Sarah Teather, Minister of State for Children and Families, live webchat TODAY, Monday 16th July, 10.30am to 11.30am

[FrancesMumsnet]

We're pleased to announce that Sarah Teather, Minister of State for Children and Families, will be joining us for a live webchat on Monday 16 July at 10.30 am. When elected to Parliament, Sarah was the youngest MP in Britain. She has previously served as Liberal Democrat spokesperson for Community and Local Government, Education, and Housing.

As part of the biggest reforms to SEN provision in 30 years, the government has recently announced the Children and Families bill. Sarah is specifically keen to get Mumsnetter's views on the proposed changes to SEN and statements. Further information about the changes are available here:www.education.gov.uk/schools/pupilsupport/sen/b0075291/green-paper/progress.

Ms Teather also has responsibility for policy areas like childcare and early education, and the Children and Families bill will also deal with care proceedings in family courts, children's welfare in cases of relationship breakdown, and fostering and adoption arrangements.

Do please join us on Monday; if you can't make it on the day, please post up your questions in advance here.

@Leithlurker

Couthy: I am not about to start disagreeing with you indeed not much to disagree with. BUT I would suggest that in order to underline special needs schools and so both raise the profile and make clear the criteria to be applied to pupils who are put forward to attend them, and the expectations of the type and quality of the education provided. A presumption should be that a place in any mainstream school of should as of right be the default setting for education authorities.

There will be a need as there always has been and always will be a need for special schools, however your very point about students leaving such places functionally illiterate is an indication that special schools have not had an identifiable set of criteria the same as mainstream.

I went to a special school in the 60's -70's most of those I left with were functionally illiterate consigned to the dole or sheltered workshops, or day centres. That choice no longer exist and in some respects thank god. But to give Children with sever LD or physical disabilities the oppertunity to have some semblance of an independent life they need education not movement and dance mixed with social skills.

I agree that we need to improve support in all schools, both special and mainstream schools. We have begun a new teaching schools programme, where we are encouraging mainstream and special schools to work together. They have things they can teach one another in the best schools, and much that can be done to improve practise in the worst. I also posted earlier about our investment in teacher training.

We are also working with colleges to try and improve teaching quality for post 16 students.

Thanks also to sickofsocalledexperts for reminding everyone that our scholarship scheme has recently opened also to teaching assistants because they often have a wealth of experience and much to offer with further training and study.

Is this the "scholarship" scheme where schools have to find 50% of the funding out of their existing training budget? Our school couldn't afford it.

@LineRunner

Sarah

I was going to ask you some hard questions but to be honest the wonderful MMers above have asked them all. I agree with Don'tPutBeerInHisEar that it's great how it's a Lib Dem minister who has to find a way though the policy mess promulgated by the Conservatives - good on you for caring anyway.

Will you accept my best wishes and good luck in your endeavours. I hope you find plenty of food for though on this MN webchat and thanks for doing it. And try to smile more on QuestionTime.

LineRunner x

thanks for your support! Sorry for not smiling on here I decided to answer as many of the the hard questions as I could in the time available! So here is a smile to say thanks and a big thanks to everyone who took part.

As I said earlier, we promise we will read everything you have written, even though I have not been able to respond to everyone in detail today.

Signing off now,
Sarah

PS -- we are going to put up some more answers over the next few days, so watch this space...

Thanks Sarah - and good luck with what promises to be a pretty hectic Summer.

Thank you, Sarah

Thank you Sarah.

Thank you very much Sarah. Sorry I missed the webchat, but very glad that you will be read and hopefully take on board all of the valid points made on here.

Sorry I missed the webchat Sarah but I was sorting out my daughters life plan. I look forward to reading your answers to the questions asked. Will that include those questions parents left on the message board.

Thank you Sarah. I was also sorry to miss the webchat. I also look forward to reading more of your answers, though just wondering, if you are not able to answer them all - can you indicate where posters might be able to go in order to get replies to their specific questions?
Many thanks again.

I also had to miss the webchat due to work committments but will look forward to reading all your answers
Thank you

Thank you so much. I hope you can answer a few more of my questions soon.

Having had a quick scan through am slightly disappointed that there wasn't more mention of the governments approach to provision for under 5's, which I gather from the introduction is one of Sarah's areas of responsibility. I commend this area to her as a fruitful area for exploration, commitment, and action !

And again recommend looking to see what can be learned from the excellent approaches being taken in the Scandinavian countries where early years education and care seems truly valued and well resourced.

