It's not the children who are stupid
(Filed: 02/10/2004)

A school in Surrey shows how misguided the Government's obsession with 'inclusion' really is, says John Clare

'Learning difficulties' is a phrase often regarded as a euphemism for stupid. Such an attitude leads to a serious misunderstanding of the impairment from which so many children suffer - accompanied by a failure to treat it.

Suppose a child is far behind in reading, reluctant to talk, easily distracted, unable to follow instructions, needs everything to be repeated, never seems to get the point - has difficulty, in short, in understanding the world.

From the age of seven or eight, he - it is much more often he than she - is in the bottom group at school, failing to thrive, inattentive, withdrawn, perhaps being bullied, perhaps aggressive, lacking in self-esteem and a concern to parents and teachers.

What do you conclude? That he has a low IQ? That nothing much can be done? That tolerance and containment are the best that can be hoped for?

You might well be driven to that conclusion by the Government's policy of forcing children with learning difficulties to remain in mainstream schools - where teachers aren't equipped to deal with them - in the interests of "inclusion".

But suppose the child's learning difficulties have nothing to do with his IQ. Suppose that his difficulties can be overcome by skilled intervention. And suppose he's your child: wouldn't you fight to save him - not just from the misery of school, but from the real likelihood of a ruined life?

That is what the parents of children at More House School, near Farnham, Surrey, have done. Their reward has been to see their children's lives transformed.

Here, in one of only a handful of schools of its kind, are 220 boys aged nine to 18 who have all been diagnosed as having one or more of attention deficit disorder (with or without hyperactivity), dyslexia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia, autistic spectrum disorder and "specific learning difficulty".

The boys are of average intelligence, with IQs of between 95 and 110. Yet, before they arrived at More House, most had been written off as all but ineducable and those that weren't soon would have been if they had remained in mainstream schools.


At the heart of this minor miracle is the school's speech and language therapy department, where the language processing problems that are the cause of the pupils' learning difficulties are identified and treated.

These are children who don't hear every word in a sentence, are confused by subordinate clauses, have difficulty understanding abstract concepts, struggle to arrange events in a logical sequence, are poor at making inferences, have trouble working out what to remember and what to discard, and, to their fury, cannot always express what they know.

With skilled teaching, they can, however, learn - something that before they came here no one apparently had understood.

Take Kurt: severe language processing problems unidentified by his teachers; frustration and aggression leading to repeated exclusions, a three-year absence from school and assignment to a pupil referral unit.

After a long battle with the local education authority, his mother got him into More House. Now he has six GCSEs at grade C or above and is taking three AS-levels.

Take Joe: poor verbal comprehension that was never addressed. He arrived at 13, illiterate, hyperactive, angry and "known to the police". Now he is taking a full range of GCSEs and wants to become a carpenter.

"He has an excellent visual memory and we taught him to visualise what's being said to him," says Meriel Davenport, his language therapist.

Take Alex. "I'd always had problems with school," he says. "No one could figure out what was wrong. They said I was lazy, they said I was thick. Then I came here." Alex is now taking three A-levels and aims to be a sports journalist.

More House's triumph lies not just in identifying the hidden causes of its pupils' handicaps, but in the extraordinarily high quality of its teaching - lucid, multi-sensory (telling reinforced by doing and showing), painstaking and endlessly patient.

No wonder parents fight to get their sons in here - and how they have to fight. Ninety of the pupils have official statements of their special educational needs that prescribe More House as the only solution to their complex problems and commit the local education authority to paying the fees: £11,000 a year for day pupils, £17,000 for boarders; speech and language therapy extra.

Behind each of these statements lie years of argument, frustration and frightening legal bills. Many other parents have fought and lost and must pay the fees themselves.

"When I took over 11 years ago, it was enough to show that a child was three years behind in a mainstream school," says Barry Huggett, the head of More House.

"Now, with the advent of `inclusion', getting an appropriate statement is becoming tougher every year. Yet the truth is that the children who've been here have an infinitely better chance of being included in society."

