Transfer from primary school to secondary school
11;4). At age 8 all children were on their school's special educational needs register, and
54% had a statement of special educational needs under the UK Education Act 1996.
Initial identification of participants was completed following a survey of educational
provision in two local authorities (LAs) in the UK. Professionals (speech and language
therapists, educational psychologists and special educational needs coordinators,
SENCOs) were asked to identify children who had a discrepancy between their level of
functioning in the area of speech and language and that which would be expected given
the child’s functioning in other areas, and who were experiencing significant language
based learning needs. A total of 133 were identified (Dockrell & Lindsay, 2000) from
which a subsample from each LA was derived. Children with any additional
complicating factors which would preclude the diagnosis of SSLD were excluded. In
addition, children of the same age in the three UK special schools for children with
SSLD were included in the study (N = 10).
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In Year 3 the children had substantially delayed development on a number of
language measures as shown in Table 1. To validate the identification of these children
as those with SSLD a series of repeated measures t- tests confirmed that vocabulary
scores, grammar scores, narrative production and phonology scores were all
significantly below measures of nonverbal ability (BAS naming vocabulary t = -2.06, =
.04, d = .29; BPVS t = -3.91, p < .0005, d = .47; Understanding grammar TROG t = -
6.22, p < .0005, d = .42; Narrative Bus Story information t = -5.74, p < .0005, d = .75
and phonological awareness PhAB t = -2.08, p = .04, d = .27). To investigate further the
pattern of language performance at this point a factor analysis was computed on the
language measures. The analysis generated a single factor solution that accounted for