SEND Matters

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SEND strategies: live by them, or death by them?

I’ve met many frustrated SENDCOs. They spend a lot of time perfecting their ‘pupil profiles’, only for no one to ever read them, let alone enact the strategies written on them.

I’ve met many frustrated families. They co-produce an accurate and helpful pupil profile, but when they ask their child what support they received that day, the strategies on the pupil profile don’t seem to have been implemented.

I’ve met many frustrated teachers. They have an increasing number of pupils in their classes with SEND, and each of them have a pupil profile with at least 6 strategies on. And they teach 10 classes across the week.

And in the middle of it might be a frustrated child, whose needs aren’t consistently being met in class.

Communication of pupil-level strategies is a fundamental part of the SENDCO role and is an essential part of a whole-school approach. So what is the way forward, in terms of individualised strategies, so that all children can thrive?

Non-negotiables or useful ideas?

Some strategies are rightly non-negotiable. Consider these strategies, written about 3 different pupils:

Always sit this pupil on the left-hand side of the classroom (the pupil is deaf in one ear)
Ensure she is allowed to use her ear defenders (this autistic pupil has made great progress in her ability to self-regulate in the classroom)
Do not force them to contribute verbally (this student has a diagnosis of situational mutism)

Some strategies are the physical enactment of a disabled pupil’s protected characteristic – the reasonable adjustment that it would be immoral, not to mention unlawful, not to make.

Others strategies are useful ideas. Consider these strategies, written about 3 different pupils:

Print out the slides so the child has them on their desk (the pupil prefers to work independently through tasks and finds the literacy demands easier with printed slides)
Check in with this pupil before they begin their written work (the pupil lacks confidence as a writer and often struggles to get started with written tasks)
Sit the child next to a preferred peer (the pupil finds it hard to build and sustain friendships)

Now, don’t get me wrong – the child must be at the centre here. There are pupils for whom the second list should also be considered essential. However, in many cases, the second list should allow for teacher discretion within the implementation. In many cases, these should be ideas for consideration, rather than non-negotiables.

A teacher’s discretion

Print out the slides so the child has them on their desk

Imagine a year 10 science lesson, in which pupils are being taught to draw ray diagrams for lenses. Experience has taught this teacher that she should lead the learning carefully in such a lesson, breaking down the task into steps and modelling each step before students practice it themselves. She chooses not to provide printed slides, because she wants all eyes on her as she live models each step; she doesn’t want any pupil getting ahead with the content.

Check in with this pupil before they begin their written work

Imagine a year 6 teacher, who has 2 children with this strategy on their pupil profile. By the summer term, Child A has some great strategies for first-person creative writing, and within this type of lesson doesn’t require a check-in before they get started. Child B has told the class TA that they don’t like being singled out for extra help – in this case, a 1-1 check-in. In both these cases, the teacher has used their professional discretion not to implement everything on the pupil profile, and in this case to let pupils begin their written work independently.

The unintended consequence of a strategy-led approach

There are all kinds of reasons why a teacher can’t, and perhaps shouldn’t, be attempting to implement 6+ strategies for 5+ pupils in each lesson they teach.

Focusing on a fixed list of strategies can stop a teacher from being adaptive – it can stop them from noticing what a child needs, in the moment, that may not be written on a pupil profile.
Trying to plan for and implement 30+ strategies can impact significantly on workload, so that meeting pupils’ needs feels like an insurmountable extra to the already difficult job of teaching a class of 30.
And finally, overly-bespoke strategies can lead to stigma for those pupils who always seem to be receiving something different to their peers, building a sense in pupils that the standard classroom offer isn’t for them.

When teachers get it right

The best teachers I see do a few things well, in relation to the strategies they’ve been asked to implement for pupils with SEND.

They quickly get a sense of which strategies are non-negotiable, and they are consistent in how they implement them. They see other strategies as a menu of options, to come back to when pupils are starting a new unit of work, or to reflect on again if they have concerns about a child’s progress.

They build inclusion into everything they do, focusing on their lessons being ‘inclusive by design’. As a result, they don’t make children with SEND feel different. They don’t make pupils feel that their education requires something which is always additional to, or different from, the offer in place for their peers (problematic, I accept, in definitions we have of SEND in England).

They reflect on the progress of pupils with SEND in all that they do, and look beyond merely pupil profiles as part of this reflection – it becomes a key feature of line management meetings, professional development opportunities and ongoing discussions with families.

They have a mindset of inclusion.

When SENDCOs get it right

As a SENDCO or other senior leader, this might mean a few things:

Focusing on universal-level inclusive practices in every classroom, minimising the need for ‘additional to or different from’ in many cases;
Getting feedback from teachers about the strategies written on pupil profiles;
Aligning pupil profile strategies around a number of core teaching practices, wherever possible;
Building the strategies from pupil profiles into whole-school professional development.

This isn’t a magic bullet, clearly. The increasing numbers of pupils with SEND in mainstream schools can make whole-school leadership of SEND particularly challenging.

That said, the most successful schools I know don’t overwhelm their staff with strategies. They show teachers that meeting the needs of pupils with SEND is not only a core function of teachers, but actually – while not being easy – is within the core skillset of teachers in many cases. It’s only by enabling this level of teacher empowerment that schools can ensure a whole-school commitment to inclusive practice.

Gary Aubin is author of The Lone SENDCO, a handbook for busy SENDCOs and those aspiring to become a SENDCO.

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The SEND and AP Improvement Plan: 3 things that could feel different for SENDCOs

I don’t know a SENDCO who thinks the SEND system is helping them to work efficiently, focus on the right things and consistently have impact. I don’t know many parents who speak glowingly of their experience of getting an EHCP. I don’t know any Local Authorities who aren’t consumed and overwhelmed by workload.

So something needs to change. But what is going to change for schools? What does the SEND and AP Improvement Plan tell us change is going to look like, and how might that change the SENDCO role?

Here are 3 ways your role could be affected.

National Standards

Many SENDCOs on Day 1 don’t yet know where to look. They may not know about some of the excellent resources from Whole School SEND, the SENsible SENCO Facebook group or the books that can guide them as they learn the role.

The answer in the Improvement Plan lies in National Standards. It looks like these will echo some of the ‘Ordinarily Available Provision’ documents set out by many local authorities (Portsmouth LA’s document is praised specifically within the Improvement Plan). Although the Improvement Plan itself raises a potential pitfall to this approach – the need to ‘find a balance between national consistency and individual needs’ – the approach at least gives new SENDCOs a starting point.

Will these National Standards be evidence-informed? The hope is certainly that they will be (the word ‘evidence’ is used 71 times in this 101-page document), with some mention of a commitment to building on the existing evidence base – for example within the area of teaching assistants.

It won’t happen quickly though. A ‘significant proportion’ of these will be published by the end of 2025, but a consultation process will follow – so nothing is going to happen quickly.

