You Need
 |
Lifelong Learning Minister, Bill Rammell MP |
A paper prepared by Martin Littler, Managing Director of Inclusive Technology Ltd for Bill Rammell MP, Minister of State for Lifelong Learning, Further and Higher Education at the Department for Education and Skills.
At the meeting of the Westminster Education Forum on 14th June 2006 I asked a question about the disappearance of Special Needs from the e-learning agenda and the Minister asked me to write to him amplifying the points I had made at the Forum.
Following this the Forum organiser, Peter van Gelder asked if he could publish my letter and the Minister’s reply to Forum members. Here are the points I raised.
Learners with special needs can benefit most from technology.
ICT has given the biggest benefits to learners who face the greatest challenges in their learning. Children without speech are no longer dependent on being asked the right question; they can be given a voice. Blind children can read what they like, independently. Children capable of only one voluntary movement or sound can play, communicate and learn to the full extent of their ability and those with learning difficulties can have resources tailored precisely to their needs. Personalised Learning has been a commonplace for children with Severe and Complex Special Educational Needs for more than twenty years because of this technology.
It can be demonstrated that if your starting point for computer resources is SEN then you have adaptable resources that will meet the individual needs of learners then all learners can benefit from the personalised learning created. My World, the most successful and widely used educational program ever used in British primary schools was designed for just one girl in a special school to help here plan her day. Clicker, today’s most successful and adaptable program in mainstream primary education was designed to meet special needs too. The whole concept of open framework learning software was developed by the National Special Needs Software Centre in the late eighties. Only the United States can compare with Britain in the development of computer resources for learners with Special Needs. For children with the most severe handicaps Britain has a clear world lead.
All of this is no accident. It is due to enlightened government leadership throughout the eighties and early nineties. The networks set up then still influence education today through people from that era occupying key positions in QCA, LEAs, at least one RBC or, like myself, in the Education Supply Industry. Time has trimmed the branches of this knowledge network tree as its members age and retire, but recent policy changes and events at Becta are threatening to cut off the roots too.
To set this in a historical context may I take you back to the stark contrast of the early and mid-eighties. The Department of Education and Science, as it then was created a National Coordinator for SEN and IT with a small team of three. They created the two Aids to Communication in Education (ACE) Centres in Oldham and Oxford serving those working with learners with Cerebral Palsy and severe communication handicaps. Each Centre had a staff of four or five. They created the four regional Special Education MicroElectronic Resources Centres (SEMERCs) each with a Director and three staff who recruited and related to a Special Needs Advisory Teacher in each of the, then, 109 LEAs and ELBs in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. From 1986 I was Director of the Manchester SEMERC from 1986 and had an SEN/IT advisory teacher based in each of the 37 LEAs in the West Midland, the North West, North Wales and Northern Ireland. Attached to Manchester SEMERC was another DES creation the National Special Needs software Unit with four staff including two programmers.
The head of the IT in schools unit at the DES, Dr Philip Lewis, met regularly with the SEMERC and ACE Centre Directors and the DES funded annual residential conferences in each of the four SEMERC regions. I was for a period the national coordinator of these conferences.
National funding for the SEMERCs was withdrawn in 1989 but the DES funded the first Micros for Special Needs Exhibition in 1988, these ran for seven years until the last of the SEMERCs was sold off to Yorkshire Television in 1995. The focus on Special Needs and IT was still sufficiently strong for Education Ministers like John Butcher MP and the late Eric Forth MP to travel up to Oldham to open Micros for Special Needs.
All of this activity was led by the National Coordinator for Special Needs at Becta (although this organisation was then called NCET after the merger of CET and MEP, then MESU and, today, Becta).
Fast Forward to March 2006
In March this year the funding for the two ACE Centres (£340,000) was withdrawn. The immensely effective Communication Aids Project to provide resources for learners with a communication handicaps was closed and Becta decided to scrap its Special Needs team too. As this team advised the DfES, QCA, BSF and the National School Leadership College none of whom had any in-house expertise on SEN/ICT, this would have left learners with SEN and those who worked with them without any voice in Government at all. The furore this proposal created has led to the grudging re-instatement of Becta’s SEN Manager – but without a team to lead.
