Special education documents and young children's right to be heard

The purpose of the study is to contribute to broadening knowledge about special needs education documents related to children in kindergarten. The study investigates whether expert assessments and individual training curricula (IOPs) contain attempts to include children’s viewpoints and perspectives, as well as how this is reflected. The research questions are:

1. Do expert assessments include explicit attempts to listen to a child when evaluating their need for special educational support?
2. How do expert assessments portray children’s viewpoints and opinions through parents’ intertextual voices?
3. How are children’s verbal and nonverbal expressions described in expert assessments?
4. In what way do expert assessments and IOPs emphasise listening to children when outlining recommendations and plans for support?

The findings revealed a clear absence of explicit attempts to listen to the children in the expert assessments and IOPs. However, the documents show that parents and kindergarten convey information about their children’s preferences and interests, which may suggest an attempt to represent the children’s voices. Although the documents contain different descriptions of children’s verbal and nonverbal expressions, these descriptions serve primarily as illustrations of the children’s challenges. At the same time, recommendations and support plans emphasise listening to children’s voices. The findings of the study highlight a need to redefine special needs education documents to listen to children’s viewpoints and to include alternative understandings in the assessment process.

The study is based on an in-depth document analysis of expert assessments and individual training curricula (IOPs), where the researcher investigated whether the documents contained attempts to include the children’s perspectives. The data consist of expert assessments and IOPs for a total of 17 children from 14 different kindergartens in a medium-sized municipality in Norway. The children were between the ages of two and six, with allocated weekly special educational support ranging from 1 to 10 hours.

Franck, K. (2023). Special education documents and young children's right to be heard. Journal of Research in Special Educational Needs, https://doi.org/10.1111/1471-3802.12620