At best, this will effortlessly bring SENDCOs closer to good evidence-informed strategies and practices, helping them to make good decisions about provision quickly, and to focus on the implementation of provision.

At worst, a book’s worth of strategies will become a stick with which to beat teachers; another reason why meeting the needs of pupils with SEND feels beyond most classroom teachers.

The devil will of course be in the detail of what these end up looking like; of how they are created and what support surrounds their implementation.

A skilled workforce

If this Improvement Plan means the focus of the SENDCO role becomes more about upskilling colleagues, I’m delighted. If it helps SENDCOs to be colleague-facing, supporting colleagues directly and helping them to access high-quality development opportunities, that is a real lever for change.

The Improvement Plan gives several examples of how it sees the workforce being upskilled – through the SENCO NPQ; through a review of the ITT and ECF; through a commitment to SEND within the content of several leadership NPQs; through additional training for colleagues in Early Years; through additional research into the best practices of teaching assistants.

The sizeable hole in this plan may well be for teachers who are neither ITT/ECT nor enrolling in an NPQ. Where the offer from the Universal Services Programme (delivered by NASEN through Whole School SEND) is excellent, the multitude of pressures on teachers and school leaders mean it is still a leap of faith to think that this offer will be accessed by staff in the numbers needed to shift outcomes for many of the 1.5 million children and young people with SEND, unless there is some kind of way to ensure that staff have the time, incentive and sheer duty to do so.

A reduction in EHCPs

It would be naïve to think more requests for EHCNA won’t be rejected. There is an explicit desire within the Improvement Plan for a reduction (‘4. Fewer will therefore need to access support through an Education, Health and Care Plan’; ES15. we expect to reduce the need for EHCPs because the needs of more children and young people will be met without them).

The aspiration behind this may well be correct – that better and earlier identification, alongside a more robust plan of support through ‘ordinarily available provision’ at SEN Support Level, provides the right support quickly – negating in some cases the need for the kinds of intense and longer-term support delivered through an EHCP. It may also mean SENDCOs spend less time making requests for EHCNA and more time working with pupils, families and colleagues.

The flipside (or just the brutal reality) could be more knockbacks from local authorities, who find themselves under pressure to reduce the ‘high needs block deficits’, as is mentioned throughout the Improvement Plan (read what you will into the 12 mentions of a ‘financially sustainable’ system).

The standardisation and digitisation of EHCPs is surely to be welcomed, as any SENDCO working on a county/borough border will testify.

I am broadly in favour of the aims of the Improvement Plan. I am generally positive about many of the ways to achieve these aims. But expect nothing to change quickly. The Improvement Plan contains many references to things being trialled regionally, with pathfinders, trailblazers and pilot projects. While this approach should help to counter the problems of implementation that have plagued the 2014 SEN reforms, they also mean much-needed change may be 2-3 years down the line in many cases. Hopefully such a patient and step-by-step approach can bring good change; it just may not bring immediate change.

For a condensed version of the 101-page Improvement Plan, including specifically what it means for SENDCOs, be sure to take a look at this excellent summary from NASEN.

The Lone SENDCO: Questions and answers for the busy SENDCO

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Hidden at the whole-class level

SEND has an identity crisis. Or at the very least, good teaching practice for pupils with SEND has an identity crisis. This relates to the requirement for ‘additional to and different from’.

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.

Gary Aubin wrote The Lone SENDCO, a book of over 300 questions and answers for busy SENDCOs

References

What is the SEND system for? | Ambition Institute

Early Career Framework (publishing.service.gov.uk)

Education inspection framework (EIF) – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

SEND Code of Practice

SEND and schools: Inclusive by design (sec-ed.co.uk)

https://www.ascl.org.uk/ASCL/media/ASCL/Help and advice/Inclusion/Teacher-Handbook-SEND-14th-Dec-2021.pdf

Special Educational Needs in Mainstream Schools | EEF (educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk)

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A signpost for SENDCOs

This is a pretty short blogpost. I’m about to publish my tenth SEND and SENDCO-related blog on another website, which I hope people here might find useful. I’ve therefore created one blogpost here, with links to the first 9.

I hope you find the hyperlinks below useful:

Effective parent partnership: three times per year and beyond

https://www.impacteducationsoftware.com/post/three-times-per-year-and-beyond-effective-parent-partnership-for-sendcos

Looking back to move forwards: how SENDCOs can continue to develop their provision

https://www.impacteducationsoftware.com/post/looking-back-to-move-forwards-how-sendcos-can-continue-to-develop-provision

SENDCOs: 9 ways the Green Paper could affect your role

https://www.impacteducationsoftware.com/post/sendcos-9-ways-the-green-paper-will-affect-your-role

Something for everyone: leading a whole-school provision

https://www.impacteducationsoftware.com/post/something-for-everyone-leading-a-whole-school-send-provision

SEND: taking timey action for accurate assessment and identification

https://www.impacteducationsoftware.com/post/send-timely-action

5 key data points for SENDCOs

https://www.impacteducationsoftware.com/post/5-key-data-points-for-sendcos

What is an annual review and what do I have to do as SENDCO?

https://www.impacteducationsoftware.com/post/what-is-an-annual-review-and-what-do-i-have-to-do

SENDCOs: Learning to Learning Walk

https://www.impacteducationsoftware.com/post/learning-to-learning-walk

Writing a great EHCP application (and why it’s actually impossible)

https://www.impacteducationsoftware.com/post/writing-a-great-ehcp-application-and-why-its-actually-impossible

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The summer term SENDCO

As the days get longer and the summer term gets underway, it can feel like SENDCOs need to straddle more priorities than they have headspace for, taking on more work than they have time for. If working strategically is the only way to make this realistic, what does this look like in the summer term?

Consider these 8 areas as potential priorities for the summer term, which broadly fit into 2 categories: doing the summer term well and preparing to do next year well:

Doing the summer term well

Statutory duties

For seasoned SENDCOs, this will be obvious, but it’s worth checking that every pupil with an EHCP has their annual review booked in and that every parent of a child on the SEND register will be met, as part of the duty to meet 3 times per year. I address some ways to ensure that 3-times-per-year (or more!) is realistic in a previous blog post. Remember, it doesn’t have to be the SENDCO holding all these meetings – just ‘an adult with good knowledge and understanding of the pupil who is aware of their needs and attainment’ (DfE-00205-2013, 6.67).

2. All eyes on the exams

Whether in primary or secondary, consider the upcoming exam experience for pupils with SEND. What additional support/intervention might be useful, in the weeks before exams, to close any knowledge gaps/provide additional opportunities for revision? What access arrangements are in place for pupils?

When considering exam preparation, balance messages about the importance of revision with messages about pupil wellbeing. Ensure parents are included in such messages, so they know how best to support their children.

3. Reviewing interventions

Of the additional support taking place for pupils, you should already know what measures of success look like. Make sure these measures of success get ‘assessed’, in whatever form is most appropriate – whether through looking at IEP targets, reading age, school attendance, SDQ, or through a conversation with the child/parents/staff.

