MAINSTREAM primary schools are having to cater for growing numbers of pupils with severe special educational needs, a new study has confirmed.

Forty per cent of schools surveyed by the National Foundation for Educational Research said that the proportion of special needs pupils had increased over the past year. Less than 20 per cent of the schools said it had dropped.

Headteachers put the increase down mainly to pupils’ needs being identified earlier. “There is now a much greater awareness that the earlier you intervene, the better it is for these children,” said Felicity Fletcher-Campbell, one of the report’s authors.

But more than half the 320 heads surveyed said that the range of special needs had increased. Behavioural problems, language difficulties and autism were more common than they were three years ago. Many felt that more training and support staff were needed.

Heads also said that they were spending more on specialist support staff and resources. Nearly three-quarters of the primaries had increased the working hours of their learning support assistants over the previous year. But less than half the schools reported that teachers were devoting more time to children’s special needs.

Although almost all schools said that their special needs co-ordinator had received some training, only a third of schools had a full-time teacher with an SEN qualification. As the report’s authors drily remark: “This is interesting when approximately three-quarters of schools had more than 10 per cent of their pupils on the SEN register.”

“The annual survey of trends in education, digest no. 13” by Tamsin Archer, Felicity Fletcher-Campbell and Lesley Kendall can be downloaded at www.nfer.ac.uk

SHORT ON SUPPORT

JANET Wyatt, head of Dudley infants school in East Sussex, believes there has been adramatic rise in the number of mainstream pupils with significant special needs over the past few years.

The school now has a full-time learning support assistant in every class. But there is less support from advisers than when Mrs Wyatt became a head 11 years ago.

She argues that placing children with serious learning difficulties in mainstream schools teaches them to be failures. “Some children coming into mainstream school are disruptive because it’s not the appropriate place for them to be,” she said.