Abstract
Abstract Meeting Mary Warnock at the final conference for some work commissioner by the DfEE/NHS in 2001 she said that one of her greatest concerns about her earlier report is the fetishisation of the statement of education needs. It was true that with the statement, as it came to be known was often equated with her report, and triggered a rather legalistic culture with all the paraphernalia of tribunals and appeals. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the border disputes between health and education as to who was responsible for children with speech, language and communication (a term which only emerged twenty-five years after her report was published). I argue in this paper that the nature of disability has changed since Warnock and that communication disability is now one of the most disability conditions and communication access at least as important as physical access. Although Warnock resisted diagnostic labels in favour of needs there has been a burgeoning market in measures since the 1970s and with it a tendency to subcategorise children and to gain consensus in that sub-classification as witnessed by the recent work on developmental language disorder. I address the importance of seeing special (especially with relation to communication) through the lens of public health and, finally, look at Warnock through the recent Bercow Ten Years On report and argue that a focus on communication is a useful test for the consequences of the seminal report.
Highlights
James Law*Meeting Lady Warnock at the final conference for some work commissioned by the DfEE/NHS in 2001, she said that one of her greatest concerns about her earlier report is the fetishisation of the statement of education needs
True that with the “statement,” as it came to be known, was often equated with her report, and triggered a rather legalistic culture with all the accompanying processes of tribunals and appeals. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the “border disputes” between health and education as to who was responsible for children with speech, language and communication needs (SLCN), a term which only emerged 25 years after her report was published
The digital gains of recent years have done much to relieve the disabilities of people who would traditionally been considered “at risk” in society for physical or those gains have done little to help those with functional speech, language and communication needs
Summary
Meeting Lady Warnock at the final conference for some work commissioned by the DfEE/NHS in 2001, she said that one of her greatest concerns about her earlier report is the fetishisation of the statement of education needs It was, true that with the “statement,” as it came to be known, was often equated with her report, and triggered a rather legalistic culture with all the accompanying processes of tribunals and appeals. SLCs are seen as critically important both in their own right as far as parents, professionals and children are concerned They are critical as an earlier marker of a wide variety of neurodevelopmental disorders (Ek et al, 2012) and in terms of access more generally, access to education, the curriculum, friendship groups and later employment.
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