“Moving to mainstream”
Item 5 is the Auditor General's report on "Moving to mainstream".
Around 44,000 children and young people in Scotland—approximately one in 20 of the population—have special educational needs. Expenditure on special educational needs in Scotland is considerable at about £388 million. Most of that represents expenditure by education authorities; the remainder comes from social work or the national health service or is funded through various specific grants.
Recent legislation will have a substantial impact on councils' provision for children and young people with special educational needs. The resumption of mainstreaming is introduced by the Standards in Scotland's Schools etc Act 2000, while the Education (Disability Strategies and Pupils' Educational Records) (Scotland) Act 2002 requires councils to prepare accessibility strategies.
Our study attempts to examine the inclusion of children and young people with special educational needs in mainstream schools in the light of the new legislative environment. The study was carried out by Audit Scotland in partnership with Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Education. I am grateful to HMIE for its support in that work. The report was a joint study for the Accounts Commission and the Auditor General, as significant expenditure by education authorities is involved.
We considered how many pupils with special educational needs are likely to be educated in mainstream schools in the future; how much the changes are likely to cost; whether councils and other agencies are in a position to deliver the changes required; and how well the needs of children and young people with special educational needs can be met in mainstream schools.
I will highlight the main findings. The estimate is that between 2,000 and 5,000 more children with special educational needs will be educated in mainstream schools in future, an increase of approximately 9 per cent on where we are now. The report attempts to prepare a comprehensive estimate of the first costs that relate to the change, and we estimate a range of between £38 million and £121 million a year. The figure of £121 million sounds spuriously accurate, but it is just that factoring up produces that sum—roughly speaking, the costs will be between £40 million and £120 million.
The second finding is that all pupils can benefit from mainstreaming when teachers and pupils are well supported. However, mainstreaming does not work for every pupil.
Another feature is that published attainment information may not fully reflect the success of inclusive schools. Such schools are obviously taking on a particular problem that may not be reflected in how their performance is measured. That is an important issue.
We have found that planning for the changes is patchy among councils and NHS bodies, which are waiting for councils to take the lead. We make 42 recommendations to help the various agencies involved—primarily councils but also NHS bodies and others—to prepare for the changes. We are exhorting councils and NHS bodies to work together to plan for the changes. They need to examine mainstreaming options and consult parents, head teachers and the voluntary sector more fully than is currently the case in a number of authorities.
We state that councils in particular must consider the needs of pupils with special educational needs when they build schools and refurbish existing schools. They should ensure that senior teaching staff have enough time and resources to support the needs of pupils with special educational needs. They should also ensure that all their staff are properly trained.
Health bodies must ensure that they have the capacity to meet the needs of pupils with special educational needs. In particular, the health service needs to look at its therapy services, child and adolescent mental health services and school nursing services.
We also suggest that the Scottish Executive and councils work together to consider how best to reflect the success of inclusive schools when they publish attainment information. We think that the performance information that is published needs to be more sensitive to the pressures that some schools accommodate, often quite well.
A separate issue that came up as we were doing the study relates to the Parliament. I suggest that the Parliament needs better information on the costs that might be attached to bills and amendments to bills. To be frank, the financial memorandum for the Standards in Scotland's Schools etc Bill was short and rather vague, and the financial resolution that accompanied the bill was broad in scope. The mainstreaming presumption came in as an amendment at stage 2 and therefore was not costed. The likely financial consequences of proposed legislation, including amendments, should be considered carefully by the Parliament.
The Parliament, of course, recognises that and standing orders now oblige the lead committee, as well as the Finance Committee, to consider and report on financial memorandums at stage 1. The Finance Committee now reviews the memorandums in more detail than in the past to ensure that they are robust. Both those measures will help the consideration of costs, but they will help only when bills are introduced. As the situation stands, they will not deal with the problem of later amendments that may carry significant costs. I therefore suggest to the committee that the Parliament be invited to consider how best to take account of relevant costs when bills and amendments are scrutinised.
Along with my colleagues, I am happy to answer the committee's questions.
On the work that councils have had to undertake, do you have a feel for which councils have completed their strategy for overcoming the difficulties with some buildings? Was your report influenced by the fact that schools and local authorities must be fully compliant with the Disability Discrimination Act 1995?
We understand that accessibility strategies were produced by all local authorities by the due date of April 2003. In our assessment of the position in local authorities, we were limited by the fact that this is a baseline study, rather than a comprehensive examination of the whole project. It is a kind of wake-up call to everyone involved.
