When I started teaching in 1979, special educational needs were not really recognised in mainstream schools. Of course, there were students with poor reading ages, low literacy skills and/or low numeracy skills, but these students were simply taught in the lower sets.
Apart from this all students were treated the same. As you can imagine, there were a lot of students who were misunderstood and frequently in trouble.
Looking back, you can see they had difficulties, but nobody really thought about it. You had Jack who continually walked out of class saying it was too noisy, Ben who would react badly when getting something wrong, and Joe who refused to work at times.
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