Adaptive Teaching

Adaptive teaching has entered the language of education and, as innovation and developments (or buzzwords and fads!) often will, has already taken on multiple interpretations across the sector.  I’ve seen school level tick lists of adaptive features and single page summaries of what each department does for SEND in their subject, and I would usually strive to distance myself form anything like this… but this is different.  Both of those approaches have missed the point though. 

Adaptive teaching may be new language to try and overcome a very old problem, but it is far from being the new ‘quality first teaching’ (shudder) or differentiation.  It is barely SEND provision or even a discrete provision at all.  The ECF’s descriptors cover a broad range of aspects of what happens in our schools and it has resonated with me because it aligns so well with Mountain Rescue and the work we have been doing at Dixons Trinity for the past ten years. 

And I’m worried.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m delighted.  But I’m worried too.  Because the history of (attempted) inclusive education is filled with promising developments and missed opportunities, and a good idea isn’t enough; right now, we are in the adaptive teaching danger zone.  It already has a buzzwordy name, a checklist, and a strong association with SEND, so it is in grave danger of becoming a separate thing, something we do for our SEND students and separate from the ‘real’ work of teaching and running our schools.  This is a mind-set that has already let our students down so many times before, but we have to start somewhere, I suppose. 

Schools operate on a simple cyclical process.  We establish where our students are at currently, we use that information to plan what we are going to do to move them forward, we implement our plans, and then we review how it went, using this review to update our information and start the cycle again. 

Assess.  Plan.  Do.  Review.

Everything else happening in our schools is either to support that cycle to happen effectively, to maximise on the opportunities it provides, or a combination of the two.  For example, the behaviour system is to support classroom management, but also provides opportunities for personal development.  Safeguarding is how we ensure access to education and we are also ideally placed to provide early and emergency intervention.   We probably most closely associate the ‘assess plan do review’ (APDR) process with SEND provision and the graduated response.  SEND APDR is simply the same process we have in place for all students, but with increasing levels of specificity and personalisation to meet the needs of groups and individuals who require a more targeted or specialist approach.  For students with SEND it is a system that is enshrined in law, but actually it’s a pattern of response we see throughout our schools and for other areas of vulnerability and need.  For example, there will be whole school routines for managing behaviour, and then graduated layers and increasing individualisation for just the children who need it.  The same goes for mental health and for safeguarding. 

The ECF descriptors don’t give us anything additional to do, or anything different that should be in place for students with SEND, but instead gives us the most effective, and therefore inclusive, approach for all learners.  It gives us a lens through which we can view our schools as a system, identify gaps and analyse for optimal inclusivity, and understand how all the moving parts must work together as a whole in order for all children to be able to learn and thrive.

The first phase of the cycle is assessment, including not only meaningful and usable academic data, but all of the information we can pour into the system in order to empower teachers, leaders and support staff to work with precision.  It includes academic levels, but also pastoral information and what staff know from their own observations and interactions with students. 

For the students we identify as SEND, it includes whatever their school is using to share children’s reasonable adjustments and strategies with staff, typically something like an Individual Education Plan (IEP), pen portrait, one page profile, or similar.  With this, and with all of the sources of information contributing to this phase of the cycle, leaders must ensure that the quality, quantity and relevance of the information is right, that support is provided and time to review it is protected, so that staff aren’t overwhelmed or having to sort through what is and isn’t useful.

The next phase of the cycle is to use that rich and varied information to plan and resource effectively, including planning for reasonable adjustments and specialist resources to be in place, but the ECF puts particular emphasis on ‘flexible grouping’.  This might be the opportunity I’ve been waiting for to move away from the term ‘double staffing’, which was an accurate description of it when we first said it, to something that better describes what it has become.  Although literal double staffing of lessons does still happen, it would now be much more accurate to describe it as a willingness to be flexible, a bit creative, and a very information led way to staff and group students.  At this phase, I would also include effective use of teaching assistants, i.e. following the research and not received wisdoms, and ensuring well-stocked, tidy and purposeful spaces for our children to learn in.

At the heart of the cycle, and therefore at the heart of everything we do, is the lesson.  The black box.  The moment.  Our raison d’être.  You can have all the right information and have made all the best plans, but ultimately it comes down to what the teacher does in their classroom.  The best laid plans can turn out not to be quite the right thing and, to complicate things further, our audience are children who have their own personalities and preferences, skills and needs, good moods and bad, just as anyone does. They are expert curveball throwers and so teachers have to be expert curveball catchers.  Standardised routines and resources, such as expected lesson formats, ‘do now’ activities and curriculum booklets, reduce extraneous cognitive load and clutter, help share best practice and create consistency, but must be used as a springboard and not a ball and chain.  What the students need are teachers who are knowledgeable (about their subject and about their students), who have a range of skills and strategies to draw from, and who have the confidence, autonomy and agency to teach dynamically and make responsive decisions in order to maximise on the opportunities the lesson brings them.