A new legislative requirement has been introduced and much more needs to be done in many public bodies to accommodate that. Because this is a baseline report, we sampled local authorities. We worked closely with seven local authorities across Scotland, which—together with the consultations that took place with professionals involved in delivering the service—provided us with an adequate base of information for the report. I am sure that Lesley Bloomer, the director who headed up the study, has other points to add.
Lesley Bloomer (Audit Scotland):
As Robert Black said, we examined in detail seven authorities: Aberdeen City Council, Dundee City Council, Glasgow City Council, Highland Council, North Lanarkshire Council, Orkney Islands Council and Stirling Council. We also wrote to all 32 councils to ask them about the position in their area. That exercise provided us with a mixed picture. As members know, when we produce baseline reports, we highlight good practice and—as Robert Black said—issue a wake-up call to all the relevant authorities. When we revisit the matter in two or three years' time, we will report on the performance of each of the 32 councils. At this stage, we have detailed information on only seven councils and additional information that touches on the remaining 25 authorities.
The Auditor General mentioned the cost attached to amendments to the Standards in Scotland's Schools etc Bill and suggested that the Parliament's procedures were lacking in dealing with that issue. Because the Parliament allows members to lodge manuscript amendments, the problem of uncosted amendments being agreed to is even greater than the Auditor General suggests. We might want to consider that issue, as none of us wants to agree to amendments that negate all the good work that is done elsewhere in legislation. We may be able to assist the Procedures Committee in dealing with the matter. I am grateful to the Auditor General for highlighting it to us.
In his oral report, the Auditor General said that Audit Scotland had prepared "the first costs" for the inclusion of children with special educational needs in mainstream schools. I suspect that those words were carefully chosen, but is the suggestion that those were the first costs that had ever been prepared?
When we undertook the examination we attempted to find out whether there was existing cost information on which we could draw, but we quickly concluded that we would have to carry out our own analysis. That is fully documented in the report. Whether the cost is £40 million or £120 million is important, but it is not the end of the story—it is the start of the story. The point is that a significant resource need is attached to mainstreaming that had not been calculated before.
Our reports cover efficiency, effectiveness and economy. As Robert Black said, one of the first things that we did was to seek estimates of the cost of including children with special educational needs in mainstream schools, but there were none. We produced estimates to the best of our ability. The wide range between the figures that we cite reflects the fact that no one yet knows how many children will move into mainstream education, the nature of their needs and the cost of supporting them. This is the first time that estimated costs have been produced.
I was astonished to read that one amendment has committed the Executive to substantial spending without any attempt having been made to clarify the figure involved. I seek clarification on two points. First, did ministers and officials attempt to clarify the cost of the amendment at stage 2, before it was agreed to? If not, why not?
Secondly, there is always a chance to deal with such issues at stage 3. Was there an attempt to inform the Parliament at stage 3—before the bill was passed—of what the true cost implications of the stage 2 amendment would be? I understand that that there had not been an attempt to estimate the costs, but surely it must have been known that a substantial cost would have to be allocated.
I will turn to Lesley Bloomer at this point but, to the best of our knowledge, no analysis of that type was presented to the Parliament.
That is correct. At stage 2, the Education, Culture and Sport Committee raised in passing the question of costs. The then Deputy Minister for Children and Education noted:
"If our policy thrust works, there will be fewer children in special schools and more in mainstream schools, which will make possible a transfer of resources."—[Official Report, Education, Culture and Sport Committee, 9 May 2000; c 940.]
Therefore, the point was picked up on. However, from the many hours we spent trawling through the Official Report, we did not find that greater consideration had been given to costs.
So there was no mention of costs at stage 3, and officials did not go back to do any investigative work after that mention by the minister of an anticipated transfer of resources.
Our understanding of the issue is limited by what we examined. Other events or discussions of which we do not have knowledge might well have taken place. Such a question might be addressed more appropriately to the accountable officer, if the committee wished to take evidence.
Do you have any recommendations on how the system might be tightened up, which we could investigate before passing the matter on to the Procedures Committee? It seems incredible to think that such an amount of money could be committed with no investigation whatever of the impact.
That could be more easily discussed under a later item, but—
It is central to the whole question.
We will return to it.
These might also be appropriate to discuss later, but I have two points to raise. First, should there be a specification to cover de minimis amendments, which have limited or no costs? Are there any thoughts on setting a threshold for that? If so, from where should such a threshold come?
