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Warnock (1978) Notes on the text
Appendices Appendix 1 List of contributors
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The Warnock Report (1978)
Special educational needs Report of the Committee of Enquiry into the education of handicapped children and young people London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office 1978
ISBN 0 10 172120 X
Chapter 4 Discovery, assessment and recording
INTRODUCTION 4.1 We cannot emphasise too strongly in this chapter, as in the rest of our report, how essential it is for a child's education that any special needs he has should be discovered and assessed as early as possible. The broader, more flexible framework of special education which we believe is required in future will entail reform of the arrangements for the discovery and assessment of children's special needs. We contend that these arrangements have in any case now served their turn. Moreover, having been developed for some 2 per cent of the school population, they would not necessarily be suitable for up to one in five children of school age, who present a very much wider range and variety of educational needs. In this chapter we consider procedures for the discovery and assessment of special needs that will be applicable to children of all ages, from birth to leaving school. We elaborate our proposal for a system of recording children as in need of special educational provision which will safeguard the interests of those with severe, complex and long-term disabilities, and we conclude by considering how statistical information about children requiring special educational provision should in future be collected.
I DISCOVERY 4.2 The discovery of handicapping conditions, which nearly always involves the identification of special educational needs, may take place at one of many different stages. Severe congenital abnormalities such as spina bifida, limb deformities or Down's Syndrome are usually recognised at birth, or in the first few days or weeks of a child's life. Other disabilities, physical, sensory or intellectual, or signs of handicapping conditions may be discovered in the early months or years of a child's life by parents and various professionals, including general practitioners, clinic doctors, health visitors, day nursery staff, social workers and teachers, all of whom need to be helped, through training, to appreciate the educational implications of these conditions. The difficulties of the large majority of children who are likely to require special educational provision, however, will become apparent for the first time in school and their needs will therefore have to be identified in that setting. 4.3 Very many contributors to the written evidence submitted to us were highly critical of present arrangements for discovering children with disabilities or serious difficulties. Many advocated the screening of the entire child population at various stages, ranging from birth and early infancy through to infant, junior and secondary school; while several among the associations of teachers and of local authorities recommended an extension of the use of registers of children at risk. In the following sections we consider how existing arrangements for discovery may be improved, and deal in turn with the contributions of parents and of different professionals and with systems of communication between hospitals and community health and other professional community services. The role of parents 4.4 In many cases the first people to detect signs of those handicapping conditions or special needs which have not been discovered at, or soon after, birth are the child's parents. It is highly desirable that parents should be able to acquire knowledge about patterns of child development so that they can more easily detect any unusual features. Opportunities may be provided in a variety of ways: for example at antenatal clinics or evening classes, through the medium of broadcasting or through magazines. Efforts are already being made by members of the health and education services and the broadcasting authorities to disseminate information about child development. We commend these efforts, but consider that they need to be taken further. We recommend that information about child development and sources of expert advice on this subject should be still more widely disseminated to parents and prospective parents, fathers as well as mothers. Moreover, parents should be reminded, through this information, of the need for their children's health to be regularly reviewed and of the availability for this purpose of the child health clinics provided under the preventive health services. 4.5 Even when parents express anxieties and suspicions about their child's development, these are too often disregarded by professionals. The fact that many parents have difficulty in convincing anyone that their children's problems are real came out very strongly from both the evidence submitted to us and the research project on services for parents of handicapped children under five which was carried out on our behalf under the co-direction of Professor Chazan and Dr Laing of the University College of Swansea. (1) Many parents need to be in contact with someone who can see that their anxieties are taken seriously and followed up. We propose that in most cases the health visitor, who will increasingly in future be working in collaboration with the general practitioner, should provide such a point of contact, and in the next chapter we develop this proposal in further detail. Health surveillance and the role of the health visitor 4.6 As the Report of the Committee on Child Health Services (the 'Court Report') recognised, periodical developmental assessment carried out by doctors and nurses trained for the job is an essential feature of the arrangements required for the early recognition of handicap. (2) Under the proposals contained in that Report, developmental assessment at specific stages of a child's life, supplemented by more intensive oversight of health and monitoring of developmental progress in the case of children with special needs, would be part of a standard programme of health surveillance. Suitable developmental screening tests might be applied to individual children in the course of such surveillance. Health surveillance programmes are already operated by nearly all area health authorities, but their effectiveness is limited by lack of resources and of suitable training for the staff. We are convinced that a basic programme of health surveillance involving a schedule of interviews between health care staff and a child and his parents, as proposed in the Court Report, would, if carried out by suitably trained staff and supported by the effective establishment and maintenance of contact with families, increase the likelihood of the early identification of disabilities or significant difficulties. We therefore endorse the recommendation in the Court Report that a basic programme of health surveillance should be provided for all children. 4.7 Registers of children considered to be 'at risk' on account of medical and other factors in their history were widely used in the 1960s, but had been abandoned by many health authorities by the beginning of the present decade. The many problems encountered were set out in the Court Report, which, rightly in our view, recommended that their use should be discontinued. (3) In particular, the strict application of risk factors led to large and unwieldy numbers of children being included on the registers, whilst reduction of the number of risk factors led to a decrease not only in the size of the registers but also in the proportion of handicapped children on them. Moreover, reliance on such registers is open to the serious objection that it may lead to children who are not on them being overlooked, while causing possibly unjustified anxiety to the parents of those who are. The same problems would arise if registers were to be kept of children likely to suffer educational difficulties, on the basis of observed events in pregnancy and the perinatal period or the family history. We therefore reject any extension of the use of risk registers in relation to educational difficulties. We believe that there is no substitute for informed and systematic observation of all children. 4.8 Area health authorities are under a statutory duty to ensure that a mother is visited by a health visitor after the birth of her baby. Although health visitors have no right of entry to the home, their visits are generally welcomed and, in practice, they enjoy ready access to families with babies and young children. They also have close links with doctors and other nurses, particularly where they are attached to a general practice. They are thus well placed to detect disabilities which have not been discovered at birth; and in many areas, in conjunction with clinical medical officers and some general practitioners, they already use screening techniques designed to detect departures from normal development. 