Labelling of children...

[frances5]

I am wondering how much does it help a child with an educational problem or even a child who is gifted and talented to be labelled. Many teachers have limited training in how to cope with conditions like dyslexia, dyspraxia, ADHD, Aspergers, mild autism, or any other special need you care to think of.

Don't get me wrong I think that all these conditions are real, however if the people around the child don't understand the label then misconceptions can be more damaging to the child than if no one knew. In particular if there is no help available then are there any benfits to labelling.

Do children/ parents/ teachers use labels to excuse poor work, behaviour or can they make them arrogant or lazy.

In the vast majority of cases I would say people don't use it as an excuse.

For the vast majority getting a dx (after much hard work) may get the child the help they need to make progress. Huge numbers of children will be on the SEN regester at some point in their school like, most will later be taken off it, need no more extra help.

I have come across a few children who do use it as an excuse. This is in secondary scool. In general they have had very complex issues, and in the main are most often statemented for EBD as well as ASD/ADHD etc etc So there is a lot going on in these kids lives. But this is one or two kids out of the hundreds that I have worked with.

I think the labelling of G&T children is very dodgy. I remember seeing a documentary a few years back abt gifted children in which they all identified this as having been bad for them. I also seriously object to the implication that the unlabelled children aren't gifted or talented.

(This is not an attack on anyone who tries to get that label for their child in order to access appropriate resources or activities for them - it's just you shouldn't have to do that.)

Think the answer might be making sure people in education understand the labels better.

It's like a lot of things - you can use the 'label' as an aid to helping the child or as a lazy way of pigeonholing, but the person who's going to do the latter probably wouldn't be much use to the child anyway.

I work in a mainstream junior school with a resource for children with ASD (not ASD children, btw) and the staff work hard to try to ensure that the other children and the staff understand the difficulties these children face without 'singling them out'. It's made easier by the fact that we have a very wide-range of interventions (over 30 different programmes) for all the children with SEN - some of which are done individually, others in groups, which often include children from the resource as well as those in mainstream.
But without the label, most of these children would never have got into the resource in the first place.