve the commissioning of services for children with autistic spectrum disorders. Work on that will kick off this month. I am pleased to announce today that in recognition of the scope and importance of this work I am increasing the funding that we give to the trust to £580,000 this financial year to ensure that it can do its work properly.

Increasing it from what?

From £500,000, so it is an additional £80,000.

It is obvious from all this that we want this country to be a place where everyone gets the same rights to an excellent education. Just because someone has a special educational need or a disability should not mean that their experience of education is any different. That is exactly what the hon. Gentleman’s Bill sets out to secure. I agree that these are important areas, and I share his commitment to ensuring that action is taken to ensure improved outcomes for children with SEN and disabilities. Let me say at the outset that I am not convinced that the proposals as framed in the Bill are necessarily the best way of securing progress, but I hope that during the course of my remarks I can set out how we can achieve the outcomes that we all want.

Taking the Bill clause by clause, let me start with the provisions relating to training. The Bill proposes a duty on local authorities in England to ensure that all staff employed in schools have sufficient training and expertise to provide an appropriate education for children with special educational needs and disabled children. Maintained schools and local authorities already have duties to meet children’s special educational needs under the Education Act 1996. Maintained schools must use their best endeavours to make the special educational provision for which a child’s learning difficulties call. Local authorities have a duty to keep the SEN arrangements in their area under review. Maintained schools also have to publish information about any arrangements relating to SEN in-service training for staff.

The Bill proposes that the Secretary of State may make regulations in furtherance of the duty on training. It says that regulations must, in particular, specify that

“every member of staff appointed as Special Educational Needs Co-ordinator”

must

“have training in SEN and disability, including autism.”

We recognise that the role of the SENCO is key to ensuring the best provision for children with SEN and disabilities. In response to concerns registered in 2006 by the then Select Committee on Education and Skills, we are taking steps to strengthen and raise the profile of SENCOs. As has been pointed out, from 1 September this year regulations require them to be qualified teachers. That is to ensure that they have the necessary authority to negotiate with qualified colleagues differentiated teaching provision geared to individual pupil needs.

The hon. Member for Rochdale and my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent, South questioned the need for SENCOs always to be qualified teachers, but I firmly believe that in order to carry out that role effectively the SENCO needs to be a qualified teacher. There is a two-year transition period for SENCOs who are not currently qualified teachers but have been in post for at least six months on 31 August 2009 to gain qualified teacher status by September 2011. That arrangement should allow sufficient time and opportunity for those who wish to gain a teaching qualification to do so. I know that there are teaching assistants who are currently performing the SENCO role, but we still maintain that the lead person who is designated by the school governing body as the SENCO will need to be a qualified teacher.

However, we do not expect that the designated teacher will necessarily carry out each and every aspect of the role. Teaching assistants play an important part in supporting the learning of pupils with SEN and disabilities. In some larger schools, there is often a SENCO team comprising teachers and non-teaching staff. Teaching assistants will, of course, be able to continue to make an important contribution, including by supporting the work of the SENCOs, but I state again that the lead person responsible for the overall co-ordination of provision must be a qualified teacher.

We agree with the hon. Member for Buckingham that appropriate training is key to SENCOs carrying out their role effectively. Some have received very good training, and I commend the efforts of schools and local authorities in that regard, but we know that others have not necessarily received as much preparation. I agree that we must address that patchiness in provision, but I am not convinced that we need a new duty to do that.

Section 317 of the Education Act 1996, as amended by section 173 of the Education and Inspections Act 2006, already gives the Secretary of State the power to institute requirements in relation to the qualification of SENCOs. We are currently consulting on draft regulations that will establish a mandatory training requirement for all those coming new to the SENCO role. We propose that the training include knowledge and understanding of the four areas of need in the SEN code of practice and the high-incidence disabilities, and that will encompass autism.

The new training requirement will apply from 1 September. The courses should normally take one year to complete on a part-time basis, assuming that no credit is given for prior qualifications or experience. Our draft regulations propose a three-year period of latitude to obtain the award, so as to make full allowance for the individual circumstances of post holders and schools. Those responding to our consultation have warmly welcomed that.

The training requirement will cover all those coming new to the SENCO role in maintained schools. For those SENCOs in post on 1 September 2009, we propose to define “new to the role” as within one year of first being appointed. We believe that that is a reasonable cut-off point. Although we recognise that there may well be SENCOs who have been in post for some time who would benefit from the training, we will be making funding available for an initial period to support the training of newly appointed SENCOs. However, it would certainly be possible for those who had been in post for a period longer than a year to attend the courses if that were desirable.

