All Roads Lead to Send
“All roads lead to SEND” - Deirdre Fitzpatrick
Bridget Phillipson is bringing SEND into mainstream schools. I won’t rehearse the reasons for this. Today, I want to think about the consequences, and how you can make SEND a success in your school.
This is what is coming:
New SEND Advisers:
Dame Christine Lenehan from the Council for Disabled Children and Tom Rees, CEO of Ormiston Academies Trust, will advise the government, with Rees leading an inclusion group for mainstream schools.
Expert Group on Neurodiversity:
An expert group will work to enhance inclusivity for neurodiverse pupils.
Specialist Provisions:
Schools will be encouraged to establish more resourced provision and SEN units, following concerns that guidance in this area has been lacking. (Also a handy way to use space vacated by falling rolls).
Response to the NAO Report:
Addressing the National Audit Office's critical findings on the SEND system, Phillipson acknowledged it had been “neglected to the point of crisis” and committed to fostering collaboration over competition in schools. (We have no money to build special schools, so they’ll be coming to a special school near you - deal wiv it).
Focus on Wellbeing and Belonging:
A shift from a narrow academic focus to prioritising pupil wellbeing, attendance, and a sense of belonging was emphasised, with Phillipson highlighting high unauthorised absence rates as a warning sign.
Data Will Not be Used as Evidence
There will be no national benchmarks for SEND progress. Nor will there be any progress 8 for your own SEND students. You will not be judged on how successful you are at educating your SEND students.
Instead you will be judged on:
How often they attend school.
How they are kept in classrooms.
How frequently they are suspended, or excluded.
How happy they are when interviewed by Inspectors.
How your teachers have made reasonable adjustments.
Whether you are gaming the system with part time time tables.
Or farming SEND students out to Alternative Provision.
A Possible Solution
Your teachers will never become experts in SEND. In a special school, especially dealing with SEMH, classes are typically 6 to 8 students. Their teachers become expert in those students because they teach them every day, all day - they teach no other kind of student.
In classes of 15 to 22 in a mainstream school, they would struggle. And your teachers, with their comparatively tiny level of expertise, are being set up to fail.
Let’s assume we can’t afford to fail. How would we make a success of the influx of SEND students?
In 2024, the percentage of students with an EHCP was 4.8% (nearly double what it was in 2016). Students receiving SEN support in 2014 were 13.6%. 19.4% in total. One fifth of students.
Meet at any expert on behaviour and exclusions and they will also point to the problem of undiagnosed needs, and students falling foul of school behaviour systems because no one has worked out the underlying SEND barriers - in other words, this figure of nearly 20% is an underestimate of the number of SEND students.
The solution is Teaching Assistants.
At the minute, Teaching Assistants are, as a group, not value for money. There are much better ways of spending £19,000. But, schools are going to spend it anyway. When Robert Coe was at the Education Endowment Foundation, the research showed that Teaching Assistants led to negative progress.
Headteachers ignored this. Now the EEF has had to change its tune. It points out that TAs delivering an intervention can have a strong impact. However, most TAs are not used this way. They are in the classroom, and continue to have a negative impact. The EEF couches this politically like this:
“However, effects tend to vary widely between those studies where teaching assistants are deployed in everyday classroom environments, which typically do not show a positive benefit,
and those where teaching assistants deliver targeted interventions to individual pupils or small groups, which on average show moderate positive benefits.”
For “typically do not show a positive benefit” read “cause students to make less progress”.
Tracking Experts
Let’s imagine we up-skilled TAs. We could start by rebranding them: Tracking Expert (TE).
This is what you now have to train and support your TE to do.
Identify the 3 most important barriers the student is facing in school.
Develop a short term (4-12 week strategy) to deal with this in lessons.
Do not help students with their work - focus on the strategy which is the issue, making that work difficult.
If this is unsuccessful, alert the teacher. The teacher is responsible for explaining how to do the work. Not you!
Train the student over time to summon the teacher themselves.
Evaluate the success of each strategy in overcoming the 3 barriers you have focused on.
Meet weekly with other TEs - share what has and hasn’t worked - develop each other’s strategies through sharing and trial and error.
Send a monthly email to each teacher of that student - year 7s one week, year 8s the next and so on, so teachers are not overwhelmed. The email should:
Celebrate the successes the student has had in overcoming barriers.
What you have noticed is working, and all teachers should do more of with that student.
Do not send out what is not working. As soon as you see something which is not working, tell the teacher. Do it live in the lesson if possible. If it is a sensitive issue, see the teacher at the end of the lesson, or in their free lesson, or, if the union reps are supportive, at break or lunch.
At the end of the 4-12 week cycle, review the barriers. Have you noticed something else which is more pressing?
In order to do this, keep a track of the student’s learning behaviour. For example, if the barrier is that the student can’t focus, begin with the minimum amount of time they will focus before a reset or diversion from you. Let’s call it 5 minutes.
Next lesson tell the student to set a higher target. Maybe 6 minutes. Measure it, and use this to raise the target for next lesson or next week. Communicate the success and failure of this each week to the student.
Some targets will affect every lesson, and some will affect a particular subject or a relationship with a particular teacher. Track what is working and what is not. Communicate it to the student daily, and the teacher as outlined above.
Where barriers are permanent - sensory needs, processing speed for example - write down the strategies which teachers might use. Laminate these. Give it to the teacher in any lesson where the teacher is not following them: (if 20% of your students have SEND your chances of remembering the best strategies are 0%. Don’t set teachers up to fail).
Or, if the student understands the worth of this, place it on the student’s desk, or your desk, so that the teacher can easily check it during the lesson.
Have half termly appraisal meetings where you outline the approaches you have tried, and the ways you have measured the impact. Outline your thinking for what to try next, and how to measure the impact.
(The line manager needs to monitor teachers who are struggling to make reasonable adjustments - you’ll know this because these adjustments are working for other teachers of the same student/s - and plan training which will help them).
Include behaviour points, positive and negative, and homework completion. But weight the real change in learning behaviour much more highly.
Measure both the quantity and quality of work - teachers will do the latter: you should literally count the number of words or lines written in the first week compared to the last week of your experiment. What has changed?
Communicate the student’s successes with parents once a month. (The school leadership should find ways to celebrate these more formally over time).
They are the expert in that student. Their expertise counts for nothing if it doesn’t always try to improve the student. It counts for little if it doesn’t improve the teacher. It isn’t expertise unless you track it, and know what is and isn’t working.
Tracking Experts. They’ll guide on the best road to SEND, so you can avoid the car crash that’s coming.
(If you would like some help in training your TAs in this way, I’ll make time for you).
I can’t help thinking that without any national benchmarks or progress 8 equivalent - nothing will materially change, other than the location where SEN children are given a substandard education.
We are now in a specialist school, and for all the talk of ‘bespoke education’ and ‘being ambitious’ the reality is they are very much focused on pushing children towards employment options like retail, warehouse work, construction, hairdressing.
This isn’t a criticism of vocational education - which is something mainstream schools are also often poor at - more that pushing pupils down that path is reminiscent of attitudes to working class pupils or girls in the 70s.
Improving pupil wellbeing, happiness and inclusivity are all laudable - but happy pupils without qualifications that reflect their ability will become unhappy and poorer adults.
I do approve of your data driven view for interventions - my experience is there is a lot of wasted money and effort at the moment in delivering interventions without any connection to whether they are successful, or even appropriate.
(We had interventions not in the EHCP while ignoring the ones recommended by the EP. It felt very much like ‘this is what we are running this term’)