Making the most of the lesson itself also relies on support and conducive factors from outside the classroom.  Well-managed transitions, absence cover, senior leadership presence and, whenever something results in a child being out of the lesson (typically for behaviour, SEND or mental health reasons), systems that prioritise quickly returning them back to the classroom where they belong are all crucial for ensuring the lesson itself goes well.  There are valid reasons why a child might be out of their lesson and things like withdrawal intervention, time out cards, internal exclusion, part-time timetables and suspensions, all have a place, but they also all take students away from the thing they came to us to get.  They are effectively forms of legitimised absence and overuse of them, arguably any use of them, results in children being away from the classroom, creating gaps in learning, damaging relationship and, often, children affected finding it increasingly difficult to cope in the classroom.  A student might need a behaviour response, a break or a particular intervention but, ultimately it is our main offer i.e. the main timetable, routines and lessons, that tends to be our most effective, well-resourced and stable offer.  Often it is our most vulnerable learners, the ones that need the very best and most consistent experience, that are most liable to spending time out of their lessons.  We should be operating on the basis that every exit from the classroom is a tragedy.  Unless we are running a behaviour system that recognises classroom paramountcy over getting that pound of flesh, and SEND provision that recognises the difference between a reasonable adjustment and educational provision, we are inevitably going to be letting children down.

The final phase of the cycle is to review.  This includes academic progress and attainment, but also evaluation of how things have gone, what has been learned about the children, what has changed for the better and the worse, and what can be fed back into the next iteration of the cycle, so that it isn’t just repeating but evolving and improving too.  Another key feature of the ECF descriptors is formative assessment and, although there may be literal APDR cycles as well (e.g. timings for assessments or providing feedback on SEND targets), in general I would say that the cycles are more figurative; it is a constant process of using rich information, smart resourcing, and formative assessment to make excellent decisions, big and small, about what action should be taken next. 

What does this have to do with Mountain Rescue?  The adaptive teaching cycle and the school’s pastoral services are two intertwining branches of the same tree, with each one both taking and providing information, resource and support for the other.  The two are inexorably linked, and so the flow of information, resource and people (staff and children) will move between them whether they are optimised for that to be done efficiently or not. 

Mountain Rescue, the model we use (there will be others, I’m sure), is a three-tier multi-disciplinary approach, utilising shared spaces, combined resources, and collaborative leadership to streamline provision and meet the needs of all children holistically.  We can continue to talk about SEND, safeguarding, challenging behaviour, poor attendance and various other vulnerabilities as if they are groups of children distinct from one another, but of course, in reality they are not.  Our highest profile students are likely to fall into multiple categories, and every child has elements of each and the potential to escalate through our systems.  I have seen enough examples of our most vulnerable, ‘edge of education’ students being caught in a tug of war between supportive (but segregating) SEND systems and overly punitive behaviour systems, or life-changing placement decisions being made in the absence of important safeguarding or SEND information, to know that it is about more than just streamlining.  It is about finding ways to do better for our children who are most at risk of losing their entitlement to the best protective factor we can give them and the very reason we exist; a high quality education.  Mountain Rescue is how we optimise the flows of information, resource and support to protect that entitlement for every student.

Another important overarching factor is relationships.  Understanding the teacher student relationship, how it impacts on teaching and learning, and being proactive in fostering, maintaining and protecting it (which requires high quality professional development, just like any of other important aspect of our job) is crucial and has relevance throughout the cyclical process.  What we learn from our interactions with students is a valuable information source and one that (hopefully!) strengthens and strengthens over time, but maybe more importantly, building strong relationships – trust – is how we get children to take learning risks and how we notice the subtle responses that enable us to make dynamic decisions.  Non-attendance, not having your needs met, and inappropriate or excessive use of sanctions are all threats to our relationships with students and so need to be minimised wherever possible.   

So how can we make the most of the potential adaptive teaching brings whilst avoiding the pitfalls of previous attempts to make education more inclusive.  Firstly, this is not a separate thing to do, or a replacement for a previous concept, but a new lens through which to look at our school systems as a whole, identify any gaps, disconnects or in-inclusivity, but probably most importantly, to find opportunities to move forward for the benefit of all students.  Secondly, to remember that the SENCO is an important voice in this conversation, but as soon as you make this a SENCO responsibility, you have missed the point and the opportunity.  This is not SEND provision, it is a way of making your school more inherently inclusive as the norm.  And thirdly, if you use the ECF descriptors as a checklist and tick each one off as done whilst students with SEND remain overrepresented in behaviour and attendance data, your corridors and classrooms are calm through extensive use of internal exclusion, suspensions and part-time timetables, meaning that your vulnerable groups get poor outcomes (not just academic outcomes but other measures as well) you have not been reflective enough. 

Adaptive teaching isn’t really a thing, but a description of what a school does just optimised for inclusivity; but that doesn’t mean it isn’t needed.  The reality is that vulnerable groups still typically receive a second-rate experience of education and adaptive teaching is an opportunity to do something about it; it is an opportunity to make things right for more students and, as if that isn’t enough, also to better understand and maximise our systems and how they work together to build more inclusivity, efficiency and sustainability into our most effective and most stable offer.  It is a way to steady the ship and succeed in spite of any external factors that might affect us.  In the end it will come down to the same thing that any potential change for our most vulnerable groups comes down to; not just what do we want, but what are you willing to do to achieve it?  We all want to be more inclusive, but what are you willing to actually change, even if you’re the only school in the country that is doing it, to make it happen?  Because the only real inclusion is equality.  And we are a long, long way from that.