Our funding priority will be those coming new to the SENCO role, but as numbers become clearer we will examine the scope within the assigned resources for supporting SENCOs who have been in post longer. We will also examine ways of ensuring that those who have been in post for some time draw the benefit from the new training resources developed under our inclusion development programme, and consider how we can promote those materials and encourage SENCOs to take advantage of them. I therefore reassure the hon. Gentleman that we are already taking steps to establish a mandatory training requirement for staff who deal with children with SEN.

The Bill proposes that any regulations made under the duty must in particular specify that every local authority must develop and publish a strategy to ensure that every school has access to a range of educational support to meet the needs of pupils with special educational needs. Under the Special Educational Needs (Provision of Information by Local Education Authorities) (England) Regulations 2001, local authorities are already required to publish information about arrangements made in support of children with SEN and disabilities. That expressly includes support for schools and arrangements for securing training, advice and support for staff working in their area with children with SEN.

Simply setting a requirement to have a strategy would not, of course, ensure that arrangements were adequate or improved. Several hon. Members have made that point, including the hon. Member for Rochdale. The Department for Children, Schools and Families has already given a clear lead by publishing in 2008 quality standards for SEN support and outreach services. The standards have been well received, and Ofsted has said that it will have regard to them when inspecting local authority SEN provision. Although we do not consider it appropriate to make those standards mandatory, we will look for appropriate opportunities to promote and support them actively. We will cover strategic planning of specialist support services in guidance on children and young people’s plans. I shall come to those plans later, making reference to the standards.

We have also taken steps to meet particular concerns, notably demographic concerns, about specialist teachers of children with sensory impairment, which my hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield referred to in her eloquent speech, during which she recited her personal experiences. Mandatory qualification courses for such teachers, running from September, will offer additional funded places to meet an expected bulge in retirements. We have also invested in enhancing course facilities in readiness for the additional numbers. Those steps have also been warmly welcomed.

My hon. Friend also made an inquiry about SEN children and school closures, when the children have formed close relationships with existing SENCOs, support assistants and teachers. Local authorities have to carry out the SEN improvement test, justifying what is proposed in terms of expected benefits, and think through the consequences for children who are covered by the provision, but I am happy to write to her on the specific constituency issue that she raised.

We have given funding support to newly established trusts to raise the profile of communication, dyslexia and autism. Their work includes promoting specialist training and access to specialist services for those who need them. Sir Jim Rose is developing recommendations on the identification and teaching of children and young people with dyslexia, and his report will be published later this summer.

On the wider, service-commissioning front, we are promoting better joint working between children’s services and the national health service, and I point to the provisions in the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill to place children’s trusts boards on a statutory footing; to pathfinder activity that has been commissioned as part of the speech, language and communication needs action plan, which will be of particular interest to the hon. Member for Buckingham; to recommendations arising from the review of child and adolescent mental health services; to the children’s communication aids equipment project, which was set out in the child health strategy that was published jointly with the Department of Health; and to the £20 million commissioning support programme, which is also operated jointly with the Department of Health. I hope that I have been able to persuade hon. Members that the measures that we have in hand are sufficient to deliver timely improvements to the skills of the schools’ work force in relation to children with SEN and disabilities, including autism.

The Bill before us further proposes that no person shall become a qualified teacher unless they have demonstrated a satisfactory understanding and awareness of special educational needs and disabilities, including autism. All providers of initial teacher training are already required to ensure that their courses enable trainees to meet the professional standards for qualified teacher status. That means that they must demonstrate an understanding of SEN issues and an ability to differentiate their teaching to meet the individual needs of children, including those with SEN and disabilities. We will continue to work actively to improve coverage of SEN and disability issues within initial teacher training courses.

Under the children’s plan, we are committed to spending £18 million over three years to improve provision for SEN and disability. The lion’s share of that, some £12 million, will go towards supporting work by the Training and Development Agency for Schools to enhance and improve coverage of SEN and disability issues in initial teacher training through the creation of new study units for initial teacher training courses and other practical steps. That substantial investment demonstrates the importance that we attach to improving work force skills.

The Bill makes a particular reference to training in autism. We agree that it is important that teachers understand autism, and we are taking action on that front. I mentioned that we had recently developed, through the TDA, new SEN and disability study units for primary undergraduate ITT courses. Those include a unit specifically entitled, “The particular needs of pupils with an autism spectrum condition”. The units were launched last June, with £500,000 to aid their take-up by training providers. Similar units for secondary and PGCE courses are nearing completion and will be released later this year.

