John Bald is a former Ofsted inspector. He is Vice-President of the Conservative Education Society.

In the early 1960s, the light bulbs in my grammar school were replaced by rows of white fluorescent tubes, to the relief to our history teacher, who blamed decades under their dim light for his failing eyesight. We all thought they were a great improvement, but now things are not so simple. A small but significant number of adults working under fluorescent light, as well as pupils, find themselves complaining of severe headaches and serious discomfort while reading. Professor Arnold Wilkins, of the University of Essex, identifies flicker caused by alternating current for the discomfort. Light bulbs flicker for the same reason, but the effect is less severe.

My work in this area confirms his finding, and I recently noted on social media five cases of adults whose working lives had been seriously impacted by lighting conditions. The people involved were a local authority science inspector, a lecturer at Cambridge University, a school secretary who had been working with an unprotected fluorescent tube shining directly onto her desk, a teaching assistant who had left school without qualifications because she could not tolerate the fluorescent lighting in examination rooms, and a primary teacher who was no longer able to read stories to her class.

The issue is complicated by the difficulty of proving exactly what it is. At a seminar last week, Wilkins identified the magnetic control mechanisms of fluorescent lighting as one source and said that flicker could be reduced by replacing them with electronic ones. The British Institute of Optometry has produced an inexpensive screening kit, which can indicate the need for further investigation, but the medical specialists are sceptical, and the only consultant I’ve met who has agreed that this is a significant issue only did so in private.

A six-year-old whose parents brought him to me after his school reported great reluctance to look at a book, had a positive reaction to screening and was referred by a specialist optician to a teaching hospital, where he was diagnosed with hydrocephalus (water on the brain) which would otherwise have gone undetected. The pupil I’ve recently written about, who could not read “the” because he was trying to sound out every word one letter at a time, finds it very difficult to read from a screen, a problem we’ve solved by changing the background colour of a text. This, incidentally, provides a quick and costless way of initially identifying an issue if a screening kit is not available.

The big question, though, is why the six-year-old’s infant school did not investigate the issue itself or seek outside help, and the answer is simple. Once SEND is identified, the school has to meet the first £6,000 of the cost of additional provision, from funds which, in their view, they simply do not have. In the light of this perverse incentive, they do nothing, and children suffer – in another case, of severe behavioural disorder, not related to sensitivity to light, the situation has persisted right up until transfer to secondary school, bringing misery to the child’s family and at times putting them in physical danger.

This state of things began with the late Baroness Warnock’s report of 1979, the basis of the 1981 Education Act. Warnock, a philosopher by trade, did well to remove the term “sub-normal” – too close to “sub-human” – from our vocabulary, but otherwise left a utopian morass. Every child with significant learning difficulties was to have a statement of their needs, followed by provision – whatever that might be, and whatever it might cost. Many special schools closed, and the essential skill of reading, the key to independence, was first ignored, then deliberately run down. The one local authority that tried to provide statements for all, from memory, Cumbria, nearly went bankrupt and sacked its Chief Education Officer. A system of staged assessment followed, with statements only for the most severe cases.

Round 2, the work of Lib Dem Sarah Teather during the coalition, extended Warnock’s idea to include disability through the Education and Health Care Plan (EHCP), to run to the age of 25, and made it legally enforceable. How this happened is a matter for speculation, but whatever the explanation, it was an error on the part of Conservative ministers. Most LAs did not have the resources or the knowledge to write good EHCPs, so either wrote plans that were so vague as to be useless, or avoided writing any at all, preferring to lose appeals and pay compensation rather than the £50k pa – rising in one reported case to £800k pa – to make the provision. A further, ideological, Conservative error was to prevent LAs from extending their own SEND provision, leaving them at the mercy of a private sector of highly variable quality, with more than a few sharks.

The government’s return to the staged assessment that followed Warnock’s failure is the only practicable way forward. Many headteachers are saying that the money allocated is inadequate, but they do not know how much is needed either. The only glimmer of hope is the determination of academics like Wilkins and a growing number of Fellows of the Royal Society to extend our knowledge and understanding of the root causes of SEND, and to begin to develop solutions. To SEND activists, however, the very idea of solutions takes us down the wrong road. Their goal is not solutions, but acceptance.

Conservative Education Society panel discussion,  Solving SEND? House of Lords, 20th April, 7 pm. Members free, £10 non-members. Details here.

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