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
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