Identifying Special Needs

Diagnostic Checklists for Profiling Individual Differences

Glynis Hannell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138491083
• eBook ISBN: 9781351011358
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Identifying Special Needs provides expert guidance to recognising and categorising the specific characteristics of a range of special needs. Drawing on her experience as an educational psychologist and special education teacher, Glynis Hannell provides easy-to-use checklists to help teachers quickly and accurately gather information to determine whether individual students need specialised attention and services, and guidelines on how to provide this help.

This unique book offers diagnostic criteria and supporting notes for a wide range of special educational needs, including autism spectrum disorders, communication disorders, social and emotional issues, cognitive disabilities and specific learning disorders. Relevant to both primary and secondary school students, all checklists can be photocopied for ease of use and downloaded from the companion website. This fully revised third edition includes additional information on guiding conversations with parents, children and colleagues, as well as advice to parents on how to select outside professionals.

The practical checklists and resources help teachers and educational professionals to:

Identify and understand special needs

• screen any student for possible special needs;
• understand the causes and characteristics of various types of special needs;
• link classroom observations to diagnostic criteria used by specialists.

Profile individual differences

• create accurate and comprehensive profiles for individual students, including positive characteristics;
• record each student's unique pattern of development within a special needs 'label'.

Work together with colleagues and parents

• quickly record important information and avoid writing time-consuming reports;
• request and prepare for further assessment and intervention;
• coordinate information from several teachers or professionals;
• involve parents in observing and discussing their child's pattern of strengths and challenges;
• plan effective, inclusive intervention in the classroom setting;
• follow up with recommended further reading, websites and professional references.

Based on internationally accepted diagnostic criteria, and relevant for educational professionals worldwide, this is an essential book for teachers, psychologists and other specialists to ensure that the children and adolescents in their care receive the support they need to succeed.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Policy and politics

Motivated by the need to provide appropriate educational opportunities and ensure freedom from discrimination, nations around the world have developed similar approaches to identifying and supporting students with special needs. This reflects the established international standards encapsulated in documents such as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) and the Salamanca Statement and Framework for Action on Special Needs Education (1994).

The provision of appropriate education for students with special needs is determined by government policy and enacted by law. Laws relating to special needs generally focus on the obligation to provide every student with an appropriate, inclusive education in the least restrictive environment possible.

Whilst policy framework and funding for special needs depends on legislative changes, such changes are almost invariably driven by an evolving, professional and community understanding of what constitutes best practice in identifying and then meeting the special needs of students.

From time to time governments amend the laws to reflect these changing ideas. In the United States the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) passed in the United States Congress 1990 was superseded by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act in 2004. In 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) replaced the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2002.

In the United Kingdom the Department for Education and Department of Health jointly issued the Special Educational Needs and Disability Code of Practice (2014). This introduced very significant changes to the provision of special education and associated health and social services in the United Kingdom. The National Curriculum (2013) brought further policy direction to the way in which teaching and learning was approached for all students. The Children and Families Act (2014) contributed further to the changing landscape.

However, it has to be said that there is often a disparity between the ideals set out in the legislation and the level of funding, resourcing and expertise available to support special needs students, their families and their teachers at their local level.

Meeting special educational needs: general principles

Despite variations in policies and inadequacies in resourcing there are also common characteristics in good practice around the world. The contents of this book facilitate the pursuit of good practice.

Parents and their children participate in decision making

The right of parents to play an active part in the development of an appropriate program for their own child is universally reflected in governments’ special education policies and practices. Similarly, students themselves have the right to contribute, where possible, to the decisions made regarding their own education.

There is now acknowledgement that the students and their families are not passive recipients of services determined by ‘experts’ but essential contributors to the process of negotiating an appropriate, effective and acceptable program to address their individual special needs.

The checklists in this book are designed to be ‘user friendly’ for parents and where practicable their children. Discussion guides are provided to facilitate structured conversations with parents and students. The recommended reading and websites can be useful resources for parents. A guide to help parents avoid untrustworthy, private ‘therapists’ is provided.

Education is inclusive and individualized

In the past students with special needs were often segregated into special schools or classrooms and in extreme cases not provided with any education at all. Today it is given that every student is entitled to an inclusive education. Unless there are very special circumstances it would be expected that a student with special needs will attend their local school and be placed within the regular classroom.

All students, with and without identified special needs, are unique individuals. It is recognized that teachers are at their most effective when they differentiate their teaching and the classroom program to respond to these individual differences.

The checklists in this book help to collate information about each student’s unique pattern of strengths and difficulties and facilitate a formal diagnosis if this is applicable.

