It’s easy to get lost amid the medical terminology, acronyms and interventions of special educational needs support and forget that we’re talking about children and their families.
A failed intervention is a failed child; an underfunded provision is an underfunded pupil; a delay to support is a family and a school left in limbo, battling alone without answers.
Everyone involved in education needs to keep this understanding front and centre in our minds, as only by doing that can we clearly see the injustice, cost and impact of failing to properly support those pupils who need it most.
As you will read in this month’s Tes Magazine Education Insights Report, in the UK and in international schools there are huge changes underway to improve interventions for those who need more help with their education.
SEND and the school system
What you will also see, though, is that the narrative around those changes frequently falls back into the language of technicalities, generalisms and politics. While we do need to phrase some of our discussions in this way, we also need the testimony of children, parents and teachers in the system to counterbalance it.
The same applies to the tools and products in the market that aim to assist schools and parents with all aspects of the special educational needs and disability (SEND) system. Whether it is tracking software for classrooms or a tool for parents helping children at home, there is a tendency to talk more about the logistical, time, efficiency and transparency benefits than what difference it would make to a seven-year-old struggling in school and a family lost in the labyrinth of government bureaucracy.
This should not be an afterthought. Teachers, families and young people should be included right from the start of any journey in the system. Only by doing so can we ensure that we avoid one-size-fits-all solutions.
Individual provision
Because we can’t put special educational needs and disabilities into neat boxes with siloed interventions and then cross our fingers and pretend everything is going to be OK. The difference between two children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), or two children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), or two children with speech, language and communication needs (SLCN), can be vast.
Indeed, an autistic child may need provision more similar to that for a classmate with ADHD than another autistic child in the class.
We need a system that embraces that complexity and does not, as has been the case in the past, shy away from it. That, of course, makes the job of governments, schools and organisations involved in SEND harder. But it was good to see David Thomas, advisor to the secretary of state, talk about the need for a system where an individual narrative can exist in an efficient standardised system (see video below). That should give us hope for real change.
If, as a sector, we can make this happen, it will mean we have a system that is fully integrated with those it serves, rather than one that seems to exist alongside it.
Tes Magazine Education Insights is a new offering from Tes magazine that features a monthly in-depth report on the education sector alongside a webinar featuring leading figures from schools, education research and the commercial sector. You can download the latest report and webinar, on the topic of SEND, for free here
