Education and Inspections Bill

My Lords, in debates on education, my traditional brief has always been special educational needs—for nearly two decades. However, I find myself in a happy situation today because not only did my noble friend do her usual trick of saying everything that I wanted to say—and saying it better than I would have done—she wandered onto my territory. I also noted that the noble Lord, Lord Rix, said everything that I wanted to say about the main thrust, which is to make sure that there is better training within special education. As he pointed out, many of the problems of school behaviour are multiplied by the failure of early diagnosis of special educational need. If we raise standards within our system, we can start to help a group that has historically not been touched by the education system—the large group who do not achieve, which has historically remained stubbornly high. There is not much debate among those people involved in education that this is a large group. I should declare an interest as a dyslexic and someone involved in the dyslexia movement. Those with hidden disabilities account for a large number of those who traditionally have not achieved. Secondary behavioural and other undiagnosed problems account for a large part of the group. The failure is there. Those who do not achieve in school invariably make up the bulk of children with discipline problems. I think that is universally accepted. Unless we get better at spotting earlier on where these problems are, we will just continue to patch up the system. The debate about special schools has a direct bearing on this. We will always have to have special schools to catch the people who have been damaged by late diagnosis, and who have learnt that the way you cover up your failure in the classroom is to disrupt it. Once again, this is nothing new. Everyone has known it for a long time. I will certainly be supporting amendments that ensure we strengthen the provision of training to identify special educational needs throughout the education process. The mainstream teacher should know when to call in help. I am not saying everyone has to be an expert, but what we have traditionally got wrong, and still do, is when to call in the expertise. We then find ourselves—unfortunately, the noble Lord, Lord Rix, is not here—in the all-important battle to get the correct help. The noble Lord is back in the Chamber. I have been agreeing with him for the past two minutes. There has been universal provision in numerous Acts of Parliament from numerous Governments—there is a direct historical flow that seems to bear very little relation to rosettes worn on election day—but we are putting in provisions that are not being accessed early enough. I have come to the conclusion that unless we address that issue here, we will not address the problem at all. It will not matter what else we do. To go on to other areas not directly covered in the Bill, I say to my noble friend Lady Williams that her comment about A-levels is probably one of the most appropriate I have heard about them. The A-level exam was designed to get us through a university system that disappeared a little after I went through it. It was designed to prepare you for an intensive three-year course where you knew what career you were going on to, and you went through and did it. We then changed the course and the exam, but we kept the same name. Let us be honest and say it has gone; it is about time. If we do that, we can relieve ourselves of the tedium of that August period when lazy journalists talk about how standards have slipped, without realising they are not talking about the same exam. It may be wearing the same clothes, but it is a different beast. Ultimately, this Bill is an opportunity to do a few good things and mitigate a few other proposed changes, which will effectively mean that most of us think long and hard before we name the different types of schools in any one borough or metropolitan area. Surely that amount of effort could be better directed at other parts of the education system.