118. Don't send them if they have special needs

118 Don’t send them if they have special needs
Learning difficulties rise proportionately with the cost of the curriculum. Illich

All children are born different. Some are born with, or acquire differences that make it more difficult for them to learn and perform some or all tasks. Some only seem to have problems in school, or when they go to school. When critiquing the problems with sending kids with labels, or with unlabelled ‘difficulties’ to school, I am talking predominantly about mainstream schools. I am not referring to the many excellent special-needs establishments that care for children with severe difficulties and disabilities in a therapeutic and caring environment. Such places offer parents a sanity space and respite from constant care of those who may never lead independent lives. Such places can be a lifeline and a blessing.

In a move towards integration into the mainstream, such places are becoming fewer and are being labelled as part of the problem of marginalisation of people with disabilities. However, the problem for the child whose needs are not being met in mainstream are frequency overlooked. Mainstream school can never provide the level of care, therapy, attention to individual needs and hands on interaction necessary when the overriding ethos is one that states all children need to do the national curriculum to achieve according to its objectives, irrespective of the child’s actual needs.

Ofsted indicate that the progress of those with learning difficulties and/or disabilities was inadequate in 467 inspections. (2.8%) with 6% of secondary schools inadequate. (figures from Hansard written answers 11/2/09 via rise trust.org.uk/cgi-bin/category.cgi?q=SEN)

Research by Edinburgh University found that bullying is the main reason children with disabilities move from inclusive schools to special schools. (Bullycide p223) Children with Asperger’s syndrome are more likely to be bullied. Paul Naylor, research fellow in conflict and reconciliation at the University of Sheffield, found that 87% of children with Asperger’s syndrome said they were bullied at least once a week. Yet he still argues that mainstream schools are the proper place for these children. (Guardian 16/4/08 Public Inquiry)

It’s not just bullying that children with special educational needs are more prone to. It’s also permanent exclusion. The government states that pupils with statements of special educational needs are three times more likely to be permanently excluded from school than the rest of the population. However, the statistics for 2005-2006 on which this statement is based on appear to show a much higher rate:
39 in every 10,000 with statements
43 in every 10,000 with special educational needs and no statement
5 in every 10,000 with no special educational needs
were permanently excluded from school.
(www.dfes.gov.uk/rsgateway/DB/SFR/50000733/SFR21-2007.pdf downloaded 27/5/08)
From these figures, it seems that those with statements are nearly 8 times more likely to be excluded and those with noticed special educational needs but no statement are over eight times more likely to be permanently excluded.

So, how many children have special educational needs? There are many difficulties with this question, and this section aims to explore some of these difficulties. Let’s start by looking at government statistics again. In 2007 2.8% of children had a statement of special educational needs. This represents 229,110 pupils. Just under 3/5 of children with statements of special educational needs are in mainstream schools. (http://dfes.gov.uk/trends/index.cfm?fuse action=home.show/indicator&cid=3&iid=13) A statement is the bit of paper that is produced following a lengthy five-step procedure, ending in certification that specifies the needs and what local authorities have to provide to meet them.

Dfes statistics for 2005 indicates that 14.9 percent of all pupils have a special need, but not a statement. This adds up to more than 1 million children. (Guardian 6/12/05 “Rebels without a cause”) There has been a year on year decrease in statements issued. (Hansard written answers 11/02.09) This could be seen as a cost-cutting exercise.
Schools deal badly with difference, with evidence that teachers are more controlling with children with special educational needs labels. (Kohn) .The emphasis is put on behaviour management, often to the exclusion of a concern about learning. (Kohn)

I noticed this with my own son, when at age 4 he was put onto special-needs because he was exceptionally bright and badly behaved in school. They argued that they needed to deal with the behaviour so he could learn. They didn’t consider that by offering a more interesting and challenging activity he would be more willing to engage. At home, he freely engaged with many activities and focused for long periods of time.

A friend’s son has a label, and he languishes in a special school. His teacher told his mother she was often confused about whether his behaviour was due to his condition, in which case they needed to make allowances, or due to him, in which case they needed to punish him. His mother pointed out that he came as a package. If a highly qualified teacher of special educational needs is confused about how to respond to a particular bit of behaviour, how much more confusing is it for the child?

