Special Needs in the Early Years

Snapshots of Practice

Sheila Wolfendale

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134612468
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book celebrates good practice in the area of early years and special needs by bringing together authors who are either practitioners or researchers, from a range of different and diverse early years settings including nurseries and units providing special provision. They describe their work with young children who have different and distinctive special needs and disabilities.

Chapter 1

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Profiling early years and special needs

Celebrations of practice

Sheila Wolfendale

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Introducing the book

This book celebrates good and innovative practice in the area of early years and special needs. It brings together authors who are practitioners or researchers from a range of different and diverse early-years/pre-school settings, including nurseries, units, and special needs provision. They describe their work with or on behalf of young children who have different and distinctive special needs and disabilities.

The profile of special needs in the early years has risen recently, as a consequence of special educational needs legislation, increased provision to meet special needs in the early years and growing expertise and skills on the part of early-years workers and practitioners. The Government requires early-years providers to be able to meet children's special needs in their settings, and local early-years partnerships must state how providers can meet special needs.

This chapter aims, first of all, to introduce the reader to the thematic organisation of the book, and then goes on to consider a number of key developments in the broad area of early years and special needs which, collectively, attest to a demonstrable shift in policy and practice at all levels of provision.

Themes and topics

The chapters are grouped into four main areas. The first three chapters describe centre-based provision for young children with special educational needs. Pamela Stanier gives an account of a special nursery centre, Moira Evans and colleagues use a case study approach to recount how a young child with Down's Syndrome is integrated into an under-fives education centre, and Pamela Barnes presents issues to do with working with the young child with special needs in the hospital setting.

The second main theme is that of early intervention approaches with a focus on working with parents. Two chapters epitomise this theme: Joy Jarvis and Karen Riley describe how parents of young children developed a support group and Fleur Griffiths gives an account of parental involvement in a multiprofessional intervention for pre-school children with communication difficulties.

A third theme explored in the next two chapters takes a questioning and conceptual approach to early-years and special needs phenomena. Helen Penn asks ‘what is normal?’ and her chapter reviews ideas about normality and disability, taking an international perspective. Theodora Papatheodorou looks at the underlying principles of a number of different theoretical approaches to behaviour problems in the early years and the relevance of such conceptualisations to management approaches.

A fourth major theme is that of research illuminating and developing practice. Three chapters illustrate this symbiotic relationship. Wendy Lynas and Susan Turner describe a research study into early intervention for hearing-impaired children in families of ethnic minority origin. Andrew Lockett takes a critical, research-based look at assessment practice, and Jo Fieldhouse and colleagues describe how the Effective Early Learning Project was adopted and trialled for use by teachers and families working with young children with special educational needs.

The final chapter, written by Sylvia Walker and colleagues, reflects contemporary approaches to collaboration and partnership work between and among ‘stakeholders’ and providers.

Collectively the chapters exemplify contemporary practice, and an increasing, pervasive profile of special needs within the early-years realm. The provision-based chapters mirror moves towards inclusive educational practice, as other examples attest (Dickiens and Denziloe 1998: Alderson 1999) and the research and practice-linked chapters likewise attest to a growing acceptance of evidence-based practice. These and other themes are explored below.

‘Snapshots of practice’, the subtitle of this book, reflects early-years/special needs practice at this point in time. We hope that the book will serve the dual purpose of encapsulating current work by practitioners and researchers, and providing inspiration for the direction of future provision.

Reconsidering the state and status of special educational needs (sen) in the early years

An earlier text (Wolfendale 1997a) examined how, over recent years, the status of SEN in the early years has risen. This author traces how special educational needs legislation has incorporated key provisions for assessing special needs and for subsequent intervention, and how the Department for Education and Employment's 1994 Code of Practice provided a blueprint for action. Its section, ‘Assessments and statements for under fives’ incorporated early years/SEN into the overall staged framework of the code.

A revised Code of Practice will come into effect during the academic year 2000–2001 and the revised under-fives section will contain guidance that reflects the implications of recent policy developments in relation to the under fives. For example, since the advent of the Code of Practice in 1994, the requirement to have ‘due regard’ to its provisions was extended to private nurseries and all under-fives providers. Also, local Early Years Development and Childcare Partnerships must, within their Plans, indicate how children with SEN will be catered for within both childcare and early education. Likewise Baseline Assessment schemes (mandatory for children on entry to school since 1998) accredited by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA, see references) must be sensitive to SEN. Such schemes should show teachers which pupils need a targeted teaching strategy or further classroom-based assessment, perhaps leading to specific support from the school or from other agencies.

QCA has also revised the Desirable Outcomes for Children's Learning, creating a foundation stage and reforming early learning goals for the end of the reception year. The revised Desirable Outcomes (QCA 1999) are more sensitive than was the first version to the need to identify special educational needs as early on as possible, and the curriculum guidance and exemplar materials reflect this. This guidance will also be reflected within the revised Code of Practice.

