Many students need extra help

[mtbc]

I heard on the radio last week that 14% of students in schools need some kind of extra assistance. That figure seemed high to me so I searched for corroboration. I found the Department for Education's Special educational needs: an analysis and summary of data sources from September 2016 and, at least in England, indeed 14.4% of children last year had special educational needs and 11.6% of children were receiving support for such, something beyond the school's usual provision for students, like specialist help. Boys rather outnumber girls among those children. Of course, the special needs children tend not to do as well academically as the other children.

Nearly a quarter of the special needs children have moderate learning difficulty. It is the social, emotional and mental health ones who tend to get permanently excluded from school.

14.4% is around one child in seven but I suppose that dyslexia alone accounts for a good few percent of people. I also wonder if issues might be more likely in more economically depressed areas – poorer nutrition, greater domestic stresses, whatever – more remote from the schools with which I am more familiar. I may well be wrong: for all I know it is the more affluent families who are able to get around to arranging proper diagnosis and help – official special needs status – in the first place.

Comments

[aldabra]

I did GCSE invigilating at, um, a successful local academy I possibly oughtn't to name publicly in this context, for several years, and that's about the proportion that officially get extra time in exams. (Which makes invigilating a nightmare, because you typically have three subjects going at a time, some of which have two consecutive papers, and most of which have kids with extra time, and the paper lengths are different to begin with, so your end-times diverge spectacularly. At least they've now standardised on 25% extra, rather than some getting 25% and some getting 10%.)

There's league-table pressure on the schools to arrange extra time for anyone they think would benefit from it, because they're judged on grade achievement. Though there was a definite tendency among the extra-time kids to sit there not doing anything at all, or peeling their nail-varnish off (they weren't allowed not to use the extra time, once they'd been awarded it).