Official Report 183KB pdf
The second item of business—the first was very quick—is evidence from Audit Scotland in connection with pre-legislative scrutiny of the draft Education (Additional Support for Learning) (Scotland) Bill. We expect the bill to be introduced around late October, but the committee was anxious to hear from witnesses and to get a flavour of the issues involved before it took formal evidence in the autumn.
Good morning. I am acting director of performance audit at Audit Scotland. With me is John Lincoln, who is a project manager in Audit Scotland and was the lead officer for the study that led to the report. I will say a few introductory words about the report, after which I will ask John Lincoln to summarise its main findings and recommendations. We will of course be glad to answer questions and to enter into a discussion with the committee about the report's contents.
The presumption of mainstreaming was introduced by the Standards in Scotland's Schools etc Act 2000 and came into force in August 2003. In addition, the Education (Disability Strategies and Pupils' Educational Records) (Scotland) Act 2002 requires councils, over time, to improve access to education for pupils with disabilities. Those are the two main pieces of legislation that will influence mainstreaming.
Thank you. The report contained many interesting insights that will help the committee's work. A number of things certainly struck a chord with me. I will kick off by making one or two points, before throwing open the discussion to the committee. We have until about half past 10 on this item.
We did not look at the potential changes to the record-of-needs system, because we did not want to muddy the waters by issuing a report on that at the same time as the Executive would be publishing draft legislation. However, although the bill will broaden the scope of the definitions—the term "additional support needs" is perhaps broader than "special educational needs"—the needs of those pupils who will be included should have been considered and met in the past, even though that might not have been reflected in the figures.
Can you give us guidance on how we might be able to get a handle on the issue as we come to consider the bill? The Parliament imposes on us a duty to do so, but that is a bit like the question, "How long is a piece of string?"
If the committee wants to consider the cost of changes, it might examine likely staffing changes, the cost of establishing a tribunal system and the number of pupils who would be expected to be involved. The committee might examine the processes now and how they will change as a result of the bill. Through evidence, the committee might try to get a handle on the numbers that are involved and to concentrate on the large numbers.
Before I throw the meeting open to committee members, I will touch on public-private partnerships and other capital projects. You were fairly critical of how councils consulted user interests and took account of the need to provide therapy rooms. Will you give us more of a feel for that? How quickly could we get to grips with that? Has any follow-up work been done since the report was produced? Are there priorities for councils' approaches or action that the Scottish Executive can take?
Since we produced the report, the Executive has published a report on the strategies for building new schools and for school improvements. That contains guidance on the need for consultation processes. It is an overarching strategic document that says how councils should manage the process. Underneath that, guidance is needed on specifics. The difficult questions are in the detail, such as how big a classroom should be, how big classroom doors should be and what floor surfaces should be used. Guidance is needed on the detailed consideration of what is required for pupils with special educational needs.
Is greater flexibility needed over classroom size changes for reduced class sizes, for example? Is the general point that more flexibility is needed and that schools should have more space?
Space and flexibility relate partly to access for pupils with disabilities. At the moment, the issues that tend to be considered relate more to disability access, whereas many pupils with special needs have sensory impairment—visual or hearing impairment. Their needs, which are perhaps less obvious, must be considered more. In doing that, people with relevant expertise need to be consulted, but when we undertook the study, we found that that consultation was not happening.
On the capital projects, have you found in your review of what has been happening that many parents find themselves without choice, because special units and special schools are closing for new-build projects? Have you found that, because of the policy of moving such provision into the main stream, many local authorities are closing the door to parents' opportunities to have a choice of other special educational settings? I am thinking about children with hearing impairments, children with Asperger's syndrome or those on the autistic spectrum and pupils with communication disorders, whom it might not always be possible to include in the main stream. I understand that many parents feel that they have no choices.
We have found that mainstreaming does not suit every pupil. Of pupils with the same sort of impairment—visual impairment, for example—some flourished in mainstream schools, while others did not. There needs to be space for pupils who do not flourish in mainstream schools.
A pupil's parents recently had to go to court to get the placing that the pupil required. That is just one case that I am aware of—I am certain that it is not the only such case. It is unfortunate that even though we have a good policy and we encourage mainstreaming, we are closing the door to other options. We need to examine carefully the options that we leave. Although I acknowledge what the witnesses have said, I think that those issues will re-emerge. More parents and pupils will be unhappy about their limited choice.
