“High quality teaching that is differentiated and personalised will meet the individual needs of the majority of children and young people.”
“The leaders of… schools… should establish and maintain a culture of high expectations that expects those working with children and young people with SEN or disabilities to include them in all the opportunities available to other children and young people so they can achieve well.”
“The class or subject teacher should remain responsible for working with the [SEN] child on a daily basis. Where the interventions involve group or one-to-one teaching away from the main class or subject teacher, they should still retain responsibility for the pupil.”
SEND Code of Practice 0-25 (DfE / DoH, 2015)
All teachers are teachers of SEND. I think (hope) that all teachers, newer or more experienced, know and accept this, although it seems to remain easier said than done. Maybe the world of SEND, especially for a non-specialist practitioner appears vast and daunting and, despite the Code of Practice being very clear that classroom teachers and whole school systems retain the bulk of the responsibility for SEND provision and outcomes, the established and accepted systems in place to support inclusion reinforce a message that SEND is something that can only be managed by specialists, experts, and through separation and segregation. The good news is that no one teacher needs to know everything there is to know about SEND. Each individual teacher just needs to get to know their students (and their students’ parents!) and know who to ask / where to find more information about the specific additional needs they are supporting. It is easy, though, to see how classroom teachers would get the impression that they need their SEND learners to be supported by teaching assistants and withdrawn from their lessons for other provision in order to get the special things that they need that are different to what they, as the classroom teacher, are offering the rest of the class. When it comes to inclusion, I think it is fair to assume that most schools are pretty much using the same approach and that they are striving to do the things that it entails – teaching assistant support, withdrawal intervention, etc. – as best they can offer, but the outcomes for SEND students (both within education and, where reasonable comparison can be made, in their adult lives beyond – see links at the end of this post) remain poor and certainly not equitable with their non-SEND counterparts. So where are we going wrong? We say that all teachers are teachers of SEND, and that is certainly the right thing to be saying, but until we acknowledge and overcome the barriers to teachers actually achieving that – the bad habits, received wisdoms, and misconceptions of what inclusion should look like – those outcomes for our SEND learners are unlikely to improve. The legislation in place already allows for this. In fact, the wording of the Code of Practice makes it clear that whole school approaches, not separate provision, is the first step and majority share of meeting SEND need. Lack of funding for SEND is an easy out for teachers and school leaders and defaulting to blaming it is in itself a barrier to making things better for our SEND students. Undoubtedly SEND is underfunded and there’s a battle being waged on that front too, but increased funding is not the answer to our inclusion issues and even if additional funds are provided you can be sure that there will still be work to do to make things right because, like the legislation, it isn’t actually the problem. What’s more, the SEND students we are teaching right now don’t have time for us to wait for a magic money tree to appear.
So if it isn’t that we each need to know every possible incarnation of SEND that we may ever encounter, it isn’t an issue with the legislation, and it isn’t that we need to wait for further funding to be provided… what is it? It is something that is much, much simpler but, somehow, possibly harder to achieve than any of these things, but the good news is this; it is within our control.
Perhaps the biggest barrier to inclusion in mainstream schools is the misconception that SEND students are something different to students in general. Schools were well established long before the concept of inclusion, initially called integration, was introduced and the things that we see representing inclusion now are the add-ons and exceptions introduced to try and make education work for a wider range of needs than it was originally intended for. This might have been the right thing to begin with, but it is this approach that keeps some students ‘special’ and in need of something different to their peers; true inclusion would be a system designed to meet the full range of needs as part of the main offer. As long as the current approach is in place, it is inclusion and not a high quality education that will remain the aim for SEND students. The first thing we can each do to start to make things better for our SEND learners is to understand this and start to adjust our own choices accordingly so that our children in our classroom start to benefit. The problem of how SEND students are disadvantaged by the current approach is huge, and there is no use throwing ourselves at a brick wall, but we can all chip away at the bottom of it and eventually the wall will fall.
I appreciate that this is hardly a practical guide to being more inclusive in the classroom, there are plenty of those kinds of things out there, but – although I’m not saying that these things don’t have value – I don’t think those books necessarily have the answer either. Strategies and systems that work well in one school, or even a few schools, won’t necessarily work in all schools. When we, either as classroom teachers or maybe department heads or senior leaders, are planning and designing what our lesson, schemes of work, routines etc. are going to be for our students as a whole we look at what is available – what’s working well in other schools, what new ideas and trends are emerging – and we borrow and adapt, mix and match, to make it right for our own setting. Meeting the needs of our SEND students isn’t just doing this for SEND provision as well; it is not needing to because those children were included in your thinking when you were planning for your class, subject, year group or school as a whole.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t students who need additional and different in order to succeed; there certainly are. But the more intrinsically inclusive your overall approach is, the more you design things from scratch to meet the needs of the full range of students you have (our SEND students aren’t a surprise to us in mainstream; we know they are going to be there!), the less additional and different you might find that you need. Crucially, any additional and different that is in place should be of equitable quality, minimise disruption of their access to education, be for their benefit and not someone else’s convenience, be evidence based (or advised by an outside agency expert e.g. educational psychologist) and regularly reviewed, not just a habit (i.e. “we have always done this for our SEND students instead of them going to MFL / art / music…”).
It also isn’t to suggest that anyone should just be winging it and hoping for the best! As with so much in education, success in this area boils down to positive relationships, communication and a willingness to move with the times, even if the only thing changing is your own knowledge, experience and confidence. No one teacher needs to (or can! – anyone that claims otherwise is terribly, terribly underestimating!) know everything there is to know about every possible type of additional need that might be present in their classroom; we each just need to know, and be willing to learn more, about our children. Getting to know, and listening very carefully to parents and carers, as well as the children themselves, doing a bit of research about specific needs they may have, speaking with the SENCO or previous teachers etc. will get you to where you need to be quicker. And believe in yourself! You’re the teacher, subject specialist person who chose to put yourself there for these kids; your SEND students need and deserve to be with you too.
There are a couple of things I would advocate for all teachers, at every level, and not just for SENCOs and others with a special / specific interest in inclusion, to do though. The first of these is to read the SEND Code of Practice (link) and find out what the statutory musts and shoulds of inclusion actually are, what your role is and where you sit in the network of systems designed to support our more vulnerable learners. The Code lives solidly in the domain of the SEND specialists, but it shouldn’t; this is a document for all of us to read, understand and use to better meet the needs of our students. Secondly, find out more about what the educational and adult outcomes for your SEND students are likely to be if we don’t actively improve things for them. A little bit of context and understanding of the bigger picture can help us to understand why our role as inclusive educators is so important and why it is crucial that we get it right and continue to get it more and more right in the future. I’ve included some links and suggestions below.
Finally, question everything. This doesn’t necessarily mean that everything, or even anything, that is already in place for your SEND students is wrong, but so much of what we call ‘inclusive’ is actual habitual; received wisdoms that we assume, because everyone does it, must be the right thing. Ask yourself if it is equitable to what their non-SEND peers are getting. Ask yourself if it is yielding the outcomes that the children involved need. Ask yourself if it could change for the better, and if it could… change it. Ultimately, we know what a high quality education looks like and we do it every day for our students as a whole. If your SEND students are getting anything other than that, if they are getting ‘inclusion’ instead of their education, there are still questions to be asked and changes to be made. Changes that can be made by you.
https://www.scope.org.uk/media/disability-facts-figures/
https://www.mencap.org.uk/learning-disability-explained/research-and-statistics
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