dysTalk Special Educational Needs Policy - Talks - dysTalk

About the speaker: Matthew Taylor became Chief executive of the RSA in November 2006. Prior to this appointment, he was Chief Adviser on Political Strategy to the Prime Minister, Tony Blair.

Further information about this Talk

Read Matthew Taylor's blog.

Key Points Covered in This Talk:

• What governments can do to help children with special needs:
  1. The first priority for government policy is that the system should be built around the needs of the child rather than the child having to have their provision built around the rigidities of the system.
  2. We should recognise that special educational provision is not a kind of Cinderella service. Firstly it is extremely important and secondly mainstream schools can learn a lot from what is best about special educational needs. Arguably the whole agenda about personalisation was more developed in special schools because of the particular range of needs that those children had. Also special schools have understood the complex, multiple, plural nature of children's abilities and have needed to understand in a fuller way how you could capture children's efforts and attainment beyond a narrow academic focus. Because you are working with children who are unlikely ever to succeed in a narrow academic way it requires you to take a more holistic view of the child. This is the way that mainstream schools should be going as well.
  3. It is important for government to maintain the need for local variety in provision (because that's the route to innovation) but at the same time to acknowledge that parents (particularly parents with children with special needs who have all sorts of other issues in their lives) need clarity. Therefore you have to have a strategy in relation to the fact that in one area a child will receive a statement and in another they won't. So you have to balance those things which need to be reasonably uniform across the system with the encouragement of local variation.
  4. Whenever we talk about special educational provision we should always see it as something that has a great deal to add to mainstream education. Effective integration of children with special needs in mainstream schools can really help to shape the culture of those schools as environments which were tolerant and collaborative. Special education is not a problem to be solved by a system that would rather focus on children who didn't have special needs, it is a form of insight and a resource for the education system as a whole.