Postcode lottery' of SEN provision
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No.228 SSN: 1741-9867 Friday 7 July 2006
‘Postcode lottery’ of SEN provision
Many children with special educational needs are being let down by a “postcode lottery” of provision,
according to a report from the Education and Skills Select Committee. The report claims that the system of
education for pupils with SEN is “not fit for purpose”. It found that there are serious flaws in the
statementing process, as well as a lack of teacher training in dealing with SEN.
The committee found that the Government is presenting a confused message about whether pupils with
SEN should be taught within special or mainstream schools, which in turn is causing confusion about
whether this means that more special schools will close. It has called on the Government to clarify its
position. It has also pointed to the lack of transparency over the admission of children with SEN to
academies, with many who gave evidence fearing that “academies are failing to seek the right approach
towards children with SEN and possibly even turning away children with SEN to improve their results”.
The committee has recommended that a National Framework linked to minimum standards be put in
place, which should place a statutory requirement on local authorities “to maintain, or have access to, a
wide range of provision, including a range of special schools, specialist units, and services for low
incidence special educational needs”.
Committee chairman, Barry Sheerman, said: “Many of the problems identified in our report stem from
the fact that SEN provision has not been given sufficient priority by successive governments. Every child
matters offers an excellent opportunity to redress the balance and ensure that the needs of children with
SEN are at the heart of our education system. Meeting the needs of children with SEN must be given the
highest priority. This should be the hallmark of a successful education system and a civilised society.”
Reaction
Steve Sinnott, NUT general secretary, said: “Their must be an independent review of Government policy on
inclusion and special educational needs provision. Simply making minor changes at the edges will not
provide the transparency and coherence that is needed for the nation’s most vulnerable children. That
review must address the fact that teachers, parents and children are being let down by the Government’s
confused messages on inclusion. It insists there has been no change, yet the Government has moved from
strict inclusion and closure of special schools to a more sensible pragmatic approach but it has been
unwilling to spell this out. As a result, local authorities are still closing special schools against a
background of continuing need.
PAT Senior Professional Officer, Alison Johnston, said: “The Government must give clearer guidance
on what it means by ‘inclusion’. Some SEN pupils benefit from being taught in mainstream schools, with
support from appropriately trained staff, while others need the specialist care and education provided by
special schools. This is the view set out in the Government’s own special educational needs strategy,
although it seems this theory has not necessarily been the reality in many parts of the country.”
ATL general secretary, Dr Mary Bousted, said: “[Teachers will] support a national framework with
minimum standards of provision to reduce the current disparities between local authorities. Perhaps most
of all they will say ‘amen’ to the judgement that SEN policy and the standards agenda – of school league
tables based on testing all pupils – ‘sit very uncomfortably together’, since schools may view SEN pupils as
potentially damaging to their league table position.”
1Schools Minister welcomes next 100 specialist schools
Schools Minister Jim Knight has congratulated the next 100 schools to successfully bid for specialist status.
The addition of these schools, which will receive almost £130 per pupil in additional funding each year for
four years, as well as £100,000 in capital funding, means that 82% of all maintained secondary schools now
have a specialism. Government statistics claim that 59.7% of pupils in specialist schools achieved five or
more A*-C grades at GCSE compared with 48.2% of pupils in non-specialists. They also continue to have
greater success at improving performance for children in deprived areas than non-specialist schools.
Jim Knight said: “Congratulations to all the schools that achieved specialist status today. They are now
part of an ever growing network of schools driving up standards across the system. Focusing on those
subjects relating to their chosen specialism these schools will develop a centre of excellence. We know that
this leads to an improvement in standards across the whole school. Over 2.6 million students are now being
taught in a specialist school. We know they work and we know they are popular. Education is in an exciting
era with record investments and record results across the board. Specialist schools are at the forefront of
this.”
Schools Minister Andrew Adonis also announced that 14 new SEN specialist schools have been
designated to join the 12 SEN trailblazer schools already established.
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Is school uniform monopoly a wolf in children’s clothing?
An inquiry is to be launched into the price and quality of school uniforms in the UK, following complaints
from parents. The Office of Fair Trading has begun a study into the interaction of government and markets,
as well as allegations from retailers that the market, worth £450 million a year, is foreclosed to them.
As part of the survey, the OFT has written to nearly 10,000 UK state schools to find out whether their
uniforms policy allows choice on where to purchase the uniform. It will ascertain how many require parents
to purchase uniforms from either a retailer designated by the school or the school itself rather than from
school uniform retailers generally. It will also assess whether such arrangements are more prevalent in any
particular type of school, whether they have a detrimental effect on poorer families, and whether they offer
any benefits to schools. John Fingleton, Chief Executive of the OFT said: “This study will allow the OFT to
see whether exclusive contracts between schools and retailers have an adverse effect on the prices paid by
parents, as well as the quality and value of school uniforms.”
