Record One in Five Pupils Has Special Educational Needs

A record one in five children is classified as having special educational needs at school, official figures revealed yesterday.

The numbers have nearly doubled over the past 20 years to 1.65million as pupils are increasingly labelled as having behavioural or speech difficulties.

The trend has triggered warnings that a growing culture of entertaining children with TVs and computer games and a lack of boundaries at home or family troubles are increasingly manifesting themselves in class as disruptive behaviour.

However, sceptics said the increase was fuelled by a growing tendency to label anti-social traits as medical conditions to excuse poor behaviour or academic underachievement.

Read more...

Children Forced Into Cell-like School Seclusion Rooms

A few weeks before 13-year-old Jonathan King killed himself, he told his parents that his teachers had put him in "time-out."

"We thought that meant go sit in the corner and be quiet for a few minutes," Tina King said, tears washing her face as she remembered the child she called "our baby ... a good kid."
But time-out in the boy's north Georgia special education school was spent in something akin to a prison cell -- a concrete room latched from the outside, its tiny window obscured by a piece of paper.

Called a seclusion room, it's where in November 2004, Jonathan hanged himself with a cord a teacher gave him to hold up his pants.

Read more...