UK Children Requiring Special Needs Education Soars

Friday, 1st March 2013

UK CHILDREN REQUIRING SPECIAL NEEDS EDUCATION SOARS – In a shocking report a study has revealed that UK kids have ‘special education needs’ SEN five times higher than any other European country.

Of all the children in the UK a staggering 19.8% of them have been identified with learning difficulties.  This figure equates to some 1.6 million children that are labeled as under-performing and therefore must receive specialized education.

Many academics are voicing their concern that children are being labeled unnecessarily and that the use of SEN, in many case, is simply not required.  So why are these children being labeled as ‘under-performing’?

There are concerns that teachers are simply using the system so that schools are not penalized or downgraded in the Governments system of educational performance.  Have our teacher’s now become more interested in the Governments performance statistics rather than in the education of our children?

As Paul Marshall, the chairman of ARK school put it; ‘For the UK to have 5 times more children requiring SEN than any other country in Europe would indicate there must be something seriously wrong with the water, otherwise it simply is not feasible that such a figure should occur.’

The Liberal Democrats did actually scrap the ‘League Table Performance Measures’ which  actually meant schools, under the last Labour Government, could attain a higher ranking by Ofsted simply by increasing the number of children on SEN.

Incredible enough the last Labour Government actually awarded schools with higher SEN than others, which only went to boost the number of SEN children.  It is almost as if the Labour Government was telling schools to label kids a stupid just so it made the Labour Government look proactive.

The other question being raised is the quality of our educators.  Are the teachers properly qualified and motivated to teach our children, or is it simpler to hide their inadequacies by placing a child on SEN?  It is a fact that Ofsted reported that some 450,000 children would not have been put on SEN if teachers had in fact been competent in their teaching methods.

There is really no one area you can pin these failings, but rather all elements are to blame, including Ofsted, the teachers and the education system as a whole.