One of the things you learn very quickly when you first begin to teach is that some children do not believe in themselves. All it takes to bring on the little frowny face is the introduction of the latest and newest in exciting learning. Before you know where you are, you face a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It happened to me last summer. We had been having a lovely time reading fairy tales. I had even gone so far as to borrow a real basket from my mum when we studied Little Red Riding Hood. We had enjoyed a glorious romp through The Three Little Pigs, Three Billy Goats Gruff and Goldilocks and the Three Bears (there’s a lot of threes, a lot of cottages, a lot of forests and wolves are generally baddies). It was time to move on.
The topic was ancient Greeks and, as I like a bit of joined-up thinking, I decided that we needed to study some ancient Greek adventures. The original Greek was a bit beyond my Year 4 group of SEND learners, but I found some texts they could access and we were good to go.
They were not impressed.
They were expecting Hansel and Gretel, they said. They were expecting more of the gingerbread tasting and the magic-bean growing, more of the familiar stories they hadn’t been able to read in Year 1. I was a naughty teacher, they said. I smiled to myself and pressed on, regardless.
It took me a little while, but it turns out that monsters and magic are hard to resist. Maps of the classical world and finding out what it is like there today is kind of interesting, and it turns out that Princesses Ariadne and Medea, while both being clever and resourceful, are very different characters indeed.
It turns out that, when you get beyond the fairy tales, the characters in the stories aren’t as straightforward as you first thought. When the pupils studied Theseus and the Minotaur with their class, they were immensely pleased to be the experts in the room.
But sometimes, and it pains me to write this, it isn’t the children who have the low expectations - it’s the adults. You hear it all the time. One day someone will say (after they’ve had a bad day, probably), “Well, what can you expect from those children?” Everyone will nod into their coffee cups and agree.
They’ve got special educational needs, after all.
Another self-fulfilling prophecy takes centre stage in the time it takes to blow steam away.
It takes a lot to break the cycle of disbelief in a child - but even more so in an adult. I wonder sometimes what would happen if we told the teachers a little white lie. Just to help them along. I wonder what would happen if I told them all that they were teaching top set. Would it make a difference?
I bet it would.
Nancy Gedge is a consultant teacher for the Driver Youth Trust, which works with schools and teachers on SEND. She is the TES SEND specialist and author of Inclusion for Primary School Teachers and tweets @nancygedge
