Gove on special needs

As so often, Michael Gove conflates and confuses the issues when he says that too many children are classified as having special needs and that this is used as an "excuse for failure" by schools.

Schools use the existing legislative framework because they are required to do so. The framework has its flaws but at its heart it is concerned with ensuring that children who have additional needs have those needs identified and met. And in my experience this is what schools and local authorities aim to achieve, and there are checks and balances to make sure that the system works in practice. There will always be disputes over diagnoses, both between professionals and between professionals and parents. The system allows for this, and generally works well up to the age of 19.

Gove wants 90 per cent of children to leave school with five good GCSEs. This is a laudable ambition, though its achievability depends in part on the nature of the examination – and of course Gove is tinkering with that.

He is reported in the Telegraph as saying: "I think that there are some students who are living with disability or special educational needs that creates a level of cognitive impairment that they cannot meet the academic levels that will lead to higher education."

In the absence of evidence, I shall assume that the grammatical infelicity was introduced in the reporting, but the meaning is clear - if you can't get into university you must be suffering from cognitive impairment. That seems to me both wrong and pernicious as a notion. And note the "I think" – surely he has the evidence?

He goes on to say: "There's no reason why a child who is living with visual impairment or who suffers from deafness or hearing loss would not achieve academically."

This is often true but not always – often visual or hearing impairments are linked to other cognitive impairment. Worse, though, is the assumption that because a child is "only" visually or hearing impaired they should success and therefore do not have special needs. This is also absolutely pernicious. Of course children with sensory impairment can succeed - David Blunkett and Jack Ashley just for two examples. They succeeded, though, with the support of the education system that enabled them to overcome the extra challenges they faced.

As an education and children's services director I was well aware of the work undertaken by the access team, which worked tirelessly to enable children with sensory or physical impairment to access and succeed at mainstream schools.

Always in fear of conspiracies, I fear that Gove is seeking to remove these children from the category of special needs, using that as an excuse to reduce funding for them through the new central local authority grant. That will do this group of children immeasurable harm.