Sandra McNally and colleagues provide the first comprehensive evaluation of 'special educational needs' programmes.

Sandra McNally

English

Research Papers in Economics

CentrePiece Spring 2009
20
Around one in five pupils in England benefit from ‘special
educational needs’ (SEN) programmes. These consist of
asking schools to identify pupils with learning difficulties
and having them adapt teaching to their specific learning
difficulties with the help of the SEN Code of Practice. 
Led by a SEN coordinator, interventions are decided and
conducted at school level and include one-to-one tuition
and teaching assistance. The SEN team typically receives
resources from the school budget to address the needs of
SEN students. The amount of funding dedicated to SEN
pupils is decided by the school. Overall SEN expenditure
amounts to about £1,400 per SEN pupil on average
(although this varies between schools). Notionally, this is
about 30% of overall school funding per targeted pupil.
SEN programmes are designed to address the specific
difficulties of each pupil. They are targeted at individuals,
rather than whole classes or schools. But while this is
potentially an attractive feature of the policy, it may also
generate individual stigma and, by labelling pupils with
relatively minor difficulties as ‘SEN’, could be
counterproductive. 
The second basic feature of SEN programmes is that they
are largely defined at the local level by head teachers. The
obvious advantage of such decentralised policies is that
they can better take account of local constraints and
better use local resources.
One potential issue is that the policy may become context-
specific. For example, a child with significant learning
difficulties may nevertheless not have access to a remedial
programme if she attends a school where there are a lot
of children with learning difficulties of whom only a
proportion can be funded by the SEN budget. Conversely,
a child with only moderate learning difficulties may have
access to a remedial programme in a school where very
few have learning difficulties.
To what extent is access to SEN programmes context-
specific and what is the net effect of such a highly
decentralised programme on pupil performance? Our
research sheds light on these fundamental issues using the
National Pupil Database conducted in England each year
since 2002.
First, we show that there are very significant inequalities in
the probability of being labelled as SEN across children
with similar learning difficulties at age 7 but attending
different schools. Importantly, these differences are much
less significant for pupils who achieve relatively good
performance or relatively poor performance early on in
primary school than for pupils in between these two
extremes.
Pupils who achieve relatively good performance at age 7
are almost never labelled as SEN regardless of their school
context. Similarly, pupils who achieve very poor
performance at age 7 are almost always labelled as SEN
regardless of their school context.
In contrast, the gap in access to SEN is very significant for
pupils with moderate difficulties. These pupils are much
more often labelled as SEN when they attend a ‘high-
context’ school (where the average level of age 7 test
There is much debate in education about remedial policies for pupils
with learning difficulties. Sandra McNally and colleagues provide the
first comprehensive evaluation of ‘special educational needs’
programmes, the highly decentralised policy adopted in England and
intended to address the specific difficulties of each of these children.
Every child matters? 
The impact of ‘special 
educational needs’ 
programmes
in brief...
School context generates huge differences in
access to resources for children with moderate
learning difficulties early on in primary schoolCentrePiece Spring 2009
21
attainment is relatively high) than when they attend a
‘low-context’ school. The decentralised design of SEN
policy generates significant inequalities in access to
remedial resources across children with similar (moderate)
difficulties at age 7. 
Second, we show that, surprisingly, the specific inequality
across schools in access to SEN resources for pupils with
moderate difficulties early on in primary school does not
generate any specific variation in academic performance
at the end of primary school. In other words, the school
context generates huge differences in access to SEN
resources for children with moderate difficulties early on in
primary school (compared with other types of children),
but no difference at all in performance at the end of
primary school.
This result suggests that there is no net effect of being
labelled as SEN on the performance of pupils with
moderate difficulties. Thus, SEN programmes do not have
the desired effect of improving the attainment of targeted
pupils, relative to their situation had they not been
targeted. In our study, this ‘null effect’ is identified for
children with less serious ‘special needs’ (who make up a
large proportion of the overall SEN population).
The analysis suggests that remedial programmes are not
working for a significant proportion of children labelled as
SEN. The UK government has endorsed an ‘every child
matters’ policy agenda. Our results suggest that the
means through which this is realised for vulnerable
children needs to be reconsidered.
There is no net effect of being
labelled as SEN (‘special educational
needs’) on the performance of pupils
with moderate difficulties
This article summarises ‘Every Child Matters? An
Evaluation of “Special Educational Needs” Programmes
in England’ by Francois Keslair, Eric Maurin and Sandra
McNally, a forthcoming CEE Discussion Paper.
Francois Keslair, who is currently visiting CEP , is a
PhD student at the Paris School of Economics. Eric
Maurin is a professor at the Paris School of Economics
and a CEE research associate. Sandra McNally is
director of CEP’s education and skills programme and a
deputy director of CEE.

In Brief: Every child matters?

http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/cp285.pdf

In Brief: Every child matters?

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