Mick Hartley

Over at the Daily Ablution, Scott Burgess informs us about ODD, the latest affliction to strike US teenagers. Here in Britain we’re also doing our bit towards clearing away those tiresome moral problems by redefining them as behavioural difficulties. Robert Whelan in the Times writes about the special needs scam:

Special-Needs education is booming. Over the past decade more and more children have been deemed to have these needs. Huge sums of money — £7 billion a year, according to one study — are spent on them. And it is, for the most part, a colossal racket.

Some children have what are called statemented special needs. That is to say, there has been a diagnosis of a definable condition, such as autism, dyslexia or physical disability. These children represent a tiny minority of the special-needs population, most of whom are “unstatemented”. The majority are deemed to have special needs because the school says so. And, no surprise, special funding follows these special needs. Delegates at the National Association of Schoolmasters and Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT) conference this week expressed dismay at the fallout from this explosion in the number of special little people in the classroom. […]

The rise in special needs also coincided with the introduction of league tables. Special needs thus enabled schools to squeeze more money out of the LEAs, while at the same time excusing their abysmal performance in these tables. Surely, not much can be expected by way of academic achievement from schools that are so caring that they take in large numbers of needy children?

There is also a familiar linguistic problem here. Bad behaviour has been redefined as an affliction from which children suffer, rather than naughtiness for which they are to blame. “Behavioural problems” is an unhelpful euphemism. Most teachers, whatever their ideological persuasion, know that children must observe certain minimum standards of behaviour in the classroom or life soon becomes hell for everyone. For this reason many schools have contracts that parents must sign, pledging themselves to uphold these standards. Friends of mine recently told me that when they complained that their child was suffering because of the bad behaviour of a handful of unruly pupils, they were told that these recalcitrants were registered as having special needs, so the contract didn’t apply.