4. Educational enrichment

Whole-school events are often slotted into the summer term. Get an overview of the planned trips and events and consider whether there are access issues with any of them, or indeed whether any preparation might be needed to increase access – a social story about sports day, some co-planning of the journey to a museum or ensuring steps are taken for a child to successfully attend a residential trip. Sometimes, flagging these issues to the relevant adult will be all that is needed.

Preparing to do next year well

Transition

Consider the pupils entering your setting, making sure you have as comprehensive an offer as is needed – visits to your school, visits to their home, attendance at their annual review, social stories about your setting, a meeting with parents, etc.

Consider the pupils leaving your setting, as well as the pupils having a significant transition through moving key stage. Ensure your offer fully supports their transition. Where you have concerns about another school/college’s insufficient transition programme, try to raise this with them and with their parent, for the good of the child/young person. I’ve found the Going Places transition scheme to be useful for the primary-secondary transition.

2. Gained time

Some secondary teachers have a lighter teaching timetable after May half-term, due to year 11s/13s being in exams. Though this ‘gained time’ is often quickly allocated to other things (covering classes, curriculum planning, etc.), a secondary SENDCO might speak to their Headteacher about using colleagues’ gained time to get some pupils ready for next year, through some targeted academic support. A full half-term of academic intervention, delivered by a qualified teacher and delivered within a small group, might help a year 9 to cope better with the literacy demands of a Key Stage 4 curriculum.

3. Next year’s priorities

I wrote in a previous blogpost about how to write a development plan, including the steps you might take to audit your current provision. You’ll want to do a good job of considering (with data, where possible; with a range of people heard in the process, where possible) what has been achieved this year and what the next steps of progress look like. Start this process of reflection early, so you can begin to get things in place long before September 1^st – especially where this involves getting buy-in from your Headteacher.

4. Staffing

This isn’t merely a question of replacing anyone who is leaving. Though that may be essential, this should also be a reflective piece of work, in which you might be asking:

Do the roles we have in our department still match the needs of our pupils? If someone leaves, is it a chance to replace them with someone with a slightly different skillset?
Of the staff who are staying with you next year, who would benefit from/is ready for development? What would this look like and what positive benefits might this bring for pupils?
What external recruitment is needed? Where are good places to recruit?
Is there enough access to specialist expertise? This may be an opportunity to look at your current spend on SEND and recruit specialists, in line with the needs of pupils (1 day per week of Speech and Language therapy, 10 days across the year of Educational Psychology, etc.)? Though this may be problematic financially, I write in The Lone SENDCO about how a range of trainees might provide additional capacity in your school, without requiring significant additional cost.

These 8 areas clearly need to be considered in the context of your school and where your SEND provision is. They’re not comprehensive, but they provide an overview of some of the things to consider before the end of the year.

Finally, remember that the summer term is long. The priorities above will need to be spread out over the term, in order to make them possible alongside the multiple unforeseeables that make the SENDCO role such a rich and challenging rollercoaster.

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Why everyone should want to be a SENDCO

All teachers should want to be a SENDCO. Whether for the professional development it brings, for the difference it can make to pupils who otherwise might struggle, or just to step up to a whole-school role, ambitious colleagues should view it as an essential step on their own route to leadership. Why? For plenty of reasons…

The breadth of the role

Especially at secondary, senior colleagues are often thought of as being pastoral or academic in their outlook – rarely both. The SENDCO role needs to involve pastoral care – parent meetings, work with external agencies, interventions to support a child’s emotional wellbeing – but absolutely with a central remit of improving teaching and learning. The SENDCO role may feel like it pushes someone into a professional development corner, but the opportunities and experiences it brings are broad.

The moral objective

I can’t think of any role in school that isn’t worthwhile. However, if you want a role in which you absolutely know you’re doing something worthwhile, you shouldn’t look further than the SENDCO role. National outcomes, by many measures, mean we are not yet getting SEND provision right. Statistically more likely to attend school less, get excluded more and make less progress from their starting points, students with SEND need and deserve a SENDCO who supports them to do well – and supports colleagues to get it right for them. The SENDCO role is a great reason to go to work.

A seat at the top table

The SEND Code of Practice says that a SENDCO is ‘most effective in that role if they are part of the school leadership team’. For some staff, being appointed as SENDCO can mean a fast-track to some of the highest levels of decision-making in a school.

Whole-school influence

For the career-minded, a Head of Year, Head of Phase or Head of Department role might be the middle-leadership role that begins your journey into school leadership. These provide excellent development in one area of the school. However, the SENDCO role gives you whole-school influence: across all year groups, subjects and phases.

Your own professional development

Typically, after a promotion in school (to Teaching and Learning lead, to a Head of Year/Phase/Department role), your development might involve getting a bit of internal support and a day or two attending a conference each year. Other than that, it’ll be about getting hold of some recommended reading and swotting up on the relevant DfE guidance/OFSTED messages. Compare this to all the learning that comes from being a SENDCO. What other roles come with the (statutory) opportunity to gain a postgraduate certificate, which can go towards a Masters in many cases?

The support around you

Though it’s true there can be a real lack of in-school, SEND-specific line management for SENDCOs, the team of teaching assistants can often be some of the most experienced and supportive colleagues in a school.

You’ll be a better Head

Heads have responsibility for the ‘strategic direction of SEN policy and provision’, ‘ensur(ing) that appropriate resource is provided for students with SEND’. The Headteacher Standards require Heads to ‘hold ambitious expectations for all pupils with additional and special educational needs and disabilities’. If you’re to meet your statutory duty to all pupils, SENDCO experience is a great advantage. If you can make school work for students with SEND, you can make it work for anyone.

We’ll always need SENDCOs

It’s one of only 2 roles that are statutory (that and the role of Headteacher); every school needs one. As research suggests annual SENDCO turnover of 12-14%, there will always be jobs for SENDCOs.

It’s true that I’m offering an idea of what the SENDCO role should be, rather than what it always is in reality. There are SENDCOs who are flying the flag alone, who are pigeon-holed as ‘the SEND person’ and whose professional development no one seems to care too much about. In my book The Lone SENDCO, I try to provide answers to 300 questions that SENDCOs need to know fast, to help to combat this issue where it exists.

However, there is a really pragmatic need both to make the role more desirable for current SENDCOs (protected time to do the role, etc.) and to encourage more people to want to fill the vacancies that exist, and that will continue to exist.

It’s not my experience that a SENDCO vacancy gets lots of applications, whether it’s advertised internally or externally. It’s also not my experience that there are enough colleagues who want to commit their careers to the education of pupils with SEND – ‘career SENDCOs’. We need more people to see this role as good for them to do for a short time – 2-3 years perhaps – in the absence of people going into teaching because of their passion for SEND.