The news comes in the same week that the Welsh Assembly has announced the continuation of its
school uniform grant scheme, with £750,000 being made available to families on low incomes.
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Failure to build on Sure Start could mean Poor Finish for some
The most disadvantaged children are losing out because primary schools are not capitalising on progress
they have made through preschool programmes such as Sure Start, according to a new report. Fade or
Flourish: How primary schools can build on children’s early progress, from the Social Market Foundation,
claims that for the most disadvantaged children the social and academic gains achieved through preschool
intervention tend to “fade out” during the primary years.
The report recommends that the Government allows primary schools greater flexibility and autonomy in
teaching and the curriculum, and argues for more effective support in consolidating and sustaining the
progress of the most vulnerable children in Sure Start and similar preschool centres around the country. The
measures it recommends include: extending the daily literacy hour to 90 minutes with ability grouping;
more flexible class sizes; nurture classes and learning mentors to prepare children emotionally and socially
for the classroom. It also recommends testing pupils every eight weeks to stop those from poor families
falling behind.
Ann Rossiter, Director of the SMF said: “The early years’ focus must be sustained throughout the
primary school phase. If this doesn’t happen, the Government’s aspirations to improve children’s life
chances, and increase social mobility will be undermined.”
2Govt launches policy review of children and young people
The Government has announced the launch of its policy review of children and young people, which will
inform decisions in next year’s Comprehensive Spending Review on what further steps can be taken to
improve the life chances of children and young people. The Economic Secretary to the Treasury, Ed Balls,
and Schools Minister, Andrew Adonis, launched the review to coincide with the first of a series of
parliamentary hearings that took place on Wednesday.
Mr Balls said: “Every disabled child deserves the best start in life – but too many families with disabled
children have to struggle on a daily basis to get the proper respite care they need, access to out of school
activities and to combine work and caring for their child. This review will look hard at how we provide
services for disabled children, high risk families, and to deliver a step change in youth services so that
teenagers have places they want to go and things they want to do after school and at weekends. We must
listen to young people themselves and involve them directly in delivering youth services. Parliamentary
hearings with MPs, experts and parents with disabled children, will ensure our review asks the right
questions and addresses the challenges facing parents and service providers across the country.”
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British celebrities prove that they love libraries, too
Celebrities from across the UK have shown their support for the Love Libraries campaign, which aims to
get adults back into English libraries. Ben Fogle, Michael Rosen, Rageh Omaar, Joolz Denby, Jade Goody
and Sandi Toksvig attended the re-opening of three libraries following their ‘modernisation’ as part of the
scheme to boost library attendance.
Adult book issues have fallen by 40% in the last decade and Love Libraries is a campaign to tell people
about the great services their library can offer. It focuses on reading as being at the heart of a modernised
library vision. Over 150 authors and celebrities including JK Rowling, Salman Rushdie and Nick Hornby
have come forward since the campaign launched to emphasise the value of the public library service.
In March, Love Libraries announced the intention of transforming three libraries in Richmond, Kent and
Cornwall in twelve weeks into models of a future library service with reading at its heart. The project has
involved the visible transformation of the library buildings in record time, using normal refurbishment
budgets and drawing on the expertise of retailers and designers. Library opening hours and book stocks
have been reviewed and publishing marketing mentors attached to each library.
Ben Fogle said: “This campaign is a really important wake up call to us all. Local libraries need our
support as they are such an important cultural resource. Many libraries are changing dramatically and lots
of people are missing out!” For more information visit www.lovelibraries.co.uk
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Youngsters still need teacher guidance on Internet dangers
British schools are not giving young people the skills they need for problem-free use of the Internet,
according to research from University of London Institute of Education. The Mediappro project, funded by
the European Commission and conducted by researchers in nine European countries, found that while
virtually all 12 to 18-year-olds surfed the Internet as a matter of course at home, they needed help in
dealing with issues such as legalities in downloading music and handling social encounters in emails,
instant messaging and text messaging.
The research, involving a survey of 7,393 young people, found that although the Internet was used more
in UK schools than in schools in the other countries, four out of 10 believed that schools should give them
better internet access, and six out of 10 said teachers never talked to them about the web. The project’s UK
director, Dr Andrew Burn, commented: “While UK schools are getting some things right compared with
other European countries, there are still too many children who do not get sufficient opportunity to use the
Internet in lessons. Schools need to do more to harness the communicative possibilities of this powerful
technology, which allows children to communicate, cooperate, play and learn online.”
3Four new Bills touching education and services for
children, with a fifth on the way
New responsibilities for local authorities and
schools
More new legislation is pouring out of Parliament, of direct relevance to
Education and Children’s Services departments and the schools they serve.
The pace of change – good and bad – is not going to slow down.
