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The teachers' plot to make our children into failures
There is an incentive for schools to register children as having special educational needs. It provides an advance excuse for bad results.
If the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, the price of vigilance is eternal tedium. There can be very little more tedious than fossicking about in local government papers and sitting through dreary town hall meetings. And few people can be much interested in the day-to-day minutiae of education policy and the running of schools. But it is the minutiae that matter.
Take special educational needs, for instance. How the heart sinks; the subject falls unmistakably into the category of important but boring, and best left to experts. Yet I wonder whether it is best left to experts, or whether it is being left to real experts. For once, I think that, on closer inspection, there is something sensational about this unappealing subject. What is going on in this field seems, from a commonsense view, both astonishing and shocking.
What proportion of primary school children would you expect to have special educational needs, as reasonably understood? I mean children who, for some special reason, cannot cope with ordinary classes in the ordinary way, and find it significantly harder to learn than their peers - children who have specifically educational needs, which ought to be met in some special individual way, unlike those of normal children. Common sense suggests that, across the population, such children would be fairly rare.
For instance, across the population, you would expect to find only 0.33 per cent of children between five and 14 with a mental handicap or intellectual disability, according to figures from the Office of Populations, Censuses and Surveys. Only two to four per cent of people suffer from dyslexia, as strictly defined, according to the educational psychologist Martin Turner, of the Dyslexia Institute. Less than 0.01 per cent of people suffer from autism. Attention deficit disorder is notoriously difficult to define, but probably does not affect more than five per cent of children, if as many. Then there are serious psychological problems, visual handicaps and disabling medical problems. All these disabilities add up, but to what? To what proportion?
It is astonishing to discover that there are many primary schools across the country where 40 per cent of the children are registered by their teachers as having special educational needs. In the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, for instance, there are only six schools that have fewer than 20 per cent of children registered with SEN. Twenty-four schools have more than 20 per cent of children with SEN, 18 schools have 30 per cent or more, seven have well over 40 per cent, and one has 55 per cent. Tower Hamlets is not alone is having these astonishing proportions of SEN children. Britain lists far more than other European countries, as the DfEE admits. Clearly, in this country, all too many teachers think that special educational needs are not really special at all, but more or less normal.
One might argue, and people do, that Tower Hamlets has particular problems - poverty, overcrowding and many children who do not speak English as a first language. However the Government's SEN code of practice specifically says that a child must not be regarded as having a learning difficulty solely because the language of his home is different from the language in which he will be taught.
And there is no reason to suppose that Tower Hamlets children have more disabilities than other children, or that SEN are genuinely so common. Ruth Miskin is the head teacher of the Kobi Nazrul school in Tower Hamlets, and she, apparently, doesn't believe it either. Most untypically, she has registered only five pupils (three per cent of her school) as having SEN. Yet her children are not selected in any way. They come from exactly the same catchment area as the Tower Hamlets schools that have registered 30-40 per cent of their children. There is no special selection.
Nearly 80 per cent of the children at Kobi Nazrul are Bangladeshi; English is their second language, and some arrive at school hardly speaking any. In 1997, 63 per cent of the pupils qualified for free school meals, a clear indication of poverty. The average class size is 27.5. Seventy per cent of the children in the local ward live in overcrowded households, according to the latest census.
Yet these children have consistently done extremely well; they scored above the national average in reading, writing and maths, in the recent government tests (SATs). They scored easily the highest in Tower Hamlets in reading tests and got an excellent inspection report from Ofsted. All the seven-year-olds at Kobi Nazrul, without exception, can read.
Something stands out a mile here: a negligible rate of SEN registration seems to go with a very high rate of reading success. That is because Ruth Miskin and her staff are passionately interested in literacy - she believes that every healthy child can learn to read - and particularly in a rigorous system of phonics, about which she has lectured and written a great deal. Properly taught, a comprehensive phonics system enables children to learn very fast, with great confidence. This means they avoid the common sense of failure and frustration of poor readers, and the disruptive behaviour that goes with it, which also leads to SEN registration.
Effectively, phonics keeps children off the SEN register. On closer inspection, it emerges that an enormous proportion of SEN children, perhaps as large as three-quarters, are labelled that way simply because they cannot read, or cannot learn to read. That is not because something is wrong with them; there's something wrong with the way they're taught. "Most of what schools see as SEN has to do with illiteracy, and much of it is created by the schools themselves," says Martin Turner. "Most literacy teaching is ineffective and children are being crippled as a result."
The perversity of this is hard to believe, but perverse it is. Above all, there is a perverse incentive to register lots of children as having special educational needs; it provides an excuse in advance for any failure. It must be tempting to attach the failure to the child, rather than to the teacher or the school or the teaching method. The absurdity is that, being registered as having special needs, does not mean that the child will get any special attention, other than meetings with parents and SEN co-ordinators.
Very often it is not much more than a label of failure and a list of unambitious targets; real personal help is rarely forthcoming. Government advisers are apparently aware of this, and anxious to keep the Literacy Project on course. Perhaps a good start would be to assume that where a child cannot learn to read, it is probably the teacher who has a special educational need - a problem in teaching reading, a difficulty with understanding the value of phonics and a slowness to understand that almost every child can learn to read, even some of the truly disabled.
The Daily Telegraph | Thursday, December 17, 1998
Comments:
I found absolutely amazing your comment "it is probably a teacher who has special needs" !!
I realy agree with you ! They simple don't understand, and worst "don't want to understand".
This system must be change ! That is why I made a petition to the Prime Minister on number 10 website. I have been fight for two long and awful years to get my son "statement of SEN" so then, he will be able to get ?!? some kind of extra support ?!? or to go to a special school. I will have my second Tribunal hearing next February... The first one I won as LEA didn't want to assess my son ! So, please if you could join us to try change this unfair system sign in our petition and pass to your contacts.
http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/SENCHILDREN/
Thank you !
Lia
Posted by: Auxilia Malta | 23 Oct 2008 21:58:51
There are two types of special educational needs. One definition is simply any child who has work extra to that of the rest of the class ("Wave 2"), so any child who has extra maths or extra reading falls into this category. Of course a child who has catch up phonics would be "Wave 2". Tower Hamlets schools have lots more adults than most schools, so we are able to rpvide more of these groups to help children reach their potential.
In Ruth Miskin's phoniocs scheme (which we use), the 'ten minute tutoring' for children who need it would fall into this category.
"Wave 3" SEN is for children who need individual help; these children's needs often warrant a statement. This is the type of SEN you are talking about as 'special needs', and what most people's idea of spceial needs is; it's far rarer, with between 2 and 10 children in any one school. No school would go through the intense paperwork of it without there being a real concern, and the borough wouldn't allow it to get through its stringent controls either.
SEN is a broad term. It is essential that all children get the support they need.
In our school, we see SEN as a a means of identifying and getting appropriate support for our children. We have very high expectations for all our kids and our children all achieve extremely highly, whether or not they are on my register. At least in part, this is because their needs were identified.
S. Hill
Special Needs Co-ordinator (Primary school in Tower Hamlets)
Posted by: Sam Hill | 19 Dec 2008 12:12:57
