Felicity Fletcher-Campbell

Exploring provision for children identified with special educational needs: an international review of policy and practice

This project aimed to create a descriptive map of international research which explores the notion of the continuum of educational provision for children with special educational needs. It also aimed to determine and examine the nature of how the continuum of provision is conceptualised, operationalised and enacted in a sample of selected countries. Commissioned by the National Council for Special Education, it also identified implications for the development of provision within the Irish context. The research involved a systematic identification and thematic review of theory, identifying and examining literature associated with the conceptualisation of the continuum; it examined the policy and provision across 55 administrations as publically reported, primarily to international agencies; it carried out more detailed examination of policy and practice in 10 countries using a survey and vignette study; and it involved a series of interviews with a range of individuals in a range of settings in four countries with differing approaches to supporting children with special educational needs. This paper outlines the overall findings of the research. It focuses in particular upon the need to change how we think about provision associated with continua, recognising the lack of international coherence in approaches to support for pupils with special educational needs. It identifies in particular the opportunities presented by a reconceptualisation of the class and the management of class resources, and the role key personnel can play in creating links between diverse services.

Double standards and first principles: framing teaching assistant support for pupils with special educational needs: a response

The authors are to be thanked for a clear report of a significant study that has challenged many assumptions about the benefits of the teaching assistant. The article is particularly timely in the UK at the time of writing as, with the new government that assumed power in May 2010, comes not only uncertainty regarding the shape of the primary curriculum, but also the likelihood of more schools stepping out on their own, ‘free’ of local authority control (or support?), with a consequent reshaping of professional support for all those working in schools. The article is also welcome insofar as it focuses attention on the wise use of resources at a time when all education systems throughout Europe are liable to be fiscally constrained as public service budgets are adjusted in response to the recession. The DISS project was formidably extensive – matchless in terms of previous studies – embracing a wide range of research sites across the whole of statutory education and collecting a wealth of data. Yet for all the work that it represents, this summary article is disappointing, even depressing, in the way that it conceives of special educational needs and, throughout, in the assumptions it makes. ‘Learning needs’ and ‘behavioural needs’ are taken as ‘givens’ and unproblematic – the pupil ‘has’ them and there is no challenge of the curriculum or pedagogy to which the pupil is exposed, and no hint of the possibility of the social construction of special educational needs. We have a clear (and comfortable to many) medical model of pupils being abnormal and deficient and ‘not making the expected levels of progress in English and mathematics’ (320) with no consideration of whether these ‘norms of progress’ have any rigorous theoretical foundation. Again, ‘structured intervention programmes’ appear to be regarded as the principal solution or certainly the only one to which reference is made here. The role of the teaching assistant is presented as functional: to help in raising standards and in reducing teacher workload. Certainly, an aim is also to ‘include greater numbers of pupils with SEN’ (320) (though the interpretation of what this ‘inclusion’ means is not given) and we are told that without teaching assistants ‘schools would struggle to cope’ (330) – but at no time in this article do the authors tell us why or how schools are thus ‘struggling’ and, indeed, how ‘pupils with special educational needs’ contribute to this struggle. We are thus left with the impression that the view is that pupils with special educational needs do not fit the norm and are, thus, an inconvenience to the system. Teaching assistants are welcomed because they decrease ‘offtask behaviour or disruption’ (and presumably we assume that this is a ‘pupil problem’ and does not result from any teacher behaviour, pedagogy or curriculum) and allow

Moving From a Continuum to a Community: Reconceptualizing the Provision of Support

The notion of the continuum is applied to special education in diverse contexts across many nations. This article explores its conceptual underpinnings, drawing on a systematic search of the literature to review recurring ideas associated with the notion and to explicate both its uses and shortcomings. Through a thematic analysis of the literature, the research team derived 29 continua, situated within six broad groupings (space, students, staffing, support, strategies, and systems). This provides a clear structure for reconsidering the issues that the notion of the continuum is supposed to describe and enables a reconceptualization of how the delivery of services is represented. We present the initial underpinnings for a community of provision in which settings and services work together to provide learning and support for all children and young people in their locality.