STRUGGLES over funding are affecting Britain’s “1.9 million children and young people who have special educational needs,” the Bishop of Lincoln, the Rt Revd Stephen Conway, said in a House of Lords debate on special-needs schools on 24 October.
It was moved by Baroness Monckton, the businesswoman and campaigner who set up Team Domenica, a charity named after her daughter, who has Down’s syndrome, and whose godmother was the late Diana, Princess of Wales.
Bishop Conway, formerly the lead bishop for education, said that there were “150,000 young people across England [attending] specialist schools and colleges. . . The special schools we have, doing a marvellous job under huge pressure, are systematically underfunded and under-resourced.”
Although he was keen “to see an integrated ecology of special and mainstream schools”, he said, “special schools not only continue and grow but continue to offer the specialist medical care, occupational and physical therapy, small class sizes, and all the activities and bespoke support which provide and ensure consistency of care for children and mitigated stresses for families.
“Individualised and complex support cannot be provided in blanket terms in mainstream schools. Nor can mainstream schools provide what I have witnessed broadly: the key importance of college places for people with a disability up to the age of 25, and all that has already been said about how important that is for accessing employment and, as part of the vision for education that the Church of England sustains, how we exercise a proper understanding of the rare dignity of all people, not least those living with disability.
“Given that church schools are in such demand, I hope that it is possible for the Government to consider the Church being allowed to engage in developing special schools, not least because of falling school rolls and the reallocation of church school buildings, which could become church-based specialist schools. This, I hope, would help to improve the access for children in any kind of need.”
In summing up, Baroness Monckton thanked Bishop Conway “for what was the most important phrase of the debate: the rare dignity of all people. That is what it is. I think, too, of what the noble baroness Lady Morris said about social mobility. When you are with somebody with a learning disability, they do not care who you are, they do not know who you are, and they do not care what you earn or where you come from. It makes you strip off mask after mask, until you are there in a proper shared humanity — that is what it means.”
The motion, to take note of the contribution that special needs schools and specialist education colleges make to the education sector, was agreed.