If you care enough, I urge you, as I have just done again, to read the 6-part blog post by Andrew Sutton "The Future of SEN I - VI
The future of SEN – I.I recommend reading each of the posts. But if you cannot manage that let me bring you to "The future of SEN - V". Here, Andrew invites us to "step outside the exhausted 'SEN'' paradigm" and to "face some previously unfaced questions". Inviting us to do likewise, he then presents his own list of "unfaced questions".
Here, with thanks to Andrew for spelling it out, is his list:
- There is no operationalisable taxonomy of educational and developmental disorders.
- There is no common theoretical structure under which to discuss them.
- There is not even a common vocabulary for that.
- There is no special pedagogy (no general pedagogy either!).
- There is no explicit social compact on what the schools (all schools) are there for.
- There are no explicit, concrete goals for the adulthoods of most children with educational/developmental disorders.
- There is little or no common understanding of the relationship between teaching and learning (writ especially large in the case of children who are 'special', in whatever way).
- For most such children, contrary perhaps to unquestioned myth, there is little or no effective knowledge base on what to do about them.
- There is, however, a large workforce dependent upon the myth that there is.
- There is little relevant, practical, technical knowledge available in the existing services: there is little relevant knowledge in 'academe' either.
- Society tends to regard such children to a large degree through the problems that they pose for the state education service.
- Contradictorily, especially where children are young or developmentally disordered, a great rhetoric has recently arisen about the health and social-care 'needs' of these children.
- This rhetoric may in effect be operationalised largely through the problems posed by marshalling over-elaborate state services (see for example the Audit' Commission's report on Sure Start this week).
- There are no quick fixes to most individual children's educational/developmental problems – correspondingly there will be no quick fixes for remediating or compensating for the inadequacies of existing services, or in establishing new paradigms for services to succeed them.
- There is no money to address most of these problems according to pesent ways of thinking.
- There are but islets of political will to do so.
- Realisable money and effective political will are likely here, as elsewhere, to be socially skewed.
- To an overwhelming degree, it is only parents who love their children and hope for them – parents can do without the additional (often crushing) burden of negative, dysfunctional services, but may be vastly helped by collaboration with those who have relevant and effective knowledge and orientation.
- Etc., etc., etc. This lot for starters, anyway. I could doubtless go on!