I am extremely grateful to the Under-Secretary for giving way, because I am looking through my checklist of concerns and I am encouraged to find that she is allaying them as she goes along. She just referred to ITT primary undergraduate units and the £500,000 that has been committed to their dissemination. Given that I think the secondary school ITT units are due to come on stream a year after the primary units, will the Minister tell me and the House the sum that is earmarked for them? Will the money also be channelled as widely as possible, and the units be actively promoted in the same way as the primary units?

We are certainly as committed to the secondary area as we are to the primary area. I do not have the figure to hand, but I shall be more than happy to write to the hon. Gentleman.

The programmes that we are supporting through the TDA also provide additional opportunities for student teachers to gain first-hand experience of working with pupils with SEN by means of extended placements in special schools.

In addition, we are looking at ways of further strengthening induction arrangements, through new materials and other support, as well as through further support for tutors.

To bolster the confidence of teachers already in post, which the hon. Member for Rochdale and others mentioned, we have launched the inclusion development programme, through the national strategies. The IDP provides specially commissioned professional development resources in areas of SEN that we know teachers find difficult. The IDP resources for 2009, launched in March, are designed to help teachers support pupils on the autism spectrum. We will continue to work actively to promote the dissemination of those resources through national strategies, SEN regional hubs and other means. We gratefully acknowledge the National Autistic Society’s contribution to those materials.

An independent study being carried out by the university of Warwick will ascertain whether those initiatives are having the desired effect in terms of improved teacher confidence and assess whether further action is needed. Subject to royal approval of the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill, we will require every area to have a children’s trust board, with a legal responsibility for producing, publishing, reviewing and annually revising the children and young people’s plan. The CYPP is the single statutory, strategic and overarching plan for all services that directly affect children and young people in an area, showing how the local authority and all relevant partners will integrate provision to improve well-being across all five outcomes in Every Child Matters and focus on specific challenges and priorities.

Although the CYPP is not a detailed operational plan, it will be required to include a strategy for the local work force to deliver the priorities set out in the plan for improving children and young people’s well-being. That will include children and young people with SEN and disabilities. We intend to consult fully with stakeholders and partners on statutory guidance for the children’s trust board and on CYPP regulations in the autumn.

May I ask the Minister two things? First, would she be willing to include interested right hon. and hon. Members in the consultation on those plans? Secondly, although I absolutely accept that there is a limit to how much detail the plans can cover, can she at least assure me that, in talking about people with SEN and disability, they will include a reference not just to what might be called universal or targeted services, but to specialist services?

I can indeed give the hon. Gentleman that assurance. Specialist services will be part of what is required, and we are always happy to welcome hon. Members’ input into regulations and guidance. I hope that he will also recognise the existing requirements and the practical steps that we are taking to introduce the new dedicated training resources.

The Bill as drafted proposes amendments to section 117 of the Education and Inspections Act 2006, in order to add to the general areas that Ofsted must have regard to in performing its functions an explicit reference both to the needs of children with special educational needs and disabled children and to compliance with relevant statutory requirements. Section 117 of the 2006 Act is a general provision that concerns Ofsted’s functions as a whole, rather than school inspections specifically. It includes a small number of high-level aspects, such as the need to safeguard and promote the rights and the welfare of children and the need for Ofsted to be user-focused, efficient and proportionate.

However, it is worth noting that, as a public authority, Ofsted is already subject to the general duty under the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, as amended, to have due regard in exercising its functions to, among other things, the need to eliminate discrimination and to promote equality of opportunity between disabled people and others. That duty applies to all Ofsted’s functions, including its school inspection function. It is absolutely right that school inspection should have a strong focus on the needs of children with special educational needs and disabilities.

The general areas that Ofsted is required to report on in the current legislative framework are set out in section 5 of the Education Act 2005. They include aspects such as the quality of education provided in the school, the standards achieved and the quality of leadership in, and management of, the school. In looking at Ofsted’s inspection framework, which is underpinned by the relevant legislative provisions, hon. Members will be aware that the framework is currently being revised in advance of the planned start of a new cycle of school inspections from this autumn. In that context, the chief inspector, Christine Gilbert, has made it clear that Ofsted intends the new arrangements to have a strong emphasis on analysing outcomes and provision for learners with different needs. Within that, the intention is for the framework to be strengthened to ensure that the needs of pupils with special educational needs are carefully considered throughout.

I understand that specialist HMIs have been closely involved in these developments. In relation to the assessment of pupil achievement and enjoyment, for example, there will be a discrete judgment in every school inspection report on the quality of learning for pupils with learning difficulties and disabilities and their progress. Where inspectors find this aspect to be inadequate, it will impact directly on the school’s overall assessment, thus limiting that assessment—to be precise, such a school will be placed in a “causing concern” category. A discrete judgment will also be made in every inspection on the effectiveness with which the school promotes equal opportunity and tackles discrimination—again, an inadequate judgment here will translate to an inadequate assessment overall.