4.9 In practice the effectiveness of health visitors in detecting disabilities and significant delays in development has sometimes been limited by other demands on their time, arising from their responsibilities for patients of all ages, and by shortages of staff. These considerations led the Court Committee to propose the concept of a child health visitor and a considerable increase in the number of health visitors. We believe that it is important that the health visitor's tradition of special responsibility for children and parents should be preserved and that the health visiting service should be so organised that more time can be devoted to work with children under five. We welcome the proposal by the government that the service should be expanded in the period up to 1980-81 and we were pleased to note that in a recent statement on the Court Report the Secretary of State for Social Services indicated that work with children and families should be health visitors' top priority. (4) 4.10 In whatever way the health visiting service is organised, we strongly support the practice of giving health visitors additional training to enable them to add an understanding of young children with special needs to their existing knowledge of child development, and to make best possible use of the developmental information acquired in the course of their visits. We recommend that this practice should be extended. Health visitors also need to be helped, through training and contacts with the education service, to appreciate the importance of early educational opportunities for children showing signs of having special needs or problems. We see considerable scope for the organisation of some of their post-basic training on an inter-professional basis and in Chapter 16 we suggest possible ways of doing this. It is important too that their records should be designed to facilitate maximum use of their observations. 4.11 We have observed a number of different approaches to the work of the health visiting service in relation to young children with handicapping conditions. In some areas specialist health visitors are appointed; in others, senior specialist health visitors supervise and support the work of their non-specialist colleagues; in yet others, the pattern is still that of a generalist service. We see room for variations in the organisation of the service, but stress that in all arrangements those who are not specialists should have ready access to specialist advice and enjoy close working relations with other professionals concerned with the care and education of children with special needs. Dissemination of information following birth 4.12 The discovery of a handicapping condition is of little value in itself unless it is followed by diagnosis and assessment of a child's needs. Where a child is born at home; it is essential that information about any special needs he may have is passed to the various community services as quickly as possible. In the case of children born in hospital, effective systems of communication between hospitals and community health and other professional community services are vital. We consider below what these systems should be. 4.13 In England and Wales, at present, documentation on an infant starts with the notification of his birth. The Area Medical Officer must by statute be notified within 36 hours of a birth; he is then able to pass the information to the appropriate health visitor and community doctor (usually the Specialist in Community Medicine (Child Health)). In 1963 a section was added to the form for notification of birth to allow the doctor or midwife to report the existence of any congenital abnormality observed at birth. Since, however, the completion of this particular section of the document is not required by law, and since doctors and midwives are understandably reluctant to complete it unless the parents have already been informed of the existence of such an abnormality, its value as a source of information about the existence of handicapped children is limited. The arrangements in Scotland, which are different from those in England and Wales, are currently being reviewed. 4.14 A second source of information which may reach the community doctor in the case of children born in hospital is the letter which is sent to the general practitioner when the mother is discharged from hospital, and which would be likely to refer to any serious abnormality. It is often the custom for a copy of this letter to be sent to the appropriate community doctor. The next source of information, and probably the most important, is the communication which is sent from the hospital to the general practitioner when the infant's neonatal period has been abnormal. This will provide medical details of what has occurred and a good indication of whether a child has or is showing signs of having a handicapping condition. It is the custom of many paediatricians, and some other hospital specialists, to send a copy of any such communication direct to the community doctor. Further letters from clinics where the child is subsequently seen may be sent to the general practitioner and, where it is the custom, copied to the community doctor over an indefinite period of time. 4.15 We have seen examples of the successful, systematic use of letters and documents in schemes designed to ensure that handicapped children are identified as early as possible and their individual needs recorded. The communication of information in this way should not give rise to problems of breach of confidentiality, since its disclosure is confined within the medical profession to those doctors directly concerned with the well-being of the particular child. We therefore recommend that area health authorities should seek to ensure that all paediatricians and other hospital consultants send copy letters about handicapped children, exercising their discretion over content, to appropriate community physicians as a matter of course. 4.16 The communication of information beyond the medical profession to, say, health visitors and other nurses, local education authorities or social services departments is essential if suitable provision is to be made without delay. The education service must be informed about children with special needs as soon as possible if early educational opportunities are to be provided for them, and the social services department must be informed if its support is to be provided for the family. The communication of such information does, however, raise problems of confidentiality. We consider that health visitors should be able to see copy letters containing information which they need in order to perform their services effectively. Other professionals will need to rely on the Specialist in Community Medicine (Child Health), who has the important task of abstracting from the documentation received from hospital specialists any information about children with special needs required by non-medical services in exercising their functions. It is desirable that, wherever possible, parental consent should be obtained to the passing of information about a child from community physicians to non-health services. The child's interests must, however, be regarded as overriding. Where the parent's consent cannot be obtained or is withheld and the child's welfare is considered to be at risk community physicians should ensure that professionals in other services are informed of any factors which suggest the need for special help, including early educational provision. The role of the education and other services 4.17 Professionals in other services besides the health service may be instrumental in the discovery of handicapping conditions in children attending day nurseries, nursery schools, nursery classes and those playgroups with which they have effective contact. The staff of day nurseries and playgroups have excellent opportunities to discover such conditions among children in their care. Where they make such a discovery, they should consult other professionals and, if necessary, point out to the parents that information about the child's condition will be needed by the head teacher when their child comes to attend school. The parent's consent to the communication of such information should be sought. The education service is clearly well placed to identify signs of special need among children in nursery schools and classes. Indeed, as one of the bodies submitting evidence put it, 'one of the advantages of nursery education is that it eases the process of identification of pre-school children with less obvious potential educational difficulties, for example children who may become maladjusted if not helped in early life'. As we stress in subsequent chapters, all professionals who come into contact with young children must be helped, through their training, to identify those showing signs of having special needs or problems, and to appreciate the educational implications of their special needs. 4.18 We have pointed out that the large majority of children with special educational needs will have to be identified within ordinary schools. It follows that the class teacher must be able to recognise early signs of possible special need and must take seriously parents' concern about their child's development. This requires that teachers should know how to identify the signs of special need and when and where to refer for further help; we return to this in Chapter 12. It is also important that each school should have a scheme for recording the progress of individual children so that, when a child begins to experience difficulties, head teachers and staff are alerted, and thereafter have the means of judging the effectiveness of special help provided. We have noted the recent Circular which invited local education authorities in England and Wales to report on aspects of local curricular arrangements, including existing practices with regard to records of pupils' educational progress. (5) Record keeping 4.19 Records of an individual child's progress should be clear, factual, up to date and reliable. We believe that two types of personal folder are needed for the maintenance of such records in school, of which one should be readily available for consultation and the other should be available only on a restricted basis. The first type of folder should be on the lines of that suggested a decade ago in the Plowden Report. (6) This envisaged that the compilation would include facts about illness, absence from school and composition of the family; examples of the child's work and the names of some of the books used and schemes of work followed by him; and results of attainment and, where applicable, diagnostic tests. The quality of the record and its effectiveness as an educational instrument will inevitably depend upon the skill and judgement of the teachers who prepare and use it. A full and carefully constructed folder will provide the information necessary for a composite picture of a child's strengths and weaknesses and of the background factors which influence his progress. Although the Plowden Report was concerned with children in primary schools, we consider that the principle of maintaining such a folder for each child should apply to all pupils in primary, middle and secondary schools. We therefore recommend that a personal folder, containing records of his progress and other factual information about him, should be maintained in school for every pupil and should be readily available for consultation. 