We therefore need to ensure the role is desirable. While ensuring colleagues are in the SENDCO role for long enough to do it well and to bring sustainable improvements to a school, we also need to make sure the SENDCO role is seen as an essential step on the road to school leadership, in the way a Head of Year/Phase/Department role might be seen. Only that way will we have a glut of well-trained, SEND-aware school leaders who can make education work for all students, including those with SEND.

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SENDCOs: 12 questions you’ll want to think about before OFSTED arrive

OFSTED last week announced that they’ll visit every school in England by summer 2025. SENDCOs will always be on the radar of a full (Section 5) OFSTED inspection, so what might inspectors ask you?

The following 12 questions link directly to all the references to SEND within the OFSTED Education Inspection Framework (EIF). Try out your answers to some of these with your line manager or a supportive colleague, so you can be as prepared as possible for the OFSTED call:

•How does your curriculum meet the needs of learners with SEND?

•What does the data say about how students with SEND are doing in your school (attendance, behaviour, progress/attainment)? What do you do with the data you collect about pupils?

•Are pupil outcomes improving as a result of the provision being made for them (including in terms of their SEND needs)?

•What steps are taken to ensure that minimal lesson time is lost for students with SEND?

•How do you identify and assess SEND in your school? How are parents involved in this process?

•What are you doing to address gaps in reading?

•How do you train and support teachers to be able to meet the needs of students with SEND?

•How do you prepare students to prepare for adulthood as they go through your school and eventually leave your school?

•How do you know that students with SEND are involved in school life?

•How do you know that learners with SEND in off-site provision are educated suitably and safely?

•How do you track the progress of students with SEND?

•Tell me about a child for whom a multiagency approach has been necessary.

It’s not possible for me to suggest answers to all of these in a blogpost. I do cover many of these topics in my book The Lone SENDCO: questions and answers for the busy SENDCO, which answers over 300 questions and covers OFSTED amongst many other topics.

That said, I’ve pasted the sections of the OFSTED EIF below, where they relate to SEND (my bold type), so you can see for yourself what they’ll be looking for evidence of. Look particularly at 353, which has the most direct relevance to SEND provision:

112. Inspectors will evaluate evidence of the impact of the curriculum, including on the most disadvantaged pupils. This includes pupils with SEND.

194. Before making the final judgement on overall effectiveness, inspectors will always consider the spiritual, moral, social and cultural development of pupils at the school, and evaluate the extent to which the school’s education provision meets different pupils’ needs, including pupils with SEND.

195. Inspectors will take a rounded view of the quality of education that a school provides to all its pupils, including the most disadvantaged pupils and pupils with SEND.

198. There is high academic/vocational/technical ambition for all pupils, and the school does not offer disadvantaged pupils or pupils with SEND a reduced curriculum.

219. Disadvantaged pupils and pupils with SEND acquire the knowledge and cultural capital they need to succeed in life.

237. Inspectors will evaluate the experience of particular individuals and groups, such as pupils for whom referrals have been made to the local authority, pupils with SEND, children looked after, those with medical needs and those with mental health needs. In order to do this, inspectors will look at the experience of a small sample of these pupils and consider the way the school is working with the multi-agency group to ensure that the child receives the support they need. For pupils with SEND, this will include ensuring that appropriate reasonable adjustments are made in accordance with the Equality Act 2010 and the SEND code of practice.

277. Inspectors must evaluate how well a school continues to take responsibility for its pupils who attend alternative or off-site provision. Inspectors need to be assured that leaders have ensured that the alternative provision is a suitable and safe placement that will meet pupils’ academic/vocational/technical needs, pastoral needs and, if appropriate, SEND needs.

353. All parts of the EIF apply to schools’ provision for pupils with SEND. However, as with all provision, SEND provision has some specific factors that should be taken into account. Inspectors will gather and evaluate evidence about:

whether leaders are ambitious for all pupils with SEND
how well leaders identify, assess and meet the needs of pupils with SEND, including when pupils with SEND are self-isolating and/or receiving remote education
how well leaders develop and adapt the curriculum so that it is coherently sequenced to all pupils’ needs, starting points and aspirations for the future
how successfully leaders involve parents, carers and, as necessary, other professionals/specialist services in deciding how best to support pupils with SEND, including agreeing the approach to remote education
how well leaders include pupils with SEND in all aspects of school life
how well the school assesses learning and development of pupils with SEND, and whether pupils’ outcomes are improving as a result of the different or additional provision being made for them, including any reasonable adjustments in remote education provision. This covers outcomes in:
- communication and interaction
- cognition and learning
- physical health and development
- social, emotional and mental health
how well pupils with SEND are prepared for their next steps in education, employment and training, and their adult lives, including: further/higher education and employment, independent living, participating in society and being as healthy as possible in adult life

354. Because of the often vastly different types of pupils’ needs, inspectors will not compare the outcomes achieved by pupils with SEND with those achieved by other pupils with SEND in the school, locally or nationally.

355. Pupils with SEND often have significant and complex vulnerabilities and can face additional safeguarding challenges. Inspectors will evaluate the ways in which leaders have made appropriate and effective safeguarding arrangements that reflect these additional vulnerabilities.

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Seeing without observing: how to be a visible SENDCO without adding to school scrutiny

As a SENDCO, you need to know what is going on in class. You need to make sure students are receiving quality-first teaching. You need to be able to diagnose where this isn’t happening so you can support teachers to develop their practice.

You also need to do this without creating a culture of fear. Staff need to feel supported and open to change, not in fear of high-stakes observations at every turn.

To have eyes and ears on teaching and learning, without adding to the observation cycle, try some of the following:

Offer to model a strategy. Rather than criticising poor practice around (i.e.) vocabulary teaching, offer to model how vocab can be taught. A teacher seeing how you teach vocab – in context, with a carefully selected image and with opportunities for practice – will help develop colleagues’ practice without you having to highlight and correct poor practice.

Support a child in class. If you can spare an hour, this can be a great way to learn more about a child’s needs and strengths. It also allows you to see the universal and targeted provision in class and can be the catalyst for a supportive follow-up conversation with a member of staff.

See the child, not the adult. Focus your learning walks on what the child is doing, rather than what the adult is doing. For this to be genuine, any follow-up/feedback will need to reinforce this message (‘I was pleased to see our year 7s with EHCPs all engaged in their learning and receiving help to give full sentence answers’, etc.)

Hold a staff surgery. This will allow adults to come to you with what they’re finding difficult, rather than finding they are being ‘caught out’.

Get in on formal processes. Rather than creating your own formal observations that add to the levels of scrutiny in a school, get involved in whatever processes already exist – performance management observations, targeted learning walks, etc. This will also ensure that any feedback you have is integral to these processes, rather than feeling like an add-on. This will be particularly valuable where a teacher has identified SEND practice as something they are keen to develop.

Focus on the positives. People don’t mind their practice being highlighted if the feedback is positive! Whenever you see something good, offer public shout-outs in briefings or bulletins, where appropriate. CC’ing in a line manager, where praise is being given, also helps to spread positive messages.