A report published last week by the Dyslexia Institute estimated that the cost to the British economy of unrecognised dyslexia, in terms of poor literacy and basic skills and the sufferers' high incidence in the prison population, was £1 billion a year.

'Inclusion' policy fails pupils with special needs
By Julie Henry, Education Correspondent
(Filed: 26/09/2004)

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School Inspectors have criticised the Government's policy of teaching children with special needs in mainstream schools.

In a report out next month, the Office for Standards in Education will say that the "inclusion" policy, where children with disabilities and learning difficulties are taught with their peers, is failing significant numbers of children.

Schools complain of a lack of expertise and funding and say they are struggling to cope with the needs of these pupils.

The report, found that were shortcomings in a "high proportion" of lessons and that teachers had low expectations of what pupils could achieve. In some areas, schools with spare places gave a disproportionate number to special needs children.

The latest criticism echoes the concerns of many teachers and parents, who have complained about children with special needs being sent into mainstream schools that lack the funding to teach them properly.

The report concludes that inclusion remains "a signficant challenge" for many schools and that the Government needs to do more to ensure that schools cater for the range of special needs and disabilities. "Even head teachers who were committed to the inclusion framework had reservations," it said.

Inspectors visited 115 schools between May and November last year to observe lessons and interview head teachers, governors and the coordinators of special needs provision.

One of the weakest areas was literacy. In six out of 10 schools, low expectations in reading and writing meant that some pupils were simply left to look at pictures or to work from very basic books.

Only three in 10 schools gave extra teaching to all pupils whose reading ages were more than a year below their real ages. Most other schools only provided extra for pupils who were three years behind.

Disability legislation passed in 2001 has strengthened the right of children with special needs to attend mainstream schools.

While many parents and teachers regard inclusion as a benefit, there are fears that the policy is being used to justify the closure of special schools. Since 1997, their number has fallen from 1,171 to 1,088 and Ofsted said that many more local authorities were reviewing provision.

Plans to close at least 20 more schools across the country, including Alderman Knight school in Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, have been made public this year.

Tim Collins, the shadow education secretary, called for a halt to the closures. "How much more evidence does the Government need that mainstreaming all students is not right? These children should be treated as individuals, some of whom will benefit and some of whom will not."

A spokesman for the Department for Education and Skills said: "We have always made clear that we do not have an either/or policy. It is important to have high quality special needs schools and also high quality special needs provision in mainstream schools."

8 August 2004: Put your autistic children into a primary school or we'll prosecute, families are told
8 March 2004: Gifted pupils 'should be in special needs group'

education.telegraph
Office for Standards in Education

Put your autistic children into a primary school or we'll prosecute, families are told
By David Harrison
(Filed: 08/08/2004)

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Parents who set up a special school for their autistic children have been threatened with prosecution for failing to send them to a mainstream primary school.

The Step by Step autistic school in East Sussex opened in April this year because parents felt that local schools could not cater for their children's special needs.

The county's education authority told the parents, however, that they would be taken to court if their children's "unauthorised absences" from school continued.

Last night the parents condemned the threats. Samantha Hilton, from Crowborough, whose son Max, six, goes to Step by Step two days a week and to a state primary school for three days, said: "They can prosecute me if they like but I'll go to jail rather than deprive my son of the chance of having a more fulfilling life.

"It is completely ridiculous to threaten me with prosecution because Max goes to an autistic school at our own expense."

Mrs Hilton, 34, whose five-year old son, Charlie, is also autistic, said: "Max is not playing truant. We are not failing to control him. We are trying to give him the best education we can find. Step by Step is good for him, he has made so much progress there, and he loves it."

Catherine James, whose son Joshua, six, attends Step by Step three days a week and St Mary's RC primary two days a week, said that the council's threats were outrageous. "We started Step by Step because the provision for autistic children was not good enough. Now they are pressuring me to give up something that gives Josh the chance of a brighter future."

Mrs James, 41, a teacher at a private secondary school, added: "The Government talks a lot about choice but what choices are we given?"

