Calling All Mainstreams - Start Listening To Your Local Special Schools
Without better sharing of knowledge and practice between mainstream and special schools, we’ll be paving the way for a crisis of demand in the coming years, cautions Simon Knight…
- by Simon Knight
Towards the end of the 2015/16 academic year, the DfE published a document that set out the projected pupil numbers for the years up to 2025.
Whilst there is a significant increase in primary (173,000 or c. 4%) and a dramatic one in secondary (567,000 or c.17%), the data provided for special school placements is equally surprising. The projected numbers show an increase of 14,000 pupils or c.14%.
If you consider a typical special school, with just over a hundred pupils and a 2:1 staffing ratio on the basis of one teacher with three teaching assistants per class of eight pupils, you are looking at classroom space equivalent to approximately 140 new schools and 7,000 staff, 1,750 of whom will need to be teachers. In eight years!
Meaningful partnership
So how are we going to address the impact of this projected increase in demand for special school places? How can we ensure that children with SEND are able to access excellence in greater volume than ever before?
Well, it can’t be done in isolation. We need to move away from the often binary choice of ‘mainstream’ and ‘special’ and start to explore opportunities for meaningful partnerships – because there is more to this issue than the need to boost investment in special schools.
Mainstream schools will, in all likelihood, need to educate increasing numbers of children with SEND with a greater degree of complexity. So what can we do to mitigate the impact of a potential capacity crisis in the specialist sector?
Expert input
When I first started working in special education we had an inclusive assessment nursery collocated on a mainstream site. Children would arrive without a Statement in order to have a period of time benefiting from our specialist expertise, while also receiving a highly detailed assessment of their individual developmental needs.
They were essentially accessing the pedagogical characteristics of a special school education as a proactive intervention, to establish whether they would need a special school placement in the long term. As such, many of the children who came to us would go on to successfully transfer to mainstream, having had two years of expert input.
Over time, however, the children became more likely to go straight into the mainstream system. In my experience, the school’s intake became increasingly characterised by those who had severe or profound and multiple learning disabilies, or who had arrived following the breakdown of a previous mainstream placement.
The experience of mainstream failing them, and of them ‘failing’, would usually have a significant effect. In many cases, the ‘gaps’ this resulted in would become insurmountable.
A systematic approach
Returning to a more systematic approach to preschool placement – in specialist inclusive assessment nurseries, for any child who need one – may go some way to ensuring that fewer pupils require long-term placements in special schools.
If we advocate a more proactive approach to special school provision referral at an earlier stage, rather than seeing special schools as an ‘education of last resort’, we may also be able to ensure that a greater number of pupils successfully transfer from special education into mainstream.
Given that there is already a capacity issue in special schools, with many being full and significant waiting lists in operation in some parts of the country, the notion that every teacher needs to be a teacher of SEND is going to take on even greater significance.
Grasping the nettle
Irrespective of where you sit on the inclusion continuum, for many families the option of choosing a special school education is one that’s likely to become less readily available. This means that those children will remain in mainstream education, with an entitlement to have their educational needs met.
We will therefore need to grasp the nettle that is the variability of SEND professional development. We must consider how to build a more cohesive and comprehensive post-qualification landscape for SEND; one that equips schools with the expertise necessary to ensure that increasing numbers of pupils with an increasing complexity of need can be taught effectively.
This would be in addition to the existing National Award for SEN Coordination, and focused more on the pedagogy and practice of educating children with SEND. The ongoing development of Nasen’s SEND Gateway (sendgateway. org.uk) and the emergence of the Whole School SEND Consortium (wholeschoolsend. com) will likely offer new opportunities for teachers seeking support in this area.
‘Houston, we have a problem’
My own experience of outreach has often been characterised by a ‘Houston, we have a problem’ approach to early intervention. A move away from seeing outreach as a responsive solution to a situation that has become critical that would potentially serve everyone better.
This may result in children who currently reach a point of no return having their needs met far more proactively, thus enabling them to successfully remain within the mainstream system.
It will, though, need to be an approach characterised by open and honest professional reflection, in which a recognition of where needs are not being met is considered a professional strength, rather than something to hide.
Communities supporting communities
The needs of schools and the children who attend them may be further served by linking specialists employed by Multi- Academy Trusts and school partnerships with local special schools. We could start to see special school staff allocated time for working within mainstream schools as part of a ‘SEND expertise timeshare’ model.
This approach could work to head off the kind of challenges that can lead to children moving out of mainstream, but it may also help to address the various SEND-related complexities that can be encountered within classrooms in a less reactive manner. At the same time, it would help encourage participating schools to invest in the SEND knowledge, skills and capabilities of their staff, so that ‘meeting the needs of all’ becomes an integral part of the schools’ offer.
If schools are to meet this challenge, then we will need a national response, supported by local implementation, that drives the specialist and mainstream sectors towards better structured collaboration. We need to move away from defining responsibility according to the children on your roll, and towards a system where communities of schools collectively support communities of children.
Mutual success
- One of the most important things I was involved with while working in special education was providing a form of mainstream education for every child, irrespective of complexity of need, for a morning every week.
- We had direct partnerships with eight mainstream schools across 11 classes, covering academies, faith schools, comprehensives and the independent sector. Each week, around 350 to 400 children would come together and work in partnership, in a reciprocal relationship that saw us visiting mainstream settings and pupils from mainstream coming to us.
- This had a profound impact on both sets of pupils and the staff working with them. Beyond the benefits for the children, it provided opportunities for informal dialogue between staff. We could question our mainstream colleagues about stretching our most able pupils, and they could ask us about the children that posed them the most complex challenges.
- It cost both parties nothing more than a willingness to promote inclusive opportunities and share our collective expertise – but the value of the collaboration was felt by many.
About the author
Simon Knight is the director of Whole School SEND; follow him at @SimonKnight100
