Time for a rethink on special educational needs

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Time for a rethink on special educational needs

The Guardian, Thursday 16 September 2010

Your article on special needs children (Half of special needs children

misdiagnosed, 14 September) quotes a new review by Ofsted. " Pupils with special

needs or a disability are disproportionately from disadvantaged backgrounds,

much more likely to be absent or excluded from school and achieve less than

other children " , and they " simply need better teaching or pastoral care

instead " . So that's all right then – they don't have to be identified as having

some kind of special need. It's just tough for those kids that they are from a

deprived background; they're a bunch of skivers, and some are already known to

the police. Half of all prisoners apparently have the reading skills of a

primary school child and poor writing skills. Their teachers must have been

rubbish.

What happened to " Every child matters " ? In a good school, the needs of a child

will be signalled. But in a classroom with 30 children it is difficult to spend

enough time with a child with, say, weak literacy, unless support is available;

classroom support is on the list of impending cuts. " Better teaching " ? Ofsted

keeps shifting the goalposts, which can put additional pressure on staff. The

Sats regime has done tremendous damage: some children fall by the wayside at an

early stage, and arrive at secondary school feeling a failure. In one of my year

7 English classes, seven out of 29 pupils have come in below level 4. For some

of these, mostly Asian, English is a second language. They struggle to keep up.

Our pupils who are supported by the SEN department are usually well-motivated

and some work extremely hard. Extra help for children with poor literacy should

be a priority, not a luxury, whatever their background. The literacy skills of

prisoners speak volumes. An overhaul of the SEN system will need to recognise

the benefits of a more literate population to the whole of society.

Ellis

Huddersfield, West Yorkshire

• & #8200;To be fair, the Ofsted review of SEN and disability is rather more

balanced than your headline suggests. As the review notes, there are issues

about over- or under-identification of SEN and the ensuing confusion for all

concerned. However, the review also rightly highlights issues relating to school

practice. A critical element can be the extent to which teachers may be helped

to make sense of how and why some children do not develop in anticipated and

" normal " ways. One of the functions of support services (such as educational

psychology) can be to support teachers and schools in achieving ways of working

that provide good learning opportunities for children as well as professional

fulfilment for teachers.

Dr Simon Gibbs

Senior lecturer in educational psychology, Newcastle University

• & #8200;You reported Ofsted's research that the number of children identified

by schools as having " milder problems " has risen from 14% to 18% of all pupils.

There is a strong incentive for schools to do this, which the Ofsted report does

not take into account. All schools are judged, by Ofsted and league tables, on

the average " value-added " performance of their pupils at KS2, GCSE or A-level.

So, based on students' attainment when they enter a school, an expected

attainment target is generated for when they leave. All schools are judged by

the amount pupils exceed or fall short of these targets. If a pupil is

identified as having " milder problems " as your article puts it (called " school

action " ), then their expected attainment is lowered – at secondary school by

half a GCSE grade per subject; so if a student is taking eight GCSEs, they can

fall a grade short of the targets in four subjects and still not count against

the school's value-added score.

There is no external checking required for schools to place students on the

school action list. The effect of having a large number of students on school

action is significant, and can make the difference between a school being, for

example, " satisfactory " , or having a " notice to improve " on Ofsted criteria. The

increase in SEN numbers is yet another example of the distortion to behaviour

brought on by league tables and the ever more micro models of student progress

that schools are asked to work with.

Alf Coles

Senior lecturer in education, University of Bristol

• In addition to those who are wrongly diagnosed, there is also a large number

of children who do not receive a diagnosis and who struggle to achieve in school

as a direct result of undiagnosed problems with hearing, vision, motor skills,

abnormal brainwave variants and in some cases even mild cerebral palsy.

This growing problem of " missed diagnosis " results from a combination of the

phasing out of developmental testing of all children by a school doctor at the

time of school entry and the handing over of responsibility for the diagnosis

and management of special needs from the domain of medicine to education in the

1980s. This has meant that problems of a medical nature are often overlooked and

misdiagnosed as a specific learning difficulty.

Research carried out in UK schools with more than a thousand children five years

ago indicated that 48% of five- to six-year-olds and 35% of eight- to

nine-year-olds in the sample did not have all the physical skills in place

needed to support reading, writing, spelling and maths. A more recent survey

carried out in the north of England suggests that the number may be even higher

in areas of social deprivation.

It is not only teaching and pastoral care that is needed but a national

programme of screening children's developmental status at the time of school

entry and monitoring it throughout the educational process, and improved

communication and co-operation between the professional domains of education,

medicine and educational psychology, to provide effective treatment or remedial

intervention.

Sally Goddard Blythe

Director, The Institute for Neuro-Physiological Psychology