ABSTRACT
At the end of the third year I was confident about teaching, but SEN scared me.
These words, spoken by a student teacher nearing the end of her course, reflect the concerns of many new teachers. Indeed, they may also reflect the views of more experienced teachers as they respond to national developments and the challenges of inclusive education. As mainstream schools increasingly include numbers of pupils identified as having special educational needs, what is being done to increase teachers’ confidence and skills? Initial teacher education (ITE) programmes follow a national curriculum
linked to regulated standards for the award of qualified teacher status. These standards have increasingly been influenced by the national strategy ‘Removing Barriers to Achievement’ (DfES 2004), which held the expectation that all teachers would teach children identified as having special educational needs. ITE programmes are now expected to cover ‘inclusion of pupils with SEN, behaviour management, assessment for learning and specialist support, all within the core knowledge and understanding of teaching’ (ibid.: 57). So, does this make a difference? Evidence, including that from government agencies, seems to imply that more
still needs to be done. The Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) report How Well New Teachers are Prepared to Teach Pupils with Learning Difficulties and/or Disabilities (Ofsted 2008: 5) identified variable experience within ITE programmes, a heavy reliance on schools to provide most of the training on special educational needs, and a weakness in monitoring this. As a result, many new teachers have completed their programmes lacking confidence and feeling unprepared for teaching children seen as having ‘additional’ or ‘special’ learning needs. Similar evidence can be found in the Training and Development Agency for Schools’ Newly Qualified Teacher Survey (TDA 2007) and Moran’s (2007) research with head teachers, suggesting the need for a different approach to this part of the ITE curriculum so that all new teachers can approach their classes confidently.
The concept of special educational needs came from the Warnock Report (DES 1978), replacing categories from the 1944 Education Act previously used to classify children with labels such as ‘maladjusted’, ‘delicate’ and ‘educationally subnormal’. With this new concept came the role of the special educational needs coordinator – the SENCO – who became the lead teacher in supporting children identified with special educational needs though the formal ‘statementing’ process. From this, a team of professionals grew to support this work; educational psychologists were required for assessing special educational needs, teaching assistants to support identified pupils and trainers started to offer focused staff development courses – arguably creating a ‘special needs industry’. Subsequent legislation, policy and initiatives embedded the concept of
special educational needs and focused on developing teachers’ practice (Special Educational Needs and Disability Act 2001 (SENDA); DfES 2004; House of Commons 2006). Over time, government agencies’ terminology changed variously to include special needs and disabilities, disabled children, learning difficulties and disabilities, but the group of children given these labels remained those originally highlighted by Warnock and set out in the 1996 Education Act – those who have a learning difficulty that calls for some kind of special educational provision to be made (Education Act 1996, Section 312). This deceptively simple definition may be the cornerstone of conflicting perspectives about pupils seen as ‘special’ and subsequent expectations of teachers. When one group of learners is perceived as special, it implies that they are
different from other ‘ordinary’ pupils. This can translate into teachers expecting special provision to be made through additional resources and special skills needed to deliver these, a view further compounded by other terminology commonly heard in schools, which describes such pupils as having ‘additional’ needs. The danger of this is clear: if ‘special’ children are conceptualised as needing a specialised education, how then will ‘ordinary’ teachers see their duty towards them? Dividing pupils in this way may lead teachers to question whether they feel competent enough to meet some children’s needs, and whether someone else, such as a teaching assistant, or somewhere else, such as a special school, could do this better. Even more confident teachers may balk at what they see as extra demands being made on them. So, ‘special educational needs’, a label that was originally intended to move
away from negative categorisation in the past, now raises further issues for teachers to consider. Hall’s (1997) challenging perspective of a ‘Special Land’ to which pupils with special educational needs can be consigned after rejection from mainstream activities draws attention to some of the complexities found within school provision. He asks us to reflect on the actual words ‘special’ and ‘needs’ and the effect of the concepts implicit within them. He reminds us that ‘special’ is something usually wanted by society, for example, special offers
or special events, but within the educational context, a special need is not one to which pupils generally aspire; instead it is often seen by teachers as a euphemism for ‘problem’. Similarly, he contests the word ‘need’, suggesting that this implies neediness and a want, rather than a learning requirement, which implies a right to schools providing for this. Other concerns about labelling are identified in the House of Commons
Special Educational Needs report (House of Commons 2006: 16). This describes the separation of learners with and without special educational needs as fundamentally flawed, arguing that children do not fit into neat categories, but exist on a broad continuum of needs which are often influenced by social disadvantage. It suggests that, as many conditions that pupils have may be syndromes with different characteristics or linked with other impairments and issues, ‘diagnosis’ becomes complex. Within this context, the report suggests that the use of simplistic categories can lead to false classifications and intervention strategies that do not address individuals’ unique learning requirements. Further concerns are highlighted through past studies showing that teachers’ expectations of pupils can differ in relation to the labels allocated to them (Rosenthal and Jacobson 1968; Norwich 1999). These concerns are also raised by more current writers (for example, Rix et al. 2004; Thomas and Vaughan 2004; Ainscow 2007; Wearmouth 2009), who reflect on the power of labels in creating teachers’ perceptions and subsequent behaviour towards children. Linked to this are issues of professionals’ use of power that enables them to impose particular identities (and labels) upon pupils and make subjective decisions on definitions of ‘normal’ or ‘ordinary’ (Frederickson and Cline 2009), thereby separating groups of learners within schools. Although this consideration of language and labels may seem overstated,
the impact on teachers’ thinking cannot be underestimated. School staffroom discussions about pupils described as ‘the SENs’, and SENCOs being seen as totally responsible for ‘SEN pupils’, are not uncommon, and serve to distance teachers from some children. The special educational needs label also identifies the problem as being located within the child – that they have the learning difficulty and so own the problem. This does not encourage consideration of other contextual issues, such as teaching styles, classroom structures and access to appropriate resources. All this can reinforce an uncritical acceptance that special children need to go to special places for a special education.
