15
Examination of witnesses
Dr Nicola Crossley, Dr Anne Murdoch and Peter Monaghan.
Q59 The Chair: Welcome to this evidence session of our inquiry into the transition from education to employment for young disabled people. Today, we will focus on schools and colleges. We have three witnesses, who I invite to introduce themselves briefly.
Dr Nicola Crossley: Good afternoon. I am chief executive of Liberty Academy Trust, which is a small group of schools for autistic children. I am also the national representative for SEN at the Association of School and College Leaders, which I am representing today. I am pleased to be here.
The Chair: Which part of the country is the Liberty Academy Trust in?
Dr Nicola Crossley: We have three schools all over the place.
Dr Anne Murdoch: I am responsible for our FE college members at ASCL. Prior to joining ASCL I was an FE college principal.
Peter Monaghan: Good afternoon, everybody. I am the head of SEND at Education Partnership North East.
Q60 The Chair: You are very welcome. We will have an opening question, and then I will invite members to ask supplementary questions. This is quite a broad question. I know you will have a lot to say on it. We find it is better if we get that through our discussion rather than from long presentations, but we would not want you to not say anything you wanted to say, so we need to try to get that balance right.
I will start us off by asking for a quick summary of the barriers that young disabled people face when they move from education to employment, and what schools and colleges do to support them during this transition.
Peter Monaghan: I will start with inconsistent access to tailored support around careers advice. Careers advice is generally generic and the staff delivering it have very little SEND experience or SEND training. From my experience, we also find limited focus on work experience in transition plans, so when young disabled people move into or out of FE there is no real focus on developing those work experience skills.
There remain pockets of low aspiration for young disabled people, with the idea that young disabled people cannot work. Generally, any sort of work experience that is given is done internally with the provider and it offers little real work exposure.
There are also inconsistencies in curriculum design. Too often, employability programmes do not lead to sustained work or employment. There is not enough support for employers, so they are not coming forward to offer these work experiences, or from the local authority in terms of funding, placements and support.
Dr Anne Murdoch: We also find and hear from our members many of the things Peter just raised. Before I mention any other barriers, it is important also to state that there is good practice around the country. It is not just about young people not getting access in every part of the country. In some places and among some providers, access to work experience, work placements and work is good.
The barriers we see certainly fall into two or three categories. Rather than repeat what Peter just said, one of the issues for young people is attitudinal barriers. Having the label of “disability” or “disabled” is often a difficulty for the young person and for any employer. There is also custom and practice, which is good and bad. Where there is not so good custom and practice, that can often be a barrier, but people will often do what they are used to doing.
Finally, within that, there are also funding and resource constraints: there might not be enough staff, or appropriately trained staff, to support the young people. We see those kinds of things very much as the barriers that young people face.
Dr Nicola Crossley: I agree with much of what Anne and Peter said. It is also worth noting that there is such a variability in the offer up and down the country. That causes concerns and difficulties.
There is a lack of understanding around what “reasonable adjustments” means in the workplace. I think a previous session also reflected on that poor awareness. There is quite a lot of misunderstanding in this area about how to make those reasonable adjustments. Linking in a little with what Peter said, there is a lack of signposting of the right routes for individuals and how to be proactive on the difficulties that young adults might face.
It is worth noting that there might also be an element of fear, in that SEN students have higher drop-out rates from higher education than their non-SEND peers. I am particularly interested in the autistic population. Data from the National Autistic Society and the Office for National Statistics suggests that only 25% of autistic individuals are in employment. That is also a key issue: how many of the children looking at transitioning into further education and employment have significant difficulties that are also a national issue that we are looking at? The transition is also really poor, particularly into higher education.