Take the long way back to your office. By walking down a corridor you get to less frequently, you may stumble across something that becomes an excellent source of information about a child’s engagement or an adult in need of support.

Ask for volunteers. Some staff may be very happy for you to drop in frequently, to provide some coaching or feedback.

Get regular feedback from your TAs. As people likely to spend most of their day in class, ask Teaching Assistants to guide you to the teachers you can support or the areas of training you can provide.

Listen to pupils. Whether done formally or informally, students can give you an excellent steer of what is going on in classrooms, for you to then follow up accordingly in one of the ways set out above.

By implementing some of the steps above, you can maintain an excellent understanding of what is going on in classrooms, without providing additional and unwanted scrutiny for colleagues.

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New to the SENDCO role/new to a school? Try to tick off these things by the end of September

The first term as SENDCO can feel overwhelming. It may be your first whole-school role, your first SEND-specific role, or a role that you’re trying to carry out alongside several others. It can be hard to know where to start; it can be hard to ever take stock and recognise successes.

Rather than try to master everything in the first month, this list gives 10 ideas for things to try and tick off by September 30^th. Each should be manageable alongside teaching and other responsibilities; it should be broad enough to cover many elements of the role, without expecting you to master everything in just over 4 weeks.

Read the Section Fs of all your EHCPs

This is statutory provision, which you must make ‘best endeavours’ to provide. You need to have read it and have plans to implement it. You might want to separate the provision into the following, to make this a manageable task:

Classroom strategies that teachers need to implement
Bespoke interventions that someone will need to deliver immediately (and others to begin once the new term is underway and new routines are embedded)
Strategies to implement if things aren’t going well (i.e. how to support when a child is struggling to cope in class, etc.)

You’ll need to find ways to share this information with relevant staff, where needed.

2. Communicate with all parents

The Code of Practice tells us we must meet with all parents of children with SEND at 3 points in the year (see 6.65 for the exact wording of this expectation). Though you’ll be unlikely to sit down with every parent/carer before the end of September, consider how you can communicate with all by this deadline.

This might just be a group text/email, letting them know how they can contact you (i.e. how they can book a parent meeting or which days you’re on the gate at the beginning of the day). This will be vital for some parents in reassuring them that their voice will be heard.

3. Drop into some classes every week

If you’re not dropping in and out of classes regularly, you’re making assumptions about the quality of teaching and learning. In as informal a manner as works for your setting, make sure you see for yourself what is going on for students with SEND in classrooms.

4. Drop in on every TA

This is less likely to be a formal observation, and more likely to be a way for you just to ensure that your expectations are being met. You might be looking at how the recommendations from the EEF’s Making Best Use of Teaching Assistants Guidance Report are being implemented in the classroom, for example.

5. Sit down with every TA

Make sure the people you are directly line managing have a chance to share with you their hopes (and any worries) for the year ahead. Make sure you have been clear about what success looks like in your eyes, and be open to feedback about how the wider SEND provision can be developed at your school.

6. Read something brief about every child on your SEND register

It’s very easy to have a sharp focus on students with EHCPs, at the expense of those who should receive SEN Support. Become informed (or refresh your knowledge) about all students with SEND, perhaps by reading each child’s 1-page profile. This can be achieved by the end of September by focusing on 1 or 2 year groups per week.

7. Know what interventions you’re currently able to offer and get data to suggest who should begin on what

Write down the intervention offer you can currently provide. This may simply be the same interventions you ran last year; it may be a more comprehensive process of being informed by research and resourcing your department accordingly. It will need to take into account your statutory duty (see point 1, above).

For each intervention, make a note of what ‘assessment’ looks like, i.e. what evidence you have of where the child is now and that this particular intervention is appropriate for them, be it social skills, spelling or a sensory circuit.

8. Communicate with all new staff and trainee teachers

Make sure that all staff (particularly new staff) know who you are, how to contact you and how to find out information about the students they are teaching. You might even provide some training yourself, or some links to sources of further information (strategies, additional resources, etc.)

9. Find some time to learn

You don’t ever need to know ‘everything’. But try to prioritise some time to formally develop your knowledge further, be it through reading a chapter of David Bartram’s Great Expectations, through watching the condition-specific videos on the SEND Gateway website or through studying Chapter 6 of the SEND Code of Practice.

10. Articulate your priorities

Try to spend the month working out what needs improving. Cast the net wide to see what others think needs improving (colleagues in your department, colleagues at senior leadership level, parents or even students). Articulate this as a handful of priorities and share these with your line manager and/or the Principal. Try to also articulate what support you need in order to make progress with these priorities.

The list above will need to be considered within the context in which you are working; there will be school-specific things that just can’t wait. But I hope that, by using the above as a guide, you will be able to end September with a sense of accomplishment at all you’ve achieved in the first month.

Finally, if you look at this at the end of September and realise you haven’t ticked them all off, please forgive yourself. These are just my thoughts; I’ve almost certainly never been to your school to see your context. In addition, the SENDCO role can sometimes be very hard to plan for; very hard to remain strategic in. Allow yourself the freedom to roll things over from one month to the next, where needed.

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The Spring term SENDCO

It’s a strange time of year. Too late to set an initiative up for the academic year; too early to write something off until next academic year. Here’s 7 things to be considering as you embark on the Spring term as a SENDCO.

Recall your successes

Think back to the Autumn term and all that went well. Remember an individual success story, a parent meeting with a positive outcome, a training delivered or some useful feedback to a teacher. Be proud of what went well.

2. Revisit your development plan

I write in The Lone SENDCO about how a SENDCO might create a development plan, in which they outline their priorities.

Presuming you did write a development plan in September, have a look back on the priorities you set yourself at the beginning of the year. Now is the perfect time to begin working on a priority that you haven’t been able to focus on so far. It’s also a good time to acknowledge the progress made in some areas already. Keep your development plan as a live document – make notes on it of the things you have already achieved and the things you would like to achieve this term. Discuss this with your line manager in school, so the priorities become shared with others in school.

3. Reflect on your statutory compliance

Make sure you’re compliant with the Code of Practice. As a quick (but not exhaustive) checklist –

Are your annual reviews of EHCPs all calendared, with invitations sent for any coming up this term?
Are you (the school, not necessarily yourself) on track to have at least 3 parent meetings for all children on the SEND register about their child’s needs and progress?
Are parents informed whenever their child is in an intervention/comes on or off the SEND register?
Are you providing all the interventions listed in Section F of the EHCPs?
Do you have an assess-plan-do-review process in place in some form?

4. Book in some self-evaluation

You might choose to use the excellent self-review guides from Whole School SEND. You might ask senior leaders in your school. You might decide to have a review where parents are the primary stakeholders giving you feedback about your provision. However you do it, make sure there is a chance to gather some feedback, and reflect yourself, on where your provision is at the moment.

