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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 13 Advice and support in special education
INTRODUCTION 13.1 Throughout this report we have stressed the importance of adequate support and help for the considerable proportion - up to one in five - of children who may have special educational needs, the majority of whom will be attending ordinary schools. In the last chapter we urged that all teachers should be helped through training to recognise and understand those special needs and that teachers with defined responsibilities for such children should undertake additional training. In addition, it is essential that all teachers should have ready access to advice, support and the expertise of specialist teachers to supplement and complement their own efforts to meet the special needs presented by individual children. A teacher who has a child with a physical disability in his class, for example, may need information about the educational implications of the child's disability; another teacher may be worried in a more general way about the progress of a particular child. In such cases, teachers need to know to whom they can turn for advice and support. In this chapter we consider how the provision of advice and support in special education should be organised to meet the needs of teachers as effectively as possible. 13.2 The evidence we have received strongly supports the view that ordinary schools need better and more comprehensive advice and support if they are to make efficient provision for children with special educational needs. Over 85 per cent of the teachers in ordinary schools who replied to a question about specialist support in the survey of teachers' views conducted for us by the Department of Education and Science (1) claimed that they had received no visits in the past year from an adviser in special education, or from an advisory or peripatetic teacher. Regular, specialist advice will be necessary if teachers are to cater effectively for children with disabilities or significant difficulties who are already in ordinary schools, including those with emotional or behavioural disorders, and for increased numbers of children with disabilities, sometimes severe or complex, who may in future be educated in ordinary schools. We regard the proposals in this chapter for the provision of advice and support as an indispensable condition for effective special educational provision in ordinary schools. 13.3 Much valuable work is already being carried out by advisers in special education, advisory and peripatetic teachers working with children with particular disabilities, and home visiting teachers, working mostly with young children. Moreover, advisers and peripatetic teachers concerned with remedial education are helping many children at present in remedial groups who, in line with our broader concept of special education, should in future be regarded as having special educational needs. However, we have become aware, both from the evidence received, and from our own observations, that the various educational advisory services for children with special educational needs are fragmented. Individual advisory or peripatetic teachers may work directly to different administrative officers, and there is often little contact between those concerned with the various arrangements which may be made for education otherwise than at school. We consider that the provision of advice to schools on children with special educational needs, wherever they are being educated, should be coordinated and we therefore recommend that every local education authority should restructure and, if necessary, supplement its existing advisory staff and resources to provide effective advice and support to teachers concerned with children with special educational needs through a unified service. As we explain later in this chapter, the school psychological service, which also has an extremely important advisory function, would remain a separate, though complementary, service. 13.4 We would emphasise before proceeding that we are not recommending that there should spring into existence a new set of people to advise the teacher. We are fully aware of the danger of multiplying 'experts', who are removed from the actual teaching of children in the classroom. The support service which we propose would be made up substantially of existing advisers, advisory teachers and other specialist remedial teachers, reinforced by a number of practising teachers, many of whom would spend part of their time in the classroom, or might be seconded to the service for a limited period. More staff will be needed, particularly in areas of the country where elements of our proposed service do not already exist, but, for many local education authorities, the formation of an advisory and support service will entail in the first instance the reorganisation and retraining of existing staff rather than the employment of large numbers of new staff. Moreover, if the school population continues to decrease, and if the number of children in special schools contracts, there should be scope for the redeployment of senior and experienced teachers in special schools as full or part-time members of the advisory and support service. 13.5 We therefore see the advisory and support service as a means of deploying as effectively as possible special education teaching skills and expertise in support of children with special needs, wherever they are being educated; of ensuring that the progress of individual children is regularly reviewed; and of coordinating and improving existing advisory services in this field. At the same time the service will be part of a network of other services for children, including health and psychological services. In case it may be thought that our recommendation makes excessive demands for new resources, we stress that the principal function of the proposed service will be the coordination of present efforts to help teachers meet the special needs of children. Substantially, therefore, we are proposing the reorganisation of present staff and resources rather than the creation of new demands. 13.6 Although we apply the term 'service' to the collective body of people who will be responsible in each local education authority area for providing advice and support to teachers concerned with children with special educational needs, we use the term in a functional rather than an institutional sense. As we explain in paragraph 13.29, any attempt to set out a blueprint for the service would be unrealistic, given the diversity in the character and size of individual authorities. Within the general guidelines offered in this chapter, which are designed to achieve effective coordination of advice and support, we accept that each authority must be able to restructure and, if necessary, supplement its existing advisory staff and resources in the way that it considers most suited to its own circumstances. We are therefore more concerned with the range and quality of help that a local service provides than with the particular organisational form that it takes.
