When we discuss special educational needs and disability (SEND) labels in schools, it’s often framed in terms of funding - without a label, funding for additional support is near impossible - or in terms of personal impact on the child: limited perceptions of their own ability, inaccurate views of capability and unhelpful stereotypes.

What is less talked about is the potential impact of those labels on a teacher’s belief in their ability to support a child with SEND - which seems a bit of an oversight: after all, a teacher’s perception of their own power to teach a child is fundamental to the success that child may have in school.

Thankfully, Simon Gibbs is shining a light on this area. The reader in educational psychology at Newcastle University has been studying the effects of labelling on teachers’ beliefs about the nature of their pupils’ difficulties and the extent to which they can intervene effectively.

He started from a position of understanding that labels are often welcomed by those receiving the diagnosis and by their teachers.

“Labels are a tool; they guide people to think in certain ways and that can be helpful,” he explains. “If you describe a child in a certain way, that might provide you with some beginnings of what you might do to help that child.

“I know that some people find it a great relief to be told they have dyslexia, for example, because it means they don’t have to blame themselves or parents don’t feel guilty. And I know from my practice that there is something to be said for enabling people to understand why this person is like they are.”

However, categorisation of pupils can potentially lead teachers to believe that their ability to support those pupils (their sense of “efficacy” ) is more limited, Gibbs says, or even that they are not their responsibility.

“There is some evidence from our work and elsewhere that teachers’ beliefs in their efficacy have a strong relationship to the outcomes for children across a number of areas,” he says. On this point, he highlights research led by Megan Tschannen-Moran that suggests students of teachers with a high sense of efficacy are likely to do better in school.

With this in mind, Gibbs conducted a study in 2015 asking primary teachers how they felt about their ability to support pupils with general “reading difficulties” or “dyslexia”. Teachers also answered questionnaires to gauge the extent to which they believed that children with “reading difficulties” or “dyslexia” had innate, fixed characteristics that made them different from others.

“When children were simply described as having a ‘reading difficulty’, teachers with greater experience of teaching such children were more likely to believe that they could do something worthwhile to help the child,” says Gibbs. “When children were labelled as having dyslexia, there was less efficacy expressed by teachers in their ability to make a difference.

“In that paper, the label of dyslexia evoked a stronger belief that these children are essentially different from other children and that, consequently, there is less likelihood that teachers will believe that they could do something meaningful to help them.”

Always read the label

Another piece of research, this time by Jeneva L Ohan at the University of Queensland in Australia, looked at - among other things - the effect of labelling students on teachers’ attitudes and willingness to help.

Ohan found that when a child who was exhibiting certain behaviours was labelled with “ADHD”, teachers were more willing to take extra time and effort to help [other] professionals implement treatments, although it did not increase their willingness to make extra time and effort on their own.

“Labelling a child as having ADHD increased teachers’ negative expectations about the severity of the child’s problems, elicited more negative emotions and decreased participants’ confidence in their ability to teach the child,” the study says.

Indeed, there is research specifically looking at how beliefs held by some primary teachers about the innate characteristics of certain categorised groups put children outside of their professional responsibility.

Referring to a Canadian study by Anne Jordan and Paula Stanovich, Gibbs says: “They certainly found that some teachers, when presented with a child with certain difficulties, would be inclined to say ‘that’s not my responsibility’.”

How can we begin to tackle these negative effects? In the study above, they had some success through increased training.

“Jordan and Stanovich have worked on trying to find ways of helping teachers overcome that sort of implicit belief, and they’ve made some progress in terms of talking about professional development for teachers to help them understand that, actually, there are things you can do,” says Gibbs.

But what about ridding ourselves of the labels altogether? It is a challenge, says Gibbs, because of the competitive nature of the education system, which relies on locating young people in groups of one kind or another.

“It’s hard … there’s this formal statutory requirement to identify how many children have got ‘X’,” he says. “I think that might be helpful in identifying proportionality but there is also the risk that it limits people’s beliefs about what it might be possible to do and limits willingness to explore what might be possible for a child to achieve. There is a risk you get premature judgements about what is possible.”

He says it might be more realistic to better educate teachers about labels.

“One thing that educational psychologists can do to help overcome this when working in schools is to try to sustain [teachers’] belief that things are provisional and we should continue to explore what can be done,” he says. “It is important not to make premature prejudicial judgements about a child’s unsuitablility for presence in a particular class or school.

“While a broad label may be helpful in terms of saying ‘we need to give this child a more sensitive, more appropriate curriculum’, then by all means do that. But don’t just, on the basis of a label, think that they are totally unsuitable for education in that school or that classroom.”

This is not a chastisement of teachers, nor is it criticism, he stresses. Rather, it is a call for greater knowledge about how labels can impact a teacher’s view of a child and for there to be better training to ensure this can be tackled for them, not because of them.

“What I wouldn’t want to do is for anybody to think that I was blaming teachers for the failure of education or children. What I am most passionate about is how we can help teachers do an even better job.”

Irena Barker is a freelance writer

This article originally appeared in the 21 February 2020 issue under the headline “Tes focus on... How SEND labels affect teachers’ judgement”