Tom’s Adventures in Mainstream
A parent’s top eight tips for better inclusion of pupils with
special educational needs and disabilities
My nine year old son – let’s call him Tom – left his mainstream
school last summer at the end of Year Two and started in September at a special
school. While we’re delighted that Tom has
finally come to what is a more enabling environment for him, we’re reflecting
on how Tom’s experience in mainstream could have been more inclusive. The mainstream school was keen to be
inclusive: the Head teacher had a
wonderful attitude and knew and loved all the children in the school. Socially, ethnically, and on behaviour issues
the school did seem to be very inclusive:
what could they do to include children with Special Educational Needs and
Disabilities (SEND) more successfully?
Before listing what I think are the top eight tips for
more successful inclusion, first a bit about Tom himself. Tom has a condition called Duchenne muscular
dystrophy (Duchenne or DMD for short).
This means he has weak muscles, poor balance, and poor coordination – he
can’t run and writing by hand is laborious and difficult for him. He needs various adaptations to help him sit
and write, including a keyboard.
Many children with DMD also have cognitive
difficulties, summarised by difficulty processing information. Like water on clay soil, information takes
longer to absorb and too much information at once is overload. Anything which needs a lot of process – like
doing maths or joining up letters to read words – is difficult for Tom, thought
he can tell you loads about many subjects and has a lively curiosity. You can appreciate the challenges for a child
like Tom in mainstream: taking in
teachers’ instructions, recalling vocabulary, other children’s fast-moving
games and social interaction, dealing with transitions from one task to another
and the hustle and bustle of the school day, and most significantly how Tom
learns and the pace of his learning.
What can be done to address better the needs of
children like Tom in mainstream? Well, an
education revolution so all classes and schools are much smaller, with a higher
ratio of teachers to pupils, would help, though that would not in itself be
sufficient. In my view, eight tweaks even
to the current system would effect significant improvements.
1. Enough Special Needs Co-ordinator
(SENCo) time
In my son’s mainstream school there were over 400
pupils and a more than average proportion of pupils with special educational
needs, including pupils with Down’s Syndrome or on the autistic spectrum. But the Special Needs Co-ordinator (SENCo) was
there only two days a week. There needs
to be enough time for the SENCo to work with teachers and teaching assistants
(TAs), time for the SENCO to follow up and evaluate the success of teaching
strategies, time for the SENCo to go into classrooms to observe pupils, time
for the SENCO to get the advice that they may need, time for the SENCo to
liaise with outside agencies. In our
case none of these things were happening to the extent that they needed to
happen. For example, it was me, not the
SENCo, who met with the local authority SEN ICT advisory teacher to get some
ICT resources for Tom’s computer, resources which could also help other pupils.
2. Time for teachers and teaching
assistants (TAs) to plan together
Tom’s TA would have about thirty seconds between
hearing the teacher’s instructions for the class and starting work with him, to
take in the learning objective and task, decide how much of the task Tom could
engage with, how to break the task down into more manageable chunks, and what,
if any, alternative strategies or resources to use. Without planning ahead of time it was
extremely difficult for Tom to do differentiated tasks with other pupils. As you’ve probably guessed, I have a teaching
background and the year I learned most was when I planned together with a
TA. We both worked part time and had our
planning meetings in unpaid time. We
should not have had to do that:
contractual time should be scheduled for such meetings.
3. Adequate training for class teachers
to support pupils with SEND
It is crucial for classroom teachers to have adequate
special needs training, because in the current system the usual chain of
command is that the classroom teacher tells the teaching assistants on a daily
basis what they need to be doing with their pupils with special needs. The SENCo is there to support, to offer ideas,
and to help evaluate strategies (though in our case there was little evidence
that this was happening).
Teachers need to be more trained in concepts such as
task analysis, backward chaining, and differentiation. For example, Tom’s class had to do ‘free
writing’. So Tom was given a pencil and
paper and ‘freedom’. His teacher told me
afterwards that he ‘made some marks and wrote the word ‘the’. Tom would certainly have had plenty in his
mind to write about, so why couldn’t his free writing have been more
supported? . Why could he not have used a keyboard? And an ICT programme to prompt him with the
sight words he knew? Both of these resources were sitting in the
stock cupboard.
If the teacher had been adequately trained she would
have seen that what she had done here was differentiation by outcome – in other
words, throw the children in at the deep end and those who succeed are those who
make it to the shallow end without drowning.
4. Adequate training for special needs
teaching assistants (TAs)
Teaching assistants need to have adequate training to
carry out the tasks they are expected to do. They need to be trained in the
pedagogical concepts which underpin their work with pupils with SEND, because
they are the ones who work with pupils day to day, the ones who on a daily
basis are fine-tuning teaching strategies, evaluating them and looking at next
steps at the micro-level.
Though the chain of command is from class teacher to
TAs, the remit of the class teacher is the whole class. While the teacher may have the big picture, in
our experience class teachers don’t have the time to plan and evaluate in
detail the work for pupils with special needs – it’s the TAs who have the day
to day picture and the teacher needs the feedback from them.
When teaching assistants don’t have sufficient grasp
of their work, it is letting down our children with special needs and also the
teaching assistants themselves. Many TAs
are parents. They feel strongly the
importance of giving children the best possible start in life; they want to
help provide that for their pupils. How
can they undertake complex teaching tasks to support the learning of pupils
with special educational needs if they don’t have adequate training?
