Rethinking special educational needs

This project will reconceptualise special educational needs and mental health difficulties to improve identification and support.

In the UK, 10-15% of school-aged children have a special educational need (SEN). Yet research funded by the Nuffield Foundation has found widespread inequalities in SEN identification, where at risk children are missed or mislabelled and consequently go without the support they need. SEN often co-occurs with mental health difficulties, but diagnostically they are usually considered separately.

Approach

This project will rethink how SENs are conceptualised and identified. It will look beyond diagnostic labels and focus on underlying strengths and difficulties in language, learning, cognition, social functioning, and mental health.

Secondary analysis will be conducted using the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) and the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS). Combining these two datasets will provide comprehensive measures for a representative sample.

Throughout the project, the researchers will engage with children with lived experience of SEN and mental health difficulties, parents, policymakers, practitioners, and third-section organisations.

Outcomes

This research will:

• Identify underlying skills dimensions and investigate how strengths and difficulties co-occur.
• Investigate how these dimensions of skills cluster and how they compare with existing diagnostic labels at predicting children’s outcomes.
• Determine which individuals and social environments should be the targets for early intervention to mitigate genetic risk for SEN and mental health difficulties.

The project findings will provide evidence on how best to target support to address children’s skill deficits. The research team will actively engage with practitioners, researchers, policymakers and funders of intervention research. The final project report will be free to download on this page.