The early academic progress of children with special educational needs

Abstract

Children with special educational needs (SEN) are known to experience lower average educational attainment than other children during their school years. But we have less insight into how far their poorer educational outcomes stem from their original starting points or from failure to progress during school. The extent to which early identification with SEN delivers support that enables children who are struggling academically to make appropriate progress is subject to debate. This is complicated by the fact that children with SEN are more likely to be growing up in disadvantaged families and face greater levels of behavioural and peer problems, factors which themselves impact attainment and progress through school. In this paper, we evaluate the academic progress of children with SEN in England, drawing on a large-scale nationally representative longitudinal UK study, the Millennium Cohort Study, linked to administrative records of pupil attainment. Controlling for key child, family and environmental factors, and using the SEN categories employed at the time of data collection, we first establish that children identified with SEN in 2008, when they were age 7, had been assessed with lower academic competence when they started school. We evaluate their progress between ages 5-7 and 7-11. We found that children identified with SEN at age 7 tended to be those who had made less progress between ages 5 and 7 than their comparable peers. However, children with SEN continued to make less progress than their similarly able peers between ages 7 and 11. Implications are discussed. . A key issue is whether the average poorer levels of attainment in later school life of children with SEN reflect the persistence of earlier problems, or whether they reveal a failure to progress at the same rate as peers with similar early cognitive skills, which would result in a widening gap through the school years. While the former scenario would appear consistent with identification with SEN in the first place, the latter raises questions about the effectiveness of SEN support.It could be argued that it is unreasonable to expect children identified with SEN to make the same rate of progress as their similarly able peers, especially for those with needs that particularly impede learning. However, taking the overarching-and diverse-SEN category as a whole, while we may not expect equality of attainment between children with and without SEN, it seems less evident why children with SEN who have reached a particular educational level should make less subsequent progress than other children attaining that level, especially if they are receiving additional support. While recognising that progress is itself a complex and contested concept, as we operationalise it here it provides a reasonable indication of ongoing development and realisation of potential among children who in past eras might have been 'written off' as benchmarked against those with comparable levels of initial academic attainment.Department for Education statistics (DfE, 2015) in...

Disability, special educational needs, class, capitals, and segregation in schools: A population geography perspective

“…The paper complicates dominant emerging academic accounts that emphasise the interconnections between poverty, hardship, and SEND. We found that young people in our case‐study areas with SEND diagnoses are more likely to come from “poor” backgrounds, being eligible for FSM, in line with broader arguments in social science (Parsons & Platt, ). Conversely, our findings show a complicated intersection between economic and cultural capital, SEND diagnoses and education, in which the spatial contexts of specific LAs and schools play an important part.…”

“…There is a quantitative link between SEND, socio-economic disadvantage, and the reproduction of educational inequalities (Parsons & Platt, 2017). Keslair and McNally (2009) use the 2006 Schools Annual Census to emphasise that relatively high proportions of young people in all SEND categories in England are entitled to free school meals (FSM), an accepted, though imperfect, measure of poverty (Ilie, Sutherland, & Vignoles, 2017).…”

Disability differentials in educational attainment in England: primary and secondary effects

“…Empirical evidence suggests that disabled children and young people in England perform consistently worse academically than their non‐disabled peers, with disability gaps already formed during primary school (Parsons and Platt ; Department for Children, School, and Families ; Keslair, Maurin, and McNally ). Low attainment is common among students with different types of disabilities, including those whose special educational needs require specialist support beyond that available in mainstream teaching provision in English schools (Blatchford et al ; Crawford and Vignoles ).…”

“…Low attainment is common among students with different types of disabilities, including those whose special educational needs require specialist support beyond that available in mainstream teaching provision in English schools (Blatchford et al ; Crawford and Vignoles ). However, lower attainment is only partly related to lower cognitive ability (Parsons and Platt ). A recent report showed that children with special educational needs in England are between 7 and 15 times less likely than their peers to reach key national examinations ‘benchmarks’ from early years through to age 16 (Department for Children, School, and Families ).…”

The influence of private primary schooling on children's learning: Evidence from three generations of children living in the UK

“…Secondly, we construct a ‘value‐added’ score that captures the progress made by a child at the second time point relative to those who had a similar initial score (e.g. Parsons & Platt, , ).…”