Students with Special Educational Needs—Social Inclusion or Marginalisation? Factors of Risk and Resilience in the Transition Between School and Early Adult Life

Abstract

This article is based on data from two national research projects in Norway dealing with upper secondary educational reforms that began in 1994. Together, the research projects represent a longitudinal study of prospective life course data from 1995 to 2003, covering approximately 500 students from the time they were receiving special education in upper secondary school to the age of 22. The analysis is based on theories of social networks, frame factors, risk and resilience, and life course transitions. It uses a typology of social marginalization based on the dimensions of network density and network size to capture the differences in framing opportunities and restrictions on the students’ social network relationships in the spare time arena. The study addresses how such relationships in early adult life are affected by earlier school experiences, such as whether they attended special or mainstream classes, compared with personal factors and their family situation at the start of upper secondary school.

Keywords:

• social networks and capital
• special and regular classes
• special needs students
• transitions to adult life
• factors of risk and resilience

Notes

¹ Burt (1992) puts forward the theory of structural holes in networks, which are things that promote strategic action. Superfluous relationships will usually be replaced by direct relations between ego in the network and the others. Then ego has the greatest control. Giddens (1991) assumes in the book Modernity and self‐identity: Self and society in the late modern age that the extreme position in which actions of calculating the individual return is a basic piece of information in society. He writes, in fact, about the “pure relation” in which individuals make choices in isolation about relations to others that form their own identities. This seems to mean that the collective aspect of building social relations and networks is virtually invisible (see, e.g., Burt, 1992; Lin, 2001; Putnam, 2000).

² These personal factors were all used in an earlier national study of the Norwegian special educational system by Skårbrevik (1996). In many cases, the expert evaluators have knowledge of the categories and scales. This ensures the reliability of the data. The terms will not be discussed in detail in the present article.

³ For a flexible organization of specially adapted teaching, it is relevant to refer to Klafki’s (2001) term internal differentiation, which applies to the fact that the community in a learner group forms the core or frame of every adapted situation (i.e., where all pupils are together after they have been in segregated groups or working on individually adapted lessons).

⁴ We have individual‐level data in which each special needs pupil was assessed by experts at the start of upper secondary school using several variables of disability. From these variables, we constructed an additive index and arranged it in quartile divisions. We then obtained a sum variable for the functional level of each young person in our data set. The variable functional level is also meaningful because many pupils identified by experts as having special educational needs have different combinations of difficulties.

⁵ Variables describing other dimensions of disability (such as difficulties with reading, writing, and mathematics; physical disabilities; and difficulties related to hearing and eyesight) are not part of the model, but analyzing them shows that they have no significant effect.

⁶ Despite the objective of an inclusive school in an inclusive society, educational practice is to a large degree characterized by a segregationist and exclusionary way of thinking focusing on the pupil as problem carrier that can be traced back to the former special schools of Norwegian tradition (Haug, 1998). The segregationist differentiation and organization of specially adapted teaching in upper secondary school in Norway show considerable similarities with the situation in the country’s 10‐year compulsory primary and lower secondary schools (see Haug, 1999; Kvalsund, 2004a). Therefore the school experiences might be additive. Kvalsund (2004a) documents that the traditional organizational approach of upper secondary education has a disabling and excluding function for many pupils with special educational needs; a general feature also reported in other countries (Barton, 2003; Skrtic, 1991, 1995; Slee, 1996).

⁷ For a discussion of different concepts of normality and deviance, see Kvalsund (2007).