It is intended that the needs of pupils with SEN will be picked up across the range of aspects considered by inspectors—for example, in terms of pupils’ safety, attendance, care, guidance and support, and the curriculum. Case studies of vulnerable pupils, looking at the effectiveness of care, guidance and support, are highly likely to include pupils with special educational needs and disability, and the emphasis is to be mirrored in the revised self-evaluation form, or SEF, as it is commonly known, which is being developed as part of the new arrangements.

The picture I have painted is an encouraging one, and it is worth noting that all the proposed aspects of the new school inspection arrangements are consistent with the recommendations to date made by Brian Lamb, the chair of the Special Educational Consortium. The question asked by the Bill, and, indeed, by hon. Members today, is whether we should be doing more. With that in mind, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has requested further advice from Brian Lamb by July on whether any further changes, including to legislation, are necessary.

Although I do not feel it is appropriate to pursue the specific proposals of the hon. Member for Buckingham at this time, the Government’s mind is not closed to the prospect of further change, if it is found to be necessary. If decisive action is needed, I can assure the hon. Gentleman and the House that we will take it. We have, I believe, a good record of responding positively to Brian Lamb’s findings in previous reviews.

The SEN framework has been much debated, and the then Education and Skills Select Committee published two reports on it—in 2006 and 2007. As hon. Members will know, we said in response to the first report that we did not think the time was right for a completely fresh look at SEN. We said it was more important to get on with implementing our SEN strategy, which set out a programme for improving mainstream school skills in meeting the needs of a wider range of children with SEN.

It is worth saying that many schools do an excellent job in meeting children’s SEN needs, and they do so to the satisfaction of the majority of parents, but just because most parents are happy, it does not mean that there are not some parents who feel they have a rough deal—and I am sure every hon. Member has some experience of that. We look forward to Ofsted’s review and the final recommendations of Brian Lamb’s review.

Let me move on to the important area of the exclusion of pupils with special educational needs and disabilities. I absolutely understand the concerns that lie behind the proposals of the hon. Member for Buckingham. Disabled pupils already have protection in law and strong statutory guidance exists to help schools handle these very difficult decisions, but I acknowledge what he and other hon. Members have said about children still slipping through the net.

We revised our statutory guidance in September 2008 and set out in more detail the points that head teachers should think about when considering how to respond to disciplinary incidents or sustained misbehaviour. The guidance states that schools should try every practicable means to maintain a pupil with SEN in school and should seek local authority and other professional advice as appropriate. Schools should permanently exclude pupils with SEN statements only in exceptional circumstances. The guidance sets out that schools should make every effort to avoid excluding pupils who are being supported via School Action or School Action Plus, including, where appropriate, by asking a local authority to consider carrying out a statutory assessment.

The guidance further states that, where a pupil with SEN is excluded, the head teacher should work with the local authority to see whether more support can be made available or whether an SEN statement can be changed to name a new school. If either of those options is available, the head should normally withdraw the exclusion. The guidance sets out an expectation that, following a permanent exclusion, local authorities should assess a pupil’s needs, undertaking an assessment, where one has not already been carried out, under the common assessment framework. It also emphasises the importance of ensuring that the parents of excluded SEN children receive advice on the options available for their child’s future education.

Ofsted recently undertook a review of how local authorities were meeting their statutory duty in that regard. The report was published on 13 May and showed that eight out of 28 secondary schools, two out of three special schools and eight out of 18 local authorities did not fully comply with the legal requirements. On the plus side, however, some of the schools at least complied in part. We accept Ofsted’s report and the recommendations, and we will support schools by gathering and disseminating examples of good practice in meeting the “day six” legislation to suit a range of situations.

We expect local authorities to ensure sufficient good-quality provision for schools to access where they choose to use external provision. We have said that we will work with both national strategies and local authorities on identifying good practice among authorities with low rates of exclusion of children with SEN. That has resulted in a series of recently completed visits to local authorities, specifically designed to identify why some authorities have high rates of SEN exclusions while others do not. The information will be used in national strategies’ ongoing work with local authorities to improve the situation. National strategies will also report policy conclusions from the deep-dive work to the Department soon. Those will input into the Ofsted SEN survey and help to inform national developments.

Early intervention and prevention are crucial, and we expect schools working together in behaviour and attendance partnerships to adopt strategies to focus on prevention and early intervention for pupils at risk of exclusion. As has been mentioned, some exclusions might be a result of schools not fully understanding the difficulties, and misinterpreting the behaviour, of children with autism. Our good practice guidance was partly designed to raise awareness of autism, and the DVD and online materials provided under the inclusion development programme will further spread awareness among teachers and early-years providers, and help them to address children’s difficulties.

