Education and Inspections Bill

I thank the Minister for his response. I was looking not for immediate acceptance of these amendments, but for the will to look at them constructively. The Minister dealt at some length with the difficulty of the first part of the amendment; that is, separating the decision from the funding. I do not want to offer a half-baked solution; I understand the problem and we need to look at possible solutions. The second part of the amendment is about velcroing funding to the child. I am not sure that the Minister spent much time on that. I felt that even if he had to say, ““Your idea that the funding goes with the child across local authority boundaries raises big problems, but within the local authority it would go with the child””, that is a start. Even so, there is another element—the funding should be spent on meeting the special needs of that child. That does not seem to raise the problems. In response to what the Minister said about the right of appeal, a parent who is not a good reader on receiving eight pages of typescript about rights and so on would tend to shelve it as being too difficult. One must recognise that there are big differences between how people are able to use their rights. Some are much more able than others and I suspect that there are a lot of parents who on seeing this formidable piece of paper saying what their rights are will put it on the shelf. I add one comment to what the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, was saying. It is right to encourage an aspect of the Government’s thinking about partnerships. Within the partnerships it would make sense for one school to say, ““We are particularly skilled in dealing with autism””. Another one’s skill might be dyslexia. Within the partnership the schools can meet the needs of the community, as each school clearly cannot meet the whole diversity of needs.