Q61 The Chair: Perhaps I can build on that and then ask other people to contribute. One of the challenges we have faced in this inquiry is that we are talking about a very wide range of children and young people. We have been determined not to narrow it down because we did not want to leave anyone out, but there is as much diversity in the sector as there is in any school that you might find. Given your experience with autistic children in special schools and your responsibilities throughout the school system, are there groups of children for whom it is particularly difficult and for whom we get it wrong? Equally, are there groups of children for whom we actually do quite well? Perhaps we could have a response about the groups within the population that we are looking at.
Dr Nicola Crossley: Definitely. I will possibly be a little biased, because my experience is very much around the autistic population, but I think we get that wrong quite a lot, because there are some preconceived ideas about the things that not just autistic children, actually, but those with the label SEN cannot do, rather than what they can do. The medicalised model that we have grown up with is quite debilitating in terms of understanding the possibilities and the opportunities for young children. Post Covid, we are noticing a particular concern about those with social, emotional and mental health difficulties. That might rear its head as something that is more complicated. Peter might have other evidence from the north-east. Where we are looking at children who may not be cognitively able, better support such as pastoral well-being support and supported living is put in place, but we are sometimes getting it wrong for children who are cognitively able but have additional needs.
The Chair: Okay. That is helpful. Do Peter or Anne want to come in on that question before I go to Lord Shipley?
Dr Anne Murdoch: Adding to what Nicola just said, there are also very good examples of where the ability of young people who are very bright but have physical disabilities to do well is totally underestimated, whether in the higher education system or in employment. That goes back to some of the things we have all mentioned about attitudinal or perceptional issues. That is sometimes among educators but very often among employers.
I would add that there are employers who want to offer young people placements but who have the added burden of a whole range of other qualifications that they have to cater for, such as T-levels, apprenticeships and higher education placements.
The Chair: It is a busy field at the moment.
Dr Anne Murdoch: Yes, it is a busy landscape.
The Chair: Peter, do you wish to add to that? It is not compulsory. You do not have to.
Peter Monaghan: As soon as people hear the word “disability”, there is a stigma attached to it. I have been a SENCO for a number of years, and I think we get it wrong from the point of view of the education, health and care plans. I have read hundreds over the years and I rarely see careers advice or guidance early on in those plans.
Q62 Lord Shipley: I want to ask a supplementary question about something Nicola said. She talked about the variability of the offer and went on to say that there are different understandings of the meaning of the words “reasonable adjustments”. Could you say a bit more about how you perceive the reasonable adjustment, what it actually is and whose job it is to ensure it is more widely and properly understood?
Dr Nicola Crossley: As an employer, it is our responsibility to make sure that we have adjustments, scaffolds and measures in place that give our employees flexibility so they can do the best they can. From an SEN perspective and thinking about how our children access work experience and supported internships, employers are sometimes fearful about what it means: “What do I have to put in place? Will it mean that somebody will not be able to do the job properly?”
We need to make it very clear that some very simple things can be done around executive functioning and time management, for example, particularly for people who are neurodivergent, by thinking about how they can see papers in advance or be given a heads up about diary entries—that sort of thing. It does not have to be anything wildly different from what the rest of the workforce experiences, but that hesitation can create an inability to put anything in place.
It is the employer’s responsibility to be proactive in asking whether anybody needs any reasonable adjustments. I expect that to happen at the point of interview. It is also the individual’s responsibility to advocate for themselves, but, of course, our SEN children cannot always do that. The advocates would therefore be their careers advisers or their teachers. That is why transition is so important, because those key things about how a person works really well are often missed and not followed up.
Q63 Lord Laming: Those were most helpful introductions. Thank you. From my understanding of the papers we have received, there are well over a million young people with SEN but without an Education, Health and Care Plan. Another 350,000 in mainstream schools have a care plan. We are talking about large numbers of children. To make this as simple as possible, if I was a parent of a child with a disability who was approaching the transition from school to employment, who would I automatically go to for advice on the arrangements? Who is responsible for ensuring this transition happens?