Effort or attainment?

Neither.  Both.  Erm… progress from personal starting points.

Or, all of these (amongst other things). 

It is, I think, human nature to categorise and dichotomise, and there’s a place for binaries in how we understand, organise and communicate information.  Reality is rarely that simple, though.

We can (and should!) be critical of an unchecked meritocratic approach.  Attainment or ability as the sole measure of achievement would be significantly flawed, exclusionary and harmful to those who fall short of arbitrary benchmarks, probably those who don’t as well.  The greater agency we have, and therefore equality, when it comes to effort is clear, but that too isn’t without its flaws (is it objectively observable?  I definitely know people who can look like they’re trying when they aren’t, and others who look way too relaxed even when giving 100%) and limitations (academic, or any measurable outcomes, aside; is it enough to ensure our students have the childhoods and then adulthoods that we are trying to facilitate?).  Any unilateral approach is going to be limiting.  Our school populations, like humankind in general, are diverse.  People’s abilities and needs, preferences, contexts and achievements, exist in a complex matrix that no binary or linear scale is going to be able to capture. 

Undoubtedly, it is summative attainment grades that loom the largest in education and this creates an element of ‘have / have not’, or ‘winners and losers’, and shouldn’t be the whole picture for any student.  Attainment grades and effort measures (perceived or actual) are not mutually exclusive, nor are they the only two options or factors at play.  Progress from personal starting points, considering both pace of change and distance travelled, surely has a place in this mix too.  It isn’t without its flaws, of course.  It is still us who set the parameters, and there are myriad individual and contextual factors that mean it could never be a ‘pure’ measure of whatever academic or personal endeavour it aims to represent.  I’m not particularly advocating for this approach either, but I am saying that attainment, effort, starting point, progress, personal and contextual factors all interact with each other and can’t be meaningfully separated out.

I’m speaking generally (none of our children deserve to be reduced to any one of these measures), but it is, as usual, our students with SEND who are disproportionately affected by the eventual meritocratic cut off point of our education system, even where the process has been tempered by other measures.  As is often the case, what is visible, i.e. our meritocratic approach to measuring achievement, is the product of the problem, not the problem itself.  We can only paper over the cracks until we secure the foundations.  This, and the other aspects of our education system that just don’t work for (or are actively harmful to) our SEND students are the result of lack of knowledge, understanding and of impetus, essentially entrenched systemic ableism and ableist unconscious bias in a constant negative feedback loop, that designs and drives our systems, including how we assess.  For me, it is a broader range of measures that is needed.  To be drawn on, understood (flaws and all), and valued in combination.  Culture shift is hard, especially when many don’t even realise that it needs to happen, but change is still possible and pushing for it is more than the right thing to do; it’s a moral imperative. 

But firstly, whatever we do, we have to start where we are at.  The adherence to exam results, grades and specific ‘recognised’ qualifications has implications beyond the school gate, maybe lifelong, so even if the system is wrong, ripping that plaster off in one go may cause our students more harm than good.  Maybe the question isn’t ‘effort or attainment’, or even ‘how do we measure’ at all, but what are we actually trying to achieve through education, both in the current context and in a better future?

I was lucky to complete my early careers phase in Halifax where, at least at the time, there were excellent LA programmes for both NQTs and for new SENCOs.  I can’t remember the exact wording, but on the wall of the building where these sessions took place was a mural (maybe a tree and butterflies?) and some words along these lines – we only need to give our children two things; roots and wings.  Cheesy, I know.  I like cheesy things.  This has stuck with me throughout my career, and it is what was swimming around in my head while I was thinking about writing this post.  For families, I agree with the original sentiment but for educators I think it is slightly different.  What we want to give our students is the gift of as many unlocked doors as possible, both while they are with us and then throughout their lives, not because we want them to take all the opportunities or follow any specific path, but because we want them to have choice.  Which means we have to give them a second thing too; the tools to make positive choices for themselves.  So, a strong sense of self and a sense of how they exist in relation to others and the world around them. 

Doors and oars.

And mixed metaphors.

I don’t know whether I’m proud of that or ashamed of it, to be honest.

At present, attainment grades are the key to many doors, so they remain part of the package of things that I want to try to give all students.  In that specific aspect of the system, outcomes will always exist on a scale and where you are on that scale will always precede you in some way.  I’m not claiming that certain benchmarks and higher grades aren’t the criteria for many courses and jobs, and generally given status over other, lower grades, but I also think people generally recognise that what we consider an achievement is personal to the individual and impacted by contextual factors.  I also think there are many courses and jobs where those benchmarks or higher grades are not required, and (most, I think?!) people recognise that those jobs have value and are right for some and not others, hopefully through choice and being challenging and enjoyable so that it gives the individual a sense of purpose.  This could be said about any job. Horses for courses.  There’s room for this aspect of the system to evolve and improve, both in terms of its structure and how society understands it, but this needs to come from decision making based on a new anti-ableist understanding and agenda. I think it can only meaningfully come from this.

