Michael Gove's fight to rescue children branded 'special needs' is another step towards reform of our education system

By Kathy Gyngell for The Daily Mail

Published: 19:23 GMT, 15 May 2012 | Updated: 18:44 GMT, 16 May 2012

Last week Melanie Phillips asked ‘can we have the real Michael Gove back?’  At the first sign of fuss from teachers the Secretary of State for Education had uncharacteristically backtracked away from unannounced OFSTED inspections.

He was not ‘back’ by the time of his speech to Brighton College a week later.  It indicated another retreat from the education culture battle. 

He bemoaned the fact that those in the best jobs and best positions today - including himself, the best part of the cabinet, the top sportsmen and actors – came from the best (private) schools. In many cases from just one of them, Eton.

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Return to form: Following a run of uncharacteristic comments, Michael Gove has pledged to reform guidelines that see thousands of children unnecessarily branded 'special needs'

Instead of delivering a blow to the education establishment’s equality of outcomes ideology, he played to its gallery.

Instead of focussing on the insidious block to meritocracy - to true social mobility - created by the ‘all must have prizes’ doctrine, he promised ever earlier intervention.

The new holy grail of equality of opportunity politics – early years’ education - tripped from his lips complete with the pernicious and ludicrous idea of a 15 hour curriculum for two year olds.

Did this herald the final takeover of children’s’ lives by the State? The final freezing out of the family that Ed Balls’ department of children and families has so assiduously worked for?

Had the educational establishment sent the Secretary of State through Room 101 and only let him out on the assurance of a new new every child matters, nationalisation of childhood agenda, despite the waste and failure of Sure Start and Head Start in America before it?

Had they finally got him I wondered? 

Condemned: 1.7million children are deemed unable to learn without special help

But no. Gove’s bold move to reform the special educational needs statement system - to end the practice of wrongly labelling hundreds of thousands of pupils as having special needs - is reassuring.

He could have chosen no riper target for genuine reform. Nothing could better reflect what is wrong with our educational establishment and system of schooling.

For it is truly incredible that one in five children in this country is classified as having special needs. We should not believe it.

Yet this is the figure. 1.7 million children are currently deemed unable to learn under normal classroom teaching without special help.

Finally now OFSTED admits that 450,000, or over 25 per cent of the children branded as 'SENS' need not be ‘statemented’ in this way.

Other experts think this is still a gross underestimate. The number could be nearer 80 per cent. This is what Tom Burkard, Research Fellow at the Centre for Policy Studies, whose advice was crucial in shaping the November 2010 Education White Paper (also architect of the Pheonix Free School bid) thinks.

He says that the definition of special educational needs has been extended well beyond genuine physical or mental disabilities.

This is why it is routine in classrooms up and down the land for at least two children in each class to be tied to their special educational needs supporter. 

It is one reason why we have so many unhappy and frustrated children in school.

The ‘statemented’ children I know of loathe it. The mortification of one was so severe it nearly put him off sitting the few the GCSE’s he was deemed capable of.  This 6’4” sixteen year old was not even allowed to detatch himself from his female mentor to sit his exams.

It made him painfully self conscious.  It did not help with his performance. It was a waste of taxpayers’ money.

The fact that a fifth of all children are deemed in need of special help should have been suggestive, as Poirot would say.  Not to the educational establishment though apparently.

Damaging: The current system shifts the blame for failure onto the pupil, rather than the teacher

Our child-centred system of education instead of focusing on what is wrong with schools and their modern teaching methods has focussed ever more on the individualised needs of children. It has been wrong.

Nothing is more symptomatic of the denial, pointless bureaucracy and time wasting that characterises this system than the targeting of SENS.

It exposes a system that emerged from the ideology of social inclusion, that conveniently blurred the distinction between genuine disability and the wreckage of ‘personalised learning’ teaching methods.

It exposes a self-perpetuating system which shifts the blame for failure onto the pupil, a system that marks these children out as different, if not stupid.  Sitting day in day out in class beside a special ‘support’ assistant beside, is tantamount to being labelled, ‘I am a dummy’. 

All good teacher training will tell the student never to blame the child for his or her own failure. Yet this is exactly what the SENS system has institutionalised. It distracts teachers from what their common sense would normally tell them.

This is what has driven the exponential rise and rise of ‘statement’ children since the 1980s. ‘Dyslexia’ and behavioural problems, not Down's syndrome, have driven the numbers. Only 2.8 per cent of them fall into the category of genuine physical and mental disability 

In fact the numbers only ‘boiled over’ after the Real Books teaching craze took over in the 1990s.  As the country’s reading scores plummeted with three decades of Real Books, so too did dyslexia begin its relentless rise.

Schools will say they need money to compensate for special behavioural needs caused by poor parenting but Burkard begs to differ. It is simply a mask for impoverished literacy teaching, he says, and the stupidity of personalised learning that leaves children with nothing to hold onto. 

He contends that any child, even  the most disadvantaged, can be taught to read; that with the right attitude from the school their parents can be engaged with this. He cites case after case from his own experience.

The fact is that children have been ill-served by the SENS system and the educational ideology of ‘inclusivity’ behind it that blurred the distinction between quite differently generated ‘needs’. The mountain of bureaucracy involved – the processes involved in getting a child ‘statemented’ to secure the funds for the school to employ more teachers, has only distracted schools from meeting real needs.

But now, for the first time in thirty years, parents with genuinely physically and mentally disabled children will be put in charge with a personal budget. It should give them the choice and control over their child's care that they so badly need.  It is encouraging that those directly involved in Special Educational Needs teaching and care are amongst the first to welcome the proposed reforms.

Christine Lenehan, director of the Council of Disable Children says she is delighted. 

Anyone who watched Rosa Monckton’s deeply moving television investigation into the plight of these children as they become adults (Letting Go, BBC1) cannot but be relieved; relieved that there is to be a fully coordinated health, education and care plan for such young people at least through to 25. It should help the thousands of families like those who Rosa met who have had to battle for their children's care.

Schools too admit that the process of 'statementing' is hell; that it is sometimes the only way to get an extra teacher; that it has become self-perpetuating.

But the fiction of needing ever more teaching assistants will only be solved by winning the battle to return to highly structured teaching. Synthetic phonics is a rare example of such a victory.  The other side is still waging a vigorous counter attack.

Michael Gove’s reform mission has only just begun.

He cannot transform a bad schools and bad teachers into good schools and good teachers. But he can remove the counter-productive policies and restraints which inhibit good schools and good teachers from performing well.

This is a good start.

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