Many children’s differences and difficulties in school are not noticed, especially if they cause no difficulty for the teacher or school’s targets. The extremely compliant child is not seen as having any difficulties. (CR)
118. SEN p2
A friend’s daughter was recently diagnosed, at age 12, with autism. She had been at a prestigious, much sought after, state primary school, where they labelled her a bit slow. A speech therapist picked up on her difficulties. In a class of 30, teachers can’t spot real difficulties, especially if they are immersed in paper work, yet the schools become the gateway to a statement.
The girl with autism struggled in a class of 30, but thrived when many were away for example on trips. At a ‘good’ secondary school with a reputation for dealing well with special educational needs, she refused to go. Now at a small specialist school she is happy to go. In 2007 Ruth Kelley, then communities secretary, refused to send her son with special educational needs to a state school but instead sent him to a £15,000 a year specialist private school to help with his learning difficulties. If those in charge won’t send their kids why should you?
There is a powerful argument that schools create many special educational needs, when the expectations and demands we make of young children are unreasonable, given their level of biological development and needs. (Kohn) We label normal childhood behaviour and attainment as disease. ‘Behavioural problems’ are often merely children being children. (Kohn)

Both Illich and Holt pointed out that the more educational resources are pumped into teaching, the more learning problems, blocks, seem to develop among the beneficiaries of all of this compulsory schooling. (GBR p18)

The question of whether some special needs are simply unmet needs is important here. The environment, processes, beliefs and behaviours in school act together to thwart the natural development of children, their growing and learning and discovering their own talents and who they are. Brains don’t work so well under pressure. No animal behaves normally in captivity.
Those with unusual talents will often be identified by the school and by psychologists as in danger of becoming antisocial, sick or unbalanced. This acts to belittle children’s true strengths, if they are not curriculum related, or if the school cannot gain credit for them. (Illich)

Labelling with special needs often follows failure to meet arbitrary targets. This benefits the school. When children with special educational needs are not included in SATs results the school’s place in the league tables is higher.

But the problems with labels can outweigh their advantages. By labelling any behaviour or level of attainment as being due to an inherent wrongness in a child, we do more than damage self-esteem and the child’s expectations. We remove responsibility from the child, from the school, from the parents for how a child is and how a child behaves.
118. SEN p3
By labelling failure as illness, in need of diagnosis and treatment, we let everyone off the hook, but take away the child’s power and meaning. By not allowing children to develop at their own pace, and labelling them as deviant when they do not attain externally defined targets, we do them a great disservice and a huge amount of damage.

If all difference is considered deviant and deviance is considered disease we end up with a situation where medical explanations are put in place on very little basis. Many diagnoses (ADHD, AS, ODD, CD, EBD) are hugely subjective, based on limited observation, if any, of the child outside of school, and reports by adults of children’s behaviour. Many are made without any attempt to engage with a child or to elicit their own explanations of what they do and why they do it.

Harber claims that lack of genuine diagnostic testing is violence by omission. (Harber C p70) Most diagnoses are done in an artificial context with false assumptions about what is normal. Assuming the modern classroom is a normal environment is the first problem.

Holt told us that, unless they are very lucky, most child psychologists will have their heads full of theories about children before they have had a chance to observe any. (Holt HCL) Expectations shape what we see. If the teacher says little Johnny has a problem, then psychologists looking at little Johnny have their first question as: “what is wrong with little Johnny?”, rather than “what can be done to make little Johnny happy?”

There is, in any case, a shortage of Educational Psychologists. When my son was at school I was told that the whole of his large inner-city primary school had one appointment per term. In 2009 there were 90 statemented kids per Educational Psychologist and 580 kids with no statement but recognised special needs in England and Wales. That is one hell of a case load. (Hansard written answers 12/02/09)

In conversations with 2 ex-educational psychologists I discovered that they had both left because the job changed from identifying a child’s needs and trying to meet them to trying to make the child meet the needs of the institution.

The child who does not reach reading targets had better be labelled dyslexic so the school isn’t in trouble. Having this label does not mean the child will receive any useful interventions as schools deal very badly with dyslexia. A New Scientist article in 2002 stated that current school interventions for dyslexia involves intensive tuition in reading and verbal fluency, and that these interventions have shown only marginal beneficial effect. (New scientist 5/11/02 “Controversial dyslexia treatment works“)
Schools don’t have the patience to wait until children are ready to read. Interventions such as multi-sensory approaches to getting them to read still exist in an environment where multi-sensory learning of other things is curtailed. Being pre-literate does not and should not hamper learning. Children do a huge amount of learning before they become able to read whatever age they do it at. Later readers are labelled as having a sickness that they can never overcome rather than being encouraged to do it in their own time.
118. SEN p4
Undoubtedly, for some children, the unnatural act of interpreting meaningless scribbles on a page to make something meaningful of them is a harder job than for others. In an environment where the written word rules, we write off later readers and those who find it difficult and lock them somewhere where they cannot cope.

Subjectivity plays a huge part in recognition of special educational needs. There are no absolute medical tests for ‘developmental disorders’ such as autistic spectrum disorders, dyspraxia, dyslexia, or ADHD. (EO Newsletter 184 p20 Christine Waterman “ Is a diagnosis necessary or useful when you home educate”) ‘Diagnosis’ itself assumes a disease. We are just looking for its cause inside the child. Diagnosis is often on the basis of observation (where?), parental questionnaires, the child’s response to test questions or tasks, all of which are subjective. A friend’s child, bored and disruptive at school, deliberately dropped a pen in his ‘assessment’ and spent an inordinate amount of time picking it up. “Oooh” said the educational psychologist “Maybe he has dyspraxia”.