5. Write down your stakeholders

If you’re aiming for SEND to be a whole-school issue, consider how widely this is happening in practice. Which groups of colleagues would consider themselves stakeholders in your SEND provision? Would your Governors, senior leaders, middle leaders, pastoral staff, support staff, parents and pupils consider themselves stakeholders in your SEND provision? Pick one or two of these groups to get more invested in SEND provision this term. What can you do this term to increase the amount of people who consider themselves accountable for SEND outcomes (in the broadest sense) in your setting?

6. Gear up for exams

This is the time of year to be reflecting on your preparedness for exams. Are you compliant in terms of exam access arrangements (especially urgent for secondary)? Where revision sessions are scheduled, have students on the SEND register been included? Can they access these sessions or is some work needed, either to work with the teacher to adapt what they’re doing or to provide additional/different sessions?

7. Don’t forget transition

For students leaving your school in the summer, is their next school known? Where they have an ECHP, have you invited the next setting to this term’s annual review? Where they are finishing year 11 or 13, what support can you or colleagues give in terms of applications?

For students arriving in your school in September (where this is known), would they benefit from a lengthy transition programme? Would a monthly visit, starting in the Spring term, be an appropriate lead-in for them joining your setting?

As the SENDCO, keeping your eye on your priorities and on your statutory compliance should ensure your provision can continue to improve, even in challenging times.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lone-SENDCO-Questions-answers-busy/dp/1913622584

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Starting as a SENDCO in September? Find 10 hours to do these 10 things before you break up for the summer

If you’re embarking on your first SENDCO role in September, you will not get to the summer holidays with total readiness. But if you can find 10 hours to do these 10 tasks, in no particular order, you’ll give yourself the best headstart possible.

Look at your current SEND register (1 hour)

Work out who you need to make a particular effort to get to know once you’re in the role. Make a list of these students and make them your priority for seeing in class and reading up on from September.

2. Make a realistic reading list and begin to read it (2 hours)

Don’t feel you need to read everything out there (and there is a lot!). My top 3 in your position:

The SEN Information Report of your school, available on your school’s website
Natalie Packer’s book The Perfect SENCO or my own book The Lone SENDCO
SEN Code of Practice, Chapter 6 (referring specifically to the duty on schools)

There are also some gems of recommendations on Twitter if you follow @NataliePacker, @sendcosolutions, @sencochat to name but 3.

3. Enrol on a NASENCO Award (1 hour)

Look at local University providers as well as distance learning providers. If you’re really not sure, put the feelers out on Twitter or Facebook for local recommendations, or ask SENDCOs in your local schools where they did their course. You don’t need to start on the course immediately; consider whether you want the professional learning support immediately or would rather settle into the role first.

4. Have a handover (2 hours)

The current SENDCO is the most important person for you to get feedback from but there are advantages also to casting the net wide here. Consider the benefits of asking for 20 minutes of the time of an experienced TA, with a senior leader or with an NQT for their experience of SEND provision in your school. These types of handover (if that’s the right word) can be just as useful as speaking to the outgoing SENDCO.

In your conversation with the outgoing SENDCO, you’ll know instinctively what you feel you need more information on. It might be the inside-info about particular children and families; the interventions overview; priorities for this year and whether progress was made with those priorities; who you can lean on for support within the school; key external contacts and key dates throughout the year. Use the information from this conversation to begin identifying priorities for next year.

5. Make a list of your stakeholders (30 minutes)

Gain reassurance that the job is doable by writing down who can provide you with some support along the way (using the outgoing SENDCO to support you in formulating the list):

Who can you work with when pastorally supporting children and families?
Who can you look to for some administrative support when you need it, even if it is from within your own TA team?
Who is going to be your advocate on SLT?
Which teachers can you go to when you want to see excellent practice in school?
Which parents/carers will give you a sense of how families are feeling about the support being given in school?
Which children and young people will be good indicators of whether pupils with SEND are thriving in your school?
Which SENDCOs in other local schools can you go to for advice when you need it?
What can you get from online communities (Whole School SEND Community of Practice; the Facebook group ‘SENCO/SENDCO Support (Professionals)’ or ‘SENsible SENCO’; the Twitter community)?
Who can help you wade through data to understand the SEND context of your school better?

6. Invite feedback (1 hour)

There is never a better time than when you’re new to be honest about your naivety. Find a way to invite opinions from anyone who has them about the quality of the SEND provision in your school. This might be through creating a staff or parent survey, or simply putting a notice in your staff/parent bulletin inviting people to get in touch.

7. Prevent information being lost (1 hour)

Look at how information about pupils is currently shared with teaching staff – most likely through a 1-page summary of need, sometimes called a pupil profile or pupil passport. Ask for as many people as possible to suggest edits to these documents, for the children they have worked with this year.

This way, you’ll capture the bits of information that will really help the staff working with these pupils from September (things that motivate a particular child, strategies that have worked for that child, etc.).

8. Get your head around some data (90 minutes)

You may or may not be a SENDCO, or a person, who is naturally inclined towards data. There are clear reasons why it’s important to use data, and the larger your school environment, the more important this becomes. I would strongly encourage you to think about who else can make this bit of your job manageable, be it a data manager; an administrator; even the Headteacher. For specific bits of data, perhaps the attendance lead has already got the information you need? Or the behaviour lead has already reported to Governors about the behaviour of various groups, including those with SEND? Although you could lose your life in data – there is always another spreadsheet you could create for yourself that would tell you something new – the main bits you’ll need can be split into 5 categories:

SEN context (how many EHCPs, most prevalent need type, etc.)
Attendance
Behaviour (including exclusions)
Academic outcomes
Data gathered from interventions

Get as much information as you can about this before the summer break, so you can get a clearer idea of what you’ll be trying to drive next year.

9. Embrace your unreadiness (no time limit on this!)

You might feel unready for the role for a range of reasons. You might feel inexperienced as a teacher of children with SEND. You might be new to having a whole-school responsibility, feel inadequate about your SEND knowledge or lack confidence about supporting colleagues to improve their practice. The only reassurance I can offer is that all these things were true for me.

Often it’s not a specialist in the role; it needs to be someone with an inclusive approach, with empathy and with a willingness to learn.

10. Look forward to becoming a SENDCO (all the time!)

I used to be a Head of Year in a secondary school and found myself issuing sanctions for much of my time. I began to avoid the staff room to avoid colleagues wanting to vent about the behaviour of children in my year group. I then became a SENDCO; I became the person people come to when a child needs support, not when they need a telling off. It’s a privileged role. I hope you enjoy it.

SENDCOs and SLT – is it really that simple?

It’s a popular refrain that SENDCOs should be on SLT. So, in order to ensure effective leadership of SEND, should schools be placing their SENDCO on SLT? I wonder if that’s not only over-simplistic as a solution – it may even be that we’re asking the wrong question in the first place.

SLT would not have helped me

There’s an obvious reason why a SENDCO should be a part of their school’s SLT – greater influence across the school, which should be good for pupils with SEND.

That said, it’s not always straightforward. When I became a secondary SENDCO, it was only my second leadership role in school, having previously been a Head of Year. I was unqualified in SEND, inexperienced in leadership and encountering an impostor syndrome that will be familiar to many.