Dr Nicola Crossley: That is another interesting question. I have recently been in that situation as a parent of a child who has additional needs. From a parent’s perspective, the immediate default is to go to the SENCO at the school and to expect that transitional arrangement to be shared by the SENCO with the future college or HE provider.
It is very difficult for employment, because we then have children who are considered to be adults. If they are looking for employment and applying for work, they do not necessarily have that support network around them. It is more relevant for those going into further or higher education or college placements, but I have experience of the information from the schools not always being utilised well in the receiving HE or FE situation. There can be gaps. That can make it very difficult, if you think that the whole purpose of the HCP approach and the 2014 educational reforms was to bring it together so that you do not have to repeat your story. What tends to happen is that students do not get the right support, they get poor support, or they have to repeat their story all over again. That also causes difficulties.
Peter Monaghan: Nicola made some great points there. In an ideal world it would be the local authority, the education provider or the careers service, or even by engaging employers early. However, at the moment it tends to be the schools’ or the colleges’ career service. There needs to be more collaboration among all the groups that are involved.
The Chair: When you say the careers service, do you mean the careers teachers in the schools or the careers service that is working with the schools?
Peter Monaghan: It can be careers service in schools or in the local authority. It is inconsistent right across the north-east.
Dr Anne Murdoch: I agree with what Peter and Nicola said. In answer to the question, if I was a parent I would go initially to the school. However, the issue I want to raise is that it is obviously much more difficult as a parent to go to an employer if your son or daughter has a particular issue. That can sometimes be where things break down, because the relationship between an employer and a parent of a disabled child is completely different from that with their other employees. Therefore, that is sometimes when difficulties can occur.
The Chair: That is a good point.
Q64 Lord Bach: This question is a continuation, in some ways. I want to dig into the careers advice system that we have at the moment in this country, and I will put it in the form of two questions. What barriers do young disabled people face in accessing careers advice in practice in education generally? Then, putting it the other way round, what barriers do schools and colleges face in delivering it?
Dr Anne Murdoch: One of the barriers that young people face in accessing careers advice is that it is variable around the country. There is no doubt about that. The amount of resource that a school or college is able to give that kind of advice also varies. We have to acknowledge that.
The Careers and Enterprise Company and other charities working in this field are supportive, and they can help in many situations, but we have talked about barriers such as limited support and attitudinal barriers, and even in careers advice there can be attitudinal barriers. Nicola mentioned careers teachers not believing that a child is capable of more than they think they are. Those are the kinds of barriers faced by young people with disabilities.
The second part of your question, if I have got this right, was about the barriers faced by schools and colleges.
Lord Bach: Exactly.
Dr Anne Murdoch: To be honest, in our experience, and our members tell us this, a lot of careers advice relates to resources. Particularly in smaller education providers, the amount of resource which that provider might be able to put to careers support is going to be stretched, as are the people who are undertaking those roles. So there is an issue with resources. I believe there are solutions to that, but we cannot get away from the fact that a lot of our members feel that if they had more resource, they could do a much better job.
Lord Bach: You mentioned solutions, and that is what we are looking for. Briefly, could you give us a couple?
Dr Anne Murdoch: On resources, at least, there is money in the system that could be redirected to this kind of activity. Clearly money and resources go into organisations like the Careers and Enterprise Company. It and others are doing a good job, but money that is collected via things like the apprenticeship levy could be redirected to this kind of thing. When we get a bit further into the discussion, I am happy to talk about that a bit more.
Dr Nicola Crossley: On barriers to access to careers information and guidance for children, their access to staff who are well trained and have the expertise is often an issue. Linked to the barriers for schools and colleges is the fact that often, particularly in smaller schools, you will find that the careers adviser has an additional responsibility rather than it being a stand-alone role, which can make it difficult to devote a lot of time to the role and do it well. I agree with Anne about variability up and down the country, and whether the local offer is sufficient has been fed back.
