Some kids are just thick

When I was young, back in Suffolk, to be Educationally Sub Normal a kid had to be stuck on finger-painting at the age of eleven and have a tendency to wipe its nose with its foot. Otherwise, it was just 'slow'. Somewhere along the way, ESN became an unfashionable moniker and transmuted to 'special needs' at about the same time spastics became cerebral palsy sufferers, and overnight it seems that a vast additional cohort of ESN kids was created.

At the same time, never backwards in cruelty, kids themselves adopted 'special' as a term of intellectual derision. To be 'special' was shaming in a way that being 'slow' never was; there's no shame at being slow in Suffolk.

Then along came Labour with a performance target for 'Statementing', a made-up word to describe the production by the LEA of a Statement of Special Educational Needs for ESN and, er, 'slow' kids. Overnight, it became a mini-industry as bureaucrats raced to meet their Statementing targets.

Today 20% of the nation's school roll are classified as 'special', more than 700,000 kids. It's all, of course, an incredible waste of money. If a child is slow, no amount of additional attention will make it intellectually quick. We need slow people; we depend on them to do the tedious, repetitive and largely manual jobs as vital to the functioning of our society as brain surgeons. Accept it.