ABSTRACT
A total of 186 children from the eight schools were interviewed, between late September and early December 1991. Ninety-three of these children had special needs and were either statemented or in the process of being statemented, and ninety-three children had no special needs and are referred to as mainstream children. (The label ‘mainstream’ is used for convenience and does not imply that children with special needs were not often part of the mainstream.) These children were matched in terms of their age, gender, ethnicity, school and class or year group. Eighty-two pairs were white, ten pairs were Asian and one pair of children were African-Caribbean. Thirtyseven pairs of children, drawn from the three junior/middle schools (twelve girls and twenty-five boys), were aged between 6 and 11 years (mean age 9.3); and fifty-six pairs of children, drawn from the five secondary schools (twenty girls and thirty-six boys), were aged between 11 and 15 years (mean age 13.1).
