Evidence of Ethnic Disproportionality in Special Education in an English Population

Strand, Steve; Lindsay, Geoff

doi:10.1177/0022466908320461

Cited by 76 publications

(101 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…There was also a significant relationship between SLCN and social disadvantage: children with high socioeconomic disadvantage were 2.30 times more likely to have SLCN than children with low levels of socioeconomic disadvantage. This social gradient of SLCN is well established and is not unique to SLCN: other research has indicated a strong association with, for example, MLD and BESD (Strand and Lindsay, 2009). …”

Section: Prevalencementioning

confidence: 83%

“…LI is also more prevalent among children from more socially disadvantaged backgrounds (Department for Education, 2015). The relationship between LI and ethnicity or race is less well researched, but Strand and Lindsay (2009) report that Chinese, Bangladeshi, Black African, Black Caribbean, and Black other children were overrepresented for SLCN compared with White British children.…”

Section: Prevalence Of Language Impairmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The OR has advantages over simple percentage measures although the OR measure requires careful interpretation (Skiba et al, 2005;Strand and Lindsay, 2009). For example, there is no absolute level at which an OR may be considered significant in an educational sense.…”

Section: Unadjusted and Adjusted Odds Ratiosmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the present study, we highlight results where the odds of being identified with SLCN for students in an ethnic minority group were 1.33 times higher than for White British students (a ratio of 1.33:1 or higher), or where the odds for the ethnic minority group were 0.75 times lower than for White British students (a ratio 0.75:1 or lower). These differ from Strand and Lindsay (2009) where we used cutoffs of 1.5:1 and 0.67:1 as we now consider that we set the bar very high and that these revised cutoffs are more reasonable indications of marked disproportionality, and hence educational significance [see also Skiba et al (2004)]. …”

Section: Unadjusted and Adjusted Odds Ratiosmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Children with Language Impairment: Prevalence, Associated Difficulties, and Ethnic Disproportionality in an English Population

Lindsay

Strand

2016

Front. Educ.

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Language impairment (LI) is one of the most common types of special educational needs (SENs), not only as a child's primary need but also as a secondary domain associated with other types of SENs. LI is a risk factor for children's later development, being associated with enhanced behavioral, emotional, and social difficulties, in particular peer problems and emotional difficulties; literacy difficulties, including both reading and writing; and reduced levels of academic achievement. Risks arising from LI in early childhood may also have an impact through adolescence and into adult life. This study uses national data from the UK government's annual census of all students aged 5-16 years attending state schools in England at four time periods between 2005 and 2011, over 6 million students at each census. We analyze the data on students with speech, language, and communication needs (SLCN), the Department for Education's category for students with LI, to examine the overall prevalence of SLCN and the variations in prevalence associated with child factors namely, age, gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic disadvantage, and having English as an additional language, and with contextual factors, namely the school and local authority. We also examine disproportionality of identification of SLCN for different ethnic groups compared with White British children. We discuss the implications of our findings with respect to the current debates regarding the varied terminology for LI, including SLCN, and of a needs-based compared with diagnosis-based approach to assessing and making provision for children and young people with SENs.

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Section: Prevalencementioning

confidence: 83%

Section: Prevalence Of Language Impairmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Unadjusted and Adjusted Odds Ratiosmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Unadjusted and Adjusted Odds Ratiosmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Children with Language Impairment: Prevalence, Associated Difficulties, and Ethnic Disproportionality in an English Population

Lindsay

Strand

2016

Front. Educ.

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“…These include both large scale studies of general populations of children, indicating the very powerful effects of socioeconomic disadvantage (Strand, 2014), parenting (Kiernan and Mensah, 2011), and school effects (Teddlie and Reynolds, 2000;Strand, 2016), which shape children's opportunities for optimal development; and also analyses of total populations of children with a range of SEN, particularly with respect to social disadvantage (Strand and Lindsay, 2009;Department for Education, 2016b).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Grand Challenge: Priorities for Research in Special Educational Needs

Lindsay

2016

Front. Educ.

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The early academic progress of children with special educational needs

Parsons¹,

Platt

2017

British Educational Res J

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Children with special educational needs (SEN) are known to experience lower average educational attainment than other children during their school years. But we have less insight into how far their poorer educational outcomes stem from their original starting points or from failure to progress during school. The extent to which early identification with SEN delivers support that enables children who are struggling academically to make appropriate progress is subject to debate. This is complicated by the fact that children with SEN are more likely to be growing up in disadvantaged families and face greater levels of behavioural and peer problems, factors which themselves impact attainment and progress through school. In this paper, we evaluate the academic progress of children with SEN in England, drawing on a large-scale nationally representative longitudinal UK study, the Millennium Cohort Study, linked to administrative records of pupil attainment. Controlling for key child, family and environmental factors, and using the SEN categories employed at the time of data collection, we first establish that children identified with SEN in 2008, when they were age 7, had been assessed with lower academic competence when they started school. We evaluate their progress between ages 5-7 and 7-11. We found that children identified with SEN at age 7 tended to be those who had made less progress between ages 5 and 7 than their comparable peers. However, children with SEN continued to make less progress than their similarly able peers between ages 7 and 11. Implications are discussed. . A key issue is whether the average poorer levels of attainment in later school life of children with SEN reflect the persistence of earlier problems, or whether they reveal a failure to progress at the same rate as peers with similar early cognitive skills, which would result in a widening gap through the school years. While the former scenario would appear consistent with identification with SEN in the first place, the latter raises questions about the effectiveness of SEN support.It could be argued that it is unreasonable to expect children identified with SEN to make the same rate of progress as their similarly able peers, especially for those with needs that particularly impede learning. However, taking the overarching-and diverse-SEN category as a whole, while we may not expect equality of attainment between children with and without SEN, it seems less evident why children with SEN who have reached a particular educational level should make less subsequent progress than other children attaining that level, especially if they are receiving additional support. While recognising that progress is itself a complex and contested concept, as we operationalise it here it provides a reasonable indication of ongoing development and realisation of potential among children who in past eras might have been 'written off' as benchmarked against those with comparable levels of initial academic attainment.Department for Education statistics (DfE, 2015) in...

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Evidence of Ethnic Disproportionality in Special Education in an English Population

Cited by 76 publications

References 33 publications

Children with Language Impairment: Prevalence, Associated Difficulties, and Ethnic Disproportionality in an English Population

Children with Language Impairment: Prevalence, Associated Difficulties, and Ethnic Disproportionality in an English Population

Grand Challenge: Priorities for Research in Special Educational Needs

The early academic progress of children with special educational needs

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