Special educational needs speech

[as delivered]

In this party, we believe that our schools are for everyone. We also believe that everyone should have an equal chance of success in life. But they don’t. Children with special educational needs should be part of the mainstream in any education system.

We are still leaving children behind. Only half of our school pupils have direct access to an educational psychologist. The rest wait months for their needs to be assessed. They need an assessment to be eligible for learning support, so long delays can hold children back for up to a whole school year.

I have a long list of figures and statistics here, but the long and the short of it is this: it is frightening how often people raise with me the problems of getting assessments and supports for children with conditions like dyspraxia and ADHD.

You know, we often talk about the health service and the education system and all the things that are wrong with them, but for the parents of children with special needs in education, it’s not a system or a service. It’s their child. It’s their child who is being held back, who is being denied an opportunity to succeed. They know that their child’s condition can usually be fully resolved with the proper treatment. They know that the best chance of success is early treatment, but they’re told that they have to wait months to even get an assessment.

So what you are often left with is parents in despair because they can’t get the treatment for their child; a child who can’t learn in the way they should; a teacher frustrated trying to deal with a large class that includes a child with special needs; and a class of children who may not be able to progress in the way they should because one or two children don’t have the resources to learn with the rest.

Surely we can do better than this. Surely we can provide an education for our children that is supportive of all kinds of talents, intelligences and personalities, and which allows all children to realise their full potential.

So let’s not get into a slagging match with the government. Let’s stop talking about the failures of the present. Let’s just say that this is a priority for the Labour Party, and in government this is what Labour will do to address the problem. We have the money, let’s spend it.

There are two things that need to be done. The first is to get children’s needs assessed quickly, and the second is learning support in schools.

At the moment, only 127 educational psychologists are employed by the state to serve a school-going population of almost 800,000. Thousands of learning support staff have been added to the payroll in recent years, but without a corresponding increase in either special educational needs training or professional educational psychologists to support their work.

We will fully resource the National Educational Psychologist Service so that it employs 400 professional state psychologists by the end of our first term of government. This will ensure that special needs are identified quickly. It will also mean that every school in the country will have direct access to a psychologist who will work with teachers, parents and learning support staff to create an environment that is supportive of children with special needs, and which does not isolate them from their classmates.

And under Labour, delegates, that will be the best education that we can provide. It is the least our children – all of our children – deserve.