Every child matters? An evaluation of “Special Educational Needs” programmes in England

Francois Keslair, Eric Maurin and Sandra McNally

Economics of Education Review, 2012, vol. 31, issue 6, 932-948

Abstract: The need for education to help every child has become more important for policy in the US and the UK. Remedial programmes are often difficult to evaluate because participation is usually based on pupil characteristics that are largely unobservable to the analyst. We evaluate programmes for children with ‘Special Educational Needs’ in England. We show that the decentralized design of the policy generates much stronger differences across schools in access to remediation resources for children with moderate learning difficulties than for children with either no difficulties or severe difficulties. However, these differences are not reflected in subsequent educational attainment – suggesting that the programme is ineffective for children with moderate learning difficulties. Also, we use demographic variation within schools to consider the effect of the programme on whole year groups. Our analysis is consistent with no overall effect on account of the combined direct and indirect (spillover) effects.

Keywords: Education; Special needs; Evaluation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272775712000738
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Every child matters? An evaluation of "Special Educational Needs" programmes in England (2012)
Working Paper: Every child matters? An evaluation of "Special Educational Needs" programmes in England (2012)
Working Paper: Every Child Matters? An Evaluation of "Special Educational Needs" Programmes in England (2011)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecoedu:v:31:y:2012:i:6:p:932-948

DOI: 10.1016/j.econedurev.2012.06.005

Access Statistics for this article

Economics of Education Review is currently edited by E. Cohn

More articles in Economics of Education Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().