Communication Aids Project
This was a brilliant cost effective scheme which lent learners the Communication Aids they needed to communicate. Because the aids were lent to learners themselves they could take them home and move school or into FE, HE or the world of work without losing their “voice”.
It cost £21 million over four years. Contrast this with the DSA scheme for HE students which cost £84 million last year alone. CAP served learners over an age range of fifteen years (the youngest recipient was 4 the oldest 19) rather than the three years of Higher Education. As the funding for four years was, rather neatly, a quarter of last year’s DSA funding over five times the age range you could say it cost only 1/80th as much as was considered necessary for students in HE. The idea of supporting the learner directly rather than the school, institution or workplace they might move between was so neat that, in my capacity, then, of European Board Member of the American Assistive Technology Industry Association, I was twice called to Brussels to promote CAP to the EU Commission as a model for Europe as a whole.
CAP also kept alive the network of expertise in Special Needs/IT as recommenders and assessors. Most important among these were the two ACE Centres and London’s CENMAC. CAP closed in March this year.
“Special Needs and Disability are completely off the Agenda” say my colleague Anna Rouke, Director of ACE North. Evidence of this is not hard to find.
DfES staff focused on Special Needs have fallen in numbers from 71 to 17 over the last three years. The two staff with expertise in this area at QCA are gone.
Special School’s needs were originally completely missed out of the New Opportunities Fund scheme to train teacher in the use of ICT. When Special Schools needs were included a years later the training undertaken by 7,000 special school teachers was judged to be the most effective on offer.
Special Schools were ignored when the National School Leadership College was set up with tenders only offered for Primary and Secondary training. Special Schools are now tacked on to the Primary School programme.
Curriculum Online originally ruled out the open framework resources needed to provide personalised learning for SEN pupils and the tagging structure, designed only for mainstream subject teaching has been a minefield for SEN resources. In the latest report on Curriculum Online, Secondary Schools are mentioned 173 times, Primary Schools 168 times. Of Special School there is not one single reference.
Learning Platforms (to which all learners need access by March 2008) could offer huge benefits to learners with Severe and Complex SEN. They could, for the first time ever choose and load the resources they use. The complex set-ups they each need (e.g: post acceptance switch delay or font size and colour) could be communicated to each programme to so the teacher or speech therapists expertise would follow them, through the ether, when they used the same resources at home. The most used aspect of LPs, the calendar, plays a huge part in the lives of many learners with SEN from CP to Autism as they plan their day and think ahead.
Needless to say the Assistive Technology industry was not involved in the Learning Platform consultation at all and nobody at the DfES or Becta (I’ve asked them) has any notion of what benefits a Learning Platform can offer a learner with Severe and Complex SEN – even though all learners must have them by March 2008. Every child matters?
What can be done now?
It is unrealistic to argue for the return to the hundreds of SEN/IT experts of the eighties, although this community was enormously effective. But “Every Child Matters” should include children with SEN too. The £60 million the Minister announced to provide out of school access for disadvantaged pupils could include Assistive Technology to those who need it and replace CAP. The 1.2% of learners in Special Schools probably need about 10% of this funding not the £500,000 (less than 1%) on offer now.
The ACE Centre funding should be reviewed too, £340,000 annually was not much for what was achieved.
Some funding for research into Learning Platforms for children with Severe and Complex SEN would pay dividends and could give Britain a world beating product. An SEN adviser attached to each of the twelve RBCs would do a great deal to sharpen focus on this area too as schools and LEAs choose LPs.
Finally, there should be a strengthened SEN team at Becta ready to influence government and provide the national leadership which everyone in the field has appreciated and valued for twenty-five years now.
Martin Littler (martin@inclusive.co.uk)
Managing Director of Inclusive Technology Ltd. (www.inclusive.co.uk)
14th June 2006
Read Bill Rammell's reply (PDF - 2.1mb)