4.20 Such a folder will go far to ensure the early detection and effective assessment of children with special educational needs, and its regular maintenance thereafter will be an indispensable condition of continuing effective educational provision. It will be essential for the purpose of marshalling all the information about the child's performance in school, and will be a useful, compact source of information about the child for any professionals involved in the assessment of his needs. It will, if properly maintained, contain a note of such professional consultations as have been arranged in school. (The detailed results of such consultations will be recorded in a separate, confidential folder, as we explain in paragraph 4.23.) 4.21 Parents should, as a matter of course, be able to see their child's folder. They should be consulted by the head teacher or the class or form teacher about information concerning, for example, the composition of the family and should be encouraged to help in the up-dating of the information in the folder. A pupil should also have access to his folder and help to select material for inclusion in it. 4.22 We agree with the Plowden Report that, to be of maximum value, the folders should be available to class teachers in primary schools and to those teachers and personal tutors in secondary schools concerned with the child. In addition, the folder of a child thought to require special educational help should be available to those professionals who contribute to the assessment of his needs. Most of the information in the folder, and certainly the details of a child's special needs and the action taken to meet them, should be passed on when he moves from one school to another. We endorse the point made in the Plowden Report that in such a case the value of written records will be greatly enhanced by direct contact between staff in the child's former school and those in his new one, and between the new staff and parents. Folders should also be available to careers officers in their consultations with pupils and parents and to establishments of further education and adult training centres in making suitable arrangements for young people with special needs. 4.23 A second type of personal folder is needed for the results of professional consultations and sensitive information given in confidence about a child's social background or family relationships. This should be a confidential folder. It would not be complete without significant medical information provided by the health authority. The folder should be kept in the school and access to it controlled by the head teacher. We would normally expect access to be readily granted to members of those professions concerned with meeting the child's needs. We discuss the handling of confidential material in Chapter 16. The monitoring of whole age groups 4.24 Close and continuous observation of pupils' progress by their teachers needs to be supplemented by procedures of various kinds which assist the identification of children with special educational needs. The operation of such procedures with regard to reading and language development was considered in detail in the Bullock Report (7) and we support the notion of testing age groups at between seven and eight years and again at the secondary stage. We think that such procedures should be applied to whole age groups rather than groups of children considered to be at risk, in view of the difficulty of defining risk factors to which we have referred. Moreover, similar procedures, though not necessarily involving testing, should be used to discover other educational and behavioural difficulties. We are aware that some local education authorities have already instituted such procedures and we believe that this practice should be more widely followed. We therefore recommend that local education authorities should operate procedures for monitoring whole age groups of children at least three or four times during their school life.
II ASSESSMENT The legal position 4.25 The process of determining which children require special education is described in Section 34 of the Education Act 1944 and Section 63 of the Education (Scotland) Act 1962 (as amended) as 'ascertainment'. This involves three stages: discovery, that is finding out which children have disabilities which may call for special help; diagnosis, that is the determination of the nature and causes of the disabilities; and assessment, that is the consideration of the implications of the disabilities, particularly in educational terms, and definition of individual needs. Under the above-cited Sections of the Education Act 1944 and the Education (Scotland) Act 1962 (as amended) local education authorities have a statutory duty to ascertain what children in their area need special educational treatment (described simply as special education in the Scottish Act) and, where they decide that a child needs such treatment, to make suitable provision unless the parents make suitable alternative arrangements. The Sections lay down certain formal procedures for ascertainment involving the medical and, in Scotland, the psychological examination of the child, which were designed for use when parents either objected to or might be expected to object to their child's attending a special school. As the Department of Education and Science Circular 2/75 (Welsh Office Circular 21/75) (8) explained, the number of cases in which the formal procedures have to be employed has greatly diminished. 4.26 When a child has been discovered to have a disability or is showing signs of having special needs or problems, the nature of the handicapping condition must be diagnosed and his needs assessed as soon as possible so that appropriate help can be provided. Since a handicapping condition can become manifest at any time from birth, and since early education is crucial to the development of young children with special needs, we see no justification for any limit to the age at which steps can be taken to provide for the special educational needs of children. In England and Wales, since the power of local education authorities to require parents to submit their child for medical examination for purposes of ascertainment, as well as their duty to comply with reasonable requests from parents to have their child medically examined, are restricted to children who have reached the age of two, in practice ascertainment and the provision of education do not at present usually take place before that age. The position is different in Scotland, where education authorities have a power to ascertain children from birth and a statutory duty in the case of children over five. They can invite parents to submit a child of any age for a medical and a psychological examination but can require them to do so only if the child is over five. They have a duty to comply with reasonable requests from parents to have their children medically and psychologically examined. 4.27 We also hold that full investigation of a child's disabilities calls for more than a medical examination. A psychological examination is necessary, as the Scottish legislation already recognises. In addition, as Circular 2/75 indicated, teachers and, in some cases, social workers have an important contribution to make to assessment. That Circular advised that, as a first step, a report should always be obtained from a teacher who knows the child well. It saw the next essential steps as being to obtain the opinion of a school doctor and an educational psychologist. It envisaged that for some children investigation by other medical specialists, therapists or specialist teachers or the involvement of a social worker would be necessary. Our later references to multi-professional assessment apply to investigations of children's needs in which a range of professionals as envisaged in Circular 2/75 is involved. 