I note the statements from a previous session about limited scope and not having the right representatives at careers fairs. I would add that it can be difficult to get the right individuals from higher education who understand SEN, so quite limited opportunities can be presented to our young people at those fairs.
When it comes to solutions regarding the level of expertise and understanding about effective careers information and guidance, we should be mandating that all schools and colleges use both the Gatsby benchmarks and the SEND Gatsby benchmarks. There is still not universal use of the SEND framework even though it is really good.
If we really want to make this a key focus, could we develop a national professional qualification – an NPQ - in information, guidance and mentoring? That could be funded as per the new NPQs to encourage greater take-up. We could make sure that there was a module on SEN so that we could see this as a high priority and give individuals the professionalism and training that they need in order to do it well.
Peter Monaghan: Nicola and Anne have made very good points, and I shall add to those. There is limited representation in terms of disabled professionals as role models in careers advice. You will rarely find people with those lived experiences giving careers advice. There is also a lack of a campaign championing the voice of young disabled people going into employment, or for employers wanting to know more about supporting young disabled people into employment.
When it comes to the providers, there is again a gap in training. As I have mentioned, careers advice is really inconsistent and very generic. Nicola made a great point about having a professional qualification with a SEND module attached to it. There has been a lot of talk over the years about initial teacher training and then having more training in SEND. A lot of the focus is on teachers in schools and colleges, but there are many other support staff working with disabled young people who make things happen and we need to focus on them as well.
The Chair: I take the point about money, but the conversation that you then went into about the status of the role in schools is really important. What I am picking up from you, and you have all spoken about this, is the need for a professional qualification. Post initial teacher training, when someone is going into this area, they should do a supplementary qualification.
Another question is: is there an element of heads not giving this issue sufficient priority? Obviously, they have choices to make—there is not much money, and these are challenging times—but I sometimes get the feeling that a lot will depend on how the head views careers education when it comes to the priority of the institution.
Peter Monaghan: I absolutely agree with you. It is not seen as a big priority in some schools and colleges as perhaps some other things are. The fact that we are having this meeting now and we have talked about inconsistencies shows that it is not a priority. It needs to be driven by the head and other people within the education provider.
Dr Anne Murdoch: I know our members would say that it is a priority, but we have to accept that it is one priority among probably 25 that they have, and where careers fit into that checklist of priorities will vary.
The Chair: Indeed. What is not important?
Dr Nicola Crossley: I have nothing to add. I was going to say exactly the same as Anne.
Lord Willis of Knaresborough: I was a member of the Secondary Heads Association when I was a gifted education-er. I must confess that one of my concerns as a head was the move away from the central training of teachers, particularly at secondary level, towards giving schools themselves the opportunity and the power to basically train the next generation of teachers. Has that caused head teachers in particular to sideline some of these additional issues and not give them priority, because that is now not done centrally and there is not the same requirement that there was in previous times?
Dr Anne Murdoch: That probably depends on whether the individual teacher is trained within the school or college—as in on-the-job training—for their initial training, or whether they go to college or university and undertake a course.
Lord Willis of Knaresborough: I mean on-the-job training, because most of them are at secondary level now.
Dr Anne Murdoch: A lot are, and at primary level too. Supporting a teacher who is training on the job is a really big commitment.
Many schools and colleges do it very well, but it is a commitment. The competencies and the number of different aspects of teaching that teachers have to master within that initial teacher training are significant. Therefore, some of these wider issues might get lost, depending on the priorities of that particular institution. If an institution has a very large population of absentee students, for example, it might focus on a whole range of other things than another institution that does not have that same problem.
Lord Willis of Knaresborough: I am sure that is the case. I was desperate to get maths and physics teachers, so they could do anything, quite frankly, provided they could teach maths and physics.
Dr Anne Murdoch: I am afraid that is still a problem.