Waterman points out “one person may see Asperger’s syndrome, whilst another may see a quirky child with an unusual hobby”. (EO article) Many defining behaviours of Asperger’s syndrome and ADHD are things we all do but to a lesser degree, that doesn’t cause a problem. (Waterman)

Those doing the assessing have preconceived ideas, pet theories about what causes children to have ‘difficulties‘. Waterman tells us that many are blinded by their own interest in a specific disability so that they miss the possibility of a different diagnosis. She gives examples of a dyslexia specialist, who diagnosed dyslexia and missed a significant visual problem that was causing the reading difficulties and tells of sensory problems that are sometimes overlooked by autism specialists.

When my son was put onto special educational needs, in another class, with the special educational needs co-ordinator as his teacher, she said that she didn’t know why he was on special educational needs as nothing in his behaviour was qualitatively or quantitatively different from other children who were not on special educational needs.
118. SEN p5
There is a conflict with the special-needs process. Schools want more statements and labels to allow them to draw in more resources that they can spend however they see fit, and not necessarily to benefit the child whose label bought it. Local authorities providing funding for the statementing process and then having the legal responsibility to provide whatever is on it, want to reduce statements and have done so. (see above) Local authorities having responsibility for the process of statement that then determines how much money they spend have a clear conflict of interest. Parents, and to some extent schools, will fight for more provision with local authorities denying needs because to admit they exist means they have to pay for them. Budgetary concerns will always influence and limit what goes on the statement while schools love special educational needs kids if they bring funding for extra staff, who can help out other children too.

A parliamentary select committee concluded that the SEN process is extremely costly, is slow and unresponsive and that statutory assessment seldom reveals new information. They noted varying rates of issuing statements and expressed concern that statements label children and define them by reference to their difficulties. (http://ww.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmselect/cmedusks/478/478ii.PDF)

Some labels seem to be increasing. There is evidence that those labelled with ADHD may be bored or afraid. (http:/www.mrc.ac.uk/NewsViewsAndEvents/News/MRC002054 this is an article by Tom Manley, Veronika Dobler and Melanie George: New clues to understanding ADHD in children 28/2/05) This research indicated that children with ADHD might simply stop noticing things on their left visual field, similar to adults with right brain damage. But rather than indicating that these children are brain-damaged, they noted that most children’s awareness of things to their left, but not to their right, significantly declines if they are asked to perform boring tasks for about 40 minutes (Most kids in the average class then!) The right brain is involved in keeping us awake and alert particularly when bored.

This raises the question- are ADHD kids simply more sensitive to the boredom of school? We can link this to neuro-linguistic programming theories of visual field accessing where for most people the left upper visual field is accessed when recalling visual memories, the left middle line visual field is accessed when recalling auditory memories and the lower left visual field is accessed when listening to internal talk. If boredom stops children being able to access visual and auditory memories or to listen to internal dialogue that is vital for self-awareness and self restraint, then the damage done by boring children, especially the most sensitive is worse than we think. If the bored behave like the brain-damaged then maybe we are right to conclude that boredom damages the brain.

Research at the University of Illinois indicates that contact with nature has a detoxifying effect on kids with ADHD. “The greener the setting, the greater their relief” (Toxic childhood p65) These kids are just more sensitive to the separation from nature that schools enforce.
ADHD can be seen as an extreme form of attention seeking behaviour. Seeking attention is seen as a problem, yet we are all attention seeking. When a child’s need for attention, (preferably respectful and acknowledging), is not met in the classroom, because the teacher doesn’t have the time, then children will gain whatever attention, they can, even if it is profoundly negative.

It is also possible that some instances labelled as ADHD are caused by sleep apnoea. An article in The New Scientist referred to research on 83 children with ADHD and found that 1 in 4 with mild ADHD and 5% with strong ADHD had sleep apnoea. They also discovered that a group who had tonsils and adenoids removed, of whom 1 in 4 had a label od ADHD, after 1 year none showed symptoms. (Emma Young “Sleep well, stay sane” New Scientist p36 21/02/09)

A label of ADHD gives a pseudo reality to a set of behaviours that could have biological, environmental and psychological origins. For more information on the problem with this label and the chemical cosh frequently used to “control” it see “112 School is a branch of the pharmaceutical industry”
118. SEN p6
When ignored children emerge from school, their need and demand for attention from parents can make things worse, if parents have other demands on their time too. I have seen many stressed mothers, who have picked up their children from extended schools at 6pm, having come from a stressful day at work and needing to do the shopping to get home and feed their brood. They have very little patience with their children who have had their need for attention neglected all day, and it is compounded by stressed parents, who hoped all their kids’ needs would be met in school so that they would not make demands on them.

We tell children to limit their beliefs about who they are and what they can become, because the label tells them that they are inadequate and not good enough. When unmet needs are labelled as a problem and a disease we deny those needs exist as rights.

118. SEN p7