Quick hit: the best interests of the child

Two articles in The Guardian today which bear some thinking about.

1. A study has been conducted which seems to suggest that if a child is abused, that child will do better in the long term if sie is removed from hir family and not returned.

That may well be what the study found. And the result certainly has the force of logic behind it: if a child is abused in a particular environment, the child will be better off not being in that environment.

However, the newspaper article only briefly touches on the idea that there are some societal issues at play here. My guess is that a child who is removed from a family will carry the effect of that experience for a long time, perhaps for life. A child who is abused will carry the effect of that experience – again, perhaps for life. It can be very difficult to assess whether a child is actually being abused, or whether a child is intentionally being abused, and whether parents can learn how not to abuse the child. No matter how many studies are done to show how “most” children are better off, there will always be children for whom the choice made is not a good one (sometimes because the “wrong” decision is made; sometimes because there was no “right” decision in the circumstances).

I think that, as a society, we’d be better off giving more support to the social workers and other people who make the decisions, and much, much more support to the parents and children involved, so as to try to ensure that a decent decision is made for each individual child.

2. A report suggests that about half of the children diagnosed with special needs in the UK “simply need better teaching or pastoral care”.

I was reading through some of the archive posts at Pipecleaner Dreams this morning, and I read this newspaper article soon after reading this blog post over there. In summary: Ashley’s Mom summarises her attempts to have her daughter, Ashley, included in the general education stream to a greater extent.

The blog post (and some of the others at Pipecleaner Dreams) and the article together made me think: not only should better teaching be available to students who “just” need better teaching, without needing a diagnosis of “special needs” to meet their needs, but even when students do have “special needs”, surely some of the answer is to provide them with “better teaching”, rather than thinking about how the teaching they need is somehow different to the teaching their peers need. To make myself clear: I know that some students do need teaching in a different mode, or more intensively, or need to be taught different skills, and so on. But as Ashley’s Mom makes clear, many of those students probably also need to be taught what their peers are being taught.

There needs to be some kind of a continuum, rather than a bimodal understanding of “normal teaching” and “special needs teaching”. I think everyone would be better off that way.

I’m not going to hold my breath.