Understanding Special Educational Needs and Disability in the Early Years

Principles and Perspectives

Janice Wearmouth, Abigail Gosling, Julie Beams, Stephanie Davydaitis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781315513355
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This key text provides essential tools for understanding legislation, policy, provision and practice for children in the early years, particularly young children with special educational needs and disability (SEND). Based on extensive research and the four areas of need as defined in the Special Educational Needs and Disability Code of Practice: 0 to 25 Years (DfE, 2015), the book charts the development of young children and their growing constructions of learning, communication, language, motor movement and emotion.

Providing material that translates into practice in a straightforward and practical way, this text is packed full of personal accounts and case studies, enabling readers to appreciate what the experience of SEND in the early years means for families and professionals, and also to learn more about how they might understand and respond appropriately to a child's needs.

Understanding Special Educational Needs and Disability in the Early Years will be of interest to students studying Early Years courses, families, SENDCOs, teachers and other staff supporting young children with a range of special educational needs and disabilities.

Chapter 1

Historical and current perspectives on legislation and provision

Major questions addressed in this chapter are:

•How did special educational, and additional support, provision and provision for children from birth to 8 years develop in the UK?

•What purposes did this provision serve?

•What was the nature of the national context that supported these developments?

•What are the current legislative frameworks across the UK that govern the area of:

•special educational, or additional support, needs and disabilities?

•provision for children in the early years?

Introduction

Chapter 1 comprises two parts. Part 1 begins by weaving together an overview of the growth and development of provision for children in the early years, that is, from birth to 8 years of age, with the history of special or additional provision for children seen as ‘different’ from peers on account of the learning, physical or behavioural difficulties they experienced. This account is chronological, time period by time period, and is contextualised with discussion of societal changes and changes in thinking about learning, behaviour and children’s rights over time. Part 2 completes the chapter with an overview of, and reflection on, the development of statutory frameworks and regulations governing policy and practice related to special educational, or additional support, and disability needs of children across the UK, and a consideration of growth in the early years sector in the past four decades.

Part 1: A historical perspective

School curricula ‘and even schools themselves are seen to be products of the social ­system in which they exist’ (Broadfoot, 2011, p. 9). This system includes society’s values, beliefs and political ideology (Wearmouth, 2009) and the question about what purpose the ­special education and early years sectors were developed to serve.

Reflective activity: Understanding the historical context of the special ­education sector and early years provision

Take a few moments to reflect on:

•What you know about the historical development of (1) the ‘special’ education sector; (2) educational provision for children in the early years;

•Why it may be important to be aware of the historical origins to understand current policy and practice.

National context for developments in provision in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

In the UK, the development of early special education provision and provision in the early years, beginning at the end of the eighteenth century, should be seen in a national context where industry was rapidly developing and expanding. This was an age of child labour in, for example, factories in towns and cities and on the land in the countryside. ‘There could be no question of establishing a system of compulsory popular education when the new factory system was insistently demanding child labour’ (Simon, 1974, p. 152). As recorded by the National Archives in Kew, London, it was not until the Factory Act of 1833 that it became illegal to employ children under 9 years of age. Even then, children between 9 and 13 could work up to 9 hours a day (National Archives, 1833 Factory Act). The minimum age of employment was not raised to 10 years until 1876, and to 11 in 1893.

Until the end of the nineteenth century, education was largely for the children of the wealthy. For all those children whose parents were unable to afford fees, education was minimal, and largely religious. Children of poor and lower-middle-class parents might attend a network of Sunday Schools, ‘voluntary’ (mostly church) schools and informal neighbourhood schools with low fees, but a significant proportion of the poorest children had no access to education at all.

Rationale for development of provision

Special education

In a national context of the growing industrialisation of society, we might see special education serving a number of purposes, for example, to:

•serve the economic and commercial interests of society, so that all children as far as possible should work and contribute to an industrial society. As Cole (1990, p. 101) notes, it was businessmen, not government, who ‘played a part in the founding of pioneer establishments for the deaf and for the blind, and … throughout the nineteenth century trade training took up much of the lives of the handicapped attending them’; and/or

•look after the needs and welfare of children who were different from others and ­unable to progress, academically, in the same way, from an essentially benevolent standpoint (Cole, 1989); and/or

•provide a formal means to exclude troublesome pupils from mainstream schooling, or pupils who require a lot of the teacher’s time (Thomas and Loxley, 2007), for example, segregating mental defectives as defined under the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913.

Early years sector

There are a number of different ways of looking at the rationale for the emergence of early years provision in this context also. We might refer specifically to Robert Owen’s reasons for the establishment of the first nursery-infant school in Britain for children as young as 1 year old long before elementary education for (almost) all became statutory. Owen (1771–1858) had made an enormous profit from his enterprises in the cotton industry in the early part of the Industrial Revolution. Subsequently, he became a social and educational reformer who set about trying to address some of the effects of rapid industrialisation on the workers and their children through education as well as poor law reform and reform of factories and the environment.

Owen drew on his own experiences as an industrialist to take a humanitarian and philanthropic position in viewing education as the most important instrument for social reform. He had a deterministic belief that ‘the character of man is formed for him’ (Owen, 1841, p. 40).

