Grantcoulson's Blog

   Do not think about, write about or deal with  human behavior without determining the effects of incentives.
   

    This is from an article by a British educator. In the part not shown here, he hypothesizes that some of the increase in the SEN (special education needs) classification is from the improved survivability of premature babies who have an increased probability of having learning difficulties. That may be true, but probably explains only a small percentage of the increase. The same things are, of course, happening in North America

Special needs is a fad that harms children
Pupils are being subjected to all manner of crank treatments in the name of helping them, says Francis Gilbert.

“Twenty years ago, when I started teaching in a tough, inner-city comprehensive, only three of my pupils were labelled as having "special educational needs". All three were extreme cases: one girl liked to throw chairs at her teachers, another had severe hearing problems, and another didn’t have a working stomach.

Today, things have swung to the other extreme: classrooms are swamped by pupils classified as "SEN", or having learning difficulties. All told, one in three of those aged between six and 16, or more than two million children, are identified as having some sort of learning difficulty. And it’s getting worse: in the past two years, the number of under-fives with learning difficulties has risen by almost 20 per cent, and the number of teenagers being diagnosed has also increased exponentially.”

……

…… “many teachers, myself included, like to "work the system", too. We realise that having a child diagnosed as SEN is greatly to our benefit because it means that we get extra resources – and it also lets us off the hook if they fail their exams.

In other words, pupils categorised as having special needs have been wrongly labelled: a government survey of teenagers classed as having SEN in 2009 showed that almost half had no such diagnosis six years earlier. A particularly worrying trend is the increasing numbers of children who are being identified as having attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), a phrase which in the teaching profession is a politically correct euphemism for "being completely out of control". According to data released under Freedom of Information legislation, there has been a 65 per cent increase in spending on drugs to treat ADHD over the last four years. Such treatments now cost the taxpayer more than £31 million a year. In the US, the use of prescription drugs to "cure" learning difficulties has become a billion-dollar industry.

This "medicalisation" of SEN is deeply worrying; it promotes the lie that a child’s learning difficulties can be solved by drugs rather than good teaching. It’s meant that all sorts of self-help quacks are grabbing money from schools and gullible parents by promising to "cure" children with herbal remedies, head massages, visualisation techniques, brainwave measurement, or the chanting of mantras.

All of which makes me think that perhaps it’s time to junk the term "Special Educational Needs" altogether, along with much of the jargon that goes with it. Sadly, these terms have become excuses to hide behind rather than steps towards solutions. Instead bandying around vague pseudo-scientific terms like "dyslexia" and "ADHD", we need to demand that learning difficulties are identified simply and specifically. If a pupil has a problem with reading books aimed at their age range, let’s call it precisely that, rather than saying he’s "dyslexic" – a notorious word that seems to mean something different every time it’s used.

It’s time we all realised no amount of jargon, drugs or massages can solve our children’s problems. The only real solution, as it always has been, is hard graft.”

    Hard graft is a British English phrase meaning hard work. “Two great peoples divided by a common language.”

Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies

This entry was posted on July 25, 2010 at 3:59 am and is filed under Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.