Training materials for teachers of learners with severe, profound and complex learning difficulties

What can you expect to learn?

The detailed learning outcomes covered in the introduction for the module are shown in the table on this slide.

In broad brush terms, the learning outcomes for the Legislative Context materials identify and trace three important aspects of work associated with children with PMLD, SLD, and CLDD that are underpinned and secured by the legislation.

As recently as forty years ago, SLD children were not automatically entitled to education and were often considered incapable of being educated – sometimes described as ‘ineducable’. That is certainly not the case now.

Since 1971, legal safeguards have ensured that all children have a more equal chance of benefiting from education. In that year for the first time, the Education (Handicapped Children) Act 1970 granted all children of compulsory school age the right to an education. This entitlement continues to this day under the Education Act 1996.

Legislation has not only provided the critical checks and balances needed to progress equal rights. It has also helped to drive the overall direction of policy and set the threshold beyond which we, as a society, agree that provision will not fall.

Theory and practice Practice does not always live up to the aspirations of legislators. Each round of reform leaves the debris of practices, procedures and pedagogy, and even buildings, which speak of the values and aspirations of the time.

The extent to which aims can be realised and the ways in which the legislative provision supports, or occasionally even gets in the way of the very thing it is intended to promote, is one of the reasons why it is so important to study the legislative context.

New ideas, and occasionally returns to previous notions, continue to stimulate debate around best practice to meet the needs of children with SEN and/or disabilities.

The Green Paper Support and aspiration: A new approach to special educational needs and disability published in 2010 with a plan to legislate in 2012 is the most recent part of the story of improvement.