1-page profiles, pen portraits, pupil passports, pupil profiles. Lots of alliteration to describe a single document that paints a picture of a pupil with SEND.
These are often implemented as a way to record pupil/parent voice, to communicate with a staff team succinctly and to monitor effective teaching.
SENDCOs work tirelessly on their creation and review, yet they can leave teachers feeling overwhelmed. They can cause ‘death by strategies’ or even prevent teachers from noticing what’s in front of them, sticking rigidly to the piece of paper they’ve been given.
These 6 tips might just support these profiles to have increased impact.
Write them in a language that everyone understands
SEND has its own language. There is nothing wrong with this, but there are real benefits to speaking a language of teaching and learning when communicating across a staff body. If we speak a language everyone understands, we’re enabling independent use of these documents. Do low-arousal learning environments or visual cues mean as much to our colleagues as they might do to SENDCOs?
Develop systems for them to be read, annotated and updated
Perhaps it’s just a professional duty of staff to read and interpret these documents, but the increase in pupils with SEND means we might need to use directed time differently in schools.
More time focusing on SEND might not mean twice the number of specialists coming to the school to deliver CPD; it might mean that each term staff are reading pupil profiles together in departments, asking for clarity around certain approaches or sharing thoughts on what, for example, a communication-rich environment looks like in History or how a distraction-free learning environment might look in Year 2.
Using meeting cycles to overcome these challenges, with pupil profiles as the catalyst for discussion, feels like one appropriate response to increasing levels of need.
Reduce where necessary by leaning on your ‘Ordinarily Available Provision‘
There is a pragmatic reason why we need to reduce strategies – it’s not possible for teachers to implement dozens of approaches at once, and I’d argue the best teaching doesn’t attempt to do so.
So where a strategy asks the teacher to ensure ‘clear instructions’, ‘high expectations’ or ‘relationships of trust’, we should ask ourselves whether these should be needed. Are they really ‘additional to or different from’ what we would expect all the time?
Where can we move things to the ‘universal offer’, as an expectation for every child, perhaps using the back page of the pupil profile to explicitly articulate this universal offer to staff, to families and to the pupils themselves?
Frame them as ideas, in many cases
Some of the strategies we might recommend are essential; they are a school delivering on its legal duty to implement reasonable adjustments. For the pupil who is partially deaf to sit on one side of the classroom or the pupil who is situationally mute not to be made to verbalise in class, these strategies are essential and a pupil profile should communicate as such.
Some of these strategies, however, should be framed as things for teachers to use where helpful. For example, a pupil might generally benefit from having the slides printed on their desk, but in some cases this may be unhelpful – perhaps the teacher needs the pupil to ‘stay with the rest of the class’, if they are to fully access today’s learning.
A pupil might require a time out. While the teacher would permit it often, they might sometimes use their knowledge of (and relationship with) the pupil to delay them leaving the class where their judgement says this is possible, or use a distraction technique instead.
To empower teachers, therefore, pupil profiles might separate that which is non-negotiable (perhaps placing these in bold), and that which teachers should consider, trusting colleagues’ professional judgement to use them where helpful.
Monitor supportively
If the implementation of dozens of strategies simultaneously is neither possible nor desirable, we must ensure our monitoring processes recognise this.
Walking into classrooms with pupil profiles in hand may be useful for reviewing what’s taking place in class for a child, but not if success means all strategies are implemented all of the time. Some of the best inclusive practice is invisible, worked in at the whole-class level without the pupil ‘standing out’ through always receiving different instruction or additional resources.
Monitoring processes that are simply checklists of strategies on a pupil profile surely underplay the complexity of meeting the needs of pupils with SEND in an inclusive manner.
Assess-Plan-Do-REVIEW
These documents must be reviewed. Needs are not ‘frozen in time’; barriers to learning can come and go; strategies can work for a while and then lose their impact.
It’s therefore important that pupils, families and staff all have opportunities to contribute to editing the pupil profile, to ensure it remains relevant.
To be clear, if I visited a school without any pupil profiles, I’d suggest they work hard to write good ones, and to do it quickly. There’s nothing wrong with succinct documents about pupils and their needs. But there are some subtle ways to make them better, and important systems that will increase their impact.
Finally, it’s worth remembering that pupil profiles almost never say that teachers should be kind, be positive, believe in and listen to the child or ‘go again’ in the afternoon after a difficult morning. Yet often, this is what seems to matter the most. While a focus on teaching strategies is vital, we must never forget that it’s the human qualities we bring to a classroom that often provide the clearest benefit to all pupils, and particularly to many pupils with SEND.
Gary Aubin is author of The Lone SENDCO and co-author of The Parent’s Guide to SEND
SEND Matters 