We mentioned in the report that councils need to conduct an option appraisal. They must examine their existing resources and those that they will need in the future. To do that, they will need to consult parents, teachers and the voluntary sector on what will be required in the light of the Standards in Scotland's Schools etc Act 2000. When considering their options, councils should conduct an option appraisal and consult with the relevant groups at an early stage.
The Education (Disability Strategies and Pupils' Educational Records) (Scotland) Act 2002 requires councils to produce strategies. Have you been involved in a survey of those strategies?
We have not. Our time scale for the research made that very difficult. The deadline for producing replies was March 2003.
I did not mean a survey for the purposes of your study—I meant a more general survey. Is Audit Scotland or another body involved in assessing the suitability of the strategies?
Audit Scotland is not involved in that.
I echo the sentiment that the report was extremely helpful in enabling us to understand the present situation and the issues that all the councils and the Parliament face when considering the implications of mainstreaming and the draft Education (Additional Support for Learning) (Scotland) Bill.
There are huge variations between councils in expenditure on children and young people in special schools. To a large extent, the reason for that is historical. Special needs pupils in rural areas have always gone to their local schools because of the long travelling time to special schools whereas, in areas where there are special schools—such as Edinburgh and Glasgow, which have a lot of special schools because they were the centres of regional authorities before local government reorganisation—special needs pupils tend to go to those schools.
Do you expect that situation to change?
I expect it to change slowly, over time. We do not expect pupils to be taken out of special schools and put into mainstream schools. We expect mainstreaming to happen when pupils go to primary school. Obviously, as the change will take place over some time, there will be a transitional cost arising from having both mainstream and special schools operating in parallel.
That is an important point, given the concern that Rosemary Byrne raised about choice. You are saying that there would be an evolutionary pattern of change rather than pupils who attend special schools being told to move to mainstream schools.
On the point about expenditure on children and young people with special educational needs, the chart that you have before you shows the expenditure per pupil based on all pupils, not only those with special educational needs. In other parts of the report, we talk about expenditure on pupils who are assessed as having special educational needs in the school census and we also examine expenditure per pupil with a record of needs. Basically, there was no relation between the expenditure on those three groups. A council that had a high expenditure per pupil based on all pupils might have a low expenditure when one looks at figures based only on expenditure on pupils with records of needs. The question of expenditure needs to be raised, but information on the number of pupils with special needs—whether the figures are based on a survey of all pupils or only those with records of needs—is inconsistent among councils and that inconsistency makes it difficult to find a pattern. Although certain councils might seem to have high expenditure, it is difficult to get behind the figures. We were not able to tease all those issues out in this report. That is a job for the future.
There is a suggestion that a balance might be arrived at, with some of the children with severe physical problems remaining in special schools, while a number of other categories of children shift into the main stream. That is beginning to emerge clearly from the study.
The legislation came into effect only in August this year. The number of pupils in special schools has not really changed over the past eight years or so. One would expect the balance to change over time and in particular, one would expect the number of pupils with moderate learning difficulties—who make up the majority of pupils—to change. One would expect those pupils to be the first pupils to go into mainstream schools. Educating pupils with severe and profound learning difficulties is more difficult and expensive. Any changes in that area might take longer.
Would you develop what you said about differences between councils? Is there a need for a road map for the introduction of mainstreaming? It is clear that there are major differences in various council areas—you highlighted those in your report. Is there a requirement for level-playing-field funding so that mainstreaming can be introduced throughout the country relatively fairly? One could envisage some councils going for a minimalist position to start off with in their options appraisal, with one base or feeder primary school for a particular secondary school or one secondary school in the area becoming the base for special needs education as their first step. Other authorities might move forward in a much broader way. Is there a need for a road map? In the report, I did not get a notion anywhere of a time scale for a major culture change. Such a change will not happen overnight, will it?
That is true—it will not. As the legislation had not been enacted and councils did not have strategies for change, it was difficult for us to examine councils' time scales.
Thank you for your evidence, which has been helpful.
The huge variations to which you refer between the percentage of children with special educational needs in the City of Edinburgh Council area and other council areas relate to how the school census is completed. We have pointed out that there needs to be greater scrutiny and more guidance on how forms are completed so that there can a better and more consistent base for considering such issues.
Do those figures appear because, for example, in the Lothians, a child is registered as an Edinburgh pupil if they live in West Lothian and travel to Edinburgh for schooling, which affects the spend per council?
In the study, we examined the number of pupils who travel in and out of each council area and we took account of the expenditure that moved between councils, so the percentages per council of children in special schools should relate to children who live in those council areas.
I have one short question. In practice, will implementation of the inclusions policy involve targeting schools, or will it apply to all schools?
