When Tom was nine he left his mainstream school and started at a special school. While
we’re delighted that Tom is now in what is a more enabling
environment for him, we’re reflecting on how Tom’s experience in mainstream
could have been more inclusive. The
mainstream school was keen to be inclusive:
the Head teacher had a wonderful attitude and knew and loved all the
children in the school. Socially,
ethnically, and on behaviour issues the school did seem to be very
inclusive: what could they do to include
children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) more
successfully?
Before listing what I think are the
top eight tips for more successful inclusion, first a bit about Tom
himself. Tom's condition,
Duchenne muscular dystrophy (Duchenne or DMD for short), means he has weak muscles, poor balance,
and poor coordination – he can’t run and writing by hand is laborious and
difficult for him. He needs various adaptations
to help him sit and write, including a keyboard.
Many children with DMD also have
cognitive difficulties, summarised by difficulty processing information. Like water on clay soil, information takes
longer to absorb and too much information at once is overload. Anything which needs a lot of process – like joining up letters to read words – is difficult for Tom, thought
he can tell you loads about many subjects and has a lively curiosity. You can appreciate the challenges for a child
like Tom in mainstream: taking in
teachers’ instructions, recalling vocabulary, other children’s fast-moving
games and social interaction, dealing with transitions from one task to another
and the hustle and bustle of the school day, and most significantly how Tom
learns and the pace of his learning.
What can be done to address better
the needs of children like Tom in mainstream?
Well, an education revolution so all classes and schools are much
smaller, with a higher ratio of teachers to pupils, would help, though that
would not in itself be sufficient. In my
view, eight tweaks even to the current system would effect significant
improvements.
1. Enough Special Needs
Co-ordinator (SENCo) time
In my son’s mainstream school there
were over 400 pupils and a more than average proportion of pupils with special
educational needs, including pupils with Down’s Syndrome or on the autistic
spectrum. But the Special Needs
Co-ordinator (SENCo) was there only two days a week. There needs to be enough time for the SENCo
to work with teachers and teaching assistants (TAs), time for the SENCO to
follow up and evaluate the success of teaching strategies, time for the SENCo
to go into classrooms to observe pupils, time for the SENCO to get the advice
that they may need, time for the SENCo to liaise with outside agencies. In our case none of these things were
happening to the extent that they needed to happen. For example, it was me, not the SENCo, who
met with the local authority SEN ICT advisory teacher to get some ICT resources
for Tom’s computer, resources which could also help other pupils.
2. Time for teachers and teaching
assistants (TAs) to plan together
Tom’s TA would have about thirty
seconds between hearing the teacher’s instructions for the class and starting
work with him, to take in the learning objective and task, decide how much of the
task Tom could engage with, how to break the task down into more manageable
chunks, and what, if any, alternative strategies or resources to use. Without planning ahead of time it was
extremely difficult for Tom to do differentiated tasks with other pupils. As you’ve probably guessed, I have a teaching
background and the year I learned most was when I planned together with a
TA. We both worked part time and had our
planning meetings in unpaid time. We
should not have had to do that:
contractual time should be scheduled for such meetings.
3. Adequate training for class
teachers to support pupils with SEND
It is crucial for classroom teachers
to have adequate special needs training, because in the current system the
usual chain of command is that the classroom teacher tells the teaching
assistants on a daily basis what they need to be doing with their pupils with
special needs. The SENCo is there to
support, to offer ideas, and to help evaluate strategies (though in our case
there was little evidence that this was happening).
Teachers need to be more trained in
concepts such as task analysis, backward chaining, and differentiation. For example, Tom’s class had to do ‘free
writing’. So Tom was given a pencil and
paper and ‘freedom’. His teacher told me
afterwards that he ‘made some marks and wrote the word ‘the’. Tom would certainly have had plenty in his
mind to write about, so why couldn’t his free writing have been more supported? . Why
could he not have used a keyboard? And
an ICT programme to prompt him with the sight words he knew? Both of these resources were sitting in the
stock cupboard.
If the teacher had been adequately
trained she would have seen that what she had done here was differentiation by
outcome – in other words, throw the children in at the deep end and those who
succeed are those who make it to the shallow end without drowning.
4. Adequate training for special
needs teaching assistants (TAs)
Teaching assistants need to have
adequate training to carry out the tasks they are expected to do. They need to
be trained in the pedagogical concepts which underpin their work with pupils
with SEND, because they are the ones who work with pupils day to day, the ones
who on a daily basis are fine-tuning teaching strategies, evaluating them and
looking at next steps at the micro-level.
Though the chain of command is from
class teacher to TAs, the remit of the class teacher is the whole class. While the teacher may have the big picture,
in our experience class teachers don’t have the time to plan and evaluate in
detail the work for pupils with special needs – it’s the TAs who have the day
to day picture and the teacher needs the feedback from them.
When teaching assistants don’t have
sufficient grasp of their work, it is letting down our children with special
needs and also the teaching assistants themselves. Many TAs are parents. They feel strongly the importance of giving
children the best possible start in life; they want to help provide that for
their pupils. How can they undertake
complex teaching tasks to support the learning of pupils with special
educational needs if they don’t have adequate training?
5. Information and computer
technology
Have computers and programmes more
readily available in classrooms and ensure that SENCos, teachers, and TAs have
working knowledge of SEND-supportive programmes. By SEND-supportive programmes I mean ‘shell’
type programmes which are designed to be tailored to individual pupils’
learning and physical needs, not ready-made activities you can just put pupils
in front of.