Attainment grades might open doors, different doors for different people, but they aren’t enough on their own.  Our schools are full of learning that is nothing to do with any curriculum, scheme of work, lesson plan or assessment, but the constant drip feeding of information we give our children through our own behaviour, communication, choices, how we organise the timetable and spaces etc., and this learning is very powerful too.  How children hear us talk to and about them, other children, staff and other adults, how we respond to their attainments and efforts, how we group and segregate, what we call things, what gets our attention, our time… all of this is teaching our children things about themselves, their worth, about others and their worth… and it is happening whether we realise it or not.  I’m not sure this stuff is measurable, or we would want it to be, and i don’t think it is necessarily a linear scale at all i.e. is 100% effort (or apparent / perceived effort) what we actually want? I don’t give equal effort to everything I do, and I don’t feel like I have to.  Is always being nice and polite what we want from our students? Or do we want them to know when to be abrupt? Defiant? Angry?  This could be particularly important when it comes to personal safety. 

It might not be measurable, but what I’m advocating for here is certainly made up of specific elements.  Knowing each student as an individual, strong relationships (which the adult is fully responsible for), and a consciousness of what is being communicated through our word choice, behaviour and how we organise time and space, will all contribute to the inclusiveness, effectiveness and positive experience of education of our schools.  Within the safety of that, we need to use what we think are the best measures of achievement (attainment, effort, progress…) that we can come up with and that fit into the bigger picture of college courses, apprenticeships, university and work… not because we are trying to send children down any particular route, but because we want as many routes to be available for them as possible, and for each of them to feel empowered to choose.  We need to communicate those measures carefully, with kindness and with purpose.  And we need to be committed to learning, improving and evolving all systems so they become better and better for more and more students with time.

SEND and Social Justice v2

It’s rare, if ever, that I meet anyone in education that doesn’t recognise that there are improvements to be made in how we manage SEND and inclusion in mainstream schools.  Nor have I ever met anyone who is really vehemently invested in the current statutory and established systems for it.  Yet the conversations continue to go around in the same circles, with the same ‘beyond our control’ problems being blamed, and we continue to lean in to familiar approaches whilst bemoaning lack of availability or whatever, with little or no evidence of their positive impact anywhere to be found.  Certainly, part of the problem is that the conversations about SEND and inclusion remain separate from the wider discourse within education.  We talk about it like it is something entirely different to education itself.  Inclusion is not a separate issue, but a thread that runs through every other issue in education.  Actually, it is so much more than even that.  Achieving true inclusivity for SEND leaners in education is a matter of social justice.  Inclusion is a human rights issue.

Inclusion is not the static set of circumstances we have come to accept as the outward signs of being a school that does something (anything!) for our students with SEND.  Inclusion is the journey, the steps we are taking towards the real goal of educational equality for all.  Inclusion is a process.  Justice is the destination.

As long as we continue to ‘include’ our learners with SEND through second rate and segregated provision, by making them an educational offer that lacks any evidence base and keeps them separate from the things that we know work, we are at a standstill on the journey towards where we actually need to be. 

The separate conversations that persists around lack of funding for SEND, the difficulties of navigating an overly bureaucratic system, and the need for extensive specialist knowledge, and even the ones around best deployment of TAs or which literacy interventions are best to buy in, all miss the point entirely.  They are all based on the assumption that SEND is something different, difficult, expensive and specialist.  An inconvenient aside to the real work we are doing.  But these are not the problems but the symptoms of the problems.  First and foremost, our learners with SEND are just learners, and we know what a high quality, evidence based learning experience looks like – we do it every day for our students without SEND.

This isn’t to say there aren’t problems; there are.  But until we step back from the received wisdoms, bad habits and externalised blame culture of the current, bizarrely entrenched (considering its relatively short history) approach, we will not be able to see them for what they are.  Until we see and accept them, we will not be able to begin the work to resolve them.  Inclusion is a journey, and we will only start to make progress when we stop walking in tight circles. 

The real problems:

• The issue of inclusion in education is both a cause and a symptom of disability discrimination in wider society
• Schools and the education system were already established before the concept of inclusion was introduced
• The current approach is based on the fairly arbitrary notion of there being distinct SEND and non-SEND learners
• Inclusion itself is a barrier to a high quality education

The adult society we have now – the teachers and leaders, parents and employers – were educated under these circumstances and now make the decisions, set the parameters, and measure the accountability based on what they learnt.  We recreate the same set of circumstances and teach the next generation the same thing.  We were raised in a flawed system and now we are marking our own homework.  This is why learners with SEND are the students we get away with not working for.

