Transfer from primary school to secondary school
classes significant, despite the high levels of support offered to many of the pupils. In
contrast SENCOs felt the children’s needs were being met, except the speech and
language needs of the SSLD cohort.
The main focus of the teachers’ concerns and a primary focus of the parents’
concerns for the SSLD and SEN cohorts was the curriculum. Significantly, few concerns
were raised about the pupils’ behaviour in Year 7. The extent of the literacy and
numeracy difficulties evidenced by both the SSLD cohort and SEN cohort was
challenging the teachers. Although SENCOs felt these needs were being addressed there
was little evidence of systematic instructional approaches to ameliorate these problems;
for many children poor basic skills were serving as a barrier to accessing the curriculum.
Parents’ perspectives on their children deepened our understanding of the young
people’s difficulties and the impact these were having. While transition was never
reported as a problem for the TDcohort for both the SSLD and SEN cohorts parents’
reported that there had been problems at transfer. Moreover two terms later problems
still remained with the curriculum, organisational issues and lower levels of self-esteem.
The similarities in the patterns of problems reported for the two special cohorts
raises important questions about the flexibility and capacity of the schools to address the
children’s needs. There was little evidence of group specific problems, barring the lack
of speech and language support, suggesting the problems the schools and children were
experiencing were generic to children with additional learning needs (see Norwich &
Lewis, 2001). Teachers relied on changing objectives and providing ‘easier work’. While
such approaches have face validity they are vague and lacking in rigorous evaluation.
Indeed there was evidence, as reported previously, that extending the time to do work
was a pedagogical strategy such that the slower pupils were finishing off tasks started in
class for homework (Galton et al., 2000). A more systematic examination of the fine
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