Well, as a parent, and as a teacher, and as a human being, you have one chance, and if your local school's pants—that's a technical 'pants'—you don't want to go to that local school. If your special school's cool, you want to go to your special school. If they've got all the resources and they've got a cracking headteacher, and your class teacher's great, and a couple of support staff are great, you want to go there. My son has been to a special nursery, a mainstream nursery, a primary school mainstream, a mainstream secondary, special secondary, special college, mainstream college. And he's had, in all of them, terrible experiences. In all of them the people have been really, really good, even the ones who've been giving him terrible experiences. And he's had some really cracking experiences, too. There's been no consistency there. So, the experience of special and mainstream, in the end it comes back down to a postcode lottery, and that's impossible for parents to navigate. So my own personal view is that, given that there's a postcode lottery, and given that we are trying to have a more inclusive society, I would be for the Norwegian and the Italian models of closing the special schools and having children in mainstream schools. But mainstream schools as they currently are are failing disabled children, so they're not the right place for disabled children. So, I'm immediately contradicting myself. And this is a part of the tension, all round the world, and it's disingenuous of the United Nations if they are suggesting it's not like this all round the world. They know it is and they know that all round the world people are being excluded from schools, even in countries where they've shut all the special schools.
So, the issue, to me, is about how you support the individual. You talked about specialist services, and there was an answer earlier on and they gave an example of a specialist service being British Sign Language. It's not a specialist service; it's a language. It's like saying Welsh is a specialist service or English is a specialist service. It's a language. The vast majority of needs in schools are communication. They don't require a specialist to be working with that individual. So, one of the big barriers that we have in Welsh schools, in English schools and in schools all round the world, even in countries where they say they don't use categories, is categories. Let's take the category of autism. Now, if I say 'autism', you could have a load of experts who could come in here and could tell you about autism. I could also bring you in experts who would tell you that, on the category of autism, there's no robust evidence to say where it starts and where it stops, and, therefore, it is not a useful category for use in schools and so forth.
Plenty of people recognise that our capacity to diagnose and allocate people to the right specialist provision is inadequate. I've got a little chart here because I wanted to remind myself, because when I was talking to researchers on the phone I got my stats wrong. In England, if you go to the local authority that diagnoses most autistic spectrum disorder, 25 per cent of children who have got a statement of special education—or an education, health and care plan—will be diagnosed with autism. In the local authority that does it least, 3.4 per cent of the children are diagnosed with it. And if you take any category, even a visual impairment and a hearing impairment, and if you take the top 10 local authorities that diagnose and the bottom 10 local authorities that diagnose, it's four times. Now, are you telling me that deafness is something that is four times more in one part of the country than in the other? It might be if your dad's in a rock band, or your mother's in a rock band, but it's not—. There are some environmental things that could cause these things. Actually, the problem is the person who's doing the diagnosis, because what they, and, you know, Beckman, who is an eminent psychologist in this field, will tell you that if you have a diagnosis, it is almost as good as tossing a coin. If you have two problems—'problems'—if you have two things to be diagnosed, it is as good as tossing a coin. And parents never agree with the diagnoses that the—when there are two diagnoses—the specialists do, and the children do. Everyone has a different opinion about it. So, then, how do you allocate the person to the right place?