Unfortunately, if your plans for improving the learning experience of students with SEND in your own school involves more withdrawal intervention, more TAs, a bigger inclusion base etc., you’re circumventing the real issues and facilitating the problems to loop around again.  It isn’t your SEND provision that needs to change, it’s your whole school.  Having students with SEND is not exactly a surprise to us.  We know they are going to be there.  It’s about time we start designing our schools like we do. 

As long as acceptance of the current system continues, our learners with SEND continue to be the victims of injustice.  Their right to a high quality education is unmet and, in this being true, we double down on the problem being repeated again.  They are denied the education they are entitled to and the learning opportunities that might equip them to challenge the injustice.  They are segregated from the social situations that provide opportunities to develop their understanding and skills for being part of a community, even just feeling entitled to be part of the community, and all of us are denied the experience and benefits of functioning in a truly diverse and egalitarian society.  It is no wonder we keep walking in circles.

So, how do we move things forward?  It is clear that this is not a situation with an easy solution or quick fix and it may even feel like we aren’t ready – the cracks in the system loom large and, of course, with more funding, better training etc. we would be able to do more – and I certainly aren’t advocating pulling the rug out from under anyone’s feet.  What we are, though, is ready to start.  And the first steps are simple and free.

We can start be seeing inclusion for what it really is; a fight for our learners’ human rights.  It is a means, not an end, and it is a responsibility of ours as educators of children.  This isn’t an inconvenience, aside or additional responsibility; it is our job.  The school is the children, all of them, and it needs to work for them.  We work for them.

The only conversations about inclusion that will move inclusion forward are the ones that happen within the conversations about every single other aspect of school life.  The conversation about staffing in maths has to be about staffing in a way that reaches and teaches every child, not just most.  The talks about routines at lunch time or break time need to be talks about how those times are going to work for all students, not just most.  This may mean that the decisions made result in more change than we are usually comfortable with, but that is what this is; the current design – even with tweaks and add-ons – does not work for every student.  It doesn’t work for the students who need it to work the most.  We either want it and we are willing to work for it, or we don’t and we aren’t.  Change on this level won’t happen overnight, there’s a lot to do and there’s a lot to undo, but change can start straight away.

Ask yourself this: what would the end of the inclusion journey look like in your classroom, lessons, school, MAT or LA?  What’s the dream for you learners, SEND and all?  Once you are clear where you are aiming, you can share that vision, share it again and share it some more.  Share the ‘what’ and the ‘how’, but – just as important – the ‘why’.  As with many issues of social justice, there are those who have the privilege of being able to disengage from it, and may be many more who are genuinely unaware of the issues.  Knowledge can be powerful.  Information can be motivation. 

Do the teachers in your school know the statistics for adults with disabilities, including learning disabilities, look like? Would they teach your students with SEND differently if they did? Clarity, consistency and communication of the mission and the vision is key.

Book recommendations:
– ‘Don’t Send Him In Tomorrow’ Jarlath O’Brien
– ‘Crippled’ Frances Ryan

Then there is the management of the new artefacts and routines of SEND and inclusion in education on the basis of this renewed understanding.  These things are behind the scenes, subtle and seamless compared to the outward signs of inclusion that we are used to.  They do not necessarily serve that ableist desire to be seen to be doing something.  Because real inclusion – the destination of that journey – is built in.  It is everyone able to get what they need, with equality and equity, and as part of the main.  Real inclusion is invisible. 

So, who is going to make this happen?  The children in our schools right now don’t have time to wait for review and reform and, based on our history of this, they’d be waiting longer even than that.  They don’t have the option of waiting for society to change – they are the potential for society to change, if only we can facilitate it.  We can’t rely on the systems in place to hold us to account.  Yes, there have been some recent improvements in this area, but also the accountability measures in education were written for a system, and by those (probably unknowingly) entrenched in that system, that accepts SEND as ‘other’ and less as enough for some people.  These things all need to change as well, I know, but we don’t have time to keep waiting for that to happen.  The bad and the good news is that this will need to be a grassroots movements.  It’s bad news because we are the people that need to make it happen.  It’s good news because we are the people that can. 

It is true that I rarely, if ever, meet people that don’t recognise that great change is needed for inclusion in mainstream education, or that are heavily invested in the current systems, but it is also true that I rarely, if ever, meet anyone that is angry enough… or at all… about the injustice.  We are talking about the rights of our learners that need us the most to have access to a high quality education.  We are talking about the rights of all learners to have the opportunity to learn first-hand the value of living in a diverse community, where flexibility, responsiveness, kindness and understanding are the very culture.  We are talking about our own chance to begin to make tomorrow’s society a little bit better for a few more people.  And all we need to do is start.

I originally wrote a blog about SEND and social justice in November 2015.  In fact, it wasn’t a typical blog post but a copy and paste of an email conversation I’d had with @SENcollusion about a book she was in the process of contributing to (now published).  To this day, this is the page on my blog that gets the most hits, both cumulatively and day by day, even though it is old and even though I never really promoted it on social media at any point.  It is also the only page that is mainly found through search engines, not social media.  I’m a passive observer of the stats page on my website, but the original SEND and social justice post stands out and it got me thinking – how and why are people finding that page?  The only conclusions that I can come to are that people are searching the terms ‘SEND’ and ‘social justice’ together and that there is so little out there they are ending up on my blog.  They must be so disappointed! 

