More than three decades after her influential report, Baroness Warnock fears that the Government’s SEN proposals will deliver little meaningful change
The subtitle to the long awaited Green Paper is “A new approach to special educational needs and disability”, and the document promises that all those children and young people who would now have statements of SEN should have one statutory assessment and be issued with an education, health and care plan, which would be agreed between all the professionals involved and the child’s parents (and where appropriate, with the child him/herself).
There would be a statutory obligation on the various authorities to provide the specified services, and it would be clear which authority was to fund which service. Voluntary and community organisations would also be involved in the single assessment so as to provide a measure of independence from the service providers. This new system, at the heart of the “new approach” of the report’s title, is promised for 2014, after a period of consultation and some local tests by “pathfinders”. {pullquote}It was the sense that nothing has changed in more than thirty years that really depressed me{/pullquote}When I first got the Green Paper in my hands, I was optimistic. This was because the foreword, signed by Michael Gove and Sarah Teather, and presumably written by the latter, was agreeably frank about the urgent need for reform of the system, and seemed to have taken account of the numerous recent reports, including those of Graham Adams and Frank Field, as well as the earlier critical reports from Ofsted and the all-party Commons Select Committee on SEN. Moreover, since one of the worst features of the present situation is the number of cumbersome assessments by different professionals that a child may have to undergo, and the fact that all of them are dictated by the then availability of funding, rather than the true needs of the child, the single assessment with an independent element seemed a good way forward, especially if the overall plan could be carried from one local authority to another if a family were to move.
But as I read on, my spirits sank. It is in the nature of green papers to be vague and aspirational, but it was the sense that nothing has changed in more than thirty years that really depressed me. Here was collaboration between different service providers being promised again, just as we promised it in 1978. Here, once again, were parents as partners, our old friends, in whom I never wholly believed. Too many parents cared about nothing but their own child and could not be expected to take much notice of public policy or, indeed, finance. Too many of them were totally at sea, being without aspirations for their children, or much idea of the crucial role they should be playing themselves, at least in the earliest years of their child’s life.
Of course, parents should be entitled to express a preference for the school or type of school they prefer, but is it actually sensible to offer them a right to choose? When they cannot get their child into the school of their choice, or when he is excluded from it, will this not lead again to the kind of antagonism between parents and local authorities, the battle grounds of tribunals which are so wasteful of resources and so heavily weighted against poorer parents that the authors of the Green Paper want to bring to an end?
It is true, as we are told, that things have moved on in some important respects, and the Green Paper reflects this. In 1974, when the Committee of Inquiry into the Education of Handicapped Children and Young People was set up (and how quaint the original title of the Committee sounds today) we were expressly forbidden to mention social deprivation as a factor in “handicap”; neither was having English not spoken at home allowed to count. As late as the mid 1980s, John Patten, then Secretary of State for Education and Science, was able to pronounce that a child’s social background had nothing whatever to do with his/her educational attainments. Such a divorce between deprivation and special needs would be unthinkable today. I suppose the reason for the instruction given to us when we started was the fear that, since “the handicapped” were still considered a separate class of inferior people (many of them “mentally subnormal”), it would have seemed elitist, or racist to suggest that social circumstances might constitute obstacles to educational success.
{pullquote}The agreement and the commitment to provide begin to look pretty flimsy unless what is to be agreed can magically be funded{/pullquote}
We have moved on from there, and the concept of a plan covering a person from birth to the age of 25 is welcome. But how will such a plan be produced and implemented? Above all, how will it be funded? We are told that the plan will be simple and transparent, that it will impose a legal obligation on the relevant authorities to provide what is needed, and that who is paying for which service will be made clear. But try to imagine the reality; even if teachers and social workers are more willing to share information with each other than once they were, they often fail to do so. And the medical profession has never been much good at sharing, often pleading patient confidentiality as an excuse for a profound lack of concern about a child’s educational needs or family circumstances. This, in itself, makes unrealistic the cosy picture of professionals sitting round a table with parents “agreeing” on the plan, whether the parent is a bemused single mother or one of a highly educated, ambitious couple who have done their research. Suppose the child has communication difficulties and urgently needs nursery education from the age of two, it is local authorities who will have to fund it; and they may have decided to close their Sure Start Children’s Centres to save money.
Even if, as may be an option, the parents are given a budget to spend on their child, it is hard for them to choose a nursery school if there are none within reasonable distance. We are told that parents will be encouraged to start their own “free” schools. But for most parents, this is fantasy. This imagined child will also need speech therapy. How can the dispute be settled as to which provider pays for this, when both health and education have a stake in such provision? What is the good of a plan that covers health, if the child’s needs turn out to include mental health treatment, and in many areas there is a two year wait for a child who is referred to a psychiatrist? The agreement and the commitment to provide begin to look pretty flimsy unless what is to be agreed can magically be funded. Even though none of it is supposed to begin until 2014, it is hard to see how the cuts now being made, necessarily, by local authorities can be reversed in the next three years.
So, sadly, the Green Paper is aspiration and no more. And therefore reading it is like teasing a hungry animal with the sight of food which is then withdrawn. For good practice, I fear, we shall still have to look to individuals who are determined to help deprived and disabled children to flourish. Mercifully, they still exist.
Further information
Baroness Warnock chaired the UK Committee of Inquiry into the Education of Handicapped Children and Young People which produced the Warnock Report (1978): Special Educational Needs. Today she sits as a crossbench peer in the House of Lords.