Q65 Lord Willis of Knaresborough: I thought they had abandoned me. To go back to the question I have been asked to get you to respond to, how linked up are the careers services in schools with other kinds of employment or careers support? I feel that there is a gap between what schools see as their responsibility and the external organisations that are paid to have that responsibility, and how they can come together.
Dr Anne Murdoch: In many cases there is a gap. Taking the example of colleges, which is where a lot of my experience is from, from talking to our college members I think that the difficulty is that looking after careers within a college is an operational activity that somebody will be doing on a day-to-day basis. Linking with other institutions might be seen more as a strategic issue, so the person who links with other organisations might be someone more senior within the organisation. Therefore, the operational work and the strategic links might not come together in a way that would be as helpful and achieve as much as one would like it to.
Lord Willis of Knaresborough: Could I follow up some of those things? One of the questions we have had repeated to us is about clarity of definition. The chair quite rightly said at the beginning that we found it difficult as a committee to say what it is, yet you go to organisations, particularly employers, and they regard disability as disability. It is a global representation. Is there anything we could do to clarify the definitions so that we get a clearer picture? Nicola talked earlier about her own child having additional needs. Is it possible to get that? Disability does not describe everybody, nor does special needs, so how do we get over that?
Dr Anne Murdoch: The use of the term “additional needs” would be a great step forward, as would getting rid of the term “disability” altogether. Looking at the numbers and the statistics, a very large proportion of the population of young people have some kind of disability, whether dyslexia or whatever. Using the word “disability” does not help us. Personally, I think that the term “additional needs” helps us to take a step forward, but when you look at the sheer numbers involved you can see that some of those additional needs almost reflect the characteristics of the whole population. It is a difficult one. I know that Nicola has some specific thoughts about this, because we have talked about it, but we can only move forward by getting away from some of those awful, negative terms.
Lord Willis of Knaresborough: As a committee, we have to propose something to government that has some teeth to it and gives us some support, and which employers can pick up in exactly the same way. I am grateful for your comments.
Dr Nicola Crossley: The distinction between schools using the term “SEND” and HE and the workplace using the term “disability” will be unhelpful. I agree that it calls for a change of terminology. It is difficult to speak on behalf of the whole population of special needs or disability, but “additional needs” can be a helpful starting point.
Also, using “disability” as a catch-all could be damaging for our young people, who are trying to find their identity. I know of multiple students who are cognitively able but have poor mental health that is impacting on their studies, but they do not see themselves as disabled. It is a really difficult thing to talk about, but we should not shy away from it just because it is difficult.
On how linked up schools and other services are, there are a couple of things that I agree with from previous sessions, particularly on Access to Work and Disability Confident. I disagreed with a previous speaker in a previous session who said that Access to Work was extremely bureaucratic. However, it requires engagement by the employer, so if the employer refuses, the applicant cannot proceed and therefore loses out. That is where the difficulties are with Access to Work, as well as a lack of understanding from employers about what it entails and what it will result in at the end. I have had some terrible examples shared with me where an employer thought they were solely responsible for providing the funding and resources that the Access to Work claim would produce, therefore misunderstanding the application process completely. Again, there is a lack of understanding and an ignorance about what is available.
I do not think that employers always see Disability Confident as a tick-box exercise, which was mentioned in a previous session. Levels 1 and 2 can quite easily be a tick-box exercise, but the large amount of work required and the evidence you have to gather when doing level 2 and the subsequent external accreditation of level 3 is quite a lot. I do not know what incentive it gives to employers in the long run once they have that badge. I know there is an assumption that you would then be part of a group who would work collaboratively with other Disability Confident employers, much in the same way as you might use the national living wage accreditation.
Disability Confident possibly also needs to have the profile of its benefits raised. Too few organisations are going down that route, because they cannot see the benefits of it, and too few employers are engaging with Access to Work for their individuals, perhaps because they think there is too much to do with it. Remarketing Access to Work so that the benefits are clear for both the employers and the employees would be a really useful way forward. I do not mind the amount of paperwork that I have to produce to get that support for my employees, but I imagine it could be quite time consuming and difficult for a large organisation with lots of people applying.
