Affect, Behaviour, Cognition:To what extent can a Randomised Controlled Trial of a Philosophy 4 Children intervention change young children’s attitudes and responses to special educational needs and disabilities?

Countering widespread negative attitudes towards disability is understood to be a universal and critically important societal matter. Peer attitudes are important to inclusion within classrooms. However, we currently know very little about how young children perceive others with special educational needs and disabilities, or about how malleable these beliefs are. To understand whether children’s attitudes towards those who learn and behave differently from themselves can be changed, we designed a Philosophy for Children (P4C) intervention and evaluated it using a randomised control trial. The participants were children from two primary schools based in the north of England (n = 165). All children, irrespective of special educational needs and disabilities (SENDs), were invited to participate in the study. In total (n = 39) children, 24% of the sample had been diagnosed with SENDs. Two non-gendered puppet characters, Zig and Zag represented learning and behavioural differences to participants. Those in the experimental group took part in one-hour weekly P4C intervention sessions designed to enhance understanding and acceptance of special educational needs and disabilities, and their attitudes were measured pre- and post-intervention, along with those children in the control group. The Chedoke-McMaster Attitudes Towards Children with Handicaps Scale (CATCH) was used to assess older children’s attitudes (affective, behavioural and cognitive) and a measure developed by the researchers was used for the youngest children. Baseline pre-test scores for affective, behavioural and cognitive attitudes showed the intervention had a significant positive effect on affective attitudes towards those with learning disabilities. At 12 weeks delayed post-testing these effects had faded. The study offers preliminary evidence that a brief four-week P4C intervention can significantly alter children’s affective attitudes towards others with learning differences. Achieving longer-lasting effects will require further sustained, age-appropriate, multi-modal intervention. These findings also demonstrate very young children can meaningfully share their perspectives.