Social deprivation, school-level achievement and special educational needs

The paper considers the relationship between social deprivation and special educational needs in the context of wider issues of social deprivation and achievement. Data were obtained from a large- scale survey of almost 300 key stage 2 teachers in 46 primary schools in England. The results show a very strong negative relationship between poverty in the population served by schools and overall levels of achievement in the school. They also show a clear, although less strong, positive relationship between poverty and the levels of special educational needs in schools. The analysis suggests that, to some extent, teachers are judging special educational needs with reference to achievement levels in their school. It also shows that the impact of poverty on special needs is largely mediated through the influence of poverty on achievement generally. The exception to this pattern is in the area of discipline problems which correlate very highly with poverty levels and where the correlation is additional to the association with achievement. The paper suggests that the register of special educational needs is not a good basis for resourcing special needs, and that resource allocation for special educational needs need not, for the most part, be treated separately from resourcing to address inequalities in achievement more generally.