I FUNCTIONS OF THE ADVISORY AND SUPPORT SERVICE 13.7 We have identified the functions of the special education advisory and support service in relation to ordinary and special schools, to the local education authority and to parents. We start by considering its functions in relation to children with special educational needs attending ordinary schools, and to the staff of those schools. Ordinary schools 13.8 The aims of the advisory and support service in ordinary schools should be two-fold: first to maintain and raise the standards of special education generally; and secondly to help with the teaching of individual children. The two aims clearly interact. The first entails helping teachers to improve the quality of their teaching through the mediation of specialist advice and support; the second requires that members of the service visit schools to work with teachers in helping particular children to master the difficulties, whether of learning or of behaviour, which they have. 13.9 The service should be responsible, as we proposed in the last chapter, for the planning and organisation of induction programmes for teachers taking up for the first time a post with responsibility for children with special educational needs. It should also be prominent in the organisation of short courses of in-service training for teachers, ancillary workers and other members of staff who come into contact with children with special educational needs. We recommended in the last chapter that courses dealing with special needs should be arranged as a matter of urgency for all serving teachers, whatever their main commitment in the school. Moreover, aspects of the education of children with special needs should be included in a high proportion of courses on the curriculum or subject specialisms. In addition to contributing to the courses themselves, members of the service should arrange for other professionals in their area, including specialists of all kinds concerned with children with special needs and teachers in ordinary and special schools, to participate in workshops, discussions and courses. 13.10 We envisage that the advisory and support service will also be a source of information for ordinary schools on local procedures for the assessment of special educational needs and on the help available to meet them. We have already recommended in Chapter 4 that responsibility for monitoring and developing the effectiveness of school-based assessment should rest with the service and that responsibility within the local education authority for the SE Forms procedure, which will be initiated when a child is referred for multi-professional assessment at Stage 4 or 5 of our proposed assessment procedure, should normally be delegated to a member of the service. Advisers in the service will thus be well placed to ensure that ordinary schools are knowledgeable about assessment procedures. Further, they should ensure that special aids are available for those children in ordinary schools who require them and that they are properly serviced. Special schools 13.11 The functions of the advisory and support service in relation to special schools will be rather different, although they too will include responsibility for the quality of education provided. Senior members of the staff of special schools, particularly those which are designated as resource centres, may themselves be part-time specialist advisory teachers. While staff in special schools will not normally be in need of specialist advice about the requirements of the children for whom they make provision, they may need guidance on aspects of multiple disability which may not be familiar to them. The advisory and support service should provide or point them to it and should also offer them personal support in their work. 13.12 If members of the service are to be able to exploit the expertise available to them from specialist teachers they will need to be conversant with the special schools, units and classes in their area and have some knowledge of other schools 'in the region which cater for particular types of special educational need. We hope that they will also help to break down the isolation experienced by staff in some special schools by bringing together subject advisers and teachers in ordinary schools on the one hand and teachers in special schools on the other to discuss materials and methods likely to be useful in both kinds of school. The development of some special schools as training bases, which we envisaged in the last chapter, should also help to increase the opportunities for staff in special schools to take courses of in-service training and so further reduce their professional isolation. The local education authority 13.13 We have already emphasised in previous chapters the need for the local education authority to be informed about the special educational needs of children assessed at one of the school-based stages of our proposed assessment procedure as requiring special educational provision. This will be essential if the authority is to arrange for additional staff or resources to be provided. In practice this information will be collected by members of the special education advisory and support service, who will also be responsible for informing the authority about the quality of special educational provision made -in ordinary as well as special schools. Moreover the service should be influential in ensuring that standards in special education are maintained by carrying out such responsibilities as the local education authority assigns to it to inspect as well as to advise on different forms of special educational provision. 