The link to the original post is here, and I’m not going to say it isn’t worth a read because @SENcollusion posed some really interesting questions, but this newer version is my attempt to make something that is worth the click-through from Google.  I’ve tried to lay my thoughts out more coherently but, more importantly, to signpost and link to some more substantial related information.  I hope people continue to search the internet for SEND and social justice, and I hope that, if they find themselves here, that it is at least a starting point for them to keep searching. 

Inclusion itself is a barrier to a high quality education

We know what a high quality education looks like, we do it every day.  We insist on a certain level of qualification and training in order for someone to be considered a teacher, we have accountability measures and we follow curricula that is designed and debated to the nᵀᴴ degree.  We have set benchmarks for progress and attainment that are measured and published nationally, and we sit exams that are then asked about in applications and interviews for decades to come.  I know there are ongoing debates about many, probably all, aspects of what I have just listed but, really, this is beside the point.  It represents the established best offer we have for our students right now.  It is our best endeavours, and all the discourse really tells us is that it is worth debating.  So if this is what we have decided is right, the most right we can currently offer, why would any of our students sit outside of it?  Why would any child not be entitled to it?  At very least, if we are separating any student from what we have deemed to be our best offer, it had better be for good reason.  It had better to be something genuinely equitable.  And that in itself raises some questions, because it may be the case that we feel that the things we remove our students with SEND to are somehow a better option for them.  But how do we know?  Remember that, for all students, it is education and not inclusion that is the aim.  For each intervention your students with SEND access, every withdrawal from timetable or separation from the main vehicle for learning (including accessing their lesson / teacher via a TA or similar), ask yourself these critical questions:

1. On what basis have they been identified? 
2. What learning will they be missing? 
3. Is what they are getting instead genuinely better for them?
4. Is what they are accessing instead led by a qualified and accountable member of staff?
5. Is what they are accessing instead evidence based?  Is it likely to lead on to equitable adult outcomes?
6. What social opportunities does it impact? 
7. How has it been framed to them?  To others?
8. What would a truly ‘social model’ (deficit in environment) approach look like?

Too often these questions aren’t asked, or they’re asked but not answered honestly, and our ‘additional and different’ ends up being based on received wisdoms, bad habits, and teacher convenience, and then we wonder why some students make less progress than others.  Wouldn’t we expect any learner to make less progress if we constantly blocked their access to the teachers and lessons?  What are we really saying by letting some learners – probably the very ones that need the most qualified, experienced and accountable input – sit outside of our systems, our current best?  There aren’t children who came to learn and children who came to be looked after; they all need both.  It’s our schools that need to change to make that happen.

The Inclusion Delusion

The current approach is based on the fairly arbitrary notion of there being distinct SEND and non-SEND learners

I have a couple of concerns about this particular aspect of our current approach to inclusion in education.  Firstly, it forces a dichotomy between SEND and non-SEND learners that I think simply does not exist.  The abilities and needs of our students exist on a vast and always evolving matrix of spikes and troughs, clusters and gaps, that cannot be usefully polarised or made linear in a way that makes any sense to me.  Of course, I know there are students who have needs that are met through additional and different to our standard offer, but that distinction is made on the limitations of our offer, not – as we behave like it is – the ‘deviation from norm’ of the child.  This is a medical model approach if ever I’ve seen it, but that is a whole other rant for a whole other time.  Ultimately, the line between SEND and non-SEND depends on the scope of the school’s universal offer as much as it does on the needs of the children and, at very least, it is a concept with a degree of relativity at its borders.  And yes, some students needs are unique within that school and needs are met through provision that is bespoke.  This does nothing to sway my assertions.  We know that this is going to be the case and could design our systems to incorporate high quality flexibility as the norm if we wanted to. 

My second concern is this: as SENCOs, senior leaders, teachers and TAs, we need to recognise the weight of the decisions we are making about our students.  As education professionals, we make decisions about whether or not a student is on the SEND register, in this intervention or on that alternative pathway… as education professions we do that.  Not doctors or psychologists.  Not future tellers or psychics.  We make decisions that may change the course of a child’s life on our limited knowledge of this flawed and arbitrary notion of SEND.

The Us and Them Effect

How Far From the Medical Model Have We Actually Come?

Unlearn Everything

Schools and the education system were already established before the concept of inclusion was introduced

Schools and education were designed and evolved without the presence of, and expectation to be accountable for, the diversity of needs we now seek to include.  Inclusion as we know it, if we take Warnock’s 1978 report as a starting point, has a relatively short history.  Inclusion as we know it is the range of afterthoughts, add-ons and annexes we have bolted on to an education system that simply wasn’t designed to work for the range off children we now teach.  It’s a sticking plaster and should never have been seen as a permanent solution.  What we need is a redesign, but it is difficult to turn a moving ship.  It isn’t going to happen overnight, but it can and should be happening incrementally through every decision we make.  If we set our sights on the right horizon, anyway.  Because now our learners with SEND are not a surprise to us.  We know that a proportion of our students will have needs that require additionality against our current standard offer.  Isn’t it time to start planning everything we do like we know they are going to be there? 