There was a long saga in trying to
get a computer for Tom at his mainstream school. Finally my brother stepped in and got us a
laptop. We bought the Clicker and
Clicker Paint programmes for it. Then
there was another long saga in making sure the teacher and TAs were confident
to use the computer, with me going in several times to talk them through it. The local authority
Physical Disabilities Support Service was great, going into school numerous
times to train and support.
6. A curriculum which allows for
a variety of learning styles
When Tom was in Year One his
mainstream school had poor results in literacy.
So the following year they instituted a school-wide phonics
programme. This was an improvement – a systematic
approach to literacy which mapped the territory. But it was inflexible. And Tom’s Year Two teacher was
inflexible. At the start of the year she
told me that to learn to read ‘you go from letters to words to sentences’. Readers do need to learn phonics at some point, but it doesn't have to be the initial approach to reading and it doesn't have to be the only approach to reading. Phonics is process-intensive, which is Tom's cognitive weakness, and it doesn't use his strengths, such as visual memory. Progress was
extremely slow. To address this the SENCo prescribed an
extra fifteen minutes per week of phonics.
Not analysis of Tom’s difficulties and lateral thinking about solutions,
just more of the problem.
The children learned phonics through
worksheets. In Year Two Tom spent at
least two terms doing handwritten worksheets overlearning letter-sound
correspondence. He began to hate school.
Though the endless worksheets were
heart-sinking, Tom did end up knowing his letter sounds. At home we started teaching him sight words
– ‘word of the week’ – and with this and his knowledge of letter sounds Tom
began to read. Excitedly he would ask
‘what is the word of the week this week?’ and suggest words that he would like
to learn to read.
While phonics was taught in each
classroom, outside in the corridor, by coincidence right outside Tom’s
classroom, was the makeshift base (made of display boards) of the Reading Recovery teacher. Reading Recovery is a one-to-one
multi-approach pupil-centred reading programme, designed to accelerate learning
for pupils experiencing literacy difficulties in the mainstream classroom.
In Year One I asked the SENCo if Tom
could join the pupils on the Reading Recovery programme. No, she said, he’s too old. Couldn’t the TAs have some training in
Reading Recovery? No, it’s a year-long
intensive training course. She did later
try to get Tom on the programme, but didn’t chase it up and nothing came of
it. In the meantime I went to the local
university’s education library and after the equivalent of about three working
days with the key book had a summary of Reading Recovery – enough to cover its
basic principles. With the support of
Tom’s Year One class teacher I gave this to his TAs. It was difficult for the class teacher to
give input to Tom’s learning because she was incredibly busy, having just been
made Key Stage One co-ordinator and PE Co-ordinator. Tom’s TAs had little training, no time to
plan, and apparently no SENCo support and in those circumstances it was difficult
for them to put the Reading Recovery approach into action. In Year Two the class teacher was slave to
phonics alone (though towards the end of the year she did begin to acknowledge
the sight word approach).
7. Appropriate accommodation for
pupils with SEN
In Tom’s school, pupils with SEN often
worked with their TAs out in the corridor, with the attendant noise and
distraction.
8. Challenging an unthinking
culture of discrimination
At a meeting of the school’s
disability equality working group I raised the point about the accommodation
for pupils with SEND. One of the
school’s governors said ‘Accommodation is always a problem – always has been
and always will be’. I said ‘Maybe
you’re right – and if it’s a problem, how about the top groups learn in the
corridor and pupils with special needs learn in quiet classrooms?’ She looked stunned at this suggestion.
At one point I went in to observe for
a morning in Tom’s classroom. When the
class split for a task into lower and higher attainment groups, it was the
class teacher who took the higher attainment group, while the TA – without
teacher training and paid less – took the children who were more vulnerable and
who had more complex and challenging learning needs.
Tom’s class had an overnight school
trip to an outdoor activity centre – and the letter from the school said that
they would like to take all the children.
Tom’s teacher did not book accommodation for him, accommodation which
included an overnight carer and which met health and safety regulations for a
pupil with reduced mobility. Was this
just forgetting, or an assumption that Tom, being disabled, wouldn’t take up
his curriculum entitlement or share the aspirations of his peers?
Conclusion
In our experience, these are eight
issues which need to be addressed, eight tweaks which could be made in the
current mainstream system to improve inclusion for pupils with special
educational needs and disabilities. In Tom’s mainstream school they were the key
ways to translate into inclusion the wonderful, genuine, and laudable love
which Tom’s Headteacher had for the children in the school.
Some of these tweaks are about
money: paying for SENCO, teacher, and TA
time and training. Some of them are
about good pedagogical practice: having
the concepts to support pupils with special needs and the curriculum to nurture
a range of learning styles and enable pupils to use their strengths to overcome
their difficulties. Some of them need funded local authority support to provide continuing professional development
and specific training.
But the really key issue, the
foundation of all inclusion, the driver of all practical measures, is a school
culture which recognises the equal aspiration and entitlement of all pupils and
is committed to solving or working round any problems which may arise.
And a final note: on Tom's final day at that school, he brought all his accumulated phonics worksheets home, a great big telephone directory sized pile of them. He put them in our wood burner. I helped him light the match and he burned them all.
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