A Critical Discourse Analysis of the UK SEND Review Green Paper

What is it about?

In this paper we carry out an analysis of the UK Government’s 2022 Green Paper ‘Right Support, Right Place, Right Time’, known as ‘the SEND Review’. This analysis forms one part of a wider research project, ‘[Project title removed]’, in which we document parents’ opinions on the SEND Review and their reasons for non/participation in the public consultation process. In this paper we explore the ways that the term ‘special educational needs’ is used in policy to continually diminish the quality of disabled people’s lives. We focus on an analysis of the Green paper through a number of its linguistic features and present three main areas of interest: the (mis)use of and omission of ‘need’, the ubiquitous and ambiguous use of ‘we’, and the presentation of ‘newness’.

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