Another Brick in the Wall?

The Enterprise of Putting All of the Children Into the Same Building

The issue of inclusion in education is both a cause and a symptom of disability discrimination in wider society

There is no way that inclusion in education can be usefully separated from the issue of disability discrimination in society; they are one and the same issue.  The ableist bias, unconscious (probably), of the decision makes and leaders results in the segregated systems and spaces in schools, and the next generation learns that that’s just the way it is.  The cycle could be breakable at any point and there is work being done at societal level as well, but change will never come if we all just continue to wait for it.  In education, we have a unique and important opportunity to provide a full and balanced enough education and childhood experience to enable them to think and do things differently when it is their turn to be the decision makers.  I have highlighted the word ‘experience’ for a reason.  The lessons, schemes and curricula we teacher are just one thing and, without doubt, our students with SEND are often denied access to those things, but what about the hidden curriculum?  Breaks and lunchtimes, social experiences, trips and events, and even just moving around the building with peers and as part of the main?  These are all learning experiences too and they are experiences that our learners with SEND often have reduced access to.  If they miss out on those experiences they still learn something, but what?  That ‘all’ doesn’t include them?  And how will that learning affect their ability to thrive and to feel able to fight for their rights as adults? They are being deskilled before they’ve even started.  But wait, there’s more – what do we all miss out on in these segregated systems?  A truly inclusive society is one that can flex and respond to everyone’s needs.  It has range and variety, smart infrastructure, empathy and understanding.  Don’t we all need those things at times?  We miss out on those things and we miss out on the learning we can take from them too.  Through our current segregated approach we teach all of our students that different is problematic, someone else’s problem and nothing to do with us.  We are teaching this to the policy makers, employers, neighbours and parents of tomorrow.  We need to stop.

The Revolution Will Not Have Disabled Access

Toilet Talk

Special Needs Jungle

Scope Disability Perception Gap Report

Grassroots Inclusion

“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.mentalhealth.org.uk/learning-disabilities/help-information/learning-disability-statistics-

https://www.mencap.org.uk/learning-disability-explained/research-and-statistics

Click to access papworth-trust-disability-facts-and-figures-2018.pdf

EEF SEN in Mainstream Schools

Five recommendations on special education needs in mainstream schools

I can’t help but feel that this EEF guidance report on supporting SEN in mainstream has slipped under the radar a little, probably because it coincided with an unprecedented global pandemic, but maybe because it doesn’t really offer anything new or different.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t disagree with (most of) the main premise of the report, it is evidence based (although it is disappointing to find that there is no research into the impact of the graduated approach in England), and it may be that it brings those same messages to new audiences – a good thing, because I’m not sure many more people than SENCOs and other SEN practitioners engage with the Code of Practice or the Regs.  A broader range of educators are, I think, likely to engage with the EEF guidance, though.  The frustration, for me, is that this is not a new message, that SEND learners basically need the same things that all learners need, that all teachers are teachers of SEND etc., but, as always seems to be the case, it just doesn’t go far enough to actually make it happen.  I don’t think I can ever read a report like this from the perspective of a non-specialist, but I’m also not sure it even delivers a clear and consistent message within its own pages.  I am all for anything that promotes the key messages that SEND learners need the same high quality teaching and learning experience as their peers, but I’m also very cautious of anything that perpetuates things that are currently a barrier to that becoming a reality.

Certainly a main theme of this guidance is that SEND learners need, and are entitled to, high quality teaching and learning, and access to time with their class teacher(s), and yet one of the five recommendations is still focused on maximising the use of TAs, and states that the individual and small group interventions are ‘often’ delivered by them.  Surely, if we really want our SEND students to receive equitable high quality teaching, then those interventions should be delivered by qualified and accountable teachers (unless it is a non-academic intervention, in which case it should be delivered by an appropriately trained individual).  If there was a high attaining student with a gap in their knowledge, or they simply weren’t clicking with a new concept or skill, I’m pretty confident that the subject teacher would be the one to sit with them, either individually or in a group with others having the same issue, and provide that intervention, not a TA.  What is it that keeps stopping us from offering that same high quality teaching intervention to all students?  The guidance report itself states that students with SEND ‘have the greatest need for excellent teaching’ and yet still advocates for the most targeted teaching to be delivered by non-teachers.

