THE BOY CAN'T HELP IT

Alexander Wade on the mysterious growth in the number of children with 'special educational needs'

`HOPE those children weren't too much of a problem,' says the primary school teach- er in whose classroom I am standing as, an observing trainee. 'They're all special needs.' I look back in astonishment at the six affable nine-year-old boys with whom I have been doing numeracy problems (what used to be called maths) and wonder what their special needs might be. 'All behavioural,' adds the teacher. I have been sitting with these children for half an hour and have experienced no behavioural diffi- culties whatsoever.

The number of children registered 'spe- cial' has risen from 11 per cent to nearly 20 per cent in primary schools over the past ten years. Indeed, this 20 per cent is a fulfilment of the suggestion in the 1978 Warnock report on handicapped children that just such a number of pupils had 'spe- cial needs'. The quota has been filled, but what are these needs?

`Special educational needs' (SEN) is one of those terms that you've heard of and hope that someone, somewhere, knows what it means. When I first embarked on my teacher-training course, after several years in another career, I imagined that it meant some kind of handicap. This is true to an extent. Special-needs policies recog- nise various specific educational difficul- ties, of which dyslexia is the most common. However, this is not the whole story.

What I was unprepared for was the large number of pupils registered as 'special needs' for behavioural reasons. Dr John Marks of the Educational Research Trust suggested in a recent report that this might account for as many as three quarters of special-needs registrations, and that the criteria for these registrations are 'vague'. From my experience this is a gross under- statement.

The co-ed primary school I recently observed as part of my course is no inner- city failing dumping-ground. As I walked to the entrance, past all the four-by-fours disgorging crisply uniformed children, I almost felt guilty that I hadn't been assigned a more run-down area. It came as a big surprise to me then that more or less the first thing the headmistress told me was that 24 per cent of the children were registered as having special needs. The second thing she told me was equally alarming: I would have to use the ladies' lavatory as there was no adult gents. My staggered expression obviously betrayed me. 'There are no male staff,' she explained. At the time, I thought that the large number of children registered as hav- ing special needs and the lack of male staff were unconnected. I was wrong.

I would spend a day in each classroom observing and working with children of each age-group, and it was often not until the end of the lesson that the class teacher would tell me that I had been sitting with the 'problem children', all of whom were registered SEN by the school's special- needs co-ordinator. None of them seemed to have what I would have called learning difficulties, or even behavioural problems. Noisy, yes; boisterous, yes; hardly surprising, as they were all boys. There were never any girls at the special-needs tables.

As someone with experience of teach- ing at a boys' prep school, and as the father of two small boys, these so-called `special needs' children seemed to me, in the majority of cases, to be completely normal boys. Rowdy, given half a chance, but for a boy this is par for the course, not 'special'.

Suddenly I started noticing other things.

In Mitre I'll stick to single-sex teaching.' I was asked countless times during the week by the pupils whether I was a head- master or an inspector — it didn't seem to occur to them that I could be a teacher. It was always the boys in each class who want- ed me to sit next to them because 'we hard- ly ever have a man in the class'. The fact that there was no gents didn't just say `there aren't any male staff; it said 'we don't expect that there ever will be any male staff.

There is no coincidence here. The fact that all the staff are female is, I believe, directly related to the large numbers of boys designated 'special needs' for nebu- lous 'behavioural reasons'. Feminine behaviour is the model; it is the standard by which all children's behaviour is judged. And boys behave differently from girls that's just the way they are.

During one assembly, the headmistress of this primary school asked the children: `What does the colour blue make you think of?' A little girl who answered 'flowers' was praised. A boy who enthusiastically answered `Chelsea'— the answer which, to be honest, had been on the tip of my own tongue — was given a pained look and told to think again.

When I asked one teacher what particu- lar characteristics her SEN pupils exhibit- ed, she told me that they often shouted out in class, pushed to the front of the class- room and were very physical in the play- ground. Ill-disciplined, perhaps. Special needs — really?

At the end of the week, I asked the headmistress about her special-needs pupils and, in particular, how many of those designated as having behavioural problems were boys. Flicking through the list as though it were a Littlewoods cata- logue, she said, 'I'm sure there are a few girls here somewhere. . . ' Then, a few moments later, she looked up and said, `No, there aren't. Actually, they're all boys.' She didn't seem worried by this fact, nor by the high proportion of special-needs chil- dren in her school in the first place.

The truth is, there are no disincentives for schools to register children as special needs. Having a high proportion of special- needs children can only enhance a school's position in league tables and bring in extra funding. And a recent House of Lords rul- ing threatens to tip the balance still further. The law lords unanimously held that if schools negligently fail to provide facilities for special-needs children, they can be sued. What chance is there then of reduc- ing registrations?

These are worrying times to be a man if the so-called masculinity debate is to be believed. Maleness, apparently, is stigma- tised everywhere. But, as adults fight over who should wear the trousers, spare a thought for the ranks of boys in co-ed pri- mary schools who have no male role mod- els, are expected to conform to a female environment, and who are routinely desig- nated as problem children.