Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

This amendment seeks to amend Section 321(2) of the Education Act 1996, which puts a general duty on local education authorities to, ""exercise their powers with a view to securing that, of the children for whom they are responsible, they identify those to whom subsection (2) below applies … This subsection applies to a child if … he has special educational needs, and … it is necessary for the authority to determine the special educational provision which any learning difficulty he may have calls for"." That is the trigger for the process of assessment and statements. The Government’s reaction to the Rose report was very welcome, and I understand—the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Drefelin, will tell me whether I am wrong—that 4,000 teachers will be trained and put into place who will be able to identify the children who are at risk of dyslexia and related disorders. The amendment proposes the method by which they shall be engaged in the process. I realise that there are questions of timing—the 4,000 have to be trained and so on—and I suggest to the noble Baroness that, rather than declaring it premature or something like that, we should have this or something like it in the Bill. It should be one of those clauses that is brought into effect by statutory instrument; we will come to the part of the Bill that gives the Minister the power to bring into effect parts of the Act that come into effect later than the Act as a whole. I am not sure that it is necessary to say much more than that. We have already debated the sorts of difficulties that are involved, and if we go on with this I would like on Report to get verbal communication into the standard list that follows dyslexia, because we all agree how important that is. I am anxious at this stage to ascertain the Minister’s general reaction to the proposal that we should provide a means by which these teachers, when they are trained, shall be deployed. I beg to move.