Ofsted and Special Needs Identification and Support… the wrong argument

By Peter · September 14, 2010 · Comments Off
CPE / PEN News and Comment, E-briefing, Think Pieces and Provocations, Uncategorized · Tagged: special needs

Ofsted and Special Needs Identification and Support… the wrong argument

Ofsted chief inspector Christine Gilbert said: “With over one in five children of school age in England identified as having special educational needs, it is vitally important that both the way they are identified, and the support they receive, work in the best interests of the children involved.

“Higher expectations of all children, and better teaching and learning, would lead to fewer children being identified as having special educational needs.

“For those children with complex and severe special needs, schools often need the help of health and social care services.

“All these services should be focused on the quality of what they are doing, and how well young people are doing as a result. At the moment too much effort is going into simply checking that extra services are being provided.”

Children in special educational needs
• 1.7 million school-age children, which is one in five pupils in England, are identified as having special educational needs.
• Pupils with a statement of special educational needs has decreased from 3 per cent to 2.7 per cent since 2003.
• Children identified as needing less intensive additional support, known as School Action and School Action Plus has increased from 14 per cent in 2003 to 18.2 per cent in 2010.

The predicatable argument following Ofsted’s latest remarks about special needs and the need for better teaching misses some important issues. Within the context of schooling Ofsted may indeed have a point but the issues are bigger than this. Whilst an imposed age-stage based curriculum and testing exists then the system will always identify special needs. They of course comprise many children who for various reasons do not meet the proscribed expectations and targets. What schools, teachers and inspectors fail to grasp is that many of these children are just on different timelines. There is a multi-millon pound special needs industry based on the inability of our learning system to effectively personalise its provsion to the needs and aspirations of the learner. Our schooling system is gloriously inefficient and wasteful and inflicts lifelong damage on many children it labels in this category. Until we end this age-stage misery, this nonsense will never end, and, those children with real diabilities and challenges will be deprived of the resources and support they rightly deserve.