4.28 With continuing good relationships between parents, local education authorities and others concerned in the discovery and assessment of a child's special educational needs, we hope that the arrangements could normally be conducted by agreement and without formality. There will, however, be occasions when even the best practices break down for one reason or another, and there will be disagreement about the process or the outcome. We therefore consider that enforceable procedures will continue to be needed, in circumstances where parents believe that their child has special educational needs which are not recognised by the authority, or where the authority considers that a child has special educational needs which the parents do not accept. The statutory procedure should embody two features which we regard as indispensable: first, in line with our view that the need for special education may begin at birth, the procedure should be applicable to any child from birth; and secondly, the multi-professional nature of effective assessment to which we draw attention in later paragraphs requires that the procedure should not be restricted to a medical examination alone. We therefore recommend that Section 31 of the Education Act 1944 and Section 63 of the Education (Scotland) Act 1962 (as amended) should be amended to give local education authorities the power to require the multi-professional assessment of children of any age (after due notice to parents) and to impose on them a duty to comply with a parental request for such assessment. We hope that in practice local education authorities will rarely need to exercise their power to require the multi-professional assessment of children, particularly of very young children. For their part, parents of children with special needs should be made aware of their right to request such an assessment, and we suggest that this should be one of the functions of the Named Person who, as we explain in the next chapter, will provide a single point of contact for them. Requirements of effective assessment 4.29 We believe that there are four main requirements of effective assessment. First, parents must be closely involved. No assessment of a child's needs can be complete without the information which his parents can supply and no educational programme prescribed to meet his needs can be complete without their cooperation. There may be a small number of cases where the early involvement of parents in their child's assessment will not necessarily be in the child's best interests. As a general rule, however, parents should be included in assessment procedures from the earliest stages, and informed of the results. In all cases where the child is already at school, parents should be consulted as soon as it is proposed that a specialist who is not a member of the school's staff be asked to carry out an assessment of the child's needs. We make proposals below for ways of enabling parents to contribute to their child's assessment. 4.30 A second basic requirement of effective assessment is that it should aim to discover how a child learns and responds over a period, and not merely how he performs on a single occasion. The educational psychologist, for example, needs time, not only to carry out tests, but also to observe the child in a variety of settings, taking into account factors such as curiosity, drive, attentiveness, distractability and the influence of different types of surroundings. He needs also to obtain the observations of teachers and others who know the child. 4.31 The third basic requirement is that assessment must include the investigation of any aspect of a child's performance that is causing concern. This will generally require only a limited range of specialist involvement. In some cases, however, depending on the nature and degree of the child's difficulty, a wide range of professional expertise will be needed if a full investigation is to be carried out. The assessment of a specific disability, such as impaired hearing or epilepsy, will usually call for the participation of different specialists to assess the effects of the disability on all aspects of the child's functioning. Although no hard and fast rules can be laid down, we do not regard as adequate an assessment which neglects any material point on which an appropriate specialist view is required. 4.32 Fourthly, the family circumstances as a whole must be taken into account in any assessment of a child's needs. A health visitor or home visiting teacher may have information about the family background in the case of young children, and the educational psychologist where older children are concerned. In most cases a social worker's contribution will be required to ensure that no material aspect of the child's background is overlooked. . 4.33 Some handicapping conditions, particularly behavioural disorders, may be brought about or accentuated by factors at the school, such as its premises, organisation or staff. In such cases, assessment may need to focus on the institution, the classroom setting or the teacher as well as on the individual child and his family if it is to encompass a full consideration of the child's problems and their educational implications. This needs to be borne in mind by all who take part in assessment. The assessment of children below statutory school age 4.34 Young children with handicapping conditions may be referred for a full investigation of their needs in a variety of ways. Those with severe congenital abnormalities apparent at birth, or severe or complex disabilities discovered in the early years of life will normally be referred directly for such an investigation by the paediatrician or hospital consultant. Others will be referred following initial assessment by one or more of a number of professionals such as a general practitioner or medical specialist, an educational psychologist, a social worker or, where a child is attending a nursery school or class, a teacher. We consider the assessment of children under five more fully in the next chapter. Stages of assessment 4.35 It would clearly be both impracticable and unnecessary to offer the full process of multi-professional assessment to up to one in five of the school population. In order to make adequate arrangements for assessing the needs of such a large proportion of children, whose requirement for special help is likely to range from minor modifications in the regime of a regular class in an ordinary school to placement in a special school, well-defined procedures are needed which make the most effective use of specialist resources. These may vary between areas and between schools. As a general principle, however, we believe that the concept of different stages of educational assessment should be established. We recommend that there should be five stages of assessment and that a child's special needs should be assessed at one or more of these stages as appropriate. School-based stages of assessment: Stages 1-3 4.36 We envisage that in the first instance the class teacher or form tutor will consult the head teacher about a pupil who is showing signs of having special educational needs. At STAGE 1 the head teacher will be responsible for marshalling all the information about the child's performance in school, together with other pertinent information that is available from medical, social and other sources including, wherever possible, the parents. For this purpose he will necessarily rely heavily on the information in the child's personal folder. In the light of all the available information about the child, the head teacher and class teacher or personal tutor will take a decision to make special arrangements for him within the competence of the school, or to continue his education without change but subject to further review, or to seek further advice. Whatever decision is taken at this or any subsequent stage, the child's progress must be carefully monitored and detailed records kept in his folder. 4.37 At STAGE 2 the child's difficulties will be discussed with a teacher with training and expertise in special education. Later in this report we stress that such a teacher should be readily available either as a member of staff or as a local advisory teacher. At this stage the head teacher will once again be responsible for marshalling all the available information about the child from the various sources, including the parents, and the teacher with special expertise or the advisory teacher may carry out a further assessment of the child's needs. The options for further action will be the same as those at Stage 1 with, in addition, the prescription of a special programme to be supervised by the specialist or advisory teacher. 4.38 If it is decided at Stage 2 to seek further advice or if a child who has been assessed at that stage subsequently fails to make as much progress as was hoped, assessment will take place at STAGE 3 by a professional or professionals brought in by the head teacher or school doctor, usually with the advice of the local advisory teacher. The professional consulted may be a peripatetic specialist teacher, such as a peripatetic teacher of the deaf, an educational psychologist or a member of the health or social services. 4.39 The options at Stage 3 will be to make special arrangements within the school or to refer the child for multi-professional assessment at Stage 4 or 5. We do not envisage that it will be necessary to refer a child for multi-professional assessment if his special educational needs, as assessed at Stage 3, can be met by the ordinary school's staff or resources, supplemented where necessary by, say, the part-time services of an additional teacher, but nevertheless readily available to or within the school. If, however; it is thought, in the light of the assessment at Stage 3, that he may require the provision of yet further help on a regular basis, which will be of a specialist nature and external to the school, then the child should be referred for multi-professional assessment, so that his needs can be more fully investigated. In this case, as we explain more fully below, the SE forms procedure should at this point be initiated by the head teacher. 4.40 The first three stages of school-based assessment allow for considerable flexibility in local or school arrangements, and would not be suitably defined in law. We suggest that they could be the subject of advice to local education authorities. It will be essential, however, that their development and conduct should be closely monitored by authorities. In practice this monitoring will be carried out by members of the local authority's special education advisory and support service outlined in Chapter 13, which will also be responsible for ensuring that the necessary information reaches the authority about any additional staff or resources required by ordinary schools to meet the needs of pupils assessed as requiring special educational provision. Multi-professional assessment: Stages 4 and 5 4.41 Multi-professional assessment beyond Stage 3 should be carried out at one or both of two levels. The levels will be distinguished primarily by the degree and amount of specialist expertise involved. The professionals involved at Stage 4, who should be able to carry out assessment of a child's needs at short notice, will be able to judge whether or not more experts, particularly experts with more specialist expertise, should be brought in and a Stage 5 assessment conducted. As we explain below, we envisage that multi-professional assessment at both levels will take place in a variety of settings. In most cases these will be non-residential but there will be some children for whom a period in residence for the purpose of assessment will be positively desirable. 