The National Autistic Society described the threats as "unnecessarily aggressive". A spokesman said: "Local authorities should work in partnership with parents to do the best thing for the children. Children's needs must be paramount and parents usually know their children better than local authorities."

The parents opened the school four months ago at Sharpthorne, 12 miles from Crowborough, after a tribunal refused to overturn the education authority's rulings that a local primary school was adequate for Max, and that two days at a primary school and three at a special needs school was appropriate for Joshua.

Mrs James said: "The local authority lumps together children with very different needs in the name of 'inclusion', but that's no good for Josh."

The parents, supported by other families, spent two and a half years planning the new school and raised £500,000 in grants from the Government, educational trusts and local fundraising schemes.

They decided to defy the ruling, open the school and send their children there - at a cost of £12,000 a year for Max and £18,000 for Joshua, who goes three days a week there. From September Josh will go to Step by Step full-time, increasing the fees to £30,000 a year.

The school, a registered charity, was approved by the Department for Education and Skills and passed its preliminary Ofsted inspection.

Step by Step has four autism therapists who use a teaching method pioneered in America, called Applied Behavioural Analysis. The one-on-one technique breaks down tasks and speech into minute steps and aims to help children achieve a degree of independence.

The parents said that the technique helped their children to develop in a way that would not be possible at a state school full-time. Mrs James said: "It can turn children's lives around."

The school has four pupils, with two more expected to join next month, and the capacity to take up to 12. The day consists of intensive one-to-one work in the morning and group sessions in the afternoon. Pupils are taught everything from reading and communication skills to dressing themselves, personal grooming and mixing with other people.

Other parents of autistic children criticised the local authority. Charlotte Moore, from Hastings in East Sussex, who has two autistic children, said: "The council's threats are unbelievable. Autistic children, almost without exception, should not be in mainstream schools. Step by Step is the right way to approach autism. If the council says that its own provision is adequate then it is almost certainly wrong."

Mrs Moore, whose children attend an autistic unit attached to a special needs school and have Applied Behavioural Analysis therapy for two hours a night five days a week at home, said: "This could be about saving money on the part of the local authority but although it may be cheaper in the short term not to fund special schools it will be much more expensive in the long term because the children will be less independent as adults."

Carol Povey, the National Autistic Society's co-ordinator for London and the South East, said: "Children with autism are very individual. Autism is a spectrum disorder and requires a wide range of provision. One solution does not fit all." Autism is a lifelong development disability that impairs a person's ability to communicate with others or form social relationships and leads to the development of strong obsessional interests.

More than 500,000 people in Britain, including more than 100,000 children, have autism, according to the National Autistic Society. Boys are four times more likely to develop the condition than girls and autistic children are 20 times more likely to be excluded from school than others. Autism was first identified in 1943 but is still a relatively unknown disability. The causes of autism are not known but scientists agree that it is a mix of genetic and environmental factors.

The Government has sought to encourage councils to educate children with special needs, including autism and other disabilities, in mainstream schools, claiming that this is better for their education. It is also cheaper.

The Conservatives promised to reverse this policy last week by giving parents of children with disabilities the right to have their child educated at a special school.

David Cameron, the Conservative MP for Witney, Oxfordshire, who has a severely disabled son, said yesterday that the Government's inclusion policy was being used to cut costs and place children in the mainstream when they would be better off in special schools. "It is crazy. We are talking about some of the most vulnerable children in the country, they have huge needs and really can not do anything for themselves, and yet the blanket policy of inclusion is being used to close special schools," he said.

East Sussex county council insisted that the education offered by the council's schools was suitable for the children. A spokesman said: "We expect all parents to make sure their children attend school. In these cases the Special Educational Needs and Disability Tribunal has found Step by Step School to be inappropriate. If a child remains absent then the county council may ultimately have no option but to prosecute."

17 May 2004: Families with autistic adults need more help, says charity
6 September 2002: Scientists blame autism 'epidemic' on new diagnosis