Another core premise of the report is that the evidence based strategies that are proven to best support SEND in the classroom are actually really simple and, if not already in use in many classrooms, would be easy to introduce.  Again, this aligns with the message that all teachers are teachers of SEND and that what SEND students need is, mainly, within classrooms and lessons.  The report also, however, perpetuates the misconception that SEND is too complex, with too many requirements that have to be externally sourced, and that it is too broad to expect teachers to learn every possible permutation of SEND that might be present in their classroom.  I know there are elements of truth to this.  I know that some children are more likely to need the input of outside agency specialists, and that EHCPs form part of an LA, and national, system that remains – despite reform – pretty bureaucratic and statute bound.  But, perceiving this as complex and specialist is still a symptom of a segregatory, us and them understanding of disability; it isn’t the problem it is being made out to be.  We bring outside agency individuals in to support aspects of behaviour, social care, to deliver PSHE and to deliver music lessons, and it is not considered to be unmanageable or complicated.  We adhere to strict, externally accountable and high stakes requirements in order to be able to host GCSE examinations, usually for large groups with different combinations of subjects and papers, without considering it so complex that it can only be managed by specialists.  And teachers are not required to have an in depth knowledge of every possible additional need that they might one day teach any more than they are required to know every possible socio-economic or environmental factor that might have impacted on any learner who enters their classroom; you only need to get to know the children you actually have.  We can stop making this into a problem that we don’t need.

I have a couple of other little niggles with the report (I have already blogged about funding for SEND here – Money Where The Mouth Is – and I don’t think this blog is big enough to cover the ‘SEND student’ or ‘student with SEND’ conversation, or the report’s lean towards the biopsychosocial model of disability and my concerns about that) but, ultimately, if the message that students with SEND need the same things as all learners and that these things are, largely, already available in our schools, is being repeated and extended to new audiences, then that can only be a good thing.  Until, though, we can shake off the shackles of the prevailing and entrenched approach to inclusion that is in place in most schools, reports like this are not going to be the revolution our children actually need and deserve.

The ‘us and them’ Effect

One of the main motivations for striving to support students with additional needs without segregation of space (or anything else) was to try to foster greater equality-rich diversity within the school community.  Everyone learns, eats, socialises, transitions from A to B, celebrates, and is sanctioned together.  It seemed logical to me that this would be enhancing and enriching for everyone involved.  What new and exciting can come from sameness?  Creativity and learning occur at the boundaries between things that are different.  For children with additional needs, I hope that truly being part of the main will give them access to the best quality resources, empower them to feel entitled to that, and that they grow up and enter adult society demanding that it is made to work for them too.  For our students who do not have an additional need, well I have hopes for them too.  That, as a minimum and among other things, an opportunity to live and work alongside those who might seem different to you will feel as normal and routine and mundane as it should feel and that the enhancements and improvements to the structures and systems we make to be more truly inclusive will be beneficial to everyone in the school.  It makes sense to me that better knowledge, understanding and empathy must come from experience.

Having an ‘us and them’ approach, based on the notion that there are able and disabled people or students and SEND students, is what facilitates us to not use qualified teachers for some of our most vulnerable learners.  Beyond the school gate, it is what allows us to turn some people away from public spaces because adaptation to meet their needs was not deemed to be ‘reasonable’.  It is clear to me that both the immediate and long term interests of some students would be hindered, even halted, by this approach.  The risks of this way of working run deeper than just access to resources, though.  That same lack of access, to both education and to experiences, could deskill and distance people and make it harder for them to fight back.  In schools, I fear that our currently prevalent approach to inclusion literally teaches our children that some people sit outside of the systems that we are told time and time again are the best, are right, and are their entitlement.  It’s an old adage, but we might talk the talk of inclusion but it is our actions that speak loudest.  Having segregated systems, whatever we call them, sends a message – it confirms, consolidates and perpetuates an ‘us and them’ mentality.  Not spending time with people you perceive to be different to you generates misunderstanding and apathy, even mystery and fear.  At best, it’s a ‘not my problem’ problem but, at its worst, it’s the underlying cause of the harmful demonisation of people with disabilities as scroungers and a burden on society.  We all benefit from diversity, but if we aren’t living it then how would we know?

I wouldn’t exactly say that the findings are surprising, but if you haven’t seen Scopes 2018 ‘disability perception gap’  policy report, it’s certainly an interesting read, albeit somewhat jarring.  From the outset, the findings show that most people significantly underestimate the prevalence of disability in society and this then, of course, has a knock on effect on all the other results.  If the majority of people surveyed don’t, by their own admission, see disability in their day to day lives, how can they form an opinion that’s balanced and fair?  It does also raise the question, why are they underestimating in the first place? Why are people with disabilities missing from so many people’s lives?  One of the starker (darker?) findings in the report is that the perception that people with disabilities ‘get in the way’ either some or most of the time quintuples with distance from disabled people, i.e. people who  do not know anyone with a disability  are five times more likely to have this belief than those who do.

Another question asks about whether attempts to give equal rights to disabled people have gone too far or not far enough  and shows the same pattern, although there’s a lot more that surprises me about this data than just that, if I’m honest.  And it is their typo, not mine, by the way.

 

I agree, of course… but what are we doing in education – whilst our students are so receptive to new information, learning how to function in a community, and preparing for successful and happy adulthoods – to help achieve this?  What do our students learn about themselves and others through, not our words, but our actions, systems and structures?  And, maybe more importantly, what opportunities to learn are we denying them?

https://www.scope.org.uk/campaigns/disability-perception-gap/