Councils can implement the policy in various ways. There is no case law on what constitutes a local school, so it is difficult to say whether all schools, or one feeder primary school for each secondary school, for example, will need to be adapted for pupils with special needs. Councils might want each primary school to specialise in one type of special educational need. For example, one primary school might specialise in pupils with hearing or visual impairment, and another might specialise in another matter. That might help to reduce the cost of mainstreaming, while providing specialist support for pupils in each school. Councils could take any of those paths, depending on what they considered to be the best way forward.
It is difficult—in fact, it is impossible—for us to conclude which approach is more effective. We can consider the costs of different approaches, but one big difficulty is that people often have different definitions of what they want from the education system. That is manifestly reflected in parental choice. Parents define what they want in different ways.
Do you have anything to add about the speed of implementing the inclusions policy?
Implementation will happen over a long time scale rather than a short one. Councils need to build up provision and the number of trained teaching and non-teaching staff. That will take time. We have examined the costing for training staff over five years. The time scale for bringing buildings up to standard is probably longer than that. For some pupils with special educational needs—perhaps children with moderate learning difficulties—provision can be made in mainstream schools fairly quickly. However, for pupils with severe and profound learning difficulties, a fairly long period is involved.
I want to consider the lessons that we need to learn from the fact that some of those issues were not identified when the legislation was being considered. Obviously, there is an issue relating to the fact that the mainstreaming presumption came in at the end of stage 1 and the parliamentary system did not seem to be able to cope with analysing the financial consequences of that.
That is the $64,000 question.
It is fair to say that the Standards in Scotland's Schools etc Act 2000 was passed by the Parliament at an early stage and that there has been a steep learning curve. Because of that, and the fact that the amendment that brought in the presumption of mainstreaming came in at a late stage, the financial memorandum was fairly vague. That situation has changed now, and the Finance Committee is examining financial memorandums in a lot more detail. That will be helpful and probably means that the issues surrounding the analysing of the cost of the legislation will have been tackled by now. There will still be issues about amendments that are made to the bill at a late stage, but it is up to yourselves to decide how best to deal with that.
Because I am also on the Finance Committee, I am aware that that responsibility is being taken seriously.
First of all, you should be looking for some analysis of the unit cost of various aspects of the work that will be done. Secondly, you will have to make some assumptions about numbers—that is the tricky bit. The best that anyone will be able to do is to produce a range of numbers. The range in our report from £38 million to £121 million reflects the difficulty in predicting the numbers, but there are assumptions that can be made and you should examine quite closely what the implications of making certain assumptions are.
To what extent are people with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties, and those with specific learning difficulties, picked up? Those disabilities are less obvious than some other disabilities. Did you get a feel for how successful the system was at catching everyone at an early stage? Was that brought into the figures on which you based your analysis?
We found that children with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties would be picked up in the figures only if they had a record of needs. The people to whom we talked said that such pupils tend to get a record of needs and to be picked up only if they are in a special school. We acknowledge that the majority of those pupils are probably in mainstream schools and are probably not picked up by the figures. That is an issue. The new bill might be better at picking up such children through definition.
Wendy Alexander might have a question.
Elaine Murray covered my point, so I will pass.
Equity of funding is one of the big issues. It was mentioned in the context of the range of funding for special educational needs across councils. A parent can have far greater support for their child, depending on where they are in Scotland and on which school their child attends. As well as special schools and mainstream schools, there are national schools that are financed by the Executive. Those schools all have different costs. When that is translated into a cost per pupil, we find that the supposed choice that parents face is not a fair one. Depending on where someone lives, they could have a far better choice. People do not have equal choice for their children. You do not seem to have given that issue central attention, although I could be missing something.
In relation to national schools, a resource will always tend to be used by people in the local area. The balance of a decision involves weighing up the travelling time against the facilities that the school provides.
I wonder whether there is room for more work here. One of the arguments that councillors would make is that when working out the financial calculations for educating a child with special educational needs in a mainstream school, that child should count as two children on the school roll, because of the extra costs that are involved. It is difficult to obtain a financial basis for the figures without firm information. Is no such information available, or is it simply that the variation makes things impossible?
The variation and the lack of information make it difficult to compare funding in councils at a national level. Each council has various methods for distributing resources among schools. We saw good examples of councils being able to take into account the needs of individual pupils when assessing the overall budget for a school. The distribution of resources to reflect need happens locally.