13.14 In order to carry out the task of monitoring the development and conduct of school-based assessment, as well as to see that the individual needs of children requiring special educational provision are met and that continuity of support for them is maintained (particularly if they move to a different school), the members of the service will need to work closely with professionals in the health, psychological and social services. Their consultations with colleagues in those services should help them to formulate policies for the development of special educational provision and to offer informed advice to the local education authority on current provision and future needs, including the suitability and planning of premises, and the evaluation and selection of materials, apparatus and equipment for use with children with special needs. 13.15 The ultimate responsibility for providing a child with special education rests with the authority itself, and the administrative procedures must be conducted through the chief education officer's administrative staff. We consider that, in the case of children recorded as requiring special educational provision, no arrangements for placement should be made without members of the advisory service being involved. They should also be consulted about the placement of children with special educational needs in hostels or boarding accommodation for other than educational reasons. Indeed, where the child is in care and it is proposed to place him in an independent school, the placement should be made only with the agreement of both the local education authority and the social services department, as we recommended in Chapter 8. The movement of children with special educational needs in and out of hospital should also, wherever possible, be discussed with members of the service. Such placements have to be made in circumstances in which educational considerations may not be paramount, but all placements have educational repercussions, and it is important that those who place the child should at least be aware of them. 13.16 The advisory and support service should not, however, be responsible for the administrative implementation of decisions about the placement of individual children. The primary consideration in every case must be what course of action is best for the child. The service should therefore be in a position to give independent advice from that standpoint. This does not mean that administrative difficulties can be ignored, for no authority can provide facilities that exactly match the needs of every child. It does however imply that advisers should from their knowledge of the range of special facilities available (both in the area and, more widely, in the region) be free to suggest which of them is best for a particular child, or, if none is suitable, what new or different provision is required. Parents 13.17 The advisory and support service will be a very important source of help and guidance to parents of children with special educational needs. In the case of some children who are recorded as requiring special educational provision, a member of the service may be the person nominated by the multi-professional team to act as Named Person for the parents, as proposed in Chapters 5 and 9. The service should however be readily accessible to all parents of children with special educational needs who are seeking advice on their children's progress. 13.18 Advisory teachers who specialise in working with young children with special needs will be involved in planning early teaching programmes with parents, and they will have particular need of training in counselling. All advisers, however, should help parents to understand and cooperate in any special programmes drawn up for their children. Moreover, they should be responsible for seeing that parents are generally helped to contribute as effectively as possible to their children's education. 13.19 Where placement in a special school or class is recommended, parents need to be able to visit the school and discuss the recommendation. It will be an important function of the advisers to facilitate visits by parents to special schools and classes and contacts with the staff.
