We were deep in the bowels of Parliament and in the distance there was a small woman slowly making her way closer to us. She slightly hunched as if the weight of Parliament rested on her shoulders but her face was light and at ease. Her hair was bravely short and still moved in the howling gales that travelled the tunnels.
She introduced herself as Mary Warnock, a Lady of the House of Lords, a philosopher, a wife of the late Vice Chancellor of Oxford University, and author of the 1978 Warnock report.
If you are like me and born in the 1970s, you may remember that the 1980s began the period of mainstreaming, where a deaf child is placed in a classroom with non-deaf children without support (1981 Education Act: integration policy). When we learn, later in life, that the then Baroness Warnock wrote a report that introduced mainstream education; you can’t help feeling resentment.
“Margaret Thatcher didn’t like me at all,” she remarked with disguised pride. She was indeed a philosopher and knew her mind. But then she described her heroes, “Winifred Tumin was an inspiration and it made believe what deaf children could achieve. She was an excellent role model.” The fact that she didn’t need to address all of these people with ‘Lady’ in front of the names was a reminder of where I was and who I was talking too. But she was approachable and inquisitive, she sped through her questions until we reached a comfortable dialogue.
“I went to a school in Wales that taught English and Welsh at the same time, the children were dreadfully confused. I never really took to bilingual education and never supported it.” I felt a twinge that made me want to respond but she wasn’t talking about education of deaf children, but a bilingual school for Welsh non-deaf children. So I moved the discussion to the importance of BSL and English in all deaf children’s lives, a point she agreed with.
The Warnock report was primarily about needs and matching an education to the needs of the child. “Even a child with a severe disability deserves an education. I met a child who learnt the desire for choice, for a radio to be further away or close by, or preference of one menu over another. Learning that one can have a choice is an education; it might not be the National Curriculum but it is what that child needs.”
But it went wrong. The implementation of the Warnock report mistakenly made the assessor of needs, the author of the child’s statement, also the budget holder. The assessment no longer became about real needs, but about budgets. She plainly wrote her criticism in an open letter. Children were being pushed into a budget appropriate educational system that was unsuitable for the child. The system should have made it easier for parents to ensure their child receives the best education, in fact became a source of frustration. Parents regularly sat in court rooms: sometimes to an extent that it was normal for a parent to attend a tribunal 30 times during the course of the child’s education.
That day, Michael Gove released a report that sought to challenge this discrepency. After 30 years of struggles to give the child the education they require, one can imagine how parents will be feeling. Their reaction was to create an ‘informed choice‘ policy.
If you talk to the leading organisations representing parents and teachers of the deaf in the UK, you will be familiar with ‘informed choice’. There is a continuous ongoing dialogue between them to protect the interest of the parents and challenge the autocracy of the budget holder. ‘Informed choice’ has served its purpose and now parents have, or will have, a greater say in the educational decisions of their child. But this policy creates another hurdle.
Informed choice is designed to meet the needs of the parents, or that of the family, and the needs of the child is tailored towards that need. But one forgets that a child does indeed turn into older children, into teenagers and, eventually, into young adults. In the period of transition from childhood to adulthood, the young person begins to make their own decisions. But without a choice made available to them initially, there isn’t a decision to make.
The report that Lady Warnock first intended has now come to its fruition. A child will be assessed to their needs and an education will be fit for purpose. The 30 tribunal hearings per child per 18 years must become a thing of the past; parents should be spending their time and money being parents. But Mary is also a protector of children, “I am a parent and I will make decisions as a parent, but my children may have a very different view to me. I don’t think parents should always have the ultimate decision.” I realise her legacy is yet over. I remember her mantra, “every child deserves an education, even to make the most basic choices.” It includes the choice to have deaf friends, to speak and/or sign, to have Deaf role models, have a relationship with the Deaf community and/or with their non-deaf family.
Every child deserves the right to experience everything the world has to offer, so when the time is right, they can lead their own future. Because that is an ‘informed choice’.
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