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Abstract
One important goal of Swedish educational policies is to integrate all pupils within regular education, irrespective of disability or difficulties in school, and to adjust education to individual needs. The aim of this paper was to explore how schools ‘socially construct’, i.e. identify and support, pupils with special educational needs. Another aim was to explore if there were any dominant patterns in the schools’ procedures to differentiate pupils with such needs from ‘normal’ pupils, and how such patterns can be understood in a broader context of educational policies. Interviews were conducted with school personnel from two compulsory schools in a municipality in northern Sweden. We chose to use the grounded theory approach for analysing the interview data. The analysis indicated that there were three different patterns or models for identifying and supporting pupils with special educational needs: a pedagogical, a social or a medical model. Various professionals were involved in different ways in each model. Another finding was that school personnel did not find it easy to sort out and assess ‘special educational needs’, and that the identification of such needs were conditioned upon resources available for the schools.
Acknowledgements
This article has been produced as part of the 3‐year project ‘Between normalcy and deviance – Support for school children with special educational needs’, 2005–2008. The project is financed by the Swedish Research Council (errand 721‐2004‐3315).
Notes
1. The project was approved by the Ethical Research Committee at the Medical Faculty, University of Umeå (Dnr 02/401, approved 030211).