II THE PERSONNEL AND ORGANISATION OF THE SERVICE 13.20 In the following section we identify the different members of the service and their duties. First, there should be special education advisory teachers who will each be responsible for providing advice and support to a small group of ordinary schools. Secondly, there should be peripatetic specialist teachers whose work with particular disabilities may cover a wider geographical area. Thirdly, many authorities will require advisers with responsibility for coordinating the work of a group of advisory teachers in a sub-division of the authority's area and the work of peripatetic specialist teachers in a particular field of disability. Fourthly, each local education authority should have a senior adviser in special education responsible for providing services to schools. We consider these different sorts of adviser in turn below. Advisory teachers 13.21 If the needs of children attending ordinary schools who require special educational provision are to be suitably met and the teachers responsible for them are to be adequately supported, the schools will require ready access to teachers with a greater breadth and depth of knowledge about special education than will normally exist among the school's own staff. We therefore see a need for special education advisory teachers who will be members not of the staff of anyone school but of the advisory and support service. Each of these advisory teachers should work in a group of schools. It will usually include one or more secondary schools, which may have their own resource centre or other supporting base for children with special needs, together with their contributory primary schools, which in some cases may have only two or three teachers. The number of schools in the group, however, should be small enough to allow the advisory teacher to spend an appreciable amount of time in each one and gain personal knowledge of the individual children in need of special educational provision. 13.22 The work of the advisory teachers should, as their description implies, be mainly advisory, but they should be concerned also with facilitating the contributions of other services to school-based assessment of special educational needs. We envisage advisory teachers helping teachers in the schools in their area to identify signs of special needs in children and to devise special methods and programmes to meet them. They will also, in particular cases, advise on the need for other professionals to be consulted at Stage 3 of our proposed assessment procedure, for example a doctor, an educational psychologist, a speech therapist or a physiotherapist, a social worker, a careers officer or a peripatetic specialist teacher, say, of the visually handicapped, and will facilitate the participation of these experts in the assessment procedure. It will thus be important that they should work closely with the individual professionals in the various services in their area who may be called upon. 13.23 Another function of the special education advisory teachers will be to help smooth the transition of children with special needs from a primary to a secondary school, or from an ordinary to a special school or vice versa, or from school to an establishment of further education or other institution. Further, they should be readily accessible to parents of children with special needs who wish to discuss their child's education with a professional in the education service other than the head teacher of the school, who will, in most cases, be their Named Person. 13.24 In practice the duties of the advisory teachers will vary according to the size and character of the local authority. Where there are many small schools, which may not have their own resource centre or supporting base, the advisory teachers will have increased responsibilities for work with individual children and it will be particularly important that they should be frequent visitors to the schools and know the children well. The number of special education advisory teachers required may appear to be very large. In practice, however, peripatetic remedial teachers are already employed by some local education authorities on the basis of a ratio of one to 3-4,000 school children or less and such teachers might, with additional training where necessary, become special education advisory teachers. Thus the staffing implications,at least in some areas, will be less significant than would appear at first sight. Peripatetic specialist teachers 13.25 Specialist advisory teachers are already familiar to many schools, particularly peripatetic teachers of children with impaired hearing. Teachers may also require help in meeting the educational needs of other children with significant disabilities, including visual impairment, physical disability, speech and language disorders, specific learning difficulties and emotional and behavioural problems. The special education advisory and support service for any local authority should be able to provide peripatetic specialist teachers in such fields when required. For the more common disabilities, most authorities should be able to provide them from within their own service, particularly where special schools are designated and developed as resource centres, as we proposed in Chapter 8. For some of the less common disabilities it will be necessary for local education authorities to draw on a regional service, based on those special schools which, under our proposals in the same chapter, would be developed by groups of authorities as specialist centres. The satisfactory education of some children with more marked disabilities in ordinary schools will be impossible without the regular attention of peripatetic specialist teachers and it will be a task of the senior special education adviser mentioned below to ensure that they are available. 