STRUGGLES over funding are affecting Britain’s “1.9 million children and young individuals 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 arrange 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 have been “150,000 young people across England [attending] specialist schools and colleges. . . The special schools we’ve, 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 proceed and grow but proceed to supply the specialist medical care, occupational and physical therapy, small class sizes, and all of the activities and bespoke support which offer and ensure consistency of care for kids and mitigated stresses for families.
“Individualised and complicated support can’t be provided in blanket terms in mainstream schools. Nor can mainstream schools provide what I actually have witnessed broadly: the important thing importance of school places for individuals with a disability as much as the age of 25, and all that has already been said about how necessary that’s for accessing employment and, as a part of the vision for education that the Church of England sustains, how we exercise a correct 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 feasible for the Government to contemplate the Church being allowed to interact in developing special schools, not least due to falling school rolls and the reallocation of church school buildings, which could grow to be church-based specialist schools. This, I hope, would help to enhance the access for kids in any type of need.”
In summing up, Baroness Monckton thanked Bishop Conway “for what was crucial phrase of the talk: the rare dignity of all people. That is what it’s. I believe, too, of what the noble baroness Lady Morris said about social mobility. When you might be with someone with a learning disability, they don’t care who you might be, they have no idea who you might be, and so they don’t care what you earn or where you come from. It makes you strip off mask after mask, until you might be there in a correct shared humanity — that’s what it means.”
The motion, to be aware of the contribution that special needs schools and specialist education colleges make to the education sector, was agreed.