4.42 The professionals involved in assessment at STAGE 4 will usually be those with direct responsibility for local services for children with disabilities, for example a medical officer, health visitor, educational psychologist and social worker based in the locality, a teacher in a local school and a special education advisory teacher with local responsibilities. Some of these professionals may be referred to as having 'district' or other responsibilities, depending on the service for which they work. They will be able to take decisions about the use of local facilities and resources or refer children, where necessary, for further investigation at Stage 5. In the case of a child already at school, the head of the school should be included in the process of assessment. We consider that, wherever possible, those taking part should meet at a school or, in the case of children not yet attending school, in another setting such as a day nursery or playgroup which affords opportunities for sustained observation of children's responses to learning. It is important, as we have already indicated, that they should be able to see children very quickly after referral. 4.43 At STAGE 5 the professionals involved may, in some cases, be the same as those at Stage 4 together with one or more other specialists, or they may be other experts with narrower specialisms, perhaps with geographically wider responsibilities. We recognise that there would appear to be considerable similarity between assessment at our Stage 5 and assessment by district handicap teams. Such teams have already been established in some areas and the principle of their establishment was recently accepted by the government in its response to the Court Report. (9) The range of professionals involved at our Stage 5 will in every case depend on the nature of the special needs of the individual child. It is essential, however, that professionals from the education service should always be included. The membership of some district handicap teams will therefore need to be extended if they are to carry out effective educational assessment at our Stage 5. We recommend that, where a district handicap team exists, it should be augmented as necessary so that it can carry out among its functions the assessment of children with special educational needs. New district handicap teams should be so constituted that they, too, can carry out effective educational assessment. 4.44 There already exist child guidance and child psychiatric teams concerned with the assessment and treatment of a wide range of learning difficulties and emotional and behavioural disorders. Their membership will often overlap that of district handicap teams. They will be well-placed to carry out multi-professional assessment at our Stage 5 of children with certain kinds of disability, provided that they have an educational component and include all those professionals whose skills are required. There is clearly a need for discussion at local level about the links between such teams and the education service and their relationship with district handicap teams. 4.45 Any team which is hospital-based is likely to develop a predominantly medically orientated approach. While this may be necessary for some children, particularly those with severe or complex disorders who require a period of specialist observation and testing, it is less likely to be suitable for those who, though they need special educational provision, do not require hospital treatment. We therefore recommend that multi-professional assessment at Stage 5 should usually take place at a centre within the community other than a hospital. 4.46 Where multi-professional assessment does take place in a specialised, hospital-based unit, it is essential that professionals from a wide range of services should nevertheless be involved. So far as the education service is concerned, a suitably trained and experienced teacher should be continuously present in the unit and, wherever possible, an educational psychologist or an appropriately trained clinical psychologist should contribute to the assessment. An officer of the local education authority, usually an adviser in special education, should also join the assessment team, since it is important that the team's recommendation for meeting a child's needs should be informed by his expertise and detailed knowledge of the local and other facilities available. For the same reason a member of the local authority social services department should be included in the team. 4.47 We recognise that in some rural, sparsely populated areas, particularly parts of Wales and the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, there may be difficulty in arranging multi-professional assessment at Stage 4. Where multi-professional assessment has to be conducted exclusively at Stage 5, facilities should be so organised that long delays between referral and assessment are avoided. It may be necessary for some children to have periods of residence at assessment centres, in which case they should normally be accompanied by a parent or someone else from their home or locality. Alternatively teams may visit outlying areas regularly. Regional-based assessment 4.48 Regional-based assessment may be necessary for the small minority of children with extremely complex or unusual disorders. In view of the highly specialised personnel required, this will usually need to take place in a hospital setting and we support the recommendation in the Court Report that regional multi-professional centres for children with relatively rare or particularly complex disabilities should be established in university hospitals. It is essential that the education service should be fully represented in these centres. 4.49 Although our proposed stages of educational assessment have been described in terms of a progressive sequence, each stage involving more refined procedures and expertise than the last, the stages will not have to be gone through in order. Many children will not go beyond the first stage, while some may be referred immediately for multi-professional assessment at Stage 4 or 5. Moreover, if a Stage 1 assessment results in a call for further advice, this may in some cases be sought directly at Stage 3. Where the general monitoring of a whole age group reveals that a child has special needs it is important that the child's needs should be fully assessed at the appropriate stage of our assessment procedure. We believe that, because of its inherent flexibility, the procedure should be applicable to all children of school age showing signs of having special needs. There are groups of children, however, for whom the assessment of special needs will call for particular sensitivity, as we explain below. The assessment of children whose first language is not English 4.50 We are aware that there are special problems in Wales and Scotland in assessing and meeting the special needs of children whose first language is Welsh or Gaelic. In order to cater effectively for children whose first language is Welsh, an increase in the numbers of Welsh-speaking teachers, psychologists and other professionals concerned with children with special educational needs is required. Education authorities in Scotland have a statutory duty to make adequate provision for the teaching of Gaelic in areas where it is spoken. The need for such provision naturally applies to, and may have considerable significance for, children in those areas with special educational needs. 4.51 Wherever a child's first language is not English, at least one of the professionals involved in assessing his needs must be able to understand and speak his language. The assessment of the needs and the placement of children from ethnic minorities may be a matter of special sensitivity. There has, for example, been concern in recent years that a disproportionate number of children from West Indian families has been placed in special schools or classes for children currently described as ESN(M). Any tendency for educational difficulties to be assessed without proper reference to a child's cultural and ethnic background and its effect on his education can result in a category of handicap becoming correlated with a particular group in society. We see this as a risk inherent in the present system of ascertainment and categorisation of handicap, and the uncertain relationship between remedial and special education. We hope that the broader concept of special education and the formulation of children's individual needs which we are advocating, together with the abolition of categories of handicap, will eliminate harmful associations of this kind. We obviously hold that all children, of whatever ethnic or cultural background, are entitled to the full benefits of our proposed procedures for the discovery, assessment and, where appropriate, the recording of special educational needs, and we would not wish to suggest any variation of these procedures for particular groups of children. Indeed we have emphasised that, for these procedures to be effective, there should be the fullest possible information available about a child's background, and this would clearly be incomplete without reference to his cultural upbringing. However we recognise that the incidence of learning difficulties which arise from living in a new cultural or