At the moment it feels like everyone is advocating for adaptive teaching, rather than differentiation, to support children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) in the classroom.
But what might this look like in the early years?
As Margaret Mullholland described in her recent Tes column, differentiation “tends to focus on working with individuals or small groups of learners”, whereas with adaptive teaching “the focus is on the whole class or groups of learners in the same classroom achieving the same learning goal”.
Adaptive teaching, then, asks us to ensure that all children can access the curriculum we have planned. To do this, we can prepare ahead by anticipating the barriers some children will face. For example, we can explain tricky vocabulary in a story before reading it aloud, or use careful questioning to check children’s understanding, adapting those questions in the moment.
Adaptive teaching in EYFS
Or we might offer extra support to some children to ensure that they securely understand key knowledge, like the composition of numbers up to 5. We would only move on to teaching bigger numbers when every child understands that 5 is made of “five 1s” or of “1 and 4”, or of “2 and 3” and so on.
This contrasts with the type of differentiation that involves planning several mini maths activities at different levels of cognitive challenge to take place simultaneously, or offering one-to-one support to a child with SEND all day. In this second scenario, a learning support assistant might spend much of the day following the child around the provision to keep them safe and occupied, as we know that, if the child directs their own learning most of the time, they are at risk of missing out on much of the intended curriculum.
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So we know what adaptive teaching looks like. But does it make sense in early years? It’s a complex question.
It is useful to begin by accepting that old-style “differentiation” is still important. As Nasen (the National Association for Special Educational Needs) reminds us, there are children with SEND who need differentiated resources and teaching approaches.
However, differentiation can all too easily lead to a downward spiral for children with SEND.
The influential Researching Effective Pedagogy in the Early Years report says that the children who were described by practitioners as “struggling to learn” received “the most behaviour management interactions from adults”. In contrast, those children whose learning was described as “expected” received “more social talk and caring interactions from the adults in their settings”.
When they are offered less teacher time and a watered-down curriculum, children can fall further and further behind. Indeed, just 23 per cent of children with SEN support achieved a “good” level of development in 2022, as defined by the Early Years Foundation Stage, compared with 65 per cent of children overall.
The current crisis in the special needs system (which is underfunded and stretched) is driving much of this problem. But there are things we can do differently to provide better support for children with SEND, and adaptive teaching shows us how to do this.
Adaptive teaching