Project details: The experiences of young children with learning disabilities attending both special and inclusive preschools.
Research Team
1. Professor Melanie Nind
2. Dr Rosie Flewitt
3. Dr Jane Payler
Funding Body
Rix Thompson Rothenburg Foundation
Duration
September 2006 - August 2007
Grant
£6,600
Description
Current wide-ranging policy reforms and investment in the early years include moves to improve the availability, coordination and quality of provision, to promote parental choice, to intervene early in the lives of children with learning difficulties, to expand inclusive education and to respond to individual child needs by creating personalized education packages. One known outcome of this developing context is that many young children identified as having special educational needs now attend both inclusive and special early childhood settings to 'get the best of both worlds' (Nind, Flewitt & Johnston, 2005). But little is known about how the children cope with adapting to the different communicative practices and expectations in each setting.
This research builds on an initial scoping study (funded by Mencap City Foundation), extending it to gain empirical data on the experiences of the young children themselves as they negotiate the different settings. The aim is to explore how young children with learning disabilities cope with moving between the three different communicative and social environments of home, special early childhood setting and mainstream/inclusive early childhood setting. It involves gathering detailed, empirical evidence on how individual children respond to the different communicative environments, which will help in the evaluation of the local and national policy and practice of combining placements in special and inclusive early years settings. The in-depth knowledge of children's response to negotiating the three settings should help parents faced with this option to make an informed decision. The ethnographic case studies will use multiple methods of data collection, including video observations to capture the multi-sensory, multimodal dynamism of children’s meaning-making.
