[senco-forum] SPLD or ASD - morphed into categorising as a topic in general

Hi Maggie,

You are right - I did assume you were asking only about SEN.  However, the
system I outlined would work for any child.  It compares children to a
normal distribution - the Bell curve.  Attainment is compared against
potential.  The second case I described illustrates that this method needs
to be used with an awareness that for some children there are blocks to
learning that mask IQ... for example 1 in 5 children have a vision
difficulty that is undiagnosed according to UK optometrists.  There will be
huge numbers of underachieving children, who would not be SEN other than via
their under-attainment, who also have hearing and/or vision difficulty/ies.
Some of these difficulties will be acuity and some may involve visual
processing  Normally, acuity would be tested by audiologists for hearing and
optometrists for vision.  Processing would be checked by speech and language
therapists and behavioural optometrists.

There should not be 25% or higher failure rate in reading skills.  Jonathan
Solity, amongst others, has demonstrated through his longitudinal studies on
synthetic phonics, that this need not be the case.

We are currently considering having hearing and vision acuity tests for all
children in our school carried out on site, given parents' permission.  The
school nurses, who are on site full time (by law here), would train with
audiologists and the optometrists are willing to come in and carry out short
tests that go beyond the normal school eye test.

Have never heard of PLASC but categorising learning blocks is fraught with
complications.  Amanda Kirby is worth hearing on this topic - she runs the
http://www.dyscovery.co.uk She spoke at the 2004 BDA conference on
co-morbidity and her lecture notes should be available from the BDA.

Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas from a sandy Dubai.

Philippa

kngbrndn at aol.com wrote:. But I'm still suspicious that the data gathered
will pop up as an underestimation statistically of the depth and extent of
SEN nationwide. Brendan King

I'm not sure that I agree with you there, Brendan.  Referring back to the
question I asked earlier, about expected progress for struggling readers,
the detailed answers I received (thank you, Philippa & Klaus) appeared to
make the the assumption that the children I was asking about were all
children with SEN.  They most definitely are not.  Only a small number of
them have any underlying difficulty.  The majority have underachieved
because they haven't been taught to read properly, not because they can't
learn to read.  They are learning now and having no problem with it
whatsoever.  But they are on our SEN 'register'  at SA by virtue of their
poor level of literacy and will, I assume,  be reported on the PLASC.  Thus
contributing to/inflating the statistics.

It seems to me to be a strangely Catch 22 situation. If I weren't working
with them they wouldn't be on the register and our register would be some 40
children 'lighter'.  But then, of course, we wouldn't get those all
important 'points' for them when it comes to calculating our CVA.  Hmmm...

Maggie