ethnic setting is a matter of sensitive concern, and accordingly we consider it of the first importance that the assessment of children's special needs, at any of the five stages that we have proposed, and the subsequent educational prescription, should reflect a balanced consideration of all the relevant factors, be they cultural, social, medical, psychological, or educational. Further, as we have consistently stressed in this and other contexts, parents must be consulted and their views given full weight in the assessment of their children's needs; and this is especially true where decisions can touch deep-seated sensitivities. Finally, the practice of regular review and, where required, the reassessment of children's needs and adjustment of the provision made for them, which we deal with in the following section, should encourage parents to view assessment not with suspicion but as offering the possibility of enhanced educational opportunity for their children. Review of progress and reassessment of needs 4.52 The needs of individual children change over time and no assessment can be regarded as final. It is important that, where a child has been discovered to have special educational needs and these have been assessed, his performance should be regularly monitored, so that any programme devised for him can be reviewed and if necessary modified, or further assessment carried out. Detailed records of his progress should be kept in his school folder. In most cases careful observation by class teachers will produce sufficient data for the record. In others, however, this may need to be supplemented by check lists and other procedures, including tests. These should be simple and easy to apply. Learning style, for example accuracy, pace and concentration, social relationships and attainments should all be covered. 4.53 We recommend that the progress of a child with special educational needs should be reviewed at least annually, and that the head teacher of his school, whether an ordinary or a special school, should be responsible for initiating the review. In some cases the head teacher may act in conjunction with a member of the proposed special education advisory and support service or other supporting service. In consultation with those teachers who have been observing the child's performance or monitoring his development and with the advice, where necessary, of a local advisory teacher or peripatetic specialist teacher, the head teacher should study the records of the child's progress maintained in his school folder and decide whether any special arrangements made for him need to be modified or his needs reassessed. Parents should, of course, be able to seek a review of their child's progress at any time. We recommend that responsibility for the oversight of reviews of progress should rest with the special education advisory and support service. 4.54 The review of a child's progress may indicate that his needs should be reassessed. The process of reassessment may be carried out at any of the stages of our proposed assessment procedure. In most cases it will be suitably carried out at one of the school-based stages. Where, however, a child whose special educational needs have been assessed at Stage 4 or 5 moves from a nursery to a primary, or from a primary to a secondary school, it may, depending on his progress, be necessary to reassess his needs at one or other of those stages. Reassessment of special needs will be necessary at least two years before a young person with special needs is due to leave school. This process should always involve a careers officer and should usually include other professionals in the education, health and social services. We return to this in Chapter 10. 4.55 The Department of Education and Science Circular 2/75 (Welsh Office Circular 21/75) reminded local education authorities: 'Though some children will prove to need to stay in a special school for the whole of their school life, no placement should initially be assumed to be final'. The Scottish Education Department Circular 733 issued on 26 August 1969 also emphasised the importance of reviewing placements at regular intervals. The need to review a child's placement remains equally important in the context of our broader view of special education, irrespective of where it is provided. The variety of forms of special educational provision that we believe is required will give considerable scope for adjustment of the arrangements for individual children. Some pupils may simply require adjustment of their educational programmes without a change of placement. For others reassessment may reveal the need for more intensive help, of a kind which calls for the pupil to be recorded as in need of special educational provision; or it may lead to a recommendation to the authority that the child's recording as in need of special educational provision should be cancelled, and that he should transfer from a special school, unit or class to an ordinary school or class, with or without additional help. 4.56 We recommend that arrangements for any change of placement should always be carefully planned. Where a change of school is indicated, the cooperation of the receiving school should be ensured. Wherever possible, the child should be prepared for the new setting by a period of attendance, either full or part-time, at the new school or class. This may be treated as a trial period although, in view of its limitations, the results of such a trial will need to be interpreted very carefully. Members of the proposed special education advisory and support service will usefully contribute to the arrangements for and appraisal of the results of any trial period. A change of placement should always be subject to confirmation after a period during which the child's progress should be carefully watched by the head teacher, in consultation with the head teacher of the child's former school where the new placement entails a change of school.
III THE SE FORMS PROCEDURE 4.57 We consider that the SE Forms procedure, modified in the way we suggest below, can provide an effective way of collecting information about and documenting the results of assessment of a child's special needs. We recommend that it should be initiated when a child is referred for multi-professional assessment at Stage 4 or 5. 4.58 The SE Forms for completion on individual children were introduced in Scotland by the Scottish Education Department's letter of 1 November 1971, in England by Circular 2/75 and in Wales by the Welsh Office Circular 21/75. There are three forms in use in Scotland: Forms SE1, SE2 and SE3, which are designed for completion by a child's teacher, an educational psychologist and a school doctor respectively. In England and Wales the sequence is different, in that Form SE2 is for the school doctor and Form SE3 for the educational psychologist, and there is an additional form, Form SE4, which is a summary and action sheet intended for completion and signature by an experienced educational psychologist or adviser in special education. The use of Forms SE1-SE4 is not mandatory. A recent survey carried out by the Department of Education and Science found that the forms were used by about two thirds of authorities in England and Wales; some of the others had devised their own equivalents of the SE Forms. 4.59 Although the SE Forms procedure was designed for children who are attending school, including those receiving nursery education, we see no reason why it should not apply also to children who have not yet started school. For pupils in school the procedure will continue, as at present, to be initiated by the head teacher using Form SE1. In the case of children under five who are not attending school, responsibility for referral will rest in other professional hands, and here a different initiating form may be used, suited to the professional context in which the referral is made. 4.60 We have stressed the need to involve parents in assessment procedures, not least because they can provide invaluable information about their child. None of the present SE Forms, however, is designed for completion by the parents and it is left to the head teacher on Form SE1 and the educational psychologist on Form SE3 (Form SE2 in Scotland) to record the parents' attitudes towards their child's needs. We recommend that whoever refers the child for multi-professional assessment should inform the parents as soon as the SE procedure has been initiated and should give them a form on which to make their own statement about their child's needs. This form should contain questions about significant events in their child's life as well as more general questions such as: What do you think is your child's main problem? What are his main strengths and special interests? What sort of special help do you think he needs? In addition, the form should ask for details of any professional consultations that have taken place about the child, and should give the parents opportunity to indicate whether or not they have any objections to the consultants' being approached for further information. The completed form should be returned by the parents either to the person who handed it to them, in which case he should forward it to the education officer of the local education authority with responsibility for special education, or, if they prefer, to that officer directly. 