The regular habits of a strategic SENDCO
“All roads lead to SEND” - Deirdre Fitzpatrick.
Who is Deirdre Fitzpatrick anyway?
Deirdre is a School Improvement Partner to over 50 special schools and a number of mainstream schools every year. She also co-founded a training provision with Andy Lole and The Mulberry Bush school.
Together, they train about 45 special school heads a year in leadership, headship and becoming a School Improvement Partner.
My role is to train them on how education research might apply to their school, whether it specialises in SEHM, autism (ASD), PMLD, or any other SEND label under the sun.
Normally, research gives me confidence. But applying cognitive research done on neurotypical brains to 45 different contexts, none of which are neurotypical, filled me with blancmange.
I was sceptical I could do it, but somehow we’ve found a way. Special school heads have almost no ego, and fear and inexperience made me leave mine behind, tucked up under the duvet.
So, over the last 3 years, they have also trained me.
I don’t know much, but I know this:
Complex needs are coming your way - and if you think a special school with classes of 10 and 2 or 3 adults in the room can’t teach you much about SEND in a mainstream school, you’re as wrong as Liz Truss conjuring an economic miracle.
If you want to learn how to help your young SEND learners, visit a couple of special schools, and see for yourself. Get some of their experts in to train your teachers. Definitely your TAs and your SENDCO.
Sadly, your SENDCO is an expert in process and paperwork. The red tape is stickier than superglue. It is very hard for a SENDCO to get out and about and see the difference being made, or not made, to their learners.
If you were magically able to send your SENDCO to teach in 4 different kinds of special schools for a week each, they would learn more about teaching SEND students than 25 years in the role in a mainstream school.
If you can afford to send your SENDCO to visit a range of special schools, even for a day each, they’ll return brimming with solutions and questions to implement, test and experiment with.
What Does a Real SENDCO Think?
This is a fascinating post. from Gary Aubin, author of THE LONE SENDCO.*
The title is revealing, isn’t it? You can’t lead well if you are isolated. Even as a member of SLT, a SENCO is often left to their own devices - surrounded by people, but ultimately alone.
You need special school help more than you know.
This is what he recommends:
Maintaining a longer-term, strategic lens in this context is tricky. The sheer busyness of the role can prevent a SENDCO from being able to prioritise strategic leadership of SEND.
For example, that might mean something like the following:
Daily
Checking in with key pupils (or ensuring key colleagues are doing so)
Checking in with the inclusion team
Maintaining visibility around school, including within classrooms
Knowing which pupils with SEND are absent
Being visible is unlikely to give you impact. Visit classrooms to check on the learning of your students - that is the purpose of being in lessons. Ask these 3 questions:
Are they developing good learning behaviours, or falling back on behaviours which have held them back?
Are TAs focusing on improving their learning behaviours and overcoming barriers to learning, or are they simply keeping the student on task, and up to date, allowing the student to opt out?
Are teachers making the reasonable adjustments the student needs, either in classroom management, or for the individual?
This will inform who you talk to later today, or tomorrow, and what training needs you can identify.
Weekly
Checking pupil attendance and following up as appropriate
Learning walks (or similar) with a specific focus
Parent surgery slots
Pastoral meetings
Staff surgery slots
If you get into classrooms daily, there is no need for a weekly learning walk.
Having a focus won’t make the visit more effective. The three questions I outlined above will always tell you how to improve things - both operationally and strategically.
You don’t have time for following up attendance - someone else in the school is already tasked with that. You also want your safeguarding team to be dealing with any consequent issues.
Staff surgery sounds like an opt in. Maybe that works. Or do you invite teachers and expect them to attend? That will have more impact.
More importantly, who can best train the teacher in the needs of their student? Probably the TA - why isn’t it their role to tell the teacher what the student needs? That can happen live in the lesson, or in the last 2 minutes at changeover. Give your TAs that responsibility and train them to do it.
Half-termly
Observing and feeding back to trainee teachers
Identifying key pupils for keyworking, attendance monitoring, etc.
Meeting with leaders with specific responsibilities, to support their inclusive leadership (Head of KS2, Attendance Lead, Family Officer, Head of T&L, etc.)
Meeting with the reading/literacy/phonics lead to discuss the intervention offer and the progress of pupils within those interventions
Termly
Meeting with the Finance Business Manager
Observing and feeding back to TAs
Learning walks with several middle leaders (i.e. Heads of Department or Phase) and senior leaders, with actions agreed as follow-up
Pupil review meetings, including pupil and parent voice activities
Reviewing the progress of pupils within interventions and adapting provision accordingly
Observing and feeding back to Early Career Teachers
Meeting with the SEND Link Governor
A parent coffee morning
Feedback to your TAs needs to happen daily. Every time you visit a classroom. Every morning you gather together before lessons.
Are your heads of department getting into lessons only once a term? That’s a school that’s not going to get better quickly.
Get a timetable of their free lessons. When you notice issues in their team, take them with you that week, or the next.
Who is going to have more impact on the learning of your students, new teachers or heads of department? Yes, that is a rhetorical question. Observe and mentor your heads of department.
Then, train your early career teachers as a group, at the same time, where you take the role of teacher. Teach them parts of lessons they are due to teach, as though they were your SEND students in the class. Give them a pupil profile with the learning needs of a student they have to pretend to be. (Do your pupil profiles even help a teacher do this? If they don’t, how will they adapt their teaching?)
Would one generic profile for an ADHD student actually involve 80% of the strategies you need for every SEND student? What if all teachers learned that?
Do this 3 times a year.
Aren’t I busy enough already?
Yes, but that is not the real question. This is the real question:
Does what I do have enough impact?
At the minute, training your TAs does not seem to be a priority. How they work with their caseload of students is going to make all the difference.
How you performance manage that, to give TAs agency, clout, and measures of impact is going to make all the difference.
Do you want to see a TA make a massive impact? No problem. Visit any special school.
There’s one just down the road.
*Who is Gary Aubin? He is a former drama teacher, SENDCO and head of year.
Gary Aubin leads on a SEND School Improvement programme with Whole Education, supporting schools and Trusts to drive a whole-school approach to supporting pupils with SEND. Gary sits on the Government’s Curriculum and Assessment Review panel.
Gary is the Education Endowment Foundation’s SEND Associate. In this role, he has worked extensively on sharing the evidence base behind high-quality teaching for SEND, as well as advised on the development of the SENCO NPQ.
As a Consultant, Gary has spoken internationally, advised the BBC, written content for the National Institute of Teaching and given talks to hundreds of Trust, Local Authority and school audiences.
He sounds pretty awesome. I wrote this before I found out how awesome he is. So, you know, I could be wrong. If you have any evidence that I am, let me know. It’s how I learn. Impact is everything.
I Emailed Gary to get his take:
Dominic,
Thank you for sending me the post going out on your Substack. I appreciate you getting in touch.
Really pleased to see the blogpost getting critiqued - the engagement from it is needed in order to provide the right challenge.
The things I've suggested in a 500-word blogpost are of course imperfect, as you point out. My greater point is to break down one's own strategic priorities into a series of habits. The timelines I suggest and habits I've suggested are of course insufficient, for some of the reasons you point out. And it's hard to be comprehensive in 500 words!
I hope people read my post and are able to reflect on how to use their (often very) limited time to work alongside others to pursue the strategic goals they've identified, rather than as a fixed list.
Your point about special school collaboration is absolutely key, thank you for making it.
And finally, the Lone SENDCO is named because it often feels that way to mainstream SENDCOs, in my experience - not because I'm advocating working alone!
Gary