You need to know what is going to happen.
Education Parliamentary Monitor covers everything that happens in Parliament
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4Maths lessons just need to be less boring, claims research
Livelier, more positive teaching has a greater effect on improving pupils’ motivation to learn maths than
grouping by sex or ability, according to a new report. The Government-funded research review found that
teaching in supportive, innovative ways that not only engage but also challenge pupils is the way to make
average and below-average 14 to 16-year-olds work harder at mathematics. But, to have any long-term
effect, these techniques must also increase their understanding.
The research found no evidence that setting had a clear and consistent impact on pupils’ motivation to
learn mathematics. It did, however, find some evidence that being in a low set could create disaffection,
especially where the whole class knew that this would deny them access to higher GCSE grades. One study
found the use of boys-only classes in co-educational schools could sometimes enhance rather than
undermine the ‘laddish’ culture it is in large measure designed to combat.
Researchers from the University of York, which led the review, commented: “The strategies considered
in this review…all require a high level of skill and expertise. These are not strategies that teachers can
simply implement without ongoing support and training.”
The researchers recommended that maths teachers work together in collaborative groups with external
support to explore and evaluate innovations in their teaching that would help improve their
pupils’motivation. They also want to see more research undertaken and made available to teachers to find
out exactly what features of each strategy are most effective.
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Young Direct Marketing Award winners announced
Enterprising pupils from three UK secondary schools have been selected as winners at the national finals of
the first ever Young Direct Marketing Awards (YDMA), organised by the Direct Marketing Association
(DMA) and held recently at The Magic Circle Headquarters in London. Teams of pupils from Bradford
Girls’ Grammar School, St Michaels RC School in Billingham and London-based The Mount School have
beaten off competition from 12 other regional winners, and almost 200 entrants nationwide. They will now
see direct marketing campaigns that they designed be distributed in their local community on behalf of The
Woodland Trust, PDSA and Macmillan Cancer Support respectively.
The award recognises the high standard of the pupils’ work in designing a direct marketing campaign for
their chosen charity. Mike Barnes, Director of Marketing and Business Development at the DMA, said:
“The winning teams can feel very proud of themselves for being crowned the first ever YDMA national
winners and the excitement is only just beginning. They now get to see their campaign become a reality in
their local area and we’ll look forward to seeing some of these budding marketers enter the industry in the
future.”
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Document round-up
Ofsted has published Best Practice in Self-evaluation: A survey of schools, colleges and local authorities. It
found that in the best institutions headteachers, principals and council leaders have prioritised a continuous
process of self-evaluation which they lead personally and which is clearly built into management systems.
It recommends that to extend best practice in self-evaluation schools, colleges and local authorities should
focus self-evaluation specifically on the impact of provision on the outcomes for children and young
people, while taking account of the views of a wide range of stakeholders and using the findings from self-
evaluation to inform priorities when planning for development. Primary schools should also extend their
self-evaluation to reflect the whole curriculum. This publication can be downloaded from
www.ofsted.gov.uk
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5Research round-up
Three journals came into our office this week. Active Learning in Higher Education (Sage, Vol.7 No.2)
contains an article entitled, ‘What is the Impact of Subject Benchmarking?’ by Steve Pidcock of Warwick
University. Mr Pidcock claims that the introduction of subject benchmarking has led to fears of increased
external intervention in the activities of universities and a more restrictive view of institutional autonomy,
accompanied by an undermining of the academic profession. His investigation did not bear out these fears,
but it also showed that subject bench-marking was not perceived as leading to improvement.
Cambridge Journal of Education (Routledge, Vol.36 No.2) contains an article entitled, ‘Whose Writing
Is It Anyway? Issues of Control in the Teaching of Writing’ by Ros Fisher of the University of Exeter. The
articles discusses how teachers of young writers are faced with the difficulty of teaching the correct
conventions at the same time as encouraging individual responses. It argues that for children to learn the
conventions at the same time as developing confidence to use these conventions in individual and creative
ways, control must be handed over to the learners. However, a study found little evidence of this.
Compare (Routledge, Vol.36 No.2) contains an article entitled, ‘Gender, Education and the Possibility of
Transformative Knowledge’ by Nelly P Stromquist of the University of Southern California. The article
argues that while global policies today encourage greater access by women to formal schooling, they leave
aside issues of content and school practices essential to the modificiation of the social relations of gender.
The article compares the promise of education with its actual contribution to transformative knowledge.
______________________________________________________________________________________
Media Watch
On Saturday, the Independent reported that a list prescribing the authors and poets for children to study
from the start of their secondary schooling should be scrapped, according to government exams watchdogs.
