AIBU to think this can’t be true are SEN numbers

[Marmite2021]

My dd’s school had pretty dire SATS results a year or two ago and they explained this by saying 20% of that year’s class had special educational needs and that the rest of the class had achieved above average attainment. Their ofsted report suggest they had below average numbers of SEN children and that the ones they did have were being fully supported and making good progress.
For starters 20% SEN pupils in one mainstream class seems extraordinarily high, and it that is “below average” what on Earth is the average??

If that was a year or 2 ago and you are not worried about your own children, why posting about this now? If it's not constant bad results, then it was clearly a one off. And sometimes school year can have strong cohort, or opposite and number of sen children vary.

spanieleyes if you have a 60 children and you add their individual progress scores and divided by 60 you get the class average. To get a progress score of -5 you would need a total of -300. If you assume the 12 SEN kids got the lowest possible score of -14 (which is applied even if they got -21 etc) then that would account for -168. So the average for the other 48 children would have to have been -132, which gives an average progress score for the non-SEN kids of -2.75.

OP not all children with SEN are going to get lower scores in tests, the classification of SEN includes all kinds of issues.

@Marmite2021

And does nobody else think that one in five children having special educational needs seem outrageous? We need to be asking why and not just accepting this as normal.

May get we need to accept that different people learn in different ways and stop trying to shoehorn all kids into an inflexible, target driven system?

Xerochrysum I’m posting about it now because I just came across the email from the headteacher and thought it was worth asking opinions on. I have no intention of bringing it up at school. I just think it was clearly not true.

Handsnotwands yes, I think that is it, exactly.

•parkpoolplunge• I know this. I am not saying all the SEN kids got low scores, but the headteacher implied that their average score brought the average class score down, which quite clearly wasn’t true.

How the results are each year doesn't really affect your child, unless it's constantly bad every year. In that case, the school are clearly doing something wrong.
I wouldn't worry about it.

@Marmite2021

They obtained -5 in writing and -3 in maths. Reading was also negative. So everything well below average.

The things about average scores is that half of schools will be below average.

marmite I never implied you did, I was just trying to explain when you asked why. There is more awareness and therefore more children are being diagnosed. Genetics, problems in pregnancy and labour, accidents in childhood. No one knows why, and I'm sorry I can't answer that.

Round here, schools get a reputation for being good (or bad) with SEN kids, and therefore get a higher proportion of parents of SEN kids applying there, driving up class numbers. Maybe this has happened here?

Parents directly, probably not, but I'd suspect that it's a repeat of what they're saying elsewhere (and parents can be a source of pressure for additional support, though schools rarely openly encourage that).

And yes, it could be a dodgy head, if that's a concern it should be raised through procedures, but I wouldn't say 20% SEN as 'outrageous' or describe SEN as dysfunction.

BiBabbles it is “dysfunction” when they are being judged on normal cognitive expectations. I mean it as a technical term to cover “cognitive and/or physical issues that affect their learning“. Sorry if it’s the wrong term to use.

@Punxsutawney

Ds's outstanding school made his life an absolute misery. He had hardly any support and they refused to help him. He's now at a different school and has an EHCP (his old school said he wouldn't get one). Our relationship with them pretty much broke down completely

DS does not struggle academically but finds everything else in his life very difficult. He's predicted 3 A*s for his A Levels but he's unlikely to be able to cope with either Uni or work at 18. He is though finally getting support from staff that actually understand autism and that is far more important to us than any academic result.

I'm glad to hear this. Not been in our chat for a long time but so nice to hear he got his ehcp and managed to move schools to the better one.

@spanieleyes

Unless the OP has both the KS1 and KS2 actual,scores for each individual child I'm not sure how she can calculate progress measures.

I said the head may have been referring to progress measures, not OP.

If this was put in an email and not just an off-hand comment in the playground, then I agree with you OP about the SEN 'blaming'.

I still think it's vanishing unlikely that 80% of the class would have been 'exceeding expectations', unless they're counting and adding together the number of children who achieved that in either reading, writing or maths.

@Marmite2021

spanieleyes if you have a 60 children and you add their individual progress scores and divided by 60 you get the class average. To get a progress score of -5 you would need a total of -300. If you assume the 12 SEN kids got the lowest possible score of -14 (which is applied even if they got -21 etc) then that would account for -168. So the average for the other 48 children would have to have been -132, which gives an average progress score for the non-SEN kids of -2.75.

