ABSTRACT
In Britain, the term special educational needs (SEN) was introduced more than thirty years ago. The desire at that time was to move away from older terminology such as ‘handicapped children’ to fi nd a generic description that would more suitably embrace the increasingly diverse group of students with problems in learning. Prior to this time, there had been a preoccupation with categorizing students according to their disability or impairment, particularly for school placement purposes (Peterson and Hittie 2010). Using a categorical approach had never worked very effectively in practice for two main reasons. First, a small but signifi cant number of children had more than one disability (or even multiple disabilities) requiring a combination of intensive services and defying any simple solution such as placement in a particular type of school. Second, very many children who experience diffi culties in learning or adjustment in school have no identifi able disability, so could not be neatly categorized. While disability affects at most 9 per cent of school-age children, it is estimated that at least 20 per cent of children have some form of special educational need (Turnbull et al. 2010). These children tend to have a combination of personal, emotional, social, environmental and family problems, unrelated to disability, that cause them to be at risk of failure within the school system (Abrams 2010; Cadima et al. 2010). Children from poorer families, for example, are twice as likely to be offi cially diagnosed with special educational needs as other students in the UK (National Literacy Trust 2009a). It was felt, therefore, that rather than focusing on a child’s disability it was more productive to focus on the nature and degree of a child’s actual need for additional support, resources and special services.
