Special needs.

A report suggests that a significant proportion of schoolchildren assessed as having "special needs" are in fact just victims of poor teaching. Not surprisingly, this has produced howls of outrage from teaching unions. I think the real problem stems from our unwillingness to accept that children - like all of us - are individuals, and don't necessarily fit into neat little niches. Schools are sausage machines, designed to turn out a specific product from "average" raw material. When that raw material - that is the young child - is not average, schools struggle to cope simply because of the way they work, and this is so whether the child is above or below what is considered to be the norm. The reality is that every child has special needs because every child is different - unfortunately our education system is not designed to cope with that.