On Friday, Ed Balls announced the Government’s response to the ‘Salt Review’ into the supply of teachers for pupils with severe and complex learning difficulties. Balls argued, and rightly so, that the Government needs to attract and incentivise graduates to specialise in teaching children with some of the most challenging needs.

However, children with severe and complex learning difficulties only made up 2.3% of all children with Special Educational Needs (SEN) in 2009. There are 1.7 million children in England with SEN, 21% of all pupils, and the majority are taught in mainstream settings. Therefore, all teachers are working with SEN children but there is a shocking lack of focus on building the relevant skills and expertise, both at the initial teacher training stage and in ongoing training throughout teachers’ careers.

Despite this, buried within the Government’s 2004 SEN strategy (which probably remains the most comprehensive look the Government has taken at the area in recent years) is an eminently sensible approach to providing teachers with the appropriate expertise. According to this model allteachers would develop the core skills needed to deal with all children with SEN; some teachers, inall schools, would develop advanced skills; and there would be teachers with highly specialist skills, in some schools but available, where appropriate, to all.

Progress in implementing such a vision has been inadequate. Another recent Government report (the Lamb Inquiry) stated the case clearly, there is an urgent need:

“to build a better understanding of SEN and disability into every aspect of training; at every level of the system; in subjects and curriculum development; and for teachers with a range of different responsibilities.”

This should be the focus of any strategy concerning teacher training for SEN, putting its own model into practice, and thereby providing over a fifth of our children with the education they really deserve.

Ralph Hartley is a research fellow in Policy Exchange’s Education Unit

Most political news is about personality and politics rather than policy.  At the moment that’s particularly true – the big stories of recent weeks have been about Brown’s behaviour, Lord Ashcroft, what the polls say.  Next week promises more of the same – a Channel 4 programme on Cameron, and the court appearance of some of the people charged as part of the expenses scandal.

I’ve often wondered how much difference all this news makes.  Sit through a focus group, or speak to your least political friends and you will hear one thing time and time again: “they are all the same”.  So much of this bad political news is just reinforcing what people think anyway – it is “already in the share price” as they say in the City.

Danny Finkelstein made the point nicely in an article last week:

The cynicism about politics is so pervasive that it embraces almost all political activity. Use a statistic? It’s a lie. Cry on television about your dead child? It’s an election gimmick. Attack your opponents’ policy? You would say that, wouldn’t you.   And this cynicism extends to the media and our coverage.  So not only politics, but news about politics, is seen as a fiction inside an untruth wrapped in a piece of spin… Most of politics and most political coverage proceeds as if there was still a reasonable degree of trust. As if the messages were still getting through, still being listened to, still being weighed up.

For the government of the day the clear implication is that what really matters is not their spin but whether they can deliver better results on the ground (a point grasped by Tony Blair some time in his second term).  It is rather more difficult for the opposition to act on this insight.  However, at the start of his time as Conservative leader David Cameron did emphasise that he would always aim to “show, not tell” people that the party had changed.  And there was something of this in Cameron’s initial reaction to the expenses scandal – when he was prepared to take a stand unpopular among some of his MPs.

The big problem for Cameron is that the Government has managed to shift so much the real-world pain the public will feel until after the election by running up huge debts.  So right now the public services are still hiring away. On the ground, things don’t look so bad.  At least, not yet.

We know more or less what the Budget is going to say already.

The Government is thinking not about how to reduce the soaring deficit – but how to spend the receipts from the super-tax in a pre-election giveaway.  We will see mock “surprise” at how much the bonus tax has raised, and condemnation of those who “said it wouldn’t raise any money”.  We will see big figures for savings based around finally officially scrapping the disastrous NHS IT programme and merging a few Primary Care Trusts.  If Liam Byrne has his way (and he probably won’t) the government may even nod to the markets by stressing how “tough” it is planning to be on public sector pay post election (nominal rises less than 1%, meaning small real-terms cuts).  The one thing it won’t do is make any meaningful effort to control the vast deficit.  Instead the Government will try to keep the debate narrowly focused around the timing of cuts – not the content.

Ironically, this is where public cynicism might ride to the rescue of the Conservatives. The idea that politicians will spend now and cut after the election is highly plausible for most world-weary voters. In the 1974 election Willy Whitelaw accused Harold Wilson of going “round and round the country stirring up apathy”.  The Tories won’t need to go round “stirring up” cynicism about the budget.  But they will need to try and be in a position to exploit it.