13.26 We stressed in Chapter 5 the contribution which peripatetic teachers can make to the development of young children with special needs, and the support which they can offer to parents. We see a very important place in the advisory and support service for teachers who specialise in work with children whose special needs are discovered in early childhood, and with their parents, and who have close links with nursery schools and other forms of provision for young children. In addition to working with individual children and their families, these teachers should be available to advise staff in playgroups, opportunity groups and day nurseries as well as nursery schools and classes. We suggested in Chapter 5 that they should be attached in most cases to assessment centres. It is vital that all the teachers concerned should be trained to work with young children and that the advisory teachers in the service (see paragraphs 13.21-24) should not be automatically assumed to be competent to deal with children under five years of age. Advisers with senior responsibilities 13.27 In large authorities there will be a need for advisers in special education with either specialist or general duties who have responsibility for groups of other advisers. Some advisers will be required to take responsibility for coordinating the work of special education advisory teachers in one sub-division of the local authority's area and for the development of special educational provision in that area. They may also be responsible for all the peripatetic specialist teachers for one disability in the local education authority, for example those specialising in the education of children with impaired hearing. Given the frequency of multiple disability, we hope that most special education advisers will have a combination of such duties, since narrow specialisation in one disability may limit the quality of advice available to the authority and schools. In addition, there will be a need in each local education authority for a senior adviser in special education who will be in charge of the proposed advisory and support service. The structure of the service 13.28 The organisation of the service must be a matter for local decision in the light of the circumstances which exist in each local education authority's area. Our proposals regarding its different functions have been made on the assumption that all secondary and middle schools and all large primary schools will have as a full-time member of staff at least one teacher with additional training who can understand and deal with the more common learning and behavioural problems which children present and help other teachers to appreciate the educational implications of the less serious physical and sensory disabilities. We would expect this teacher to have undertaken the one-year or part-time equivalent general course leading to a recognised qualification which we outlined in the previous chapter. We recognise that there are at present some trained remedial teachers who are carrying out these functions successfully, but we believe that many of them should have further training if they are to ensure that effective help is provided for the wide range of needs of up to one in five children who may require special educational provision at some time during their school career. 13.29 We recognise that any attempt to set out a blueprint for the advisory and support service would be unrealistic, since local education authorities vary considerably in character and size; for example, in England and Wales two are responsible for fewer than 25,000 children, while five or six have more than 200,000 children in their areas. Similar variations exist in Scotland. Moreover, some authorities are almost entirely urban while others cover extensive rural areas with a sparse population. Nevertheless one basic principle is clear: the special education advisory and support service must be both a unified service and closely integrated with the local education authority's other educational advisory services. It must not be a series of unconnected individual units each operating in a limited field of special education. Nor should the service as a whole operate in isolation from other advisory services to schools; rather it should be closely coordinated with them.
III ADMINISTRATION: THE SERVICE IN A LOCAL AUTHORITY CONTEXT The local education authority 13.30 Administrative responsibility for special education is delegated by chief education officers in different authorities in a variety of ways. In many authorities there is an education officer responsible for special education who often has additional responsibility for other assorted services including transport and school meals. Sometimes the education officer concerned is responsible only for special schools, and arrangements for remedial services and other provision in ordinary schools are the concern of education officers for primary and secondary education. It follows from our broader concept of special education and our proposal for a coordinated advisory and support service that the education officer responsible for special education should have wide terms of reference which embrace special educational provision wherever it is made. We therefore recommend that every local education authority should have an education officer responsible for all arrangements for children with special educational needs, wherever these needs are being met. He will naturally need to work very closely with colleagues responsible for primary, secondary and further education. 13.31 The changes in approach and attitude recommended in this report also have implications for the structure of local authority education committees. In some authorities there is, within this structure, a separate special services committee but in many others special education is included within the terms of reference of the schools committee. We recognise that there are disadvantages in having a separate committee for special education; in particular, the risk of its becoming isolated from other sub-committees. However the importance of having a group of elected members who can focus on the special needs of children wherever they are being met cannot be overestimated. We therefore recommend that every local education authority should have a separate committee or a subcommittee of the schools committee responsible for the provision for children and young people with special educational needs of all ages, that is children under five, children of school age, whether they are in ordinary schools, special schools or other establishments, and young people attending establishments of further education Or other institutions. We further recommend that members of