We have issued clear and strong guidance to schools, designed to ensure that permanent exclusion is a last resort. We have a worry that further legislative provision risks hindering heads in the reasonable exercise of their disciplinary powers when faced with difficult and challenging situations, but we recognise the importance of ensuring that messages are reinforced. We will continue to look for opportunities to emphasise the importance of a reduction in the disproportionate rate of exclusion of pupils with SEN.

We have collected examples of good practice in reducing exclusions of SEN pupils and, as recommended by Sir Alan Steer, national strategies will use that to support and challenge high-excluding authorities and those with high SEN exclusion rates. Under the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill, behaviour and attendance partnerships will be required to make an annual report to the children’s trust board—a further monitoring mechanism. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has instructed officials to include SEN and exclusion in the guidance on behaviour and attendance partnerships, which is due to be published later this year. That will provide a timely opportunity to highlight the importance of a reduction in the disproportionate rate of exclusion of pupils with SEN. We will look to involve the hon. Member for Buckingham, and would welcome involvement from any other hon. Members and from appropriate SEN interests in drafting the guidance.

I pay tribute to the hon. Gentleman, who has set out to seek the best for people with SEN. That has come through strongly in the debate. I agree with the fundamental principles outlined in the Bill around raising outcomes for children with special educational needs. I hope that I have shown that we are meeting those concerns head-on. Where we have not already addressed such problems, we are making good progress. The message is clear: we cannot allow pupils with SEN to come to school to be met by unfair circumstances. The support they need to succeed should be of paramount importance to every local authority, school and teacher. As we have discussed, there are ways in which provision for pupils with SEN can be improved. We need to do our best to close the gaps and make sure everyone gets a fair chance when it comes to their education.

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on introducing the Bill, which is testament to his dedication to children and young people with special educational needs. I appreciate the desire to reinforce that with legislation and new duties, but I do not think that that is appropriate at this stage. I hope that I have demonstrated that what we are already doing, and what we intend to do in future, will achieve the outcomes we all want. I am, however, extremely grateful to the hon. Gentleman for bringing the Bill forward. His persistence in such matters ensures that children with special educational needs and disabilities are always at the forefront of our minds. If he is minded to withdraw his Bill, he has my assurance that the commitments I have made today will be delivered.

I am extraordinarily grateful to the Minister for her detailed, comprehensive and explicit response to the points that I raised my speech and to observations made by other hon. Members. I could not have wished for better.

I think I am right in saying that the emphasis in the inspection framework will be mirrored in the revised self-evaluation form, and that—this may be a point of detail, but it is extremely important—the form will ask schools to provide information on compliance with the duties under the Disability Discrimination Act and those in subordinate legislation and statutory codes of practice. I hope that, perhaps with a nod of the head, the Minister can confirm that my understanding is correct.

indicated assent.

I hope that the Minister will also confirm that evidence of non-compliance will influence the assessment on equalities.

indicated assent.

In response to that, I have again received an encouraging nod of the ministerial head.

Let me end by saying something about exclusions guidance. The National Autistic Society and I would welcome an opportunity to participate in the consultation process. We are also keen to be involved in the consultation on the children and young people plans. I was given a pretty clear steer on this by the Minister. The Government have given us an advance indication of important research on exclusions, which I think—although I am not sure—is to be published, and we would welcome sight of that at the time when it would be proper for us to see it.

My engagement with the Minister, with her right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families and with the Department’s officials is proof positive that it is possible to make real progress by engaging in a non-partisan way. I had a little list, to coin a phrase, of no fewer than 25 commitments which I had some reason to hope, and anticipate, that the Government would make today. As the Minister rose to reply to the debate I had the list in front of me, and I am pleased to say that I was able to tick off each and every one of the 25. That is a form of pre-emptive gratification for a Member presenting a private Member’s Bill.

As I said to the Minister yesterday and as I also said in my speech this morning, I am not remotely bothered about or interested in a “Bercow Act”, and I understand why the Government feel that to legislate at this stage is not the best course. What I am trying to do is deliver a step change in performance that will bring about improvements in services and care for children and young people with special educational needs or disabilities. I am thoroughly reassured by what the Minister has said today: I believe that such improvements will come about, that they will be driven, and that parents and students themselves will enjoy the benefits.

Obviously I shall keep a beady eye on developments and we will have many future discussions, but following the Minister’s assurances I am happy to withdraw my Bill. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the motion.

Motion, by leave, withdrawn.