Working with Children with Specific Learning Difficulties in the Early Years. By Dorothy Smith. QEd Publications pound;6. Web: www.qed.uk.com.

Sue Roffey’s text starts with the oft-quoted African proverb “It takes a village to raise a child”, but in this case the child has special needs and the village is the community of professionals, advisers and support teachers who may be involved.

The underlying message is that it takes a determined effort to develop a potentially disparate and fragmented group of professionals into a co-operative team. Professionals and families are rarely clear of the boundaries of expertise, while different agencies seldom work towards agreed objectives which promote the family’s or child’s own efforts.

What goes into effective partnerships is distilled to issues such as early identification and communication, professional roles and their responsibilities in relation to legislation and policy, joint training and planning. Practitioners will find some interesting case study examples of early years networking, including outreach and drop-in services in Newham, Haringey, Lincolnshire and Gloucestershire. There are some useful contact addresses for resources and voluntary agencies.

This is a highly accessible introductory book that is not challenging enough in terms of its analysis or evidence base for the key players it addresses: the professionals themselves.

Also set within the new SEN Code of Practice context for early years’ practitioners, Dorothy Smith’s 60-page guide explores the meaning of specific learning difficulties in relation to very young children in the foundation stage.

One problem here is deciding whether a child’s poor spatial awareness, hand control, language or short-term-memory reflect the kind of developmental differences evident in any group of young children, or a distinct problem which requires a distinct intervention. Does the child who says “better lox” instead of “letter box” have an expressive language disorder or auditory sequencing problem? Should a four-year-old who cannot count be labelled as dyscalculic?

Notwithstanding the vexed questions of whether, when or how to intervene, lots of ideas are given for developing programmes and activities to meet specific needs.

So much is considered so briefly in this text, such as Asperger’s syndrome, attention deficit disorder and scotopic sensitivity syndrome, that the technical details (such as diagnostic assessment) sit very uneasily alongside other forms of advice (for example, “Very young children use single words to make themselves understood and as they grow older use simple sentences and then more complicated ones.”).

At the foundation stage it is vitally important for all early years staff to know how to promote language, numeracy and early literacy and to accommodate different learning styles. This guide prompts some creative responses, but at the risk of a premature focus on what might be wrong with every child.

Alec Webster

Alec Webster is professor of educational psychology at the Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol