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Where Does SEND Begin? – Are We Limiting Children’s Development By Underestimating Their Abilities?

What if it's poor teaching, not inbuilt learning problems, that causes some children to fall behind?

Nancy Gedge
by Nancy Gedge
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One of the advantages of getting an at-birth or pre-birth diagnosis of a learning disability – my son has Down’s syndrome – is that there is no period of time where a person is left wondering what is wrong. A condition like Down’s syndrome, easily identifiable with a blood test and well known, alerts the system straight away. Medical protocols slowly give way to educational ones; in a funny kind of way, you know where you are. You wouldn’t think it, but the presence of a special educational need or disability (SEND) is often up for debate. It’s partly down to definition. If you look in the code of practice, a document which shouldn’t be purely the preserve of the SENCO, a child with SEND is defined as someone for whom special educational provision is made.

It’s confusing. When you think about it, learning in school is such a complex process that there is hardly a child who doesn’t have special provision of one sort or another.

The presence of a label or diagnosis makes the life of the classroom teacher easier in some ways – if you can get past the power of the label, that is. Don’t get me started on the number of people who have limited my son because of their outdated or ill-informed ideas of what a boy with Down’s syndrome might – or might not – be able to do.

Yes, he can read, yes, he can ride a bike. He’s pretty good at scoring goals too. If you know there is a specific problem, you can go and find out about it and off you go. A well-researched intervention and Bob’s your uncle. Sort of.

The thing with a disability like Down’s syndrome, though, is that it is visible. You don’t need a doctor’s letter to see it in someone’s face. But for the majority of SEND children in the common or garden primary school, it isn’t like that.

If you didn’t have letters and notes from a variety of professionals, education and health, you would never know just by looking that there was a problem.

The simple fact is that disabled people, learning or otherwise, don’t always come in wheelchairs or with handy flashing signs above their heads shouting ‘Look! This person has additional needs! You will need to do something about that!’. This can cause teachers up and down the land to scratch their heads and ask themselves the questions, ‘Where does SEND begin?’

It’s easy to assume that the child who isn’t keeping up with the rest of the class must be SEND and that their learning problems are inside them, inbuilt. It’s far easier to declare that they are the problem, not us.

But it’s there in the code of practice, bold as brass and for all to see: the needs of the vast majority of young people in school will be met by high-quality teaching.

When we are thinking about the children who appear to be falling behind, we need to assess our own practice first, before we start making plans to intervene. Did we sit them so that they could see the board? Did we put them next to someone they don’t like – or like a little bit too much, and consequently they’re chattering their days away? If they can’t spell, did we give them a dictionary, and teach them how to use it? Are our expectations of their work high enough? Did we pitch their work at just the right level of challenge – or is it too hard or easy? Are we doing enough of the things that work, or too much of the things that don’t? Did we check the research before we bought the expensive intervention?

Of course, once we start asking ourselves these questions and are assured that our teaching is the best it could possibly be and every child in our class is making more than acceptable progress, it is terribly easy to swing the other way. SEND doesn’t exist, we tell each other over a cup of tea in the staffroom, or into the void that is social media. It is the result of bad teaching, it is learning gaps, and that’s the end of it. Only it isn’t. I look at my son and I know that even though it is slippery and difficult to grasp, SEND exists.

Nancy Gedge is a primary teacher in Gloucestershire. She blogs at notsoordinarydiary.wordpress.com.

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