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Departmental differences in attitudes to special educational needs in the secondary school
Author(s) -
Ellins Jean,
Porter Jill
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
british journal of special education
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.349
H-Index - 38
eISSN - 1467-8578
pISSN - 0952-3383
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8578.2005.00396.x
Subject(s) - mainstream , special educational needs , inclusion (mineral) , likert scale , mainstreaming , psychology , subject (documents) , pedagogy , mathematics education , set (abstract data type) , special education , scale (ratio) , special needs , medical education , medicine , political science , library science , social psychology , developmental psychology , physics , quantum mechanics , psychiatry , computer science , law , programming language
As trends in favour of inclusion continue, questions arise concerning the extent to which teachers in mainstream schools feel prepared for the task of meeting pupils' special educational needs. Little previous research has considered how the subject taught impacts upon the attitudes of mainstream teachers towards pupils with special educational needs. In this article, Jean Ellins, research fellow at the University of Birmingham, and Jill Porter, senior lecturer at the University of Bath, report on their research into the attitudes of teachers in one mainstream secondary school. Building a detailed case study using documents, records of pupil progress, an interview and a questionnaire using a Likert‐type attitude scale and open‐ended questions, these researchers set out to explore distinctions between the attitudes of teachers working in different departments. Their findings suggest that the teachers of the core subjects, English, mathematics and science, had less positive attitudes than their colleagues. Further, pupils with special educational needs made least progress in science where teacher attitudes were the least positive. Jean Ellins and Jill Porter review the implications of these findings and make recommendations for future practice and further enquiry.