this committee or sub-committee should represent the local education authority on the Joint Consultative Committee (or in Scotland the Joint Liaison Committee). The school psychological service 13.32 Some local education authorities have tended to regard their school psychological service as providing a special education advisory service. We hold, however, that there is a need for two separate services to carry out two distinct but overlapping areas of work, both of which are vital to effective special education. Our proposed advisory and support service for special education will have a clear responsibility for the quality of special education wherever it takes place and will be concerned with the whole curriculum, the professional development of special education teachers, and the progress of individual children. The school psychological service, for its part, will be primarily involved in work with individual children, including assessing their special needs and making recommendations for individual programmes for them within the curriculum, and in providing support for schools and parents. The work of educational psychologists is discussed more fully in Chapter 14. The services are in many respects complementary but they should not in our view be combined into one service. The senior adviser in special education and the chief educational psychologist should work closely together and both should work to the same administrative officer. Other services 13.33 The effectiveness of the special education advisory and support service will depend to a large extent upon its ability to build up good relationships with the other services that are involved with children with special educational needs and their parents. Those advisers specialising in work with young children, for example, must have particularly close links with health visitors. All advisers should develop close working relations with members of the health, psychological and social services, and those working with older children should work closely with careers officers and their specialist colleagues in the careers service. In their turn, the members of those services should be aware of the functions of the advisory and support service. The fact that there will be a coordinated service with responsibility for providing advice on the special educational needs of children wherever they are receiving education should in itself make communication easier, for communication often breaks down, not because anyone is unwilling to communicate, but because no one is sure with whom to communicate or where to reach that person. Assessment centres, to which we have proposed that members of the service who specialise in work with young children with special needs should in most cases be attached, can provide an effective point of contact for all those professionals concerned with children with special needs below school age. It should be a prime duty of the members of the advisory and support service to take the initiative in establishing communication between the schools and other services, so that doctors, psychologists, health visitors, social workers, careers officers and other professionals become well known personally in the schools. 13.34 The maintenance of extremely close links between the advisory and support service and other services concerned with children with special educational needs will also be an essential condition for the effectiveness of our proposed assessment procedure. The senior special education adviser should be responsible for informing the chief education officer about the working of multi-professional teams at Stages 4 and 5 of our proposed procedure so that the latter, through his elected members on the appropriate Joint Consultative Committee, can ensure that inter-professional arrangements in the locality continue to be developed and improved.
IV IMPLICATIONS FOR STAFFING AND TRAINING 13.35 At present only about two in every three local education authorities have an adviser in special education, although a number of authorities has developed small but effective teams under the leadership of a senior inspector or adviser. Some training arrangements will be necessary to prepare advisers for senior posts. The arrangements we suggested in the last chapter on teacher training, together with an increase in the number of senior posts in special education in universities and polytechnics, should provide the means of offering the necessary training. The Special Education Staff College will also have an important part in high level training. Moreover, we envisage that members of Her Majesty's Inspectorate concerned with special education will continue their very valuable contribution to the development of expertise amongst advisers through the organisation of conferences and courses. 13.36 We think it important to repeat that we are not proposing the development of an entirely new service. We recognise that in some areas many more advisory teachers will be needed if an effective service is to be provided, but initially the service will be drawn from existing experts in special education, with additional training where necessary. These will include senior teachers in special schools, particularly those designated as resource centres, and peripatetic and other advisory teachers. The single framework that our proposed service provides will enable all those within it to work confidently together to the greater benefit of children and young people with special educational needs.
CONCLUSION 13.37 In this chapter we have outlined our concept of a special education advisory and support service. We consider this to be among the most important developments which will be necessary if up to one in five children are to receive adequate special education when they need it. We recognise that it will not be possible to staff such a service fully in all areas immediately but we see no reason why its structure should not be set up straightaway. Once this has been established, it should be possible, as resources become available, and as the numbers of children in special schools decrease, progressively to build up the service we have in mind over a period of years.
Reference (1) For details of this survey see Appendix 8. 
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