The move was part of a radical overhaul of the national curriculum which would also see study of the
British Empire moved to the heart of the history curriculum. The package aimed to give teachers more
freedom over how they approached lessons. Until now, teachers had been told that pupils must study at
least four poets and two authors from before 1914 as part of the curriculum for 11 to 14-year-olds,
including Milton, Wordsworth, Dickens and Austen. They were expected to study a similar number of post-
1914 writers. But the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority has now proposed leaving it up to teachers
to decide what their pupils should study. Only Shakespeare survives as a compulsory element of the
curriculum, with pupils to be compulsorily tested on one of his plays at 14, as at present. The
recommendations had been put out for consultation until November.
On Sunday, the Observer revealed that special needs education had been condemned in a
Commons committee report, which highlighted “significant cracks” in an underfunded system that left
desperate parents without sufficient support. Although the government had denied it had an inclusion
policy, the study by the Commons Education and Skills select committee claimed that was the message it
was sending to local authorities. The damning report said that the Government’s policy was “failing to cope
with the rising number of children with autism and social, emotional or behavioural difficulties”. The MPs
recommended that more options should be available to parents of special needs children, including special
schools, specialist units, and mainstream schools. The report concluded that SEN must be “radically
improved” or society would face heavy costs in terms of exclusions and youth crime. Current figures
showed that 87 per cent of exclusions in primary schools involved children with SEN and 60 per cent at
secondary.
On Monday, the Herald reported that in an address to MPs, Richard Lambert, the former Financial
Times editor and new director-general of the Confederation of British Industry, reiterated the CBI’s fears
over educational standards. He said that although the government had increased spending, British skills at
6all levels “remained woefully short of world class, with a shockingly high proportion of young people still
leaving school without the basic literacy and numeracy skills needed by business”, and complained about
the “Needless” red tape, counter-productive environmental legislation, and “scandalous shortcomings” in
education and training.
Monday’s Daily Mail reported that a government watchdog was launching research into online
networking sites used by millions of youngsters after a headteacher warned that paedophiles were scanning
the sites for victims. The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre said it would be putting pressure
on the companies behind sites such as bebo.com and MySpace to discourage children from putting
provocative images and contact details on their personal pages. The announcement came after the
headmistress of Tunbridge Wells Girls’ Grammar School in Kent, Linda Wybar, banned the bebo website
from school computers and wrote to all parents warning of its dangers. Some 700 girls at the school had
signed up to the site, which organises online communities around colleges and schools, and many had
placed “semi-pornographic” pictures of themselves on their personal pages, as well as their full names. A
spokeswoman for the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre said the Government body would be
staging a series of seminars later this month, with computer industry figures, children and parents.
Monday’s Times revealed that teachers would be given the authority to search pupils if they suspected a
knife was on the premises. Ministers were drawing up plans for the new powers after Alan Johnson, the
Education Secretary, decided that that the new Violent Crime Reduction Bill did not go far enough.
Teachers would be given statutory guidance on how to conduct a search and the search methods would
include metal detectors, airport-style frisking and scanners. Recent Home Office figures showed that the
number of children aged 12 to 14 convicted of carrying knives at school had doubled to 170 between 200
and 2004. The Times’ second leader agreed that the law on knives should be strengthened, but pointed out
that the change would confer important new responsibilities on both teachers and the police. It warned that
teachers could not be expected to search an aggressive group of teenagers without support, but said the new
law deserved cross-party support.
On Thursday, the Guardian along with many other papers reported that the Office of Fair Trading had
launched an inquiry into the school uniforms market after parents’ had complained about high prices and
poor quality. Half of Britain’s state schools operate a strict code on uniforms and many nominate specific
retailers where parents should buy the clothes. The OFT said it was investigating the impact of such rules
on poorer families by examining policies at 10,000 schools. The OFT wanted to find out if such schemes
benefited schools after complaints from rival retailers that they were being shut out of a market worth
£450m a year. Under current government guidelines, school governing bodies should give high priority to
cost considerations when specifying their school's uniform.
Thursday’s Independent reported that the academy programme was under renewed fire after a father
won the first round of a legal challenge to stop plans to close his son’s comprehensive and replace it with
an academy. Rob MacDonald was given permission by the High Court to seek a judicial review of Merton
Borough Council's decision to close his 15-year-old son Callum's school, Tamworth Manor, and another
school, Mitcham Vale. Mr MacDonald, from south London, argued parents were not properly consulted
about the council's proposals or provided with sufficient information about the new academy. The council
denied that and said the correct forum for objections was through the independent Schools Adjudicator -
who approved the closure scheme. But Mr Justice Silber ordered a two-day hearing of the case, within the
next three weeks. Mr MacDonald’s lawyers are arguing that the consultation process was flawed because
parents did not have access to the “funding agreement”.
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Education
Editor: Michael Marshall
Editorial team
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© 2006 Education Publishing Worldwide Ltd.
Distributed by the Education Publishing Company Ltd
ISSN: 1741-9867
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