Around 450,000 children are being failed by the UK education system because they have a special educational need and disability (SEND) that is effectively unrecognised by most schools and local education authorities, an author has warned. Supporting Color Blindness in Education and Beyond , by author Marie Difolco, shines a spotlight on a commonly-overlooked SEND in modern classrooms: color blindness (also known as color vision deficiency, or CVD). She also warns that many myths surround this condition, with many people believing it just means not being able to tell the difference between red and green, but color blindness affects how a person sees the whole visible color spectrum.
Despite CVD affecting one in 12 boys and one in 200 girls (equating to one child in every average class of 30), Difolco says most schools across the UK are failing to identify all their children with this SEND. This leaves children to struggle in silence and even lose marks on exam papers, she explains. Routine screening for color blindness was quietly removed from the Healthy Child Screening Programme in 2009, based on a review that relied on outdated and incorrect information and, through no fault of their own, teachers aren't usually trained to spot the signs or to support it, often reporting they've never taught a color blind child.
Most children affected by this SEND are boys, so they're persistently exposed to in-direct sex-discrimination due to common teaching practices that rely on color. F.