Chair of the Cross Party Autism Group, Mark Isherwood AM, has called on the Welsh Government to provide parents of children with Additional Learning Needs (ALN) with assurances that its proposed new system for meeting the ALN of children and young people in Wales will not result in the rationing of services.
The Welsh Government is proposing to replace the existing Statement of Special Educational Needs with an Individual Development Plan (IDP), but Mr Isherwood is concerned about the changes.
Responding to Statement in the Senedd this week by the Minister for Lifelong Learning and Welsh Language on ‘The Additional Learning Needs and Educational Tribunals (Wales) Bill’, he said:
“I believe I may be the only Member left of the Committee in the second Assembly that produced the three-stage report on which these proposals are based. It does go back a long way, and this does replicate many of the recommendations in that Committee. We took evidence from Baroness Warnock, whose original recommendations led to the introduction of Statementing in 1981. And she told us that the system had become needlessly bureaucratic, that it was originally intended that 1 per cent of pupils might need Statements and it had risen to 5 per cent, but, nonetheless, that the needs of that particular cohort with complex specific needs still needed to be protected.
“How will you therefore assure parents like me, and many others, who had to battle for a Statement to access the services otherwise being rationed; parents like me and others, who, once armed with a Statement, could, only because of its legal status, access services that were withdrawn from my child and others in his unit, because we had that Statement; and parents across Wales who’ve seen the rate of exclusions of children without Statements, but with Additional Learning Needs, doubling since the emphasis on Statements was withdrawn, that replacing a legal document, which the Statement is, with your proposals for a generic Individual Development Plan meeting the needs of all learners, will not water down the legal status and strength of that legal document - that very important Statement - provided for parents like me, and continuing to provide for many other parents across Wales?”
The Minister replied: “I recognise the power and the strength of his arguments, but the purpose is to move away from that system. The Member has described very well a system that is failing, and we do not want to pursue or to sustain a system that is not delivering the services we require, whether it’s for his family or for other families.”
Mr Isherwood added: “In the real world, the new system proposed by the Welsh Government is currently too open to being used to ration services rather than meet needs, when the problem is not the current law, but the need for it to be obeyed.”