Last year I authored a series called radical inclusion. A year on we have the White Paper and subsequent guidance. There’s lots of buzz and will to get schools right for our most vulnerable young people. This is great but I also think there are some pitfalls or ‘illusions’ that seem like inclusion but actually reinforce forms of exclusion when done badly.
In this series, my intention is to feed into the policy debate and offer some constructive suggestions. I set out four of these possible ‘illusions’ and some musings, about how we might guard against them. They are: ISPs; Impact, Inclusion Bases and Experts.
2. The ISP Illusion
IEPs, ISPs, ILPs, Pupil Passports… the list goes on. Most schools have an iteration of them and they are gaining traction in light of the SEND reforms, which centre the promise of new digital ISPs for all pupils with SEND[4] and Ofsted’s approach to “pupil trails” whereby inspectors track the experiences of vulnerable students to attempt to evaluate the lived experience of a school’s curriculum, safeguarding and inclusion procedures.
Despite the hype, I am sceptical about the impact of some of these plans. In a humble attempt to feed into the policy conversation, I’m going to share of my reasons why.
Let me set out my stall straight up. Those of you who know my work will be aware, I am a strong advocate for systems that support the information about individual pupils with classroom teachers in coherent ways. Knowing our pupils as individuals (particularly their strengths and goals) is key to all pupil’s achievement. This is particularly the case for our pupils who have more barriers to learning. I work with some wonderful schools who share and use specialist information (including through ISPs) brilliantly.
However, too often in schools, desperately sought after Ed Psych or Speech and Language reports go unread or unimplemented due to poor communication and learning from a targeted interventions are not integrated because the targets and strategies exist in a SEN department silo. The only way generalise learning from targeted and specialist support is if a teacher are aware of them.
Whilst it is undoubtedly a good thing that the DfE and Ofsted are prioritising the most vulnerable and telling schools ‘you can’t say you’ve secured the expected standard if you’re not meeting everyone’s needs’, how we do this in a meaningful way is not simple.
In many, but absolutely not all, secondary schools the reality of the ISP model looks something like this: SENDCos and their teams (in practice often TAs) commit huge amounts of their time to meeting with parents, carers and young people to complete these plans. Despite this outlay of time, they will often fall short of the recommended three meetings a year. This is in part due to in-school pulls but it is also because many parents are very busy working to put food on their tables and some of our most vulnerable families remain harder to reach.
Once a meeting has happened. A plan might typically look something like this the one below that I ripped off google below:
The plans contain a lot of information. Some plans are more needs based (like the one above) but many list ASD or Dyslexia without explaining the specifics of what a child might find difficult in the classroom. Some contain questionable or unevidenced based suggestions but most of them contain sensible yet generic strategies, like ‘chunk instructions,’ ‘pre- teach key vocabulary’ or ‘target questions to check understanding’. These are certainly good strategies for those learners, but they also are for all learners. In a school that prioritises evidenced based teaching, this should be the ordinarily available provision anyway. I say it often but good teaching for SEND really is good teaching (it just requires you to be extra good at it).
Once these plans get created, SENDco time is then invested in quality assuring, distributing and providing training on them for staff. This is typically a short session at the start of the year, where teachers are usually told to read them and implement the strategies in the classroom.
In some schools this will be the last people hear about them. In others there’ll be a nod to ‘Quality Assuring’ them, which, depending on the leadership style, can tend towards an overzealous checklist approach (you didn’t target questions to check Jamie’s understanding in the two minutes I was in the room’ or such a vague nod to them that in practice they are meaningless. Either way, I don’t think many schools have got the implementation of these plans entirely right. Nor do I necessary think that checking on these is the best use of SENDCo or SLT time.
There will always be a place for reasonable adjustments. Perhaps a seating pan requirement due to a hearing impairment. These maybe more static over time, planned for and non negotiable or they may spring up as a result of a medical need, a laptop for a broken wrist or a toilet pass for example and need a more dynamic response.
Whilst leaders do need to develop intelligent ways of sharing this information and holding teachers to account for implementing these legal duties, we don’t yet have enough consensus about what works for pupils with more complex SEND. As the Steplab paper Common SEN (Mis)Interventions – An Evidence Summary illustrates there is still a lot that we do in school that we are not clear on the impact of. There is a danger that some of our interventions hold pupils back or place a ceiling on what they can achieve rather than taking away barriers. I’m going to unpack this further in the third blog of this series.
The shift towards five developmental areas[5] the White Paper is an excellent start in shifting the conversation from labels to barriers, the recently published Ambition Inclusive Teaching Framework is really helpful for framing our understanding the best available evidence for great inclusive classroom practice. Hopefully this will underpin the National Inclusion Standards, which will then inform the digital ISPs.
Aside from the uncertainty about the content of these plans, the dynamic nature of pupils needs and the reality of big schools and increasing SEND registers means a massive cognitive load for teachers. Keeping hold of all this information and integrating it in a meaningful way is an immense challenge. For the average geography or art teacher the reality will struggle to really read all the information, let alone hold it in their heads and draw on it at the right moment.
That’s why I think there is a better conversation to be had. One that centres ‘Inclusion by Design’, The great Gary Aubin uses the metaphor of automatic doors to explain this brilliantly [6]. A key element of inclusive design is supporting teachers curriculum knowledge and pedagogical decision making so they can gather information from about where pupils may have barriers to learning or misconceptions and adapt and scaffold accordingly.
We have a lot to learn from our strong schools and Trusts serving high levels of disadvantage and pupils with SEND. The best schools I know say things like ‘the teacher is the intervention’ and explore innovative ways to scaffold teacher decision making, through intellectual preparation and instructional coaching. Many of these schools use technology carefully to share information and review impact in really a meaningful ways. I these schools, the piece of paper (whatever it gets called) comes to life.
These schools know that skilful adaptive teaching rests on teachers being deeply confident in their curriculum thinking. The Curriculum and Assessment review refers to the importance of ‘vertical curriculum’, teachers understanding the logical sequence of progression in their subject disciplines and understanding the subject specific bottlenecks and threshold concepts in order for students to progress through the curriculum. It also requires us to address the ‘horizontal’ challenges, where these bottlenecks might be affected by inter-disciplinary concepts (for example the importance of a secure foundation in thermodynamics in physics before pupils can understand weather in Geography).
I’m going to explore this further in my final blog of this series, which is all about expertise and collaboration. I have some concerns about the notion of ‘experts at hand’. Aside from the fact that there aren’t enough experts to go around, the choice of the term ‘experts’ suggests the answers are someone else’s responsibility. What if the expertise was located not in a SENDCo or an Educational Psychologist but in the parts between us? What if we were to build coalitions to help us better understand horizontal and vertical curriculum alignment and knowledge, skills and sequencing needed to ensure all young people thrive at school, have an deep and ambitious curriculum entitlement and are successfully prepared for to adulthood?
I think putting our focus their might be the key to removing individual barriers rather than an ISP, digital or not.
streamlinedsendco.com 