4.61 Some parents may need help to express their views and feelings adequately on the form. Advice should be readily available from their Named Person, who will provide a single point of professional contact for them, and whose functions we describe in the next chapter. The Named Person for parents will normally be the health visitor where the children are under school age or the head teacher where they are at school. In most cases, therefore, their Named Person will be the same person who gives them their form. Other sources of help in completing the form, particularly for parents of young children not attending school, may be their general practitioner, the social services department of the local authority, a local resource centre on handicap, a voluntary organisation concerned with the handicapped or a citizens' advice bureau. In every case the availability of help should be explained to parents when the form is handed to them. 4.62 We recommend that the completed SE Form which initiates the SE procedure should be sent to the education officer of the local education authority with responsibility for special education. We recognise that in practice he will wish to delegate responsibility for the SE procedure and we recommend that a member of the special education advisory and support service should normally be given this responsibility. That officer will then seek information about the child on the appropriate SE Forms from the different services. 4.63 At present the only professionals for whom the SE forms are designed are teachers, doctors and educational psychologists. We consider that the social services department should also be sent a document as part of the SE procedure in order both to inform its officers that a particular child is thought to require special educational provision and to obtain any information they consider should be supplied about the child's family background. 4.64 There has been much criticism from doctors in general and child psychiatrists in particular about the inadequacy of Form SE2 (Form SE3 in Scotland) and the lack of clarity about where, say, a psychiatric report is to be recorded. We consider that there should be better provision for contributions by medical professionals and by other health service professionals, such as speech therapists, physiotherapists or health visitors. We recommend that contributions to Form SE2 by members of the health service should be coordinated by the Specialist in Community Medicine (Child Health) or a medical colleague designated by him, normally an officer with clinical responsibilities. 4.65 Forms SE2 and SE3 have been widely criticised also for their lack of flexibility. In view of these criticisms we recommend that Forms SE2 and SE3 should be revised, after due consultation with the appropriate professionals. We hope that it will be possible to substitute structured documents which would give ample opportunity for full descriptions of various aspects of the child's functioning. It would be more useful and economical to have a briefer initial form, to which supporting information relating to particular areas of the child's functioning could be appended. We further recommend that a document on lines similar to the revised Forms SE2 and SE3 should be drawn up for completion by professionals in social services departments. The format of these documents should provide scope for the professionals concerned to give the fullest information in terms more in keeping with the best practices of their profession. For example, where a psychologist has had opportunities to observe a young child without formal testing but with various play and learning structures designed to bring out the child's progress in some area, it should be possible for him to record these observations in full, with their conclusions. Similarly, it should be possible for, say, a speech therapist to provide a full report of his findings. A short handbook will need to be compiled giving guidance as to the kind of information required. 4.66 We consider that the process of multi-professional assessment of a child's needs at Stage 4 or 5 should be concluded by the completion of Form SE4, renumbered as necessary in the light of our proposals above. We therefore recommend the introduction of Form SE4 in Scotland. The detailed profile of the child's needs and the recommendation for the provision of special help entered on this form will, as we explain in the following section, provide the basis for a judgement by the local education authority as to whether the child should be recorded as requiring special educational provision. We regard it as essential that the completion of this form should remain the responsibility of an officer of the local education authority, either an adviser in special education or an educational psychologist. He should show the child's parents the completed form and give them an opportunity to indicate on it whether or not they concur with the statement of and prescription for their child's needs. The form should then be forwarded to the officer of the local education authority responsible for the SE Forms procedure, who should ensure that copies are sent to the local authority social services department, the area health authority and, where the child is of school age or attending a nursery school or class, the head teacher of his school. 4.67 Under our proposals the SE Forms will clearly be an integral part of procedures for multi-professional assessment at Stage 4 or 5. The profile of the child's needs contained in Form SE4 will need to be set out in a way that will be familiar to the local education authority in whose area the assessment is carried out and to any other education authority in whose area the child may subsequently live or attend school. In view of the strong desirability that the SE Forms should have national currency, we recommend that their use by local education authorities in England, Wales and Scotland in a form to be determined jointly by the Secretaries of State should be mandatory. 4.68 We are aware that there is often at present a considerable interval between the initiation and completion of the SE Forms procedure, with the unfortunate result that the provision of special education to meet a child's needs is delayed. We emphasise the necessity for speed in collecting information about the child from the various professionals concerned so that assessment can take place and special help be provided promptly. We suggest that it should be part of the function of the Named Person to seek to hasten the completion of the SE Forms by acting as a 'progress chaser'.
IV RECORDING OF CHILDREN AS IN NEED OF SPECIAL EDUCATIONAL PROVISION 4.69 As we indicated in the previous section, the completed Form SE4 will be the basis on which the local education authority will judge whether or not a child should be recorded as requiring special educational provision. We have considered most carefully whether such a system of recording could in practice tend to emphasise the separateness of the children concerned - an idea which throughout this report we are at pains to dispel. We think that such a possibility will be minimised by the confidential nature of the record and by the variety of settings, in many cases in ordinary schools, in which the children's special needs will in practice be met. Moreover, the broader concept of special education which we have proposed, linked to progressive stages of assessment and the regular noting of an individual pupil's needs and progress in a school folder, will, we hope, also work against the emergence of distinctive groups. However, to the extent that a system of recording may suggest a form of separateness we think that any possible disadvantages are outweighed by two considerations of practical importance. In the first place the needs of children who require the provision of regular special help outside the ordinary school greatly exceed those of children for whom special provision can be made wholly or mainly within the school: they call for greater resources and more complex organisation of services. Unless these needs and the corresponding means of meeting them are explicitly recorded there will be real danger of insufficiency or default in their provision. Secondly, even though regular specialist help may be available to the ordinary school which a child is currently attending there can be no guarantee, in the absence of a formulation of need and provision, that it will continue to be available if he moves to another school, whether in the same area or that of another local authority. We therefore recommend that a duty should be imposed on authorities to maintain a record of children whom they judge to require special educational provision not normally available in the ordinary school, subject to the proviso that no child should be recorded without prior assessment by a multi-professional team. We consider that authorities should have the power to record a child as requiring special educational provision from any age, although in practice, as we explain in the following chapter, we envisage that it would be unusual for them to use this power in the case of very young children. In support of this statutory provision, we further recommend that the Secretaries of State should be required to make regulations as to the resources deemed to be not generally available in county and voluntary schools; as to the composition of the multi-professional teams and as to the form of the record. 4.70 The process of recording a child as requiring special educational provision will entail entering in a file in the local education authority's offices the completed Form SE4 with a profile of the child's needs and a recommendation for the provision of special help, as well as a separate note on how that recommendation is being met in practice, together with the name of a person designated by the multi-professional team to provide a point of contact for the parents. These documents will form the record of the child. The parents should have ready access to the documents comprising the record of their own child. Beyond them, however, access to details of children recorded as requiring special educational provision should be restricted to those with a professional interest in a particular child and to those who can show on application to the local education authority that they have a bona fide reason for seeing the documents, for example for research purposes. It will be for the local education authority and, where necessary, the area health authority to decide, in the latter circumstances, whether access should be granted, and on what terms. 