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Children: Developmental Care and Autism

My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Maginnis, for raising this issue and for introducing it so effectively. The noble Lord is right to emphasise the importance of this disorder, and he and my noble friend Lord Addington, as well as the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, are all absolutely right to stress the importance of picking it up early and supporting people from the earliest stages. As my noble friend Lord Addington points out, it is important to pick it up later and monitor the progress of a child.

I want to place special emphasis on the role that the new commissioning bodies will have in ensuring that children with special needs, including autism, receive the care that they need. I hope that I can reassure the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, in this regard. We know that there is a need to improve the early identification and assessment of special educational needs and thus remove the duplication and frustration which many families have encountered in securing an assessment. That is absolutely vital. We have already made progress in delivering the necessary improvements. For example, we have introduced an early years progress check for children at the age of two in order to pick up problems early and tackle them. Several noble Lords have mentioned this assessment. It is extremely important in terms of the early identification of autism. We recognise the importance of a key universal service for improving the health and well-being of all children through health and development reviews, immunisation programmes and so on. Between the age of two and two and a half, a child will have a full health and development review at which parents will have the opportunity to raise any concerns, ask questions, and prepare for the next stage of their child’s development. This can trigger the need for a formal SEN assessment which must include doctors, educational psychologists and paediatricians if that seems to be necessary.