It’s time to drop the S word

I hate my job title. If it’s not offensive already then it surely soon will be. In fact I’ll wager good money that the term will have become obsolete by the time I retire.

I am a Special Educational Needs Co-ordinator. ‘Special’ here refers to the needs that some students have in the classroom. The ones who are on the SEN register. The needs of all the other students are, by this definition, not special. Presumably their needs are... what? Ordinary? They must be, because they are not on the register of children whose needs are special. Teachers can educate all those other students in a regular humdrum fashion. They reserve their special teaching for my students.

It’s a horrible term. It manages to be both patronising, offensive, but also antithetical to the goal of meaningful inclusion that we are trying to achieve. To define someone by their ‘special’ needs is the quickest way to other them. To establish that they are in a category removed from the commonplace. To define their needs as qualitatively distinct from the rest of the class. Extraordinary. An add-on.

There's a point in Kung Fu Panda where the old turtle says “To make something special, you just have to believe it’s special”. Well the reverse also holds true. To make someone feel normal, you have to believe they are normal. I.e., to make someone feel genuinely included as an equally valued member of the classroom along with all the other students, the first thing you have to understand, and project, is that they are not special. They are children with needs just like anyone else. To regard those needs as in some way exceptional risks leading you towards a perception of these needs as extra or in addition to your regular job of teaching to the bulk. It implies an optionality that could be dangerous, when levels of available time and energy are low, or when school budgets are stretched.

"Categorizing the needs of a disabled person as “special” makes me feel stigmatized and more different than society has already made me feel. How can we advocate for inclusion and equal access when our needs are seen as “special.” If we can’t normalize the needs of disabled people, we will remain in a little box society has placed us in labeled DIFFERENT." (Alex Dacy)

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that although the term special refers to the student’s needs, it is widely extended to refer to the students themselves. It is more often said that a student is SEN than he has SEN. It is one of the things stopping us moving away from the medical model (there is something wrong with the child and they need to change) towards the social model (there is something in the child's environment that needs to change). It has become a term that is used to define students, and as I have discussed in a previous post, such terms historically tend to become terms of offence before long.

And so it will be with ‘special needs’. The term’s inevitable descent into derogatoriness is baked into the history of all the terms that have preceded it. No-one wants to be on the special needs register. And this is a problem, because an inquisitive autistic kid will ask about the S in my job title, or on the sign outside my office. And I find it hard to give an honest answer without sounding like I'm saying 'I work with you because you're different.'

"Was Jamie himself concerned at being branded stupid? 'No, I honestly don't think he was. I remember he used to have to leave the normal classroom for special classes, and each day he did it the others would chant "special needs, special needs, special needs . . ." (Jamie Oliver's Dad, Trevor, recalling memories of Jamie's school days)

There's an old BBC piece in which disabled people were asked to rate the various terms they hear according to how offensive they deem it to be. Superbly, disabled people put ‘special’ as the fourth most offensive term around, just below 'brave' in third, but significantly more offensive than 'mong' (8th) and ‘window licker’ (10th). Interestingly, when asked, non-disabled people assumed that terms like 'window licker' and 'retard' would be the most offensive terms, far more offensive than 'special'. We might conclude from this that disabled people are, believe it or not, just like everyone else. They have a sense of humour, they don't like being patronised, they don't want to be seen as charity cases, and perhaps they don't want to be 'othered' in such a cloying manner with terms like special. 

So if the 's' word is so awful, what can we replace it with? Additional Educational Needs never really took off. Although it removes the awful word ‘special’, it still suffers from similar problems. It divides the cohort. Curriculum Support? In France they call it enseignement adapté (adapted teaching). In Finland they avoid categorising pupils according to disabilities or support needs, focusing solely on the level of support they are going to provide to meet the needs of each child in different places and at different times. This is something worth thinking about.

We already have a term that I think would serve as a better job title. Head of Inclusion. This is what I do, I am in charge of making sure that all students are included. Not just the 'special ones'. In fact, if a kid is made to feel special in a classroom them we have to some extent failed them; success surely comes when they are made to feel like every other student.

Perhaps the job could be more accurately described as being that of an equal opportunities officer. Equality of opportunity for all children is a basic human right enshrined in law. My job is not necessarily to to identify instances where the child won't be able to cope, nor is it to come up with a list of kids who can't. My job is to find out where the school system is in danger of unfairly discriminating against some children, and then to lead the school in offering support, developing policies and delivering training to mitigate against this risk. It's the school’s legal duty, and in a good school it becomes just a routine part of everyday teaching.

If a trunk of a tree is diseased, you can cut off the branches but new ones will grow and they too will acquire the disease in time. So you can keep inventing new terms to describe kids with learning difficulties, but if they are rooted in a drive to separate them from the mainstream then these new terms will soon become infected with the same problem. Before meeting to decide what language to use, let's first make sure everyone is sitting at the table. And let's make sure that the principles of neurodiversity and respect for difference are echoed by the words we use, not contradicted by them. And let's look ahead with confidence to a time when the old divisions between those who are 'normal' and those who are 'special' finally fade to grey.