What Would The Perfect SEND Support System Look Like?
People often talk about what’s wrong with the current system of SEND provision – so what would the perfect system actually look like? Sue Gerrard assembles her wishlist
- by Sue Gerrard
The scene – a workshop about educating children with autism. The lovely lady leading it had just given us a pep talk on how demoralising it could be to simply complain about the existing SEN support system.
“Let’s share some positive examples of good practice,” she exhorted, pen poised over the flipchart. You could have heard a pin drop. A few brave souls eventually came to her rescue, but her ‘good practice list’ ended up being a short one.
Flipping bad practice
What the workshop leader hadn’t seemed to realise is that ‘What doesn’t work’ is a much richer seam to mine for ideas than ‘What does work’ – simply because there are usually more ways of getting something wrong than there are of getting it right. What you can do, however, is flip examples of bad practice round and figure out what should have happened instead.
The SEN system has come in for a lot of criticism. Ever since the introduction of compulsory education in England – and irrespective of whether children with SEN were being quietly shuffled off into special schools or ushered into mainstream settings at any given time – there have been problems.
We know what those problems have been. Some children with SEN have been deemed ‘ineducable’ or become institutionalised. Some have disrupted the education of other children, or failed to achieve their full potential.
So what would a SEN system look like in an ideal world?
‘SEN or not SEN?’
Let’s start with the children, who will often have a lot in common with each other but can also be very different. At one end of the spectrum are those who are pictures of rude health – potential Olympic athletes with IQs of 150; at the other, those who have lifelimiting medical conditions, can do nothing for themselves and appear to have little awareness of what’s going on around them. The vast majority, of course, will be somewhere in between.
The focus of debate is often over whether or not a particular ‘in between’ child has a special educational need or not, but this debate shouldn’t be necessary. Each child is legally entitled to an education suitable for their age, ability, aptitude and any educational needs they have – and between them, that range of needs can be very wide indeed. The ‘SEN or not SEN?’ debate only happens because resources are difficult to access.
The 1978 Warnock Report (tinyurl.com/warnock-1978), which first defined what we now understand as ‘special educational needs’, estimated that up to 20% of children would at some point in their school career require special educational help. The current legal definition of ‘a child with SEN’ is that they will have a difficulty that calls for educational provision not generally available in local schools – typically some form of additional support to help manage or mitigate the impact of a neurological, physical or behavioural factor on their ability to learn.
If the right support is put in place, those learning difficulties won’t necessarily ‘go away’ – but as such provision becomes more widespread, the number of children with special educational ‘needs’ will go down. Only a small percentage of children attend special schools, however. 98% of children with SEN are in mainstream settings – which brings us to the teachers.
Teachers and training
Teachers in mainstream schools need to teach each and every child in their class. The Warnock Report called on all teachers to receive training in SEN, and the Education & Skills Select Committee was still calling for it in 2006 – yet successive governments appear to have struggled with making SEN training a statutory requirement for teachers.
Governments like ‘one-sizefits- all’ systems, because they appear on the surface to be easier and cheaper to run than systems that accommodate individual differences. But children don’t come in one size.
What governments have overlooked is that the best way we’ve found of accommodating individual differences is to give professionals the skills they need to do their jobs and then let them get on with it. Teachers can meet the needs of a standardised education system, or the needs of each child in their class; there aren’t enough hours in the day to do both. That said, it’s unreasonable to expect mainstream teachers to grasp the finer points of all developmental disorders, and they don’t have to. Teachers need to know about children’s educational needs.
Problems with sensory processing, attention, cognition, co-ordination and mobility crop up repeatedly across a range of conditions. Children might have different problems relating to these core functions, but once you’ve got your head around what those core functions are, it’s a lot easier to figure out what a child’s educational needs will be and what provision they require.
It’s necessary for all schools to have a workable wholeschool behaviour strategy and ensure that children can discriminate between speech sounds, and clear, age-appropriate teaching, but some children need more than that. In an ideal world, teachers would be trained to teach all the children they’re expected to teach.
Giving with one hand, taking away with the other
When my own son entered Y1, his school requested a multiagency assessment because their interventions just weren’t making any difference. The assessment took 18 months – a ridiculous waiting time for a school, never mind a 5 year-old.
In the end, fed up with having to wait, his school enlisted the services of a local speech and language consultancy to train their staff in basic SLT techniques. In an ideal world, we would see more schools able to access this type of specialist support as and when they needed it.
In 2006, The Education & Skills Select Committee pointed out that if local authorities are responsible for assessing the level of children’s SEN and for funding the additional educational provision they require, it’s a recipe for trouble. The Committee recommended back then that this link between assessment and funding be broken, but it hasn’t been.
In an ideal world, such assessments would be carried out by independent professionals, and LAs would simply fund the provision.
In an ideal world, there would not be a binary division of children between ‘those who have SEN’ and ‘those who don’t’. Instead, all children would be seen as being somewhere on a broad spectrum encompassing a wide range of educational needs. It may be that new types of specialist schools, or units within existing schools, would then start to appear. Initial teacher training would begin to incorporate much more in the way of SEN instruction, and in-service SEN training would be made more readily accessible.
Schools would receive prompt responses and support from specialist services. Children thought to need additional provision would be assessed by independent specialists, with LAs providing the funding. Central government might still get to decide on the overall structure of the broader education system – but otherwise, it would let trained education professionals simply get on with their jobs.
Every child would be able to receive an education that’s suitable for them, parents would be reassured and teachers could get on with actually teaching. Communities would benefit too, since fewer resources would be needed for patching up a system that doesn’t work – and ultimately, we would all see more people being happier and better educated.
About the author
Sue Gerrard is an independent researcher affiliated to the Knowledge Modelling Group at Keele University; she tweets as @suzyg001
