Special educational needs in design and technology

As a teacher of Design and Technology, I was concerned by the very wide range of ability of pupils I taught, and the frequency of learning difficulties. I suspected that some learning difficulties might be common across the curriculum. I was also interested in what training teachers had had to help them cope with learning difficulties, and what further training teachers felt might be useful. I devised a questionnaire, designed to try to answer these questions, and used it to conduct a survey of teachers working at the high schools in the Tamworth and Lichfield area of Staffordshire. This paper reports the analysis of the data produced by the questionnaire and discusses some of the issues raised.