Inequalities and SEN

Lucinda Platt has carried out research on child disability and the experience of bullying [Chatzitheochari, S., Parsons, S. and Platt, L.(2016) ‘Doubly disadvantaged? Bullying experiences among disabled children and young people in England’. Sociology, 50(4): 695-713]. Additional resource under this theme is an animation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38mZLDWMNe4. Other work includes the evolution of disabled children’s school performance and the primary and secondary effects of disability on educational outcomes [Chatzitheochari, S. and Platt, L.(2019) Disability Differentials in Educational Attainment in England: Primary and Secondary Effects. British Journal of Sociology,70(2): 502-525]. She has examined the development of young children’s cognitive and non-cognitive skills [Parsons, S. and Platt, L. (2017) ‘The early academic progress of children with special educational needs.’ British Educational Research Journal, 43 (3): 466–485; Fauth, B., Platt, L. and Parsons, S. 2017. ‘The development of behavior problems among disabled and non-disabled children in England.’ Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology. 52: 46-58]: and the longterm social relationships of those with childhood disability and SEN [Parsons, S. and Platt, L.(2020) The social relationships of three generations identified as disabled in childhood. Longitudinal and Life Course Studies. DOI: 10.1332/175795920X15955998470689]

In the context of China’s increasing rural-urban migration, few studies have investigated how parental migration affects children’s experience in school. The high cost of schooling, taken together with the institutional barriers in destination cities, have compelled many rural parents in China to migrate without their children, leaving them in the care of their spouses, grandparents, relatives or other caregivers. Still other parents migrate with their children, many of whom then attend urban migrant schools in their destination city. This co-authored paper seeks to understand the academic engagement of children of migrant workers is particularly salient, as the poor qualities of migrant schools, a lack of parental support, and exposure to competing alternatives to schooling may render both migrant children in the cities and left-behind children in the rural villages vulnerable to disengagement, and ultimately school dropout.

Chen, Shuang, Jennifer Adams, Zhiyong Qu, Xiaohua Wang, and Li Chen. "Parental migration and children's academic engagement: The case of China." International Review of Education59, no. 6 (2013): 693-722.

Lucinda Platt aims to develop her work around school context and interethnic relations and identities, aiming to identify the potential of childhood interactions for longer term attitudes and engagement. [Burgess, S. and Platt, L. (2021). ‘Inter-ethnic relations of teenagers in England’s schools: the role of school and neighbourhood ethnic composition’. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. 47:9, 2011-2038, DOI: 10.1080/1369183X.2020.1717937; Veerman, G.-J. and Platt, L.(2021) School composition and multiple ethnic identities of migrant-origin adolescents in the Netherlands. Ethnic and Racial StudiesDOI: 10.1080/01419870.2021.1887503]; and to complete existing preliminary work on the relationship between educational attainment and occupational aspirations across ethnic groups.

Lucinda Platt is currently working on a new study of the impacts on family members of child special educational needs in Nigeria. Preliminary results from this are anticipated in 2023.

Lucinda Platt is currently working on a study of the long-term economic and employment consequences of childhood disability across three cohorts. An early version of this work is currently in working paper form [Parsons, S. and Platt, L.(2022) Special educational needs and disability: a lifetime of disadvantage in the labour market? CLS Working Paper 2022/4. London: Centre for Longitudinal Studies, UCL. https://cls.ucl.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/CLS-Working-Paper-2022-4-Special-educational-needs-and-disability-a-lifetime-of-disadvantage-in-the-labour-market.pdf]

It is estimated that around 10 per cent of individuals have dyslexia, a reading disability that negatively affects a person’s ability to read and comprehend texts. Almudena’s on-going projects evaluates a computer assisted learning intervention that targeted primary school students in the region of Madrid (Spain), which was focused on diagnosis and solutions to students ‘reading and writing difficulties derived from dyslexia (Dytective).