You Need
Raising the profile of learners with severe and complex special educational needs.
Learners with Severe and Complex Special Needs in England face enough challenges without being systematically omitted from each new initiative that emerges from the DfES. It didn’t used to be like this at all.
How can the needs of these learners be given the profile they used to have? How can the profile be raised? Last June, at a meeting of the Westminster Forum, Bill Rammell MP had asked me to write to him detailing the concerns widely voiced by special educators. I did. The reply from his DfES officials confirmed our worst fears (PDF). These learners are off the map.
Happily, at the same meeting, I met Baroness Walmsley who speaks on education for the Liberal Democrats in the Lords. Lady Walmsley agreed to host a large meeting at the House of Lords. I would find ninety experts in special education and assistive technology and she would provide a dozen parliamentarians to listen to us.
The Baroness was as good as her word.
Over a hundred of us met on the covered terrace of the House of Lords prior to a lordly buffet.
Ivan Lewis MP arrived breathless from the Commons. He is a very pleasant man with practical experience with adults with just the difficulties we were talking about which has stood him in good stead in ministerial jobs in both the DfES and, currently, the Department of Health. In between he was Economic Secretary to the Treasury.
Lady Walmsley asked me to speak first. I was nervous, but I knew what I was going to say and said it.
Ivan Lewis didn’t know what I was going to say and may have felt he had been ambushed. He was clearly shocked by some of what he was told and said he would start by largely abandoning the “line” the DfES had prepared for him.
Mr Lewis mounted a spirited defence of government education and care policy, at some length, wanting to see the plight of learners with severe and complex needs put in the context of much higher government spending.
However he did promise to “make a commitment today to try and respond to Martin’s challenge to raise the status of this issue again, give it a higher priority and get it back on the politicians’ agenda”. And to “go away from here and commit to, say, asking some questions, raising some issues and trying to get the question of assistive technology, that Martin has demonstrated today, genuinely does need, really at a ministerial level, some push”.
He concluded that: “he needed to go away from today’s gathering and speak to colleagues across the government to ensure that we have in government a specific focus on this particular issue. Every disabled child matters!”
The Minister left.
Lady Walmsley (Lib Dem Education) leaned across Lady Morris of Bolton (Conservative Shadow Education Secretary) toward Lady Darcy de Knayth (crossbencher): “I think we got a result”.
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Comic relief: Bob the Builder presents Lady Walmsley with a cheque for
£10,000
for the Manchester Children’s Hospital Fund.