Sources of bias in special needs provision in mainstream primary schools: evidence from two British cohort studies

Abstract

This study examines inequality during late childhood in children's access to special needs help in mainstream primary schools using data from two British cohorts: the National Child Development Study (NCDS) and the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70). It explores the source of any biases in the provision of special help using measures of individual gender, attainment and psychosocial adjustment; family social class; school composition; and education regions. Pervasive gender bias was found both in the identi cation of children with special needs and in the provision of help to children with special needs. There were more children from manual homes receiving help in school than children from professional homes, but when reading, mathematics and psychosocial adjustment scores were taken into account, the gradient reversed, so that children from professional homes were more likely to be getting help. The in uence of the school's composition showed the same reversal. Once test scores were considered, schools with a greater proportion of above average children were more likely to be able to provide help for those with special needs than schools with a greater proportion of children with problems. Regional variation suggests that areas in southeast England are better funded than average, while areas of deprivation are not provided with suf cient resources to meet their children's needs.

Childhood Language Skills and Adult Literacy: A 29-Year Follow-up Study

“…Previous evidence would suggest that many of the parents of the most vulnerable children may not be inclined to engage with the services. 47 The second concerns the age of the children. The present data refer to the long-term implications of language difficulties at 5 years, some time after most health surveillance programs have ceased to function.…”

Disproportionality in Special Needs Education in England

“…Indeed, other forms of disproportionality, which at first sight seem likely to embody teacher constructions of differences, appear in fact to be mediated by achievement. This is true of socioeconomic background (Sacker et al, 2001); ethnicity (Bhattacharyya, Ison, & Blair, 2003;Department for Education and Skills, 2005b); gender, because boys are lower achievers than girls in the English system (Gillborn & Mirza, 2000); and of our own puzzling finding about the overrepresentation of young-for-cohort children, given that such children are lower achievers than their older peers (Dyson et al, 2004). Similarly, disproportionality seems to reflect deeper social divisions and inequalities.…”

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“…The beliefs people hold about behaviour and how learners develop influence the ways in which they respond to learner difficulties (Mentis & Annan, 2013;Walker, 2013). Teachers tend to attribute the difficulty to an inherent disposition of the learner or their home circumstances, and undervalue or overlook the effect of teaching and class-and schoolrelated factors (Sacker et al, 2001;Worrell, 2022). These attributions locate problems within the student rather than in factors within a teacher's control.…”