Trends in SEN identification: contexts, causes and consequences
Authors: Hutchinson Jo , Timimi Sami , McKay Neil 
Published: February 2021

This policy seminar addressed these current issues and questions: i. Are there shifts from an interactive to within‐child model of identification? And if so, what are the factors that are contributing to this? ii. What are the changing relationships between parents, schools and LAs and their influence on identification practice? And iii. What kind of identification and assessment framework do we need for the future?

The first speaker Jo Hutchinson, from the Education Policy Institute, presented on ‘How fairly and effectively special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) are identified?’ in which she summarised her interim findings about school attainment and inclusion questions. One of her key findings was that about four in ten children have some interaction with the SEND system over the course of their schooling. This is a lot more than the commonly held assumptions about SEN incidence (one in five or six). Further analysis indicated that factors that best predicted the identification of SEN Support in primary schools were measures of deprivation and prior attainment. There were moderate effects for absences, ethnicity, looked after child status and child in need status. Lesser but still significant factors were sex, months of birth, EAL status and school mobility. The communication language and literacy scale of the Early Years Foundation Stage Profile was the best predictor of being identified with SEND at the SEN Support level. Also, analysis showed that most of variation in SEN Support identification was predicted by school variations, indicating that individual effects were halved once school factors were taken into account. Analyses for secondary and SEN at the EHC Plan level were still be completed.

Dr Sami Timimi, Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist, presented on ‘the social construction of autism’. In his presentation, he deconstructs the ‘common sense’ understanding of autism to argue that it is a construct that lacks a coherent basis in science and can result in therapeutically unhelpful dynamics. In presenting a historical background to psychiatric diagnosis, he argues that there is no such thing as a psychiatric diagnosis of autism. Part of this argument is that concepts like ASD do not even work well as a descriptive classification as they operate as ‘thin descriptions’, overlooking what matters about individual people. He concluded his presentation by pointing out that an ASD diagnosis can be a ticket to services but also a reason to exclude from services and that it can disempower parents and teachers by accident.

The third presenter Neil McKay, a consultant and trainer, presented on ‘dyslexia – definitions and identification’. Though he started by acknowledging the problems with the IQ discrepancy diagnosis of dyslexia, he took a particular perspective on the ‘dyslexia debate’ based on his teaching and advisory practice. He questioned whether a dyslexia diagnosis unlocks provision at the expense of others, arguing that all children with a reading difficulty regardless of IQ should be encouraged to seek intervention. His central point was that Elliott and Grigorenko (who question dyslexia) rely on a narrow view of reading by concentrating on accuracy. This is the basis for the argument that, because dyslexic and non‐dyslexic poor readers show almost identical patterns of difficulty, dyslexia does not exist. McKay’s position is to focus on ‘unexpected difficulties’ by interpreting unexpected difficulties as being about comprehension, a position which derives from practitioners’ experience of children with ‘unexpectedly good’ comprehension despite poor‐reading accuracy. He advocates the Scottish HMIE concept of dyslexia as ‘marked differences in certain areas, especially with regard to oral versus text‐based skills’. From this stance, he concludes that high‐quality teaching based on validated synthetic phonic approaches empowers most learners, regardless of label, to learn to read. But, it is the unexpected gap between reading accuracy and higher order comprehension and thinking skills that often typifies the dyslexic learner.

In the group discussions, there were common themes about an increase in prevalence of several conditions, with some questions about whether this was due to getting better at diagnosing particular types of need and/or that only by a focus on a within‐child model of identification would parents be taken seriously. Several groups believed that the role of parental expectations was central to this increased prevalence and the growing tensions between parents, schools and authorities. The kind of identification and assessment framework that was supported in several groups involved these features: multidisciplinary, collaborative, independent from budget holders, transparent, one aiming to build parental trust in the system and one that is values driven. There was some concern about whether there was proper scrutiny of environmental factors, and if not, whether this can lead to adopting a reduced within‐child model and a sense of learned helplessness in schools. A graduated response was endorsed by some as an appropriate model for an identification framework.