I see what you mean about the numbers. However there is another way of interpreting her statement which would make a lot of sense in light of the way that schools interpret data (generally by categorising students in RAISE groups). I understood her statement to mean ‘if we removed the category of SEN from school results, the remaining categories outperformed the average of other schools.’ This is very different to the understandable interpretation you formed, which is (as I understand it) ‘every student who isn’t registered as SEN performed above average’. School data is generally extremely robust- it has to be. I think the issue here is that she didn’t express it clearly, not that she is trying to mislead.

so so many thingd here

firstly its outrageous for the head to be publically blaming SEN children

My son is both adopted and has ASD, because of his very poor start in life began his education in special provision. Thanks to a truly heroic teacher and his own hard work he caught up to the point where he could function in mainstream.
He is not ‘dysfunctional’, he is a hard worker and his teachers all thought the world of him. He has always been firmly in the middle to bottom 20% in terms of achievement, but never right at the bottom, He achieved a decent set of GCSEs and is in college.

He was lucky in that I sent him to two of those schools considered to be ‘good with special needs’ and which many other families try to avoid.
His secondary school was amazing, sent children to university, including Oxbridge but also supported children like mine to achieve to the best of their ability.

But the school had a ‘reputation’ such that the parents if one child in my son’s scout group chose to send them to a private school when they were allocated a place at my son’s school. Wouldnt even set foot in the school to see what it was like - when I asked why the reply I got was ‘over my dead body’ are they going there.

By contrast one of my friends sent her son with ASD to a fee paying school, was managed out at the age of 13 and three years later is still not in school. Another sent her daughter with ASD and ADHD to the local catchment school and was also managed out at 12. It took my friend two years of appeals, fighting the LA to get her a place in special provision.
Children who are managed out don’t just walk into special provision, and many don’t actually need it.
My son didnt need specislist secondary provision. My friends daughter would have managed in her mainstream school if they had got a few basic things right, such as not doling out detentions or punishments which aggravated behaviours, including on numerous occasions preventing her from eating at specific times which was essential for her medication.

Ted27 cognitive dysfunction is a term. I am not calling children dysfunctional.
Cognitive dysfunction refers to deficits in attention, verbal and nonverbal learning, short-term and working memory, visual and auditory processing, problem solving, processing speed, and motor functioning.

OP, you keep saying you're not judging these kids and rejecting the points people are making about higher number of children being identified as having SEN while remaining convinced the numbers are too high or are higher than they should be. They aren't. It's always been like this. The difference, as many people have pointed out, is that these children were often excluded from mainstream schools previously and/or were simply accused of being "thick".

The reality is that many children with SEN are not "dysfunctional" or faulty. They just learn differently. And our education system is not set up for that. So instead, we have to try and support these children to still be able to succeed in this setting. Eg Ds has significant processing issues which makes classroom learning difficult for him. His IQ is probably about average or slightly above, he's got no behaviour issues etc, but without extra support he'd be even further behind than he is now. I am very very grateful that his school is one that tries hard to accommodate and support children like him.

And absolutely some of those other schools find ways to push children with SEN out. Of course, it goes the other way too - DS' school is really great with a wider range of children, but it's not clear that children who are very traditionally "bright" and who thrive in a traditional classroom setting will be offered the opportunities for advancement they might be in a school that focuses almost exclusively on traditional learning. So pros and cons.

Burnshersmurfs if the remaining students outperformed the average of other schools you would think their collective progress scores would be higher than -2.75. Otherwise it would mean they were doing amazingly well above average at ks1 but now are just slightly better than average, I guess.

SpaceOp

OP, you keep saying you're not judging these kids and rejecting the points people are making about higher number of children being identified as having SEN while remaining convinced the numbers are too high or are higher than they should be.

I don’t think I keep doing anything of the sort. Where have I judged anyone, other than the headteacher? And I am not calling any children dysfunctional. Cognitive dysfunction is a common umbrella term to describe learning issues. Saying someone has erectile dysfunction doesn’t mean you are calling them a dysfunctional person, does it?

@Marmite2021

Burnshersmurfs if the remaining students outperformed the average of other schools you would think their collective progress scores would be higher than -2.75. Otherwise it would mean they were doing amazingly well above average at ks1 but now are just slightly better than average, I guess.

That would depend on the particular profile of the school intake, if you see what I mean. RAISE grouping allows you to compare like-with-like. Each category will have some variance in progress made. So it’s possible for a school as a whole to have negative P8 scores, but to be doing better than the average of other schools with the same profile. I hope I’ve explained that clearly- not entirely sure I have!?

I'd be alarmed that a school can't help ANY child with SEN achieve average or above average results, especially if they seem to think this is fine and freely share the information.

ZoeTurtle

I'd be alarmed that a school can't help ANY child with SEN achieve average or above average results, especially if they seem to think this is fine and freely share the information.

Indeed!