5. Information and computer technology
Have computers and programmes more readily available
in classrooms and ensure that SENCos, teachers, and TAs have working knowledge
of SEND-supportive programmes. By
SEND-supportive programmes I mean ‘shell’ type programmes which are designed to
be tailored to individual pupils’ learning and physical needs, not ready-made
activities you can just put pupils in front of.
There was a long saga in trying to get a computer for Tom
at his mainstream school. Finally my
brother stepped in and got us a laptop.
We bought the Clicker and Clicker Paint programmes for it. Then there was another long saga in making
sure the teacher and TAs were confident to use the computer. The local authority Physical Disabilities
Support Service was great, going into school numerous times to train and
support. I also went in a number of times.
6. A curriculum which allows for a
variety of learning styles
When Tom was in Year One his mainstream school had
poor results in literacy. So the
following year they instituted a school-wide phonics programme. This was an improvement – a systematic
approach to literacy which mapped the territory. But it was inflexible. And Tom’s Year Two teacher was
inflexible. At the start of the year she
told me that to learn to read ‘you go from letters to words to sentences’. This approach is process-intensive – Tom’s
cognitive weakness. Progress was
extremely slow. The SENCo prescribed an
extra fifteen minutes per week of phonics.
Not analysis of Tom’s difficulties and lateral thinking about solutions,
just more of the problem.
The children learned phonics through worksheets. In Year Two Tom spent at least two terms
doing handwritten worksheets overlearning letter-sound correspondence. He began to hate school.
Though the endless worksheets were heart-sinking, Tom
did end up knowing his letter sounds. At home we started teaching him sight words –
‘word of the week’ – and with this and his knowledge of letter sounds Tom began
to read. Excitedly he would ask ‘what is
the word of the week this week?’ and suggest words that he would like to learn
to read.
While phonics was taught in each classroom, outside in
the corridor, by coincidence right outside Tom’s classroom, was the makeshift
hovel of the Reading Recovery teacher.
Reading Recovery is a one-to-one multi-approach pupil-centred reading
programme, designed to accelerate learning for pupils experiencing literacy
difficulties in the mainstream classroom.
In Year One I asked the SENCo if Tom could join the
pupils on the Reading Recovery programme.
No, she said, he’s too old.
Couldn’t the TAs have some training in Reading Recovery? No, it’s a year-long intensive training
course. She did later try to get Tom on
the programme, but didn’t chase it up and nothing came of it. In the meantime I went to the local
university’s education library and after the equivalent of about three working
days with the key book had a summary of Reading Recovery – enough to cover its
basic principles. With the support of Tom’s
Year One class teacher I gave this to his TAs.
It was difficult for the class teacher to give input to Tom’s learning
because she was incredibly busy, having just been made Key Stage One
co-ordinator and PE Co-ordinator. Tom’s
TAs had little training, no time to plan, and apparently no SENCo support and
in those circumstances it was difficult for them to put the Reading Recovery
approach into action. In Year Two the
class teacher was slave to phonics alone (though towards the end of the year
she did begin to acknowledge the sight word approach).
7. Appropriate accommodation for pupils
with SEN
In Tom’s school, pupils with SEN often worked with
their TAs out in the corridor, with the attendant noise and distraction.
8. Challenging an unthinking culture of
discrimination
At a meeting of the school’s disability equality
working group I raised the point about the accommodation for pupils with SEND. One of the school’s governors said
‘Accommodation is always a problem – always has been and always will be’. I said ‘Maybe you’re right – and if it’s a
problem, how about the top groups learn in the corridor and pupils with special
needs learn in quiet classrooms?’ She
looked stunned at this suggestion.
At one point I went in to observe for a morning in Tom’s
classroom. When the class split for a
task into lower and higher attainment groups, it was the class teacher who took
the higher attainment group, while the TA – without teacher training and paid
less – took the children who were more vulnerable and who had more complex and
challenging learning needs.
Tom’s class had an overnight school trip to an outdoor
activity centre – and the letter from the school said that they would like to
take all the children. Tom’s teacher did
not book accommodation for him, accommodation which included an overnight carer
and which met health and safety regulations for a pupil with reduced
mobility. Was this just forgetting, or an
assumption that Tom, being disabled, wouldn’t take up his curriculum
entitlement or share the aspirations of his peers?
Conclusion
In our experience, these are eight issues which need
to be addressed, eight tweaks which could be made in the current mainstream
system to improve inclusion for pupils with special educational needs and
disabilities. In Tom’s mainstream school they
were the key ways to translate into inclusion the wonderful, genuine, and
laudable love which Tom’s Headteacher had for the children in the school.
Some of these tweaks are about money: paying for SENCO, teacher, and TA time and
training. Some of them are about good
pedagogical practice: having the
concepts to support pupils with special needs and the curriculum to nurture a range
of learning styles and enable pupils to use their strengths to overcome their
difficulties. Some of them take
well-funded local authority support to provide continuing professional development
and specific training.
But the really key issue, the foundation of all
inclusion, the driver of all practical measures, is a school culture which recognises
the equal aspiration and entitlement of all pupils and is committed to solving
or working round any problems which may arise.