There are too many kids with special educational needs

Children with special educational needs.

Sir, It was good to see Dr Ni Brolchain's interesting study of children with special educational needs (February Journal, p.56). They form a small but important subgroup of a practice child population. I suspect these children and their families may well have higher consultation rates than a control group without special educational needs. I trained for general practice (including nine months i...

Analyzing Preference Rankings when There Are Too Many Alternatives

Consumer preferences can be measured by rankings of alternatives. When there are too many alternatives, this consumer task becomes complex. One option is to have consumers rank only a subset of the available alternatives. This has an impact on subsequent statistical analysis, as now a large amount of ties is observed. We propose a simple methodology to perform proper statistical analysis in thi...

too many students’ congresses, are they necessary and useful?

Formula Funding and Special Educational Needs

This thesis is based on a six year research study and is set against the implementation of Local Management of Schools and the formula funding arrangements for pupils with special educational needs (SEN). The main aim of the research is to investigate the principles and practice for allocating additional resources to provide for pupils with SEN but without statements. Two theoretical perspectiv...

How many tastes are there?

How many basic tastes are there? Most people list four: sweet, sour, salty and bitter. Those with a background in the chemosensory sciences usually add a fifth, umami. But why stop there? There is growing evidence that there are more—perhaps many more. The idea that there are four basic tastes goes back at least as far as ancient Greece, so if there are more than four basic tastes why haven't t...