Here are five simple principles we are using to help guide our thinking in the way we support our school leaders and SENDCOs around inclusion.

Principle 1/ I don’t have to be an expert to play my part

Working in SEND can be a lonely place. There is lots of technical and legal detail, and some pretty strident views about what are the ‘right’ and the ‘wrong’ approaches to take. This can easily become a barrier to getting involved because of the fear that we might get it wrong, or that we don’t know enough. But being part of a healthy inclusion team – one with a breadth of skills, experience and knowledge, reminds me that when I’m unsure, I can always ask what to do next. 

In this area more than any other area of school leadership, as I wrote about here, it’s a case of don’t try to be right, try to get it right. And because there are no easy answers (Who should get the support? How should we deploy staff?) we have to solve the problems and create solutions together.

After all it’s us who hold the relationship with children and parents, not those writing books. I’m the one reading with the child, or designing provision, or planning the staff meeting, or writing the section F. The system may be pretty broken, but it’s down to me to do the best I can for this child in front of me. Taking inclusion seriously means developing a working knowledge about what good practice is, listening deeply to parents and working faithfully to get closer to the ideal offer for the child each day.

I need to recognise that while I’m not an expert, I can still play a big part in changing the status quo.

Principle 2/ Are those getting the help, the ones who really need it?

Equality means treating everyone the same, regardless of need. Equity, on the other hand, will mean treating some people differently – by giving additional support – so that everyone has an equal chance of success. This treating people differently is a key element in what we mean by ‘reasonable adjustment.’ Reasonable adjustments can often be misunderstood by other pupils and parents or even staff as ‘special treatment.’ This conflict is itself a learning opportunity.

But the reality we often see in school is that some children have lots of help and support from parents while others have next to nothing. It’s worth seeing what this looks like in our school. What at first sight may look like a fair balance of need and support, may well be skewed. Perhaps the parents of those that have access to more help are able to ask more articulately, or have the sharpest elbows, are more affluent, or have better access to additional resources.

Whereas the parents of some children with little or no additional support, may be less loud, or may have difficulty accessing support, or may have language barriers, or even mental health issues. If we understand and recognise these differences, then we can start to ask better questions which can make a difference and promote stronger equity.

One reflection I keep hearing from SENDCOs is that we are, right now, missing out on being able to help a specific group of children who we used to support well. Since schools (especially primary schools) are having to deal with a whole new level of ‘high’, they need to direct most of their resources and time to the small number of children who would, a decade ago, met the criteria for a place in special school. This means less time and fewer resources for those children whose needs are still significant but who no longer reach the any sort of threshold for help. Children who, with alternate mornings of reading support or 1:2 or 1:3 maths help were able to catch up fast, but who are now missing out. This isn’t an equitable situation.

Are the pupils getting the most additional help in our school the ones who actually need it the most?

Principle 3/ Get the culture right

Culture around SEND and Inclusion means lots of things: it means the shared expectations we have about high needs children (How well can they learn? What exam results could we expect? How well can they behave?). It means planning provision well against these expectations. And of course it means the way we talk about our SEND children and their parents, and what conversations we encourage in the staff room.

As a headteacher I remember spending the first five minutes in every staff briefing for a whole year showing photos of three different children with special needs, while my SENDCO and I would talk about their strengths and barriers and what we liked about each child. We’d ask particular staff where we knew things were going well for that child to share ideas of what was working well. I knew that some of the staff found some of these children hard to like, and I wanted to flip this culture.

The individual culture in each school significantly impacts the way that SENDCOs & teaching assistants approach their work and whether pupils feel cherished and parents heard or not. The best and most inclusive schools haven’t always got the best resources, the most money or the most TAs. But they probably do have teams who do their best to reflect the school’s values in how they speak and in what they do.

These visible behaviours (both good and bad) that we see and hear are the tip of the iceberg, and they are a reflection of the whole school culture, which might be represented by the much deeper section of ice below. It takes time to get this right.

What can help the culture of key meetings we have in school (these could be planning meetings, annual reviews, or reintegration meetings)? Here are three prompts:

– Be future-focused, instead of dredging up the past. It’s easy to spend more time proving what provision has been offered up to now, instead of looking forwards.
– Get the classroom right. This is where the child spends up to five hours of their day, which is a long time to self-regulate, so how are we helping them to rehearse habits and plan to help them be more successful in managing themselves?
– Try to see through classroom and playground time through the eyes of the child. How are you capturing their real, lived experience as part of the plan?

Principle 4/ You have to see it, to try it.

Sometimes you simply need to see good inclusive practice in action to know what could work better in your own classroom or setting. In a civilised society, the needs of the most vulnerable come first, so this should be at the centre of what we do in schools. Because many pupils are stuck in mainstream and require specialist provision, setting this up that is precisely what many ‘mainstream’ school leaders have done.

The building of SEND specialist units in mainstream should provide a better experience for children and families. We are in the process of writing a self-evaluation toolkit for our specialist provisions, to support leaders deliver well in what has pretty much been a guidance vacuum for the last few years. One by-product of this improved specialist knowledge is that it should help mainstream teachers enhance their practice with all children, while also providing an opportunity for mainstream teachers, teaching assistants and SENDCOs from other schools to come and look. But let’s not lose sight of the fact that by setting up SEND specialist units, Heads and SENDCOs have taken on huge additional responsibility, which was previously not theirs.

We still have work to do to professionalise our teaching assistant workforce. This might involve a whole variety of things: discrete training around specific needs; more accessible routes into teaching; including teaching assistants in all staff meetings and INSET days; looking at your model of appraisal so that it works for support staff too. The NPQ SEN is a great opportunity for emerging SENDCOs, fearful perhaps of the scale and accountability of the job, to sit with more experienced colleagues who can help demystify some of the complexity (applicants do not need QTS so this is more accessible for experienced TA’s too).

Principle 5/ Believe in the unlimited potential of every child

It’s energising to see inclusion meetings begin by professionals asking, “What can they do?” instead of, “What is it they can’t manage?” in an attempt to subvert the deficit mindset. To ask: “What are they brilliant at? What are they proud of?” To find the superpower in each child.

Measuring the progress of children with high needs requires wisdom and thought. How do we acknowledge pupils’ wider gifts and abilities as well as their academic differences? While Einstein probably didn’t say: ‘if you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid,’ the words are a reminder to question the tools we are using to assess and measure children, given their starting points, and whether they really work?

Some of the most memorable moments in the job come when a child, against all the odds, makes a huge leap forward. I remember sitting with the headteacher during a slow phase of an inspection in one of our schools recently, when all of a sudden the assistant head rushed in shouting, ‘Guess what, she spoke!’ Hard on her heels came the SENCO and a range of teaching and support staff, all overjoyed because a young girl who had been mute for a very long time, had that afternoon begun to talk.

Months and months of encouragement, teaching support, specific literacy help and confidence building for a girl locked in silence had not defeated the staff team. They had remained hopeful. My abiding memory of those two days was not the inspection process, successful though it was, but that euphoric moment. It told me so much about what mattered for the staff in that school, and why we do the job.