I had a great deal to learn all at once. How to work in partnership with parents, how to track and record the progress of pupils, what strategies I might recommend to colleagues and how I might ensure they’re being enacted in practice – let alone the statutory and paperwork demands of the role.

Placing me on SLT would have been the worst thing for the school to do. I didn’t have enough experience as a middle leader, let alone the ability to contribute usefully at the top table of school leadership. I had enough to learn as a new SENDCO, without being given the potential trappings of school senior leadership – line managing curriculum areas, multiple duties per day and support for whole-school initiatives.

For many schools, a SENDCO’s elevation to SLT is straightforward and effective. I won’t argue with any Head looking to take such a step. But it’s also worth considering why this is sometimes not quite the right way to think about it.

The current picture

Research in 2020 found that around 2 in 3 primary SENDCOs and just 1 in 3 secondary SENDCOs sit on their school’s Senior Leadership Team (Boddison et al, 2020). And these schools aren’t breaking any rules in this regard. The SEND Code of Practice (DfE, 2015) recommends such practice, but also allows schools to make their own judgement in this area:

6.87 The SENCO has an important role to play with the headteacher and governing body, in determining the strategic development of SEN policy and provision in the school. They will be most effective in that role if they are part of the school leadership team

The SEND and AP Improvement Plan (DfE, 2023) doesn’t commit to any strengthening of the wording here, though it describes effective SENDCOs as those who are ‘whole-school, senior and strategic’. It uses these words in relation to the introduction of the SENCO NPQ, the new statutory qualification for SEND leadership in mainstream schools.

A quick look at some of the ‘Learn How to’ statements in the SENCO NPQ echo the sentiment of ‘whole-school, senior and strategic’:

1.a Working with other leaders to develop, implement and monitor the effects of school policies

3.c Recognising where issues with teaching or curriculum quality may manifest as SEND and working with other leaders to address these issues swiftly

5.n With other senior leaders, providing a safe and open forum to debrief following serious behaviour incidents

It’s clearly only from a position of seniority that these goals can be meaningfully achieved.

Ask not ‘should my SENDCO be on SLT’; ask ‘who should my SENDCO be?’

That said, the question, as we ask it, may be the wrong way round. It’s not necessarily about asking ‘should we place our SENDCO on SLT?’, but it may be a much more fundamental question – ‘which of our senior leaders is best-placed to lead SEND?’ It becomes about schools asking ‘which of our leaders has the ability to be whole-school, senior and strategic in relation to SEND?’

In other words, to return to my experience of becoming a SENDCO, the learning is not that I should have been catapulted to SLT, it’s rather that someone else might have been better placed to be SENDCO in the first place.

When I started as a SENDCO, it was my first Head of Department role. So how did I approach it? I ran a department. I made sure that those within my department were supported to function well. I worked closely with the teaching assistants and others who made up my ‘Inclusion Department’. I took responsibility for developing the offer of interventions that the department ran, and developed our work partnering with families. I told my line manager proudly whenever I thought I was running the department well.

Was I whole-school? No. Was a senior? Not really. Was I strategic? On occasion, though my newness to leadership made this inconsistent.

Which of my senior leaders is best-placed to be my SENDCO?

There are inherent dangers in making a busy senior leader a SENDCO. If a Deputy Headteacher already has vast areas of responsibility, will it be useful to add the significant responsibility of SEND to this list, or might SEND coordination get lost among their other tasks?

This moves me to think of the safeguarding model in many schools. Frequently in schools, a Deputy Head is the Designated Safeguarding Lead. That doesn’t mean they carry out every function in relation to safeguarding – these might be done by a Safeguarding Officer, a Welfare Lead or a Head of Year – but the buck stops with them as a senior leader, as of course it should.

What might such a model look like within SEND? It might mean a Deputy Head becoming the SENDCO, giving the role a seniority and delivering advocacy for pupils with SEND in all school leadership decisions. It means the buck stopping with a leader who by definition should be whole-school, senior and strategic.

It might require some creativity about roles that support this senior SENDCO – a SEND Teaching and Learning Lead, a SEND Operational Lead, a Statutory Provision Coordinator, a SEND Assessment lead, a Head of SEMH provision or a Family Liaison Worker based in the Inclusion Department, for example.

Sometimes, enhancing SEND leadership will be straightforward. It might involve the easy promotion of a SENDCO, who is ready and able to make the jump to senior leadership. But sometimes it won’t be that easy. Either way, it’s imperative that schools find ways to ensure genuine, informed and effective leadership of SEND at a senior level, so that the needs of pupils with SEND run through all school leadership decisions.

References

Boddison, A., Curran, H. & Moloney, H. (2020) National SENCo Workforce Survey 2020: Time to Review 2019–2020. https://www.bathspa.ac.uk/projects/sencoworkload/.

Department for Education (2015). SEND Code of Practice: 0-25 years. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a7dcb85ed915d2ac884d995/SEND_Code_of_Practice_January_2015.pdf

Department for Education (2023). SEND and AP Improvement Plan. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/63ff39d28fa8f527fb67cb06/SEND_and_alternative_provision_improvement_plan.pdf

Department for Education (2023). National Professional Qualification for Special Educational Needs Coordinators. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/65d8b9e387005a001a80f90c/National_professional_qualification_for_special_educational_need_coordinators.pdf

The flex: reasonable adjustment in the classroom for pupils with SEND

When it comes to getting classroom teaching right for pupils with SEND, it isn’t always about funding. It isn’t always about having years and years of specialist SEND training. It’s about the flex.

Consistent in your principles; flexible in your practices

One of the best INSET sessions I ever attended was by Rob Long. I’ve no idea what he’s doing now, but I remember him talking about schools being ‘consistent in their principles; flexible in their practices’. I was a Head of Year at the time and this advice influenced my pastoral work. It then went on to influence my work as a SENDCO.

In SEND, we call this reasonable adjustments of course. We might associate this term with legal rights, protected characteristics, classroom strategies. But in practice as a classroom teacher or TA, it’s one of the hardest things to get right – how do I maintain high expectations for all, yet make exceptions for some? How can I create a classroom that is fair, when I’m treating pupils differently?

Which leads us to an image like this, often used in CPD around SEND:

The point of this image for teachers and TAs is 2-fold of course:

That it’s okay to provide different supports for pupils if it increases their access;
That if we can deliver lessons in a way that ensures individual support arrangements are not required, removing the barrier in the first place, that is ultimately ‘inclusive by design’.

In short, that we have flex in what we do.

Putting the ‘flex’ into our teaching

For those new to the profession in particular, there can be a steep learning curve here. If my objective is that pupils enter the classroom in silence, begin their work independently and share their answers in full spoken sentences, what might that look like for a child with ADHD, MLD and SLCN respectively*?