Lord Willis of Knaresborough: You have hit another nail here that I will keep you hammering away at. I spoke recently to one of my friends who works for Jobcentre Plus. Naturally, you always blame someone else for the problems rather than your own organisation. He was quite clear that he blamed schools in particular, and colleges to some extent, for not having clarity about the information they gave about a particular student in order for them to be able to pick that up and work with it in terms of job access. When I asked another colleague who teaches at a sixth form, he blamed Jobcentre Plus, saying, “They don’t give us clear guidance about what they want in the forms”. I wondered if you would share that with us—or are they both talking nonsense? They are not listening, so you do not have to worry.
Dr Nicola Crossley: My organisation very much deals with access to work and promotes it on our website. We are also a Disability Confident employer and working towards level 3 at the moment. However, it was difficult for me as an employer to look for that information and work out how I could apply. They are probably both right in terms of how we are marketing it and showing that it is an attractive thing for both educators and businesses to go for. It is not clear that it could be a positive thing to apply for in a school setting, and there are very few that I know of that go down that route.
Lord Willis of Knaresborough: Perhaps I can move on to Peter. He is going to give us the answer now to how we can get clarity on both sides of the argument. Peter, a summary from the north-east, please.
Peter Monaghan: First, I want to touch on the last question about reframing the language that is used. From speaking to employers, when trying to sort out work placements for our young people here, I know that one of the main barriers they say they have is knowing what language to use. You always have awkward initial conversations, because no one is quite sure what they can and cannot say.
To come back to the question about careers services, in my experience we engage with them far too late, in either their last year of secondary school or their last year at college when they are moving on to their next destination. If we could engage earlier, we could build up those relationships. The careers service would know these young people from year 8, 9, 10 and 11 and into the FE sector. There needs to be earlier collaborative working.
Lord Willis of Knaresborough: Is it not unrealistic to expect a Government to provide such a complex service, servicing literally hundreds of thousands of young people every year, not simply in their final year but in earlier years? Does that not say that schools themselves have to take on this responsibility? As I said recently to the committee, in a survey we did when I was doing some work on engineering, 82% of careers masters or mistresses in schools had an arts background rather than a science or engineering background. Unless we produce people to do that, it ain’t going to work.
Dr Nicola Crossley: That is why we need the NPQ.
Lord Willis of Knaresborough: Peter has hidden away somewhere.
The Chair: Do you want Peter to answer that first?
Lord Willis of Knaresborough: Well, poor Nicola seems to be in the firing line for everything, but Peter hides away somewhere.
The Chair: We have lost you from the screen, Peter. We are not blaming you. It seems to be our technology.
Dr Nicola Crossley: That is why the NPQ is a good thing to have. If we have a national professional qualification for careers information, advice and guidance—as well as mentoring, which is also important—so that we think about those conversations that young people have before they get to year 10 or 11 and move into sixth form, as Peter says, people will have more confidence to talk about what careers look like. It would also mean that we could tailor that to our SEN learners, which is also very difficult. Peter talked at the start of the session about too generalised training in careers information, advice and guidance, so having something pertinent and tailored to SEN, and making it clear that there is a wider range of opportunities, is where the NPQ would be a great win.
Dr Anne Murdoch: There is no doubt that we need to facilitate better communication and collaboration between schools, colleges, employers and careers services. A few months ago we did some work looking at how we could get more young people into, in that particular instance, engineering and construction. We came to the conclusion that we have to start at primary school level by helping children to develop interest in those kinds of jobs. The same applies here. If we want a young person, whether or not they have a disability, to get into employment eventually, we have to start much earlier on, giving them not just advice and guidance but access to information about what those roles involve. If we could start much earlier on, we would achieve more.