Research has shown that investment in this area will be well rewarded, paying for itself many times over, equipping future citizens for life and work, enabling more women to work,supporting families, and will be very popular with the voters

I hope the government can honour the encouraging noises it has made suggesting they understand the value of good early years provision. Sadly their actions of late, such as with regard to the funding of children's centres, doesn't appear to match their words.

I'll second that JWTO!

Thanks Beer - I could do with one actually after my day today with the under 5's

'It isn't always sensible to have a direct payment if there is only one provider of a service in an area'

But what if there are alternatives e.g. ABA but the LA does not want to recognise this as a valid alternative?

What about if the LA has a block contract with SALT at the hospital - these people have covered each others backs for years, are LAs really going to let parents go into the private sector when those professionals will be less willing to back shoddy provision at Tribunal? Surely there needs to be some compulsion that if a parent identifies a viable alternative (and there is lots of work ongoing to have ABA competency framework etc) then the LA will let the parent buy it?

How are you going to get info about what the real costs (not the ones LA report to Tribunals) of therapies etc are? My LA told the Tribunal as my child would not need the hospital to recruit him his own speech therapist then it was a nil cost! Obviously it does have a cost and to put that on an equal footing with the private sector it should include pension & training costs and % of capital costs etc. Then it would be seen that lots of therapies that look expensive are actually costing no more than public services. This info on true costs needs to get into the public domain so there can be some scrutiny about how these personal budgets are being costed.

I am not convinced parent forums are the answer. We have had one for a few years. We live in a massive rural area so they only meet once a month in the middle of a workday in the middle of the County, manageable for very few parents. I tried to join the committee but was told they already had too many parents from my area with children with autism and I could not join. Their meetings are closed so you cannot go along as a member of the public. A few of the members are to put it bluntly not best placed to advocate for others, having their own very narrow agenda. The LA has consistently refused to deal at all with other well established parent groups insisting everything has to go through the forum, even though they know the people on the forum are not terribly effective. So I do think these things can just be lip service and not actual engagement.

JWTO I agree. My LA has just published an autism strategy where it has budgeted £15,000pa to deliver autism intervention to all under 5's in the County. Not quite the early intervention ST might have had in mind.

In 2004/5, our Local Authority wrote to most of the parents of children who had been identified in early years settings as needing SALT before starting school, telling them there was no money available for this, as demand had been too high. (There were supposed to be grants of £500 per child).

After an internal tipoff, we did an FOI request, and found there had in fact been a surplus in the allocated funds, of £57,000. This had been vired across to an Out of School scheme in another part of the county an hour away, which we believe was a local councillor's pet project. That could have funded SALT for 140 children (interestingly, as we understand it, fewer than this had applied, so it meant all the children could have been funded who were identified as needing the service).

In effect, therefore, the local authority had lied. When challenged, they just waffled on about how it was the Health Authority's responsibility to meet these costs. We tried to take a formal complaint through the appropriate channels, but got nowhere. (I did make a formal representation about this to the recent SEN enquiry, incidentally).

It's dealing with this sort of ignorance and dishonesty that makes life so difficult for parents of children with SEN.

Accountability IS key. You can have as many new COPs. Policies, guidelines, laws even, but until unless they are enforced they mean nothing.

I agree - once we had a period when we were very much on the same side as the LA and it made a huge difference for one of the kids. Saved a lot of money and got a better education for him as a result. Parents are not always out for everything they can get from the taxpayer, sometimes we just want to ensure efficient delivery just like the LA does.

I think this is the difficulty when LAs are so different and some behave well and some poorly.

On paper our local offer will look very similar to others - e.g. we have autism outreach teams, behaviour support teams, enhanced mainstream provisions for different disabilities. But the reality in the face to face intervention time provided is vastly different than other areas. Here professionals do not see or work directly with children at all, its all 'consultative' which often means just travelling around the County giving the same generic basic level advice again and again. Over the border a 3 year old is getting 25 hours of specialist input a week directly from the outreach service. Here they get 1 hour a term 'advice'. Underneath the local offer is a web of eligibility criteria and budget allocations, the devil is in the detail. But the local offer is just going to say we have autism outreach - its not going to specify a minimum number of hours or even if a particular child is eligible for the service at all - so on paper the service could look identical to the one next door.

Well Agnes, this is why I asked Sarah if the Local Offer was going to be subject to the same requirements of specificity as Statements, so a LA who published a Local Offer in terms of "access" and "availability" and "advice" would be made to withdraw it, and quantify it.

She didn't reply.

bump