It must be evident to those who have been in the practice of observing children with attention, that much of good or evil is taught to or acquired by a child at a very early period of its life; that much of temper or disposition is correctly or incorrectly formed before he attains his second year and that many durable impressions are made at the termination of the first twelve or even six months of his existence. The children, therefore, of the uninstructed and ill-instructed, suffer material injury in the formation of their characters during these and the subsequent years of childhood and of youth.

His schools were therefore established with a view to influencing character formation and social training of children from a very young age. As he wrote himself:

It was to prevent, or as much as possible to counteract, these primary evils, to which the poor and working classes are exposed when infants, that the area [i.e. a playground] became part of the New Institution [i.e. school].

Into this playground the children are to be received as soon as they can freely walk alone.

(Owen, 1857, p. 288)

Given the societal context of the time, it is unsurprising that, despite Owen’s humanitarian view, others took a more pragmatic view of the purpose of education for young children as it relates to employment. John Griscom, for example, an American visitor to Owen’s schools, is cited in Donnachie and Hewitt (1993, p. 102) as saying:

This baby school is of great consequence to the establishment, for it enables mothers to shut up their houses in security, and to attend to their duties in the factory, without concern for their families.

Types of special and early years provision prior to the advent of universal elementary education

Special provision

The earliest institutions providing any kind of training for children who experienced difficulties of any kind, learning, sensory or physical, were established in a societal context where child labour was the norm. Schools for blind and deaf children founded by individuals or by charities, not by government, came first (DES, 1978, ch. 2). When central government intervened subsequently, initially it was to supplement what voluntary agencies provided and, later on, to create a national system of special education provision. (Education for all children, however severe the difficulties they experienced, was not officially seen as an entitlement until the 1970s).

Early private foundations were designed to focus on training in work skills, moral improvement and the Christian religion (Oliphant, 2006), for example, the School of Instruction for the Indigent¹ Blind, established in 1791 in Liverpool, the School for the Indigent Blind in London founded in 1800 and the Asylum and School for the Indigent Blind at Norwich in 1805. The founding plan of the School of Industry in Liverpool included ‘to furnish the blind with employment that may prevent them from being burdens to their family and community …’ (Oliphant, 2006, p. 58). As recipients of public charity, the inmates should form ‘habits of industry’, with men making baskets, tablecloths and whips while the women spun yarn, made sail cloths and picked oakum. Misdeeds could be punished severely, and most children’s prospects were grim. In 1825, two boys were flogged for insolence and another for ‘making away with his yarns’, as the Liverpool School Visitors’ Books records (Oliphant, ibid.). It was not for another 30 years that educational aspects were introduced, for example, in the London Society for Teaching the Blind to Read in 1838.

Other charitable institutions were similarly limited in what they offered. Attempts were made to teach a trade to girls with physical disabilities from poor homes in the Cripples’ Home and Industrial School for Girls established in Marylebone in 1851, and to boys in the Training Home for Crippled Boys founded in Kensington in 1865. However, although the curriculum was predominantly training, ironically ‘many of their inmates failed to find employment on leaving and had recourse to begging’, as the Warnock Report (DES, 1978, p. 9) notes in relation to institutions for the deaf.

Apart from workhouses and infirmaries with secure care, there was little provision for those children who experienced serious difficulties in learning until the end of the nineteenth century. The first specific provision was a philanthropic asylum for ‘idiot’ children, the Earlswood Asylum for Idiots established at Highgate in 1847, in Britain. The National Archives records the aim of this asylum as:

not merely to take the Idiot and Imbecile under its care, but especially, by the skilful and earnest application of the best means in his education, to prepare him, as far as possible, for the duties and enjoyments of life [Bye-laws 1857].

(National Archives, The Royal Earlswood Hospital Records)

However, as Hall (2008, p. 1006) notes, the philanthropic optimism accompanying the founding of the Earlswood Asylum, that those with difficulties in learning could be ­educated, faded and

was replaced by a eugenicist preoccupation with fears of national decline, because of what was seen to be a link between mental defectiveness and criminality (Thomson, 1998; Wright and Digby, 1996). Mental defectives were seen as genetically tainted; they should be both separated from society, and prevented from reproducing.

By 1870, there were five asylums. Parents had to agree to their children being certified as ‘idiots’ in order to have them admitted, a label that attracted much odium (Cole, 1989, p. 22).

One exception to provision restricted to a focus on training for work and religion was the foundation of the College for the Blind Sons of Gentlemen in 1866 in Worcester. (In its 1872 report, ‘gentlemen’ were described as ‘belonging by birth or kinship to upper, the professional or the middle classes of society’ [Bell, 1967, p. 16]). Worcester College remained the only route for blin...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Historical and current perspectives on legislation and provision
• 2 Understanding and responding to the developing learning needs of young children
• 3 Understanding, assessing and addressing difficulties in communication and interaction
• 4 Understanding, assessing and addressing difficulties in cognition and learning
• 5 Understanding and addressing social, emotional and mental health needs
• 6 Understanding and addressing sensory and/or physical difficulties
• 7 Family perspectives
• 8 Inclusion of young children with SEND
• 9 Collaboration with other professionals
• Afterword
• References
• Index