Is there potential for having comparable figures or is that pretty impossible, because the fact that we are talking about such an individualised task means that we will never have standardised figures—figures that we can compare across authorities in Scotland? "Never" is a difficult word to use; perhaps I should have put it to you that it is "unlikely" that we could obtain such figures.
We examined figures on pupils with records of needs, pupils with individualised educational programmes and pupils whom head teachers had assessed as part of the school census as having special educational needs. The figures varied so much among councils that it was difficult to do anything with them. In the report, we recommended that the Executive and councils should examine ways to improve the quality of that information. Once that has been done, perhaps we will be able to answer your question, which raises a difficulty.
We have a little time, so members could ask more questions, but first, I will ask about a slightly different matter that is important to the bill—the support services from health boards and other such groups. Page 51 of your report says that many therapists thought that they would be taken out of the front line of dealing with children and that they would become
There were shortages of therapists—particularly occupational therapists and physiotherapists—to work with pupils with special needs across the board. The situation with speech and language therapy was not of the same order, because that therapy has a different arrangement, under which councils fund national health service speech and language therapists. The difficulties relate to occupational therapy and physiotherapy. Child and adolescent mental health services were another difficult matter that we identified.
Are some of those specialists employed by councils as part of their education services, and some employed by health boards? Does a pattern emerge?
Physiotherapists and occupational therapists tend to be funded and employed by the health service. In the main, councils fund speech and language therapy, but it is provided by the health service. Councils pay the health service for the speech and language therapy service and they fund that service to varying degrees, so the level of health service speech and language therapy varies among councils.
Am I right to say that that therapy is also supplied by voluntary sector organisations, to an extent?
Yes.
Is that significant?
We did not collect information on speech and language therapy services that are provided by voluntary agencies.
Did you consider management issues? I know that the education service in a local authority does not manage the service that is delivered in schools. If a language therapist or occupational therapist enters a school, that therapist is accountable to a health service manager and not to an education department, which can lead to difficulties. Have you examined that?
We did not consider that in detail. Speech and language therapists and physiotherapists told us that their ability to do their job depended largely on a school's ethos and its willingness to be flexible and to recognise the contribution that they could make.
Did you ask the schools about management issues?
We surveyed schools on whether they were happy with the amount of physiotherapy, but did not survey or talk to individual schools about management issues involving physiotherapy.
There is so much that I would like to say about the matter. I am greatly concerned about the integration of services, which is the issue that has just been discussed. This is not what I initially set out to say, but I have to add to what has just been said. At the moment, services are patchy throughout the country. In some local authority areas it is difficult to get speech therapists, while in others the problem is getting occupational therapists. In addition, there are too many bosses and managers, because health boards, education authorities and voluntary sectors are all involved.
Sorry to interrupt, Rosemary, but can you perhaps direct questions to the witness?
Yes, I am coming to that. My concern is that there will continue to be a patchy service throughout the country. Was consideration given to bringing together the agencies that supply support to schools—for example, speech and language therapy and occupational therapy—under one umbrella when the moving into mainstream plan was being put together? If that was not considered, why was that? Further, was consideration given to the extra work load that teaching and auxiliary staff would have to take on board?
On the issue of patchy as distinct from integrated services, we assessed how good councils' relationships were with health boards and other agencies. Some councils were obviously better than others in that regard. In the best councils we found examples of good practice. For example, in one council there was a manager in charge of children's services and the health board and the education and social work departments jointly funded that post. That person had responsibilities across the board and so was able, for example, to put together a protocol for pupils with autistic spectrum disorders that covered all agencies within the area.
In your report, you make it clear that there will be increased expenditure on the grounds of capital costs, transitional costs of rationalisation, revenue costs and the costs of providing NHS therapy services. Earlier, you referred to losing special school economies of scale, which are particularly important for NHS services. My question is simple. Given the fact that implementing the bill is going to involve a great deal of expenditure, do you foresee the policy being carried out in an evolutionary way over a long time?
Yes, one would imagine that it would be carried out in an evolutionary way rather than through a big bang approach.
Rosemary Byrne talked about Government initiatives. I am trying to link issues together. In your report, you make the point that the changing children's services fund was perhaps a better, more holistic initiative than some of the initiatives that had gone before. However, there is still an issue about the timing of announcements of new funding, which are often made towards the end of the year rather than at a time when councils can work with them and plan for service development.
All the councils to which we spoke welcomed the initiatives and the new money, although some of them would have preferred to have had longer to plan for the initiatives. Councils want as long as possible to plan and want initiatives such as those relating to the presumption of mainstreaming to be co-ordinated, so that initiatives in education are matched with initiatives in the health service to support them. We have spoken to the Scottish Executive since it received our report, and it is producing an action plan that involves responding to all the recommendations in the report.