The student’s eligibility for resources such as additional teaching assistance, equipment or specialist therapy will be assessed on the basis of their identified needs, including information generated by the checklists.

Professionals supporting students with Special Educational Needs

Classroom teachers

Without doubt the key professional for a student with Special Educational Needs is their class teacher. This is the person who will have most contact with the student and who will, generally, have the primary responsibility for ensuring that the student receives an inclusive, individualized program which is appropriate to their needs. Classroom teachers are supported by more specialist colleagues as appropriate.

Specialist teachers and educational advisors

Specialist teachers and educational advisers have very important roles to play in ensuring that students’ special needs are fully addressed. Their titles seem to change on a regular basis and they go by different names in different countries. For instance, in the UK they are currently called Special Educational Needs Coordinators (SENCOs) and in the United States they are called Specialist Instructional Support Personnel (SISP). Specialist teachers and advisors may be within the school or may be supporting several schools in the same district.

Medical and other specialists

School psychologists, student counsellors, speech and language therapists, physiotherapists, paediatricians, psychiatrists, social workers and other experts are likely to be part of the advisory team.

Information about the medical and other specialists who may be involved in various categories of Special Educational Need are given in the supporting notes which follow each checklist. In the UK the integration of Education and Health Services is underpinned by the Special Educational Needs and Disability Code of Practice (2014).

Diagnosing and profiling Special Educational Needs

In our efforts to treat every student as an individual there is sometimes a reluctance to use diagnostic categories or ‘labels’ for fear that we will then ‘box’ the child or adolescent into a stereotype.

This does both us and the student a disservice. In just the same way that we would expect our medical doctor to treat us as an individual but also to diagnose our condition correctly, so too students have the right to be correctly diagnosed (where a diagnosis is applicable) and for this diagnosis to be used in combination with an understanding of them as individuals.

The profiles created by the checklists in this book explicitly demonstrate that every child, even with a given ‘label’, is unique and has their own individual characteristics that need to be considered at every stage of planning, delivering and evaluating their educational experiences.

Using parent and teacher observations as a valuable resource

While formal testing and assessment are important in determining a student’s needs, vital information also comes from naturalistic observations made, day in and day out, by parents and class teachers.

Such informal observations can be hard to ‘capture’ and organize. It is all too easy for valuable information to be overlooked in the assessment process. This need not be the case. The checklists in this book offer a practical and efficient way to record real life observations of parents and teachers. Focused on clusters of specific behaviours the observations help to build an accurate and useful profile of a student’s special needs.

Diagnosing Special Educational Needs

A key advantage of a diagnostic ‘label’ is that it creates an instant opportunity to find out more about the condition from the experts in that field. There is a wealth of reliable, evidence-based information available from reputable sources such as scientific journals, researchers, academics and recognized professional experts in their field.

References to scientific articles and books, recommendations for further reading and information on trustworthy websites are provided in the supporting notes which follow each checklist.

Profiling Special Educational Needs

Every student diagnosed with any type of special need has their own unique profile within that category of special need. Identifying a student’s unique profile of strengths and special needs is an essential beginning point for the teacher and the specialist advisors.

The checklists provided in this book allow for a broad diagnostic category to be identified and then for the student’s unique profile within that category to be mapped out.

The diagnostic checklists

Soundly based and consistent with international diagnostic categories

The checklists in this book develop detailed, diagnostic profiles of individual students, capturing the real-life characteristics of the student’s disability, disorder or difficulty. The checklists neatly connect the informal observations from home and school with diagnostic criteria used by specialists.

The checklists are all soundly based on current research and have been refined in consultation with paediatricians, child psychiatrists, psychologists, speech pathologists, classroom and special education teachers, parents and caregivers, and organizations dealing with specific difficulties or disorders. They are intended to supplement (but not replace) standardized tests and assessment tools that may be used in determining a student’s special needs.

The checklists are generally consistent (if applicable) with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 5th Edition (DSM-V) 2013, which is recognized internationally as the standard diagnostic reference. Other international classification systems such as the World Health Organization’s Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health for Children and Youth (ICF-CY) 2007 are also reflected, where appropriate, within the text.

The checklists for giftedness, low self-esteem, maltreatment and immaturity do not have a direct link with DSM-V categories but are included as useful and relevant resources for teachers and other professionals.

The checklists can be used for students between the ages of 4 and 18.

Cognition and learning

Intellectual disability 18–9

Gifted and ta...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Identifying Special Needs
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Cognition and learning
• 3 Communication
• 4 Developmental
• 5 Autism Spectrum Disorder
• 6 Social, emotional and mental health
• 7 Sensory
• 8 Supplementary Resources
• Index