It starts with the principle above. If what I can provide for all pupils reduces the need for individual adaptations (justice, in the image above), perfect. If some individual adaptations allow all pupils to meet teacher expectations (equity, in the image above), great.

What might those individual adaptations look like? Let’s take the 3 examples above: silent entry, starting work independently and giving full sentence spoken answers. What might flex look like in these contexts?

Silent entry – a silent entry to the classroom will be tricky for certain pupils, but it might be made easier when the teacher checks in with that child before they enter, gives them a specific job to do when they enter the classroom and/or tells them they will be checking in with them individually, once the class are sat down.

Starting work independently – this will be tricky for certain pupils, but it might be made easier when single-step instructions are clear on the board, when the work increases in difficulty as pupils complete it (i.e. no one looks at Q1 and sees impossibility) and when prompts are provided (knowledge organisers, etc.) to support pupils if they get stuck.

Sharing an answer in a full spoken sentence – this will be tricky for certain pupils, but it might be made easier when the pupil rehearses their answer with a partner, writes it in a sentence or sees/hears a model answer first.

These specific supports won’t work for all pupils of course, but they are examples of a teacher offering flexibility, based on an understanding of a pupil’s individual strengths and needs.

Applying ‘the flex’ to behaviour

The same principle applies for promoting positive learning behaviours. In all the best schools I’ve worked in, the positive behaviour of pupils is supported by a consistent, explicit and well-articulated system. But it wasn’t a system that could work without flex.

Consider some common approaches to behaviour taken in schools. Generally in schools, pupils are expected to move calmly in corridors and to focus on teacher instruction in class. That’s an appropriate aspiration for all pupils, and not one we should merely abandon when pupils are on a SEND register. However, in our equality/equity/justice model, that consistent principle requires flexible practice. What might flex look like here?

Moving calmly in corridors – this will be tricky for certain pupils, but it might be made easier when adjustments are in place for some pupils – staggered exits from class, additional supervision at certain times in the day and the explicit teaching of expected behaviours.

Focusing on teacher instruction in class – this will be tricky for certain pupils, but we can set more pupils up for success if we understand what motivates and supports them to succeed – perhaps through showing a pupil the progress they are making, through an intelligent seating plan and through teacher instruction that uses pause, pace, repetition and questioning appropriately.

There are countless examples of what reasonable adjustment in classrooms can look like (books by Natalie Packer and Sara Alston are full of many great examples), but these can never account for every classroom scenario. The point for teachers is the flex.

With a mindset of flex, we can continue to aim high for all, but make sure we are taking all pupils with us. We can create a classroom that is not merely equal, and not only equitable, but provides access to a meaningful education for all pupils.

*It’s also about managing the value of the labels we attach to certain children. A child’s label of ADHD/MLD/SLCN might be a useful shortcut – and might be essential knowledge for all staff to have – but it will never be sufficient on its own.

Gary Aubin is author of The Lone SENDCO, a handbook for SENDCOs of over 300 questions and answers.

SEND provision: Intelligent trial and error?

The SENDCO role in a mainstream school is invaluable, especially when supporting pupils with complex needs. External specialists can be equally as invaluable.

Are there times though when the presence of a specialist – the SENDCO, an Educational Psychologist – can delay teachers and TAs from making good decisions for pupils? In relation to the use of specialists within SEND, care must be taken to ensure colleagues are supported but not disempowered.

The importance of a referral

I’ve had many times in my career when I’ve been called in to offer expertise, whether as a SENDCO or when working across a MAT.

Seeking support should be encouraged. The earlier a colleague flags a concern, the earlier we can arrange intervention, informed by early identification. The problem though is with this idea that the expert carries a magic wand. It’s the magic wand approach that I feel needs addressing.

Delay delay delay

Think of a child who is struggling in their year 8 class. A teacher raises a concern to the SENDCO. The SENDCO gathers the information they need to make a referral to their local EP service. The external referral is seen and a date is arranged for the EP to come in and meet the child. The visit goes well and a report follows. The SENDCO arranges to meet the teacher who made the initial referral and supports them to implement the recommendations.

Even if that process goes smoothly, the process I describe above might take 3 months. For many overwhelmed SENDCOs and LA services, it might be far longer. But at least we’re now giving some good advice to the teacher who requested support.

The recommendations

Look at a list of recommendations sent by a really excellent Educational Psychologist, for a boy in Upper Key Stage 2 (anonymised):

Continued close liaison between home and school to support (pupil’s) emotional needs and ensure consistent transference of strategies
Further exploration and intervention to support his reasoning skills
Continued support and intervention to ‘catch up’ on his numeracy skills and literacy skills, especially his writing/recording skills
Access to a social-emotional learning curriculum, for example an individualised emotional literacy programme such as ELSA
Availability of a significant, consistent adult to deliver and review interventions and to prompt their use in class and in other contexts as appropriate

This is an excellent list. It has accurately captured his difficulties and suggested appropriate responses. But is there anything there that the school couldn’t have concluded themselves, if given the time and space to formulate such a plan? Is there anything in there worth waiting 3 months for?

Using our EPs differently

This blog isn’t looking to criticise Educational Psychologists, or any external specialist colleague working with young people with SEND. In every school I’ve worked in, I’ve ensured we have a budget to purchase additional EP days, such is the value of their partnership and their importance in the SEND system.

But we need to appreciate our own expertise as educationalists. Teachers and TAs need to feel they can notice what a child needs (or no longer needs) in a classroom and adapt their support accordingly. Similarly, SENDCOs need to feel skilled enough to quickly identify a challenge for a child, working with the family and young person at all times, and plan a response accordingly.

This approach will allow us to use our EPs in a way that provides greater capacity to drive outcomes for all pupils, especially our pupils with SEND. By valuing our own expertise, we can use EPs to share evidence-informed interventions, to deliver staff training, to audit our provision or to supervise and guide SENDCOs. We can use them to provide surgeries for staff, advice for parents and guidance to principals.

Intelligent trial and error

Getting it right for pupils doesn’t suddenly become easy – we’re still not possessing a magic wand – but it relies on our ability to implement ‘intelligent trial and error’; the ability to take the information we have, to try the most appropriate response, and to monitor its impact. What in SEND we often call the ‘assess-plan-do-review’ cycle.

Our ability to make informed and accurate decisions may come from:

What has worked for this pupil before, and which we need to try again;
What has worked for other pupils, and may work for this pupil;
What the evidence shows has worked for other pupils (and other similar pupils, where possible), and may work for this pupil;
What an external specialist recommends.

To talk of ‘error’ may sound flippant, especially to the families of children with SEND. No colleague ever wants their practice to be strewn with errors. The presence of specialist colleagues – whether an in-school SENDCO or an external Educational Psychologist – can help to reduce these errors, but it must never prevent teachers and TAs from reflecting on their own practice and making changes accordingly, in a timely manner, without always seeking external guidance.

It’s this ongoing cycle of reflection and amendment, from colleagues who reflect on their practice constantly, that will ultimately lead to better outcomes for pupils.