I am not sure whether my second point comes under the ambit of this committee; as with matters that we were discussing earlier, it might be a question of making a referral to another committee. The Auditor General said that mainstreaming is generally beneficial for most children where the appropriate resources are available. Clearly, there are some children for whom mainstreaming is not beneficial. Each of us will know of cases of distress on the part of parents and children alike, where a square peg might be getting put into a round hole.
Does Mr Black have any views about where we are heading and about the risk that we might be replicating the difficulties that followed the wholesale drive towards community care? Should we be addressing the matter in the context of maintaining specialist special needs education, as opposed to having a wholesale drive towards mainstreaming? It might not be for the committee to determine where to strike the balance on that, but we should perhaps be asking for a review, or for a delineation or definition to be set.
On how amendments might be classified, I respectfully suggest that that is not a subject for the Auditor General. However, it might well be a subject that the committee wishes to pursue in consultation with other committees, and we could certainly help informally with ideas at a later stage, if the committee is minded to go in that direction.
On the benefits of mainstreaming, the committee will have noted that Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Education was heavily involved in the study behind our report. It was enormously helpful for us to have the inspectorate's professional assessment of the circumstances under which mainstreaming seems to work well and under which there are barriers to making it work well. One chapter in our report goes into that in some detail.
Some matters of general concern stem from that. First, the needs of the child must be addressed sensibly and professionally at the level of the individual. Secondly, before mainstreaming becomes a commitment, resources must be available for accommodation and staffing, and for training and support for everyone involved. The area is highly complex and, in doing our study, we became aware that there are deeply held views among people who know a lot about it, so it was helpful to have HMIE involved.
A couple of legal points will affect the extent to which special schools have to be retained. The first one has to do with exclusions to the mainstreaming presumption. There are three possible reasons for an education authority not to seek to mainstream children and nobody will know exactly how things will be interpreted until there is case law. The second legal point is the provision to make placing requests. If an education authority proposes to educate a particular child in a particular school, the parents can say no and can request that their child be educated in a special school. Those are two important reasons why it is not possible at the moment to say whether the legislation could result in a reduction in special school places or, indeed, in the closure of special schools.
I echo the views of others in that I hope that we will consider further the financial implications of legislation and, specifically, of the amendment process. Some committee colleagues have asked whether officials investigate the cost implications of proposals. That takes us into an interesting debate about implementation. Politicians have a huge responsibility and must be aware of the cost implications of their proposals. Would the Auditor General like to comment on that? I suspect that officials and advisers, in both the Executive and the Parliament, might hold back because they feel that it is for us to guide and decide on policy. The buck stops with us.
I was struck in this report—as I have been in other reports but particularly so in this one—by the number of what I would call generic points, which come through time and again in comparable pieces of work that have been done in other areas. I am thinking, for example, of work done on children's and older people's services, and on community care and the like. Some issues stand in the way of organisational efficiency and effectiveness in the delivery of policy objectives: local authority and NHS boundaries are not coterminous; there are staff shortages in key areas; there is a time lag between increasing the capacity in specialist professions such as therapy and delivering the policy; there is a need for greater joint working and, as has been mentioned, resource transfer; and huge issues arise to do with culture change and consultation with parents and pupils. I would very much welcome the Auditor General's comments on how he and Audit Scotland deal with some of those generic issues that arise repeatedly. How can he, or we, attempt to deal with some of the clear themes that emerged during the first session of the Parliament to do with the blockages to the delivery of our policy aspirations? Those are big questions, so I will leave it at that.
Those are two significant questions. On the financial component of proposals, my thought—for what it is worth—is that the Executive should be encouraged strongly by the Parliament and the Audit Committee to ensure that bills are accompanied by financial memoranda that contain the best possible analysis of the financial consequences. The original financial memorandum for the legislation that we are discussing consisted of only a couple of lines, which stated that, in effect, few additional costs would arise. I am clear in my view that when bills are introduced by the Executive, it is the Executive's responsibility to provide financial analysis to the satisfaction of the Parliament.
The situation is more complicated with amendments to bills. In terms of risk management—to use the language that we tend to use—amendments are a risky area for the Parliament, because as committees take evidence they will, quite properly, take soundings from the general public, clients, experts, and voluntary organisations who have good proposals to make. Understandably, members who sit on a committee will be minded to be as responsive as possible to those proposals, but there is a risk that some of the proposals might have a significant pound sign attached to them. It is not for me to comment or advise on how the Parliament should address that, but it is a risk management issue that it is quite appropriate for us to mention.