I have a question on a point of policy. We are going to have to predict the expenditure and ask the Executive to follow the figures through so that it knows exactly how many people will be affected and how many pupils will need support so that the money can follow the pupils. In the report, you make an interesting point about the difference between the number of boys with records of needs and the number of girls with records of needs. One thing that we can predict is the gender distribution and the number of boys and girls who will be affected by the bill. You say that the Executive should research whether the difference in the number of boys and girls identified as having special education needs is the result of genuine differences in the levels of support that are required. Can you explain that in more detail? That will have an impact on the prediction of numbers and expenditure.
When we compiled the report, we found that two thirds of pupils with special educational needs and records of needs were boys. A similar proportion of pupils with IEPs were boys. There seems to be a preponderance of boys among pupils with special educational needs. The health service people on our advisory groups said that one would expect more boys to have special needs because of specific vulnerabilities and conditions in boys. The question in our minds was: how many more boys would we expect to have special needs? Nobody knew. We want to know whether the current position is correct or whether boys are being over-identified or under-identified in some regards.
Thank you—the committee is indebted to you for the time that you have given us this morning and in particular for the report, from which we are sure to draw much interesting information and many lessons. I dare say that we will meet you again in the future, what with one thing and another.
The Executive makes the point that there is no obligation for the financial memorandum to be upgraded as we go along. I do not want to trespass on the remit of the Audit Committee, but that seems to be a terrible structural weakness. We should at least tell the Audit Committee that we would appreciate its taking a view on that at the earliest opportunity. It was suggested that we should expect the Executive to have the capability to cost options and to fine tune that appraisal process. Obviously, there are questions about all the issues that we have discussed, for example who is in and who is out, and common definitions. Given the diversity of provision, the Executive should have the capability of costing the options at authority level.
We should be careful about spurious accuracy in this field, because there are many variables. Fiona Hyslop will remember the issues surrounding the Homelessness (Scotland) Bill in the Social Justice Committee in the previous session. The difficulties are understandable to a degree. On the other hand, there is perhaps a feeling that the Executive can go a bit further in giving us guidance.
I agree. The answer is not to legislate for something that is about processes. The temptation in committees, because we are responsible for legislation, is to try to legislate for what are essentially good practice or standards. What we are really doing is encouraging the Executive to be capable of telling us how long it will take for processes to be in place and what the cost might be. We will hopefully then exercise a degree of restraint and not try to enshrine in legislation that which is more appropriately held in guidelines, for example.
A good bit of that is to do with time scales; for example, how long it will take to adapt buildings, recruit staff and so on. Much of the flavour would come from such information. Are you suggesting formally that we write to the Audit Committee?
There are two issues. First, we could write to the Audit Committee to say that the point about an obligation to update the financial memorandum as amendments are agreed to is pertinent. We realise that that is the Audit Committee's area, but it is very important to us and will continue to be so in this case and regarding education bills as a whole. Secondly, we could ask the Executive whether it expects us to resist some of the more ambitious demands of parents who think that money follows legislation. I am not quite sure how that can be done—perhaps it can be done informally through officials. There will be a degree of triangulation throughout the process of getting the legislative framework right, but our level of confidence in the Executive's proposals will be rooted in part in whether we feel that it has taken criticisms seriously and, in so far as it has the capacity to cost the measures that are likely to emerge, overcome them.
I support very strongly what Wendy Alexander has said. The more the legislation smacks of compulsion, the less successful it will be. If it tunes into a gradual evolutionary process, it will be much more acceptable.
I detect that the committee supports that general approach. Do we agree to write to the Audit Committee about the matter? The minister reads or is advised of the Official Report of our meetings, so it is not necessary for us to raise the matter with him formally.
I agree whole-heartedly. This is not just about the costing of changes to Government policy or legislation. It strikes me that the lack of transparency in funding special educational needs throughout Scotland is not helpful to anyone. I know from experience that that adds to the frustration that many parents feel. There is huge underlying frustration and there have been many battles between parents and authorities. Too often, those battles relate to what are defined as reasonable expectations for people's children. The fact that it was impossible for Audit Scotland to assess what represents an equitable funding settlement for any child illuminates that.
I have two observations. First, the report seemed to suggest that the requirement for special needs support was not linked to the usual deprivation factors. It is a unit cost across authorities. That issue is relevant to local authority funding.
Meeting suspended.
On resuming—