4.71 In order to protect their interests, we recommend that, on the introduction of our proposed system, all children currently ascertained as requiring special educational treatment and also those who, though not so ascertained, are attending special schools or designated special classes or units should be recorded as requiring special educational provision. Local education authorities may wish in due course to arrange for the needs of these children to be reassessed by a multi-professional team so that up to date information is available against which to judge whether the educational provision being made for a particular child requires revision, or whether the child should continue to be recorded. We also recommend that, in order to ensure continuity of specialist help for a pupil who, having been recorded as requiring special educational provision by one local education authority, moves to another area, a copy of the documents comprising his record should be passed to the authority into whose area he moves and that he should be automatically recorded by that authority. 4.72 Arrangements should be made for children to cease to be recorded if they no longer need regular, specialist help external to the ordinary school. It will clearly be impracticable (and anyway in our view unnecessary) to insist that a recording can be cancelled only after full reassessment by a multi-professional team. However, we consider that no decision should be taken until the child's needs have been reassessed by more than one professional external to the school, if not by a full multi-professional team. If it is decided that the child should cease to be recorded, the documents held by the authority about his needs should be struck through. 4.73 The recording of children as in need of special educational provision will enable their parents to satisfy themselves that the children are receiving a suitable education. The profile of their child contained in Form SE4, as well as the document filed by the authority alongside Form SE4 recording how the child's needs are being met, will afford the parents a basis on which to make representations to the authority and subsequently, if necessary, to the appropriate Secretary of State if they consider that their child's needs have been incorrectly assessed, or that the recommendation for meeting them is inadequate, or that the authority is failing to make suitable provision. 4.74 Under Section 34 of the Education Act 1944 and Section 66A of the Education (Scotland) Act 1962 (as amended) parents have the right of appeal to the appropriate Secretary of State against a decision that their child requires special education. They have no corresponding right of appeal against a decision that he does NOT require special education although in England and Wales they could of course appeal under Section 68 of the Education Act 1944 on the general grounds that the authority was acting unreasonably. We believe that in future they should have explicit right of appeal against such a decision. We therefore recommend that parents should have the right of appeal to the appropriate Secretary of State against a decision by a local education authority to record or not to record their child as in need of special educational provision.
V STATISTICAL RETURNS 4.75 The statistical returns of handicapped pupils which are made by local education authorities to the Department of Education and Science, the Scottish Education Department and the Welsh Office are based on statutory categories of handicap. They show the numbers of handicapped pupils who are attending special schools, special classes or independent schools, who are receiving education in hospitals or at home and, in England and Wales, who are boarded in homes or who are awaiting places in special schools. The returns of pupils in England and Wales can be misleading in so far as the way in which an individual child is shown tends to depend on the type of disability for which his school caters rather than on his own primary disability. Moreover, they do not afford scope for showing any additional disabilities. 4.76 If, as we have recommended, statutory categories of handicap are abolished, a new framework for statistical returns will be required. We believe that this should be capable of yielding much more comprehensive statistical information than at present about children who require special educational provision (for example information about the number of children with different combinations of disability and. the number with particular degrees of any given disability). This will be possible only if the information for each child is initially recorded on a grid, of which one axis lists a number of different areas of functioning under which the child's disability or disabilities can be shown, and the other takes the form of a scale on which the degree of disability can be indicated. We therefore recommend that a feasibility study on the use of a grid for the purpose of statistical returns should be carried out in a sample of local education authorities and that, if it is found to be practicable, a grid should be introduced as a basis in future for such returns. An example of a possible grid is given in Appendix 3: this would show on a five-point scale the degree of impairment of a child's functioning in each of a number of areas. There may be scope for improvement in its design. Detailed instructions for completion will of course need to be compiled. 4.77 It is clear that in practice it will be possible to complete such a grid only after multi-professional assessment of a child's needs. We therefore suggest that the grid should be filled in by the same person whom we have recommended to be responsible for completing and signing Form SE4, namely the adviser in special education or the educational psychologist. We envisage that it will be printed, along with a table showing the child's initial placement and any subsequent change, on the blank back page of Form SE4. While the information on the grid will be of use to the local education authority whether or not it decides that the child should be recorded as requiring special educational provision, we recommend that the statistical returns to government departments based on the grid should be of those children actually recorded as in need of special educational provision. The returns will thus have a uniform basis which will enable them to be used for comparative purposes and for planning the necessary provision. Information on the number of children with any particular combination of disabilities could be collected on the basis of the completed grids for individual children. The details entered on the grid for an individual child will need to be regularly updated to ensure that the returns are as accurate as possible. We suggest that they should be checked as part of any reassessment of the child's special educational needs. 4.78 If local education authorities are to ensure that the necessary staff and resources are made available to meet the needs of all children who require special educational provision, not just those who are recorded, they will require information about children assessed as needing such provision at the school-based stages of our proposed assessment procedure. Such information will also be required so that authorities can put specialists such as specialist careers officers in touch, at the appropriate time, with pupils with special educational needs who are likely to require their help and advice. We recommend that local education authorities should devise their own framework, which might be a simplified version of the grid, for collecting information from schools about pupils assessed at Stage 1, 2, or 3 as being in need of special educational provision.
CONCLUSION 4.79 If appropriate special educational provision is to be made, and if it is to be made as early as possible, arrangements for the discovery and assessment of special educational needs must be effective, and must be carried out without delay. The procedures proposed in this chapter should, we believe, cater effectively for up to one in five of the school population, while providing a particular safeguard for the interests of the much smaller proportion of children with severe, complex and long-term needs. In subsequent chapters we consider particular aspects of these procedures in relation to the under fives, children of school age and those leaving school.
References (1) See Appendix 5 for details of the research project. (2) Fit for the future. The Report of the Committee on Child Health Services. Cmnd 6684 (HMSO 1976), Vol 1, p221. (3) Ibid., pp 139-40 and Appendix F, pp 413-5. (4) Priorities in the health and social services. The way forward (HMSO 1977), p 10, and DHSS Health Circular HC(78)5 Local Authority Circular LAC(78)2; Welsh Office Circular WHC(78)4, Health Services Development (January 1978), Annex A. (5) DES Circular 14/77, Welsh Office Circular 185/77, Local education authority arrangements for the school curriculum (29 November 1977). (6) Children and their primary schools A Report of the Central Advisory Council for Education (England) (HMSO 1967), pp 161-2. (7) A language for life Report of the Committee of Inquiry appointed by the Secretary of State for Education and Science under the Chairmanship of Sir Alan Bullock FBA (HMSO 1975), Chapter 17. (8) DES Circular 2/75, Welsh Office Circular 21/75, The discovery of children requiring special education and the assessment of their needs (17 March 1975). (9) DHSS Health Circular HC(78)5 Local Authority Circular LAC(78)2, Welsh Office Circular WHC(78)4, Health Services Development (January 1978). 
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