On the second question, on generic issues, if I may say so, I think that Susan Deacon has hit the nail on the head. It is surprising how often we come up against the same types of issues when we examine different policy areas. Generally speaking, we must take generic issues about coterminosity, staff problems and so on and apply them to a specific circumstance if what we say is to mean anything, because we cannot do anything about public sector staff shortages in the round. The fact that Audit Scotland is a single body means that we have the opportunity to examine barriers to delivery at all levels, from Executive departments, through health boards, to local service providers—for example NHS trusts, as they used to be called. Increasingly, our reports attempt to do that in a sensible way.
There is no simple answer, but members can rest assured that, when we are doing our work, increasingly we attempt to examine the whole system and the barriers to change at different levels. A noticeable feature of our studies now is that there are usually recommendations for departments and recommendations for service providers in the one report.
I have an observation on the chapter of the report on how well the needs of pupils with special educational needs can be met in mainstream schools. For purposes of comparison, would it not have been quite useful to have a chapter on how well their needs are already being met in special schools?
The report is intended primarily to examine the extent to which the various agencies—primarily local authorities and health bodies—are tooling up for the implications of the new legislative duty, which is the presumption of mainstreaming. The report is not on what is happening in our special schools at the moment. Such a report would be a separate piece of work, which others would be much better qualified to undertake. It would probably be undertaken by HMIE.
I am interested in how the effectiveness of inclusive practice was measured. Was that done by examining examples of good practice on the advice of HMIE?
HMIE asked the local authorities with which we were working for examples of schools that they thought were really good. When we set up the study, we took a decision to examine solely schools where there was good practice, rather than examining a cross-section.
We wanted the report to be a resource for authorities and schools and we wanted to ensure that good practice was followed. The report says what can be done and what authorities and schools need to do to ensure that their practice is effective. When we do the follow-up in two or three years' time, we will examine a cross-section of mainstream schools and determine in how many of those there is good practice and in how many the practice is not good enough.
The assessment of effectiveness was based on whether the features were in place that HMIE said needed to be in place for a school to be effective in meeting the needs of children with SEN. The inspectors assessed against those criteria. They visited schools, observed what was happening and talked to pupils, parents, teachers and visiting staff in making their assessment against the standard of what they considered to be good.
As for all our studies, we had an advisory group made up of a wide range of professionals involved in the field. They were a touchstone for us in ensuring that what we were assessing against was right. They also acted as a touchstone when the findings came out. We asked them, "Does this seem real to you? Does this feel right to you?" and the answer was yes. That was an additional safeguard on how we measured effectiveness.
You have highlighted a difficulty in predicting the costs of inclusion because of the exclusions to mainstreaming and the extent to which the sort of separate special needs provision that will be made is unknown. How did you take that into account in your costings? Were your assumptions different from ministers'? Does that account for some of the concerns and differences in costings?
We wrote to special needs managers in all 32 councils and told them that the mainstream presumption was being introduced. We asked them to tell us, based on their experience and local provision, how many more children with special needs they thought would move across into mainstream schools in five years' time and what the nature of their needs would be. That gave us a wide range of figures, and our costings of £40 million to £120 million take into account the low-level and high-level predictions of the number of such children who will move across. From memory, I think that 3,000 was the lowest estimate of the number of children who would move across and 9,000 was the highest estimate. When we did the costings, we considered those extremes and factored in the nature of the needs and how much it might cost to support children with the different needs.
The element that is difficult to predict is obviously parental choice.
Absolutely. If local authorities can work with the health service and other agencies to make mainstream provision really good and give the pupils, teachers and other staff a lot of support, that will influence parents and more parents than before will see mainstream schools as their first choice. We asked the education managers to predict the extent to which parents' views will be engaged, but the views themselves will vary according to how well supported the provision is.
I have one last question. In considering the costs associated with training, did you focus on training specialist support teachers—for example, with a postgraduate diploma or a certificate in special needs teaching—or did you consider the need to train classroom teachers and non-teaching support staff as well?
The costings at the back of the report are based on training teaching staff, so they are conservative. We provide a range of costs, based on whether all primary school teachers are trained or whether only a third of primary school teachers are trained. The figures reflect the range of what might happen. They are conservative, as we do not include costings for the training of auxiliary staff but focus on the training of professional staff.
As those are all the questions on the "Moving to mainstream" report, I thank the Auditor General and his staff.
Meeting continued in private until 12:34.