School matters: how context influences the identification of different types of special educational needs

Abstract

Despite dramatic changes in Irish special education policy during the last decade, there is little understanding of the factors influencing how special educational needs (SEN) are identified and whether identification varies across different school contexts. International research has tended to focus on how individual child characteristics influence SEN identification. Less attention has been given to other factors such as teacher characteristics or school social mix. Using data from the nine-year-old cohort of the Growing Up in Ireland study, this article examines which children are most likely to be identified with different SEN types taking into account student social background characteristics, teacher characteristics and school social mix. Findings show that children attending highly disadvantaged school contexts are far more likely to be identified with behavioural problems and less likely to be identified with learning disabilities than children with similar characteristics attending other schools. It seems that ‘behavioural’ issues take precedence over learning difficulties in these schools pointing to a culture of care/containment rather than academic progress.

Keywords:

• SEN identification
• gender
• social background
• teacher characteristics
• school context

Acknowledgements

Growing Up in Ireland data have been funded by the Government of Ireland through the Department of Children and Youth Affairs; have been collected under the Statistics Act, 1993, of the Central Statistics Office. The project has been designed and implemented by the joint ESRI-TCD Growing Up in Ireland Study Team © Department of Children and Youth Affairs.

Notes

1. The three categories of disadvantaged schools are Urban Band 1, Urban Band 2 and Rural disadvantaged schools. Urban Band 1 schools have higher concentrations of disadvantage than Urban Band 2 schools, and the former receive greater resources.

2. Research by Gash (2006) finds that beginning teachers cite working with children with learning or behavioural difficulties among the main challenges they face; and may signal less confidence in identifying students with such needs.