Needs attention

Anastasia De Waal, 8 May 2009

Two depressing findings came out about schools this week. The first is that the number of children on free school meals has risen since last year. The second is that one in five children are now on the special educational needs (SEN) register.

One reason for the former is fairly clear: the impact of the recession on families’ employment. Even though free school meal entitlement is an imperfect poverty measure (potentially counting, for example, self-employed parents  regardless of their income), there’s a strong relationship between entitlement and coming from a workless household. There are also other (though related) contributors to the increase in children on free school meals such as a rise in numbers of ethnic minority pupils since last year; also likely connected to greater unemployment and fewer job opportunities.

The reason for the latter concern, the rise in SEN pupils, is less clear, though likely to be at least partly connected to deteriorating conditions – such as home-life deprivation through unemployment.

Aside from issues relating to altered definitions of what usefully constitutes special educational needs, the registered increase is at least partially an indictment of current weaknesses in the education system.
In some ways, the increase in the number of children considered to have special educational needs is likely to be connected to difficult learning and teaching conditions. One of the aforementioned is home-life difficulties, which have a well-documented impact on children’s achievement. There are also many ‘in-school’ problems, such as distorting targets, over-sized infant classes and needless bureaucratic pressures leading to high teacher turnover to mention but a few. Unsurprisingly, children’s learning and achievement can suffer when teachers are thwarted from responding to pupil’s specific needs. Connected to this type of ‘frustrated’ learning are behaviour issues, with difficult behaviour a significant contributor to SEN numbers. Addressing learning hurdles therefore impacts on behaviour hurdles.

In both cases – extraneous and school-level challenges to learning – systemic turnaround isn’t the only thing that would help. A drop in prescription, for example, giving teachers more discretion, would impact on learning, as well as scrapping existing Sats and shrinking classes.

Concerns are sometimes raised about the ‘pathologisation’ of less severe learning problems when definitions of SEN become overly broad. However the bigger issue is that shifting school weaknesses onto children can mean that they are mis-identified as the problem, when in fact the problem lies in school arrangements.