I read with interest a piece on Tes last week that outlined two core policy developments that have contributed to the huge issues in the special educational needs and disabilities system in England - one of which has been the move to a far more academic-heavy curriculum.
It’s an issue I certainly recognise - and one for which I think we are only just starting to understand the true extent of the damage that has been caused.
The relationship between the curriculum and attendance in school is critical, I would argue, but, over the past 14 years, this has changed hugely. It is one key reason why we’re seeing attendance issues across the country.
Curriculum changes and SEND
Back in 2010, when I was a headteacher, I had far more options available that made schools a much broader, more holistic environment. It was a curriculum balanced on both academic and vocational offerings.
Students in key stage 4 had access to a range of opportunities, such as land-based studies on the school farm, hair and beauty in our salon, hospitality and catering in partnership with a local hotel, motor maintenance and engineering, and many more.
These were all offered at Level 1 and Level 2 by reputable providers such as City & Guilds, Pearson Btec or ASDAN. This was not instead of maths, English, the sciences, history or modern foreign languages but complementary. For many students, it helped them to see the link between academic and vocational and was a bridge towards further education, apprenticeships or work.
Aside from the curriculum experiences, I also found it easy to recruit into the workforce. At that time we had great diversity in the teaching community.
Staff brought the lived experience of industry, sharing those narratives with young people who wanted to know about different jobs in different parts of the country.
We employed instructors, builders, lecturers and, yes, of course, teachers. Our children benefited from a range of contributions, and it was integral to our journey from special measures to “good”.
This all gave students a broader set of adults to interact with and subjects to enjoy, making schools a more engaging place. The loss of so much of this, though, made it harder for many students to engage in school.
But until recently I hadn’t made the leap to how this has also led to a rise in SEND across the system.
Now, of course, there are children with disabilities who require adaptations to the curriculum to access learning. But for many it feels as if the problem is not the child but the system. What if children are being labelled SEND because they do not fit the narrow academic curriculum of the English Baccalaureate era?
Removing opportunities
In psychology this is called the “fundamental attribution error”. This is when we over-emphasise the individual traits and underemphasise the situational factors or context.
The SEND crisis is real. Please do not misunderstand my point here. But the SEND crisis may be the greatest example of the fundamental attribution error our country has ever seen.
We have focused children on subjects that not all can access equally, and we have removed the opportunities in the curriculum for children to achieve and celebrate success.
We fail around a third of all children who sit exams and expect them to take resits after resits in the belief that this will be helpful.
Meanwhile, the curriculum in many schools has developed so the broad set of experiences formerly on offer is now a packed a KS3 carousel of tokenistic experiences, with little opportunity for onward learning, even if a child shows interest or aptitude.
Blaming the child
We now see the impact of this system on the behaviour of children and families - and the system has chosen not to look inward but to create new labels to explain this behaviour without taking any responsibility.
Children don’t come to school? They have emotional-based school avoidance (EBSA), which attributes the problem to the child’s emotional resilience.
Children exhibit frustration and non-compliance? This is labelled a social, emotional and mental health (SEMH) issue.
Children can’t read quickly enough, can’t listen or sit long enough... the list goes on. We attribute the cause to the child’s behaviour or traumatic past.
What is clear is that we repeatedly look at inherent factors within the child and attribute the issues to them. Well, this needs to stop.
The number of children falling into SEND labels is overwhelming, but what if it is not the child but the system? What if we caused this?
Tom Campbell is CEO of the E-ACT multi-academy trust
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