Social and Educational Disadvantage: Reconnecting Special Needs Education

Abstract

Alan Dyson, Professor of Special Needs Education at the University of Newcastle on Tyne (in BJSE 's ‘The New Professors’ series) argues that special needs education has, at a time when there are concerns over falling standards in education generally, lost sight of the relationship between children's difficulties in school and wider patterns of socio‐economic disadvantage and inequality, and suggests that special needs education in the late 1990s is incapable of addressing basic failings and inequities in our education system and within society as a whole.