Black children in the UK are labelled as having so called "special educational needs" at a much higher rate than other children. I believe that this is primarily a manifestation of racism and anti-blackness.
Statistics on the Disproportionate labelling of Black and mixed children as having special educational need
A Telegraph article on 23rd October 2013 entitled "Boys 'much more likely to be labelled with special needs" reported the following:
"Black children were far more likely to be diagnosed with special needs, with numbers standing at 24.1 per cent. This compared with 22.3 per cent of Pakistani pupils and 20.6 per cent of white pupils, while the proportion was as low as 11.6 per cent among Chinese children and 12.3 per cent of those from Indian families;" https://web.archive.org/web/20191021134228/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/10399599/Boys-much-more-likely-to-be-labelled-with-special-needs.html
The subjective label of Special Needs
But what exactly does special needs actually mean? From the UK Government website, we read:
"Special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) can affect a child or young person’s ability to learn. They can affect their:
behaviour or ability to socialise, for example they struggle to make friends
reading and writing, for example because they have dyslexia
ability to understand things
concentration levels, for example because they have ADHD
physical ability"
To me, a lot of these indicators seem very subjective. I mean, if a child has difficulty making friends or socialising, why does that indicate that there is something up with them, necessarily? What if other children and even adults are ostracising them, bullying them, misunderstanding them, etc? Professor Steve Strand is a researcher who has put out some excellent analysis of race and education system in the UK over the years. In a 2018 study he explained that within the umbrella term of SEND, there are Needs that can be said to be physiological in origin, and those that are determined by a child's perceived problems with their social environment. Strand points out that:
"Some forms of SEN have a clear biological basis, for example sensory impairments, physical needs, or Profound and Multiple Learning Difficulties... These categories are often contrasted with categories... which are defined in terms of the student’s actions within a context, mainly the school and classroom. These needs are socially constructed in the sense that students’ behaviour is interpreted in terms of expected patterns or norms."
Referring to the non-physiological needs, Strand then tells us the following:
'Judgemental' categories... are not the only SEN evidencing disproportionality… but they are those where the disproportionate identification of Black students is greatest. http://www.education.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Combined-Report_2018-12-20.pdf
This is extremely important to recognise. What he's saying is the disparities facing Black children are most extreme when it comes to the non-physiological so called special educational needs. At this point, it's important to look at historical data. An article in The Times Educational Supplement reports that:
"The growth and consolidation of special educational provision in the 1960s and 1970s coincided with the arrival of immigrants from the Caribbean and South-East Asia. Statutory categories were developed for children with "limited ability" and those who "showed evidence of emotional instability or psychological disturbance and required special treatment to effect personal, social or educational readjustment". From the outset, these labels of "educationally subnormal" (ESN) and "maladjusted" were disproportionately applied to disadvantaged minority ethnic pupils. The Inner London Education Authority reported in 1967 that "misplacement" to educationally subnormal (ESN) schools was four times more likely for "immigrant" children and was largely due to behavioural problems. In 1968, a third of children in ESN schools were classified as "immigrants", compared with 17 per cent of children in mainstream schools, and three-quarters of them were of Caribbean descent. For the past half-century, whenever relevant data has been broken down by ethnicity, black Caribbean students have been over-identified as having SEN, and pupils with SEN have been disproportionately excluded. (Emphasis added) https://www.tes.com/news/black-caribbean-fsm-boy-send-168-times-more-likely-be-permanently-excluded-white-british-girl
Black children and their families coming to the UK from the mid twentieth century faced unrelenting hostility on all fronts, including within the education system. The racism of these institutions led these professionals to spuriously label Black boys and girls as "educationally subnormal" in the same way that police forces labelled them muggers and sexual predators. Black people from the Caribbean made up the overwhelming majority of Black people in this country at the time and they bore the brunt of the antiblackness. A book written in 1970s called “How the West Indian Child Is Made Educationally Sub-normal in the British School System: The Scandal of the Black Child in Schools in Britain” helped to galvanise the Black community into action and prompted the rise of the supplementary school movement.
But the disparities have continued to this day. Some of the disparities disappear if socio-economic factors are taken into account. Children who can be identified as being poorer, are more likely to be labelled as having Mild Learning Difficulties. Now this still requires the follow up question, why are Black children more likely to be in this category of poorer children? But that's a question for another time. However, the disproportionality when it comes to so-called Social Emotional Mental Health needs does not disappear even after controlling for these socio-economic factors. In other words, that disproportionality seems to be predominately based on race.
Disparity between Caribbean and African children
Another important factor to consider is whether Black African children face the same disparities as Black Caribbean. It is well known, for example, that Black children African are actually much less likely to be excluded than Black Caribbean children. Where 4.4% of Black African children were temporarily excluded in 2015-16, a whopping 10% of Black Caribbean children were. There's a bigger disparity when it comes to permanent exclusions. And in both cases, while the black Caribbean rate is higher than that for white children, the Black African rate is lower the rate for White children. (https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/education-skills-and-training/absence-and-exclusions/pupil-exclusions/latest)
Going back to the special educational needs issue, there seems to be a similar pattern. A paper entitled "Special Educational Needs and Immigration/Ethnicity: The English experience" gives the following information:
"Once the influence of socioeconomic disadvantage, gender and age had been taken into account, the likelihood of pupils from different minority ethnic groups having SEN showed interesting patterns... Compared with the likelihood of White British pupils having SEN, the percentage of Black children was not substantially different. Indeed, there was a lower likelihood (odds Ratio) of Black Caribbean pupils (0.85:1) and Black African pupils (0.47:1) having Moderate Learning Difficulties than White British pupils. However, Black Caribbean pupils were still 1 times more likely to be considered to have Behaviour, Emotional and Social Difficulties."
How can we make sense of the differences between the experiences of Caribbean and African children? Well, part of it is down to the fact that Africans are generally fairly recent immigrants to the UK and thus benefit from the so called "migrant bonus." This is the well-observed pattern of migrants being highly motivated to succeed in their new countries.
The longer-established Caribbean community here has faced decades of multi-faceted opposition from the host population. If, over a 50 years period, a quarter of Black Caribbean children have been labelled as having SEND, think about the compounding effect over time. You're talking about generations of people being tarnished and marginalised. You're talking about an entire community being systematically terrorised (and I used that word very deliberately) by institutions that were and are in theory meant to be there help them. To underscore this point, we’ll close this discussion with the following from a UK Government report on the educational background of so-called young offenders:
"As a whole, pupils currently identified as having special educational needs are disproportionately from disadvantaged backgrounds, are much more likely to be absent or excluded from school, and achieve less well than their peers, both in terms of their attainment at any given age and in terms of their progress over time. Over the last five years, these outcomes have changed very little. Past the age of 16, young people with learning difficulties or disabilities comprise one of the groups most likely not to be in education, employment or training." (Young Offenders From "Understanding the educational background of young offenders")