DfEE Green Paper (22/10/1997) - What are special educational needs?

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1 Policies for excellence

What are special educational needs?

1. The term "special educational needs" can be misleading and lead to unhelpful assumptions. It may suggest that children with SEN are a readily-defined group, with common characteristics. It is sometimes used as though it applied only to the 3% of pupils with a statement of SEN. It is sometimes used of children from disadvantaged families. All this is far from the truth.

2. The law says that a child has special educational needs if he or she has:

a learning difficulty (i.e. a significantly greater difficulty in learning than the majority of children of the same age, or a disability which makes it difficult to use the educational facilities generally provided locally); and if that learning difficulty calls for special educational provision (i.e. provision additional to, or different from, that made generally for children of the same age in local schools).

Whether or not a child has SEN will therefore depend both on the individual and on local circumstances. It may be entirely consistent with the law for a child to be said to have special educational needs in one school, but not in another.

3. In January 1997, schools said that 18% of their pupils - 1.5 million children - had special educational needs. Interpreting these figures is not straightforward. But, at the very least, many in this group will later be among the one-twelfth of young people who currently leave school without any GCSEs; and the one-sixth of adults with inadequate basic skills.

4. Success in our policies set out in Excellence in schools, particularly those aiming to tackle difficulties of literacy and numeracy at an early age, should enable schools to reduce over time the proportion of children they identify as having SEN. It would not be appropriate to set a target for this reduction. But we believe that, as our policies take effect, the proportion of secondary age children whom schools need to identify as having SEN should move closer to 10%. We will ensure that all our policies and programmes for schools are explicit about their implications for children with special educational needs.

31/08/2000