The Government's Green Paper on SEN (DfEE 1997) referred to ‘the new emphasis’ being placed on early identification and intervention. Its philosophy was expressed thus: ‘early diagnosis and appropriate intervention improve the prospects of children with SEN and reduce the need for expensive interventions later on. For some children, giving more effective attention to early signs of difficulties can prevent the development of SEN’ (DfEE 1997:13).

This rhetoric was followed up in the Government's Programme of Action (DfEE 1998a) which cross-refers to initiatives, such as Early Years Development and childcare plans referred to above, and also to SURE START (see p. 7).

Many readers will have witnessed and contributed to the rising profile of SEN in the early years and the initiatives reported in this book provide evidence of a widespread view that this area is no longer marginalised and of low priority.

Vulnerability in the early years: towards an inclusive view

During the 1980s and 1990s there was much discussion and debate in professional literature about the precise definition of ‘special needs’, ‘special educational needs’, the term used in the 1981 (then 1993, now subsumed into the 1996) Education Act, and ‘in need’ the definitional term adopted in the 1989 Children Act.

Distinct unease about such labels has pervaded practice too, but practitioners, often working within the legislative frameworks, have had to adopt a pragmatic, accepting attitude. Sue Roffey (1999:14) provides a useful summary table showing the legislative guidance, including recent early-years legislation and provision. In fact, the 1994 Code of Practice, with its comprehensive descriptors of different ‘conditions’, wittingly or unwittingly brought back the notion of ‘categories’.

The DfEE Green Paper, referred to above, draws attention to the legal definition of ‘special educational needs’ but at the same time points out that this term ‘can be misleading and lead to unhelpful assumptions’ (DfEE 1997:12). The fact that SEN is a slippery, elusive concept is borne out by the remark that appears later on the same page:

whether or not a child has SEN will therefore depend both on the individual and on local circumstances. It may be entirely consistent with the law for a child to be said to have SEN in one school, but not in another.

(DfEE 1997:12)

As far as young children with identified or suspected SEN are concerned, the Green Paper is of the view that they are at an educational disadvantage, and not surprisingly this theme is echoed in the SEN Programme of Action (DfEE 1998a), where the premium is on early identification and intervention.

Implicit in the various conceptions of ‘special needs’ and ‘educational disadvantage’, is the vulnerability of young children thus designated. Sinclair et al. (1997) depict the journey through childhood using a Snakes and Ladders metaphor, which graphically describes the early or endemic vulnerability of some children, disadvantaged socially, economically, educationally.

Recent government and local initiatives now acknowledge explicitly that provision targetted at young children and their families (Carpenter 1997) cannot effectively be uni-dimensional, that is, the monopoly of one statutory service. The idea of ‘joined up’ policies epitomises joint service planning and delivery, with the full inclusion of all partners, or ‘stakeholders’, as all participants are sometimes described. Most chapters in this book epitomise inclusivity and partnership and are vibrant examples of how policies ‘trickle down’ to practice settings where practitioners and children alike spend their working days.

The coherence of a number of themes denoting partnership approaches towards young children and their families is explored below.

Intervention and prevention: an inclusive approach

Early intervention typically has these primary goals:

• to support families to support their children's development

• to promote children's development in key domains (cognitive, social, physical, emotional, linguistic)

• to promote children's coping competence

• to prevent the emergence of future problems

In the early-years/SEN realm intervention is purposeful and designed to effect as close a match as possible between a young child's identified special needs and that provision or resource which will meet his or her needs and best facilitate learning and development. The interventions should manifestly make a difference (see Soriano 1998 for a review of early intervention trends in seventeen European countries).

The recognition that intervening early on in the lives of vulnerable ‘at risk’ children is socially and educationally justifiable has been the primary rationale behind many social and educational initiatives for around thirty years (see also Wolfendale and Bryans 1979). Often these intiati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• 1 Profiling early years and special needs: Celebrations of practice
• 2 Working together in different ways: Rodney House School
• 3 Integrating a child with Down's Syndrome into an Under-Fives Education Centre
• 4 Working with the young child who has special needs in the hospital setting
• 5 'Listen hear': Parents supporting parents with deaf children
• 6 Research and practice: An evaluation of an education improvement strategy to support teachers and parents of young children with special educational needs
• 7 Play partners: Parental involvement in a pre-school project for children with communication difficulties
• 8 What is normal?
• 9 Behaviour problems in the early years: The conceptualisation of behaviour problems and its relevance to management approaches
• 10 Early intervention for hearing-impaired children in families of ethnic minority origin
• 11 A contextual orientation to assessment
• 12 Sheffield Early Childhood Association: A snapshot of Sheffield Practice
• Index