High-quality teaching for all
On the one hand, good teaching for pupils with SEND is good teaching for all. We see this message in many places:
- Within the Early Career Framework (and all NPQs), which takes adaptive teaching as its starting point and states the importance of ‘intervening within lessons’ and ‘adapting teaching in a responsive way’.
- Within NASEN’s push for the needs of pupils with SEND being ‘built-in, not bolt on’; with lessons being ‘inclusive by design’.
- Within the EEF’s evidence research in this field, which finds that the teaching approaches that favour pupils with SEND sit very much within the skill set of teachers and within many of the things they already do, or could conceivably choose to do without significant additional training.
Additional and different
On the other hand, the SEND Code of Practice defines SEND provision as being in place when pupils require something ‘additional to or different from’ high-quality teaching:
xv. special educational provision is educational or training provision that is additional to or different from that made generally for other children or young people
1.24 High quality teaching that is differentiated and personalised will meet the individual needs of the majority of children and young people. Some children and young people need educational provision that is additional to or different from this.
‘Additional to or different from’. That means inclusion should be visible. At best, this means all needs being met, whatever it takes. At worst, it represents what Nicole Dempsey accurately describes as inclusion through ‘annexes, add-ons, exceptions and afterthoughts’.
The OFSTED framework very clearly sits on the side of adaptive teaching here, both praising this approach and criticising differentiation in the same bullet point:
‘they (teachers) respond and adapt their teaching as necessary, without unnecessarily elaborate or differentiated approaches’
That said, many SENDCOs’ experience with an OFSTED inspector anecdotally involves them looking to see clearly visible differences in what pupils with SEND are getting, with the insinuation that visibly different = good practice.
So on paper at least, the Code of Practice states that pupils with SEND require different approaches; the OFSTED framework argues against differentiated approaches. With statutory compliance and the OFSTED framework arguably the 2 greatest levers affecting schools’ practice, we seem to have a problem.
This is all semantic unless it carries clear implications for what teachers are expected to do in classrooms.
Picture Teacher A. She has a diverse class, with pupils across the attainment range and with a number of pupils who are on the SEND register. She factors the needs of pupils with SEND into her planning and ensures that all aspects of her ‘high-quality teaching’ delivery have the needs of pupils with SEND in mind – built-in, not bolt-on. Everything she does – the clarity of her explanations; her targeted questions; her specific exposition that shows pupils how to learn and retain content; her well-embedded routines; her scaffolds that exist at the whole-class level; her leadership of behaviour – allow pupils with SEND to thrive. The inclusion is invisible.
As such, 3 parents book meetings with the SENDCO because they can’t see what their child’s provision is. The SENDCO takes a further 2 pupils off the SEND register because it is no longer clear that they need something ‘different from or additional to’ other pupils. The Local Authority see no evidence that the one child with an EHCP in this class is having his Section F delivered in class. The teacher’s line manager isn’t able to tick off evidence of explicit things that the teacher is doing for pupils with SEND and when OFSTED come to visit, the inspector is new to inspecting and can’t see explicit evidence of this either.
Though this represents a clear caricature of a ‘built-in’ approach to meeting the needs of pupils with SEND, the unintended consequences of the term ‘different from or additional to’ are not entirely implausible.
Sometimes of course, individual exceptions will be highly visible. Augmentative and alternative communication devices stand out as an obvious example that will always be visible.
However, we also need to accept that having high aspirations, zero stigma and maximum inclusion often means making your support of children with SEND hard to pinpoint. The sooner all policy documents align on this message, the sooner we can achieve inclusion that feels not like an add-on, but as something integral, embedded and as such often invisible; something hidden at the whole-class level.
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