Peter Monaghan: Does that mean an increase in careers guidance officers? No, we already have these people in schools and colleges. We just need to train them better and communicate earlier with the external services.
Q66 Lord Shipley: I turn to work placements. There is great pressure on employers to do a lot, and work placements are part of that. Schools are always very keen to develop links with local employers to provide work placements and so on. What do you think the barriers are to arranging and accessing quality—I emphasise “quality”—work placements for young disabled people in education? What would you do about it?
Peter Monaghan: I saw some really good practice at a college that I previously worked at. It had online training for employers and it was all free. The college itself had set up modules for employers to access and talked about supporting disabled young people in the workplace, how to make reasonable adjustments, starting conversations and the types of language you could use with these young people. That gives employers a lot of confidence. We have previously talked about the barriers that we have. If there is some sort of free training or free access for employers, we will get a lot more buy-in for offering these work placements.
Q67 Lord Shipley: I would like to pursue a supplementary question. You have talked about examples of good practice. Do you think more could be done to spread good practice among employers? In other words, you get employers to do more themselves rather than relying as much on the education system or government agencies.
Peter Monaghan: Absolutely. I am part of a lot of employment forums for a variety of local authorities that we work with. We have encouraged the employers to be part of these forums and then let that increase and increase. They share their good practice and success stories regarding the work placements they have offered to these young people, and how they have gone on to thrive. It is a marketing campaign about how useful people with additional needs can be in the workplace.
Lord Shipley: Who does that marketing campaign? Where does the responsibility for that lie?
Peter Monaghan: For me, it should be the employers driving it forward. When they are doing their own marketing and promotional material, it is an ideal opportunity for them to show how inclusive they are.
Lord Shipley: Might that be done through employers’ organisations such as chambers of commerce? Do you know of any thought that has been given to trying to create structures like that?
Peter Monaghan: I am not aware of any structures like that which have been created.
Lord Shipley: Okay. Nicola, did you have anything to add?
Dr Nicola Crossley: I agree with Peter. Access to quality work experience is variable across the country. For the most part, it is dependent on the proactive approach of individual schools to ensure that there is a consistent link or partnership with businesses, but there is an opportunity, as you suggested, for chambers of commerce and local business hubs to link with education. It would be useful for both sides to take responsibility to see the mutual reciprocal benefits of having that link in the long term. These long-term partnerships could be developed, where businesses and schools plan together with consistently named representatives from both organisations and give reciprocal visits so that they understand each other’s contexts and what each is trying to get out of it. Again, this needs time, and time costs money. This is where we need to find the time to put those approaches in place.
Schools have a responsibility to quality-assure where their young people are going in the first instance. I can see that careers advice or the careers liaison link in the school has to manage a lot of work experience placements, but if we say that a placement is not appropriate or suitably challenging, we should have checked that out first to ensure that our children are put into the right experiences.
Little and often helps our SEN children: having wider experience of different contexts so that they are ready for the world of work. We should push on supported internships, maybe by offering continued marketing of case studies where they have been particularly successful. Nationally, we should strive for Project SEARCH as the gold standard for supported internships because that is where the exemplary practice lies.
Lord Shipley: You have just said that little and often is the best way. Could you define what do you mean by “little”?
Dr Nicola Crossley: We could start with work experience where children get experience of the workplace in the school environment for a couple of days over a certain period. I know that a lot of special schools do that anyway. They could then extend it to local businesses. It is not just a case of doing two weeks at the end of year 10; our SEN children need to have access to it more regularly so that they understand and get used to the working environment, and so that they can be as successful as possible.
Lord Shipley: Anne, I am also interested in the incentives to employers. As well as adding anything from the previous question, are there things that would be a positive gain to an employer, and an incentive, as opposed to a bit of additional reputation?
