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Unit 2: Special Education: Objectives and Need

2.3 Special Educational Needs (SEN) Notes

A child has special educational needs (SEN) if he or she has learning difficulties or disabilities that
make it harder for him or her to learn than most other children of about the same age.
Many children will have special educational needs of some kind during their education. Schools and
other organisations can help most children overcome the barriers their difficulties present quickly
and easily. A few children will need extra help for some or all of their time in school.
So special educational needs could mean that a child has:
• learning difficulties - in acquiring basic skills in school
• emotional and behavioural difficulties - making friends or relating to adults or behaving properly
in school
• specific learning difficulty - with reading, writing, number work or understanding information
• sensory or physical needs - such as hearing or visual impairment, which might affect them in school
• communication problems - in expressing themselves or understanding what others are saying
• medical or health conditions - which may slow down a child's progress and/or involves
treatment that affects his or her education.
Children make progress at different rates and have different ways in which they learn best. Teachers
take account of this in the way they organise their lessons and teach. Children making slower progress
or having particular difficulties in one area may be given extra help or different lessons to help them
succeed.

The primary special educational need was behavioural, emotional or social difficulty.
Fewer than 8% of pupils in total had low incidence disabilities, such as physical or
sensory disabilities, recorded as their primary need.

2.4 Special Educational Needs and Disability Act (SENDA)

When examining the literature around populations at risk of exclusion it becomes clear that much of
the emphasis in research and policy texts remains rooted in concepts of special educational need.
This dominance of special educational needs as a descriptor is reinforced by the prevailing special
educational needs legislative framework. Although the Special Educational Needs and Disability
Act attempted to bring together two potentially competing frameworks, policymakers failed and in
the event created a rather muddled and unworkable piece of legislation which did little to alter the
prevailing culture of individualisation.
The rising number of children with autism, social and emotional or behavioural difficulties (SEBD)
– this is causing high levels of frustration to parents, teachers or children.’
Disability as defined by the disability rights agenda is framed within notions of structural changes
in society in a move towards greater equality for disabled people. This approach is ‘based on an
understanding that the poverty, disadvantage and social exclusion experienced by disabled people
is not an inevitable result of their impairments or medical conditions but rather stems from
environmental barriers.’
By extending the DDA to include education settings through the SENDA, it was hoped that this
more transactional view of disability would provide an alternative model. In this model the emphasis
shifts from viewing the individual within a paradigm of remediation to one of a social construct
where disability is a product of the external, environmental factors that present barriers to education
and learning.
Under the DDA arm of SENDA, such provision would be a legal right for disabled pupils. Growing
from this interactive model of disability was a growing interest in principles of universal design.

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