Neil O’Brien is the Director of Policy Exchange

A report out today has calculated that the bankers’ bonus tax will raise around £2 billion more than initially thought.

While this begs a number of questions (who got the initial calculations THAT wrong? Why were the banks so focused on short-term gain that they didn’t delay their bonus payments? Why were the banks able to pay such high bonuses if they were really in such trouble? And so on…) the really big question is this: what will the government do with the money?

Will they put it into the general spending pot? Will they use it in a pre-election bribe budget? Or will they do the responsible thing and use it to start paying down our deficit?

This is something to watch for. It’s an indicator of whether the money markets and voters are able to believe Gordon Brown when he talks about making the right choices.

As our report More Fees Please? this week recommended, university fees need to rise if we are to protect the quality of the student experience in the future.  Anyone who reads a newspaper will know that things are not looking good. Mandelson’s machete has sliced through the higher education budget – and there are rumours of worse cuts to come. Higher fees should never be used to let the Government off the hook on supporting a sector that delivers serious benefits for our economy and society, but graduates should contribute towards the education from which they will profit – and right now those contributions are not even touching the sides.
 
University heads warn that key subjects will face the axe, and while the Government may talk a good game about the importance of science, these departments are expensive to run and seriously underfunded. Science departments that haven’t scored highly in the all-important research rankings will be particularly vulnerable. That said, arts and humanities dons shouldn’t imagine they are safe. These subjects are clearly low priority for the Government, and some institutions feel that it is easier to ditch arts subjects without damaging your claim to be a serious player. There is little doubt that modern languages will be wedged in the firing line right across the country.  Meanwhile, with vice chancellors urgently seeking redundancies, the ratio of staff to students will continue to fall.   And of course if domestic fees don’t budge, international students whose fees aren’t capped will increasingly be seen as a lifeline – fundamentally changing the landscape of higher education in the UK.
 
Yet fees must only rise if students themselves will clearly benefit. For too long universities have focused on research, without thinking hard enough about the experience of their students.   And for too long universities have refused to answer the questions that really matter to parents and students, expecting them to choose their course with no clear idea of whether it will lead to a job, what they might earn, how many hours teaching they will receive or how big their classes will be. The culture has to change. Graduates must invest more in their higher education – but so too universities must demonstrate that they are actively investing in students in return.

Anna Fazackerley is Head of Education at Policy Exchange.

I do find it depressing to continually read headlines basically hinting that Tories don’t care about the environment. It’s simply not true. It is getting boring to regularly write on here why, even if you don’t believe climate change scientists (and – let’s be fair – many of their recent antics have undermined their authority), many of the ways in which we can act against climate change are also beneficial in financial terms.

Given our current economic malaise, though, we do have an amazing opportunity at the moment. It’s not the answer to all our problems, and it won’t cut our emissions by anything like enough, but as they say in the ads, every little helps.

There are two key points here – firstly that the Tories are thinking in very serious terms about how to encourage green growth.  And secondly, that being energy efficient and thereby reducing your carbon footprint has the fantastic side-effect of reducing your bills.

None of this is rocket science. Being a bit greener does not mean living in a cave. New technologies are only expensive to install at the moment because they are not used widely enough to make them more efficient both in operational and in installation terms (ie the more people use them, the better they are and the easier it is to use them – a classic virtuous circle). Reducing your energy consumption will (generally) reduce your energy bills.

So I do wish people would return to the previously much-vaunted “Politics of And“. In this area in particular, it’s there, it’s sensible, and it works.

Look at this initiative from former Governor Jon Hunstman (R-OH – yes, a Republican governor of Ohio). It’s a fantastic, multi-stranded initiative: by encouraging state employees to compress their work into a four day week (so instead of working 9 til 5, they work 8 til 6 and have Fridays off), by carpooling, and by tripchaining (ie making one trip with several stops, rather than going backwards and forwards from home several times a day), the programme has cut a million miles of travel and saved over 50, 000 US gallons of petrol. 

But another key benefit is that state workers are reporting higher levels of job satisfaction, better family relationships, fewer sick days and greater availibility of state services (partly because the state offices are open at times when people can actually get to them).

This dual purpose is what the “Politics of And” is all about. Quality of life, environmentalism, reducings costs… It’s what we can and should do here.