I wrote about this when I was doing my foundation degree in early years many moons ago! It was seen as a problem right back then, and nothing seems to be resolved yet! All children come with their own set of ‘special needs’ individual to that child, it’s when they become more complex and specific to an individual that we have to go down the route of labelling to access help and funding for extra support. Whilst that system is in place, a label is, unfortunately necessary. If it was possible to access support without a label, that would help! I can remember having a child that her parents and I were sure was autistic, it was obvious that we would need support to help her, but she had to have that official label in order for us to get help.
On my course we also pondered the usage of the terms ‘disability’ and ‘dis-ability’ and whether we felt differently about the connotations of the labels.
We used to use the term ‘Big Helper’ as sometimes the actual individual would change, or be absent for some reason. Someone else could then be called upon to be the ‘Big Helper ‘ for the session.