A capability approach to understanding academic and socio-emotional outcomes of students with special educational needs in Ireland

ABSTRACT

Using data from Ireland’s national longitudinal study of children, this paper employs a capabilities approach to disability to understand how individual characteristics as well as home and school environmental factors at age 9 relate to academic and socio-emotional outcomes of students with special educational needs (SEN) at age 17. Results suggest that young people with SEN register both lower average scores and make less academic progress between the age of 9 and their national lower secondary examination, with the exception of young people with a physical SEN. Both home and school environmental factors at 9 years have long-term associations with the academic outcomes of young people with SEN, after controlling for individual characteristics and prior academic achievement. Home and school environmental factors had less consistent associations with the socio-emotional outcomes of young people with SEN. By using rigorous nationally representative longitudinal data, this paper offers a more holistic understanding of the development of young people with SEN. The paper also provides important evidence that a more inclusive approach for supporting students with additional needs, their parents, and their schools is needed.

KEYWORDS:

• Special educational needs
• capabilities approach
• academic achievement
• socio-emotional outcomes
• Growing Up in Ireland

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank David Hallinan, Helen Russell, Jennifer Symonds, Richard Rose, Rosalyn Tamming, and Seán Lyons for their useful feedback on earlier drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement:

The data that support the findings of this study are available from Ireland’s Central Statistics Office (CSO). Restrictions apply to the availability of these data, which were used under license for this study. Data may be obtained by registered research organisations with the permission of the Central Statistics Office. Growing Up in Ireland (GUI) is funded by the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth (DCEDIY). It is managed by DCEDIY in association with the CSO. Results in this paper are based on analyses of data from Research Microdata Files provided by the CSO. Neither the CSO nor DCEDIY take any responsibility for the views expressed or the outputs generated from these analyses.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here

Notes

1. An overview of questionnaires used by GUI at different waves is available at https://www.growingup.ie/questionnaires/#Wave-1-Child-Q

2. To account for skewness the distribution of the Life Satisfaction outcome variable, an additional general Poisson model was run. The association between emotional SEN, sex, self-concept, and depression status of primary caregiver remained statistically significant. This robustness check did not find a statistically significant association between level of conflict, DEIS status and receiving additional support, and the life satisfaction outcome measure.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Ireland’s National Disability Authority.

Notes on contributors

Georgiana Mihut

Georgiana Mihut was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Economic and Social Research Institute in Ireland. She recently received her Ph.D. in Higher Education from Boston College. Her work includes publications in education and comparative higher education.

Selina McCoy

Selina McCoy is Associate Research Professor in Social Research and joint education research coordinator at the Economic and Social Research Institute in Ireland, and Adjunct Professor at Trinity College Dublin. She has over 25 years of experience with responsibility for research and evaluation projects in the fields of European education, inequality, academic achievement and student development.

Bertrand Maître

Bertrand Maître is a Senior Research Officer at the Economic and Social Research Institute. He is a Graduate of Economics in the University of La Sorbonne Paris I. His current research focuses on poverty and inequality, social exclusion and income distribution.