Angela Watkinson

Conservative Party | Upminster

Early years education

This speech was part of a debate in the House of Commons.

I want to introduce the issue of special needs in early years, and I begin by reading a paragraph from the response from the general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers to the report:

"The early identification of special educational needs is essential and must be accompanied by adequate resources that will enable those needs to be fully met, ensuring appropriate provision and intervention, in order to enable all children to make the best possible progress. Not all children will be able to 'catch up' and many will have severe and complex learning needs that will require long-term support. There are also implications for the demands on other qualified professionals working in areas providing that support."

These days, most reception teachers will identify in their first term at least half a dozen children with special needs. Some of those needs derive from a lack of the normal home and family experiences. Such children may come from homes that do not have books. Perhaps they have not been exposed to children's literature, from Little Red Riding Hood to Harry Potter. They may not have had nursery rhymes sung to them. They may not even have been exposed to normal conversation sitting round a table and eating with the family, so they have poor development of language and other social skills. They may not have had the normal counting games that parents usually introduce to their children when they are dressing, such as counting shoes or buttons. Those children will be able to catch up once they go to school and experience the whole range of things that teachers put in front of them.

Other children have learning difficulties and may never be able to catch up. For example, they may have chronic illness that has taken up much of their early years in hospital visits or has made them unable to join in robust forms of play with other children owing to their being more protected, thus delaying their development. They may have physical or mental impairment that necessitates special educational provision. There is a wide spectrum of need: the one thing that one cannot do with special needs children is generalise about them. We need to offer them a wide choice of provision. There is a case for introducing as many such children as possible into mainstream, with the proper support. However, some will never be able to survive in mainstream schools, so I make a plea for the retention of the special school in the range of options available to parents.

I have deep concerns about a policy of total inclusion. Inclusion may be appropriate for some children—if not at the beginning of their education, at some time subsequently—but some will always need the protective environment of a special school. I should like to tell hon. Members about a child at the school where I spent many years, who had brittle bones—a very fragile but quite intelligent child, who, after many years in a special school, was transferred to mainstream at her and her parents' request. I am going back to the 1980s, when the policy of putting special needs children into mainstream school with support was in its infancy. The child had acquired a large measure of independence in her special school, and when she went to mainstream the other children and the teachers were so overprotective that she lost some of that independence. It is a complex matter: each individual child must be looked at carefully and the appropriate provision chosen.

I was concerned recently to learn that a special needs nursery in my constituency which usually had about 20 pupils referred to it each year had no children referred to it this September. This morning I heard that a consultation procedure is in progress for the closure of the nursery. It is ironic that in the same area a sure start programme is in preparation. I hope that the consultation procedure will take account of all the objections that arise.

I end by quoting a paragraph from a letter by the special children editor of the Teaching Times:

"There is still a great deal of confusion about what 'inclusion' means: for some people, the term is synonymous with mainstreaming, for others it signifies the consideration of a child's specific needs and how best to meet them, by using a wide range of provision. For policy-makers and senior managers, it often comes down to what is practicable within the existing system and budgetary constraints."

We are faced, as ever, with the compromise between idealism and reality. I leave hon. Members with that thought.