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Children with learning difficulties are in danger of being forced out of special schools and into the mainstream system, Conservative leader Ian Duncan Smith has claimed.

Speaking at the Conservative party’s seminar on special educational needs he said that children with special needs were being encouraged to integrate into mainstream schools that were "ill equipped to understand or to respond to their needs".

He told delegates: "I do not want us all to turn around in 10 years' time and find we have made the same mistakes in special needs education as were made in care in the community because we missed the warning signs in the dash for inclusion."

Duncan Smith called for professionals to be "more imaginative and open-minded" about education provision for children with special needs. He is a director of Whitefields special school in Walthamstow, London.