Dr Anne Murdoch: I must add that I agree with what Nicola and Peter have said. As for incentives for employers, what works best for employers is a boost to their reputation as an individual business or some kind of financial gain. Many employers are willing, particularly if they have experience of working with disabled young people personally. Many of them have more altruistic reasons for getting engaged.
This is not an incentive for an employer necessarily, but it is an opportunity that we do not seem to be using at the moment. Every region in the country has local skills improvement plans. Employer representatives are working together within that plan—the chambers, the Federation of Small Businesses, those kinds of employer groups. There is an opportunity to use those organisations to help with the development of really good, high-quality work experience placements, the training and mentoring of employers, and the development of a much more professional approach to work placements than we currently see. Individual work placements are often left to somebody in a school or college who spends their time contacting employers and arranging for young people to get that experience with them. If it can be done more professionally among employers or employers’ groups, we could gain something from that.
Q68 Lord Laming: You have been most helpful. As you know, we are charged with producing a report, primarily for the Government, that we hope will lead to a change in some of the policies we have been touching on. Could each of you say what your first two or three priorities would be? What change in the system would you like to see that would be the most effective in supporting these young people and their parents in the transition from education to employment?
Dr Anne Murdoch: I would like to see a more personalised careers guidance service for young people. That means that we would not see young people treated as one group; we would help them more in terms of their own particular requirements when going into work. I would like to see funding going into the training of mentors in the workplace to support young people, particularly if they have a disability. There is a pilot for apprenticeships along those lines, and maybe there could be training for champions for young disabled people.
I would like to see the apprenticeship levy used to provide some resource to help the development of careers, advice and guidance for young people going straight into employment, whether that is straight from school or from college. A lot of employers do not use their levy for training in the way that was originally intended, and that money therefore goes back to the Government. There is an opportunity there, which we should grasp, to use that funding to help the young people that we are talking about here.
Peter Monaghan: To follow on from what Nicola was saying earlier about the mandatory SEND qualification for all careers advisers, we have already said that the advice is very generic and needs to be more specialist and specific to help our young people. There should be earlier access to careers advice rather than waiting until the final year of school or college before these young people get access to that. We should start it at primary school.
We are missing out on an opportunity in the Education, Health and Care plans. There needs to be a focus in those plans when we are talking about careers and employment destinations.
Dr Nicola Crossley: Peter has talked about training, and my NPQ thing that I keep harping on about is still there.
We should revisit the decision to reduce the available BTECs and pause that reduction, pending the findings of this inquiry, so that our SEN learners are not penalised by a reduced offer.
One issue that we have not really talked about today but which I think is important is simplifying the disabled students’ allowance process so that universities can confirm the need, rather than relying on GP evidence. Universities are better placed to evaluate the impact on learning, progression and completion. There are also mixed messages when it comes to applying for that funding, stating that you do not need a formal diagnosis but then you require documentary evidence to process it. There is a gap there that needs to be addressed.
The Chair: It has struck me while listening to your answers that a lot depends on personal relationships, more so than in any other area of school life that I can think of. Is that true? It is quite difficult to legislate for that, as you know, even though we can incentivise and so on. Do you think that is a fair comment?
Dr Nicola Crossley: It is completely fair. That is why it is important to develop long-term partnerships where you can see reciprocal benefits for both education and businesses.
Dr Anne Murdoch: I quite agree. It is down to good personal relationships. If those relationships reflect good and strong practice, that is a basis for developing policy.
Peter Monaghan: I absolutely agree. We work with a variety of local authorities and employers right across the north, and it just depends on those relationships and how proactive people are in developing and building on them.
The Chair: That is excellent. Thank you all for your evidence. It has been an informative and fast-moving conversation, which I have enjoyed. All of you mentioned at some point that you have examples of good practice. If it is possible to let us have those, we can submit them as evidence, and that would be really helpful. If you put in writing anything you feel you have not had the chance to say, it will play an important part in our deliberations. We are grateful and thank you for joining us today, and we wish you every success with your important work.
