How to Improve the Situation of Young Learners with Special Needs?

This report focuses on the learners identified as having special needs. The practice of comparing and classifying learners of similar age for educational purposes is widespread and rarely questioned despite the disadvantages that can accrue when learners are rank-ordered on specific criteria such as ability, or the occurrence of certain conditions or impairments. However, as a structural feature of the school system, these sorting practices set the point at which individual students’ educational needs come to be defined as ‘special’.