Inclusion, Special Educational Needs, Disability and Physical Education

Special Educational Needs, Special Needs and Disability

In the UK, as elsewhere, there is a tendency on the part of teachers, policy makers, government officials and academics (see, for example, Vickerman et al., 2003) to conflate [Page 221]the terms SEN, special needs and disability and use them interchangeably even though they may be used to refer to different things and used in different ways in different contexts. We will deal with each of these in turn.

SEN is a legally defined term that refers to the school-based learning needs of pupils that arise from a wide range of difficulties – including cognitive, physical, sensory, communicative or behavioural difficulties as well as those who are perceived to be specially gifted in one way or another1 – and is used to identify (typically in a statement of SEN) those pupils for whom some kind of special educational provision needs to be made (Audit Commission, 2002; Department for Education and Skills (DfES), 2001a: 6). More specifically, while pupils with SEN – like all pupils – are not a homogenous group and ‘are part of a continuum of learners’ (Garner and Dwyfor Davies, 2001: 26) they are typically considered to have a learning difficulty of one kind or another if they:

• ♦
  have a significantly greater difficulty in learning than the majority of children of the same age; or
• ♦
  have a disability which prevents or hinders them from making use of educational facilities of a kind generally provided for children of the same age in schools within the area of the local education authority;
• ♦
  are under compulsory school age and fall within the definitions above or would so do if special educational provision was not made for them (DfES, 2001a: 6).

While this conceptual distinction of learning difficulties is useful insofar as it provides an indication of the criteria that help teachers to identify pupils with SEN, it is equally important to realise that a (falsely dichotomous) distinction also tends to be made between two broad groups of pupils: those with SEN and those with SEN in PE (Department of Education and Science (DES)/Welsh Office (WO), 1991). Typically, the latter refers to almost all pupils with movement difficulties – many of whom will not have a formal statement of SEN under the 1981 Education Act – as well as those who may have an SEN related to some or all aspects of PE, while the former refers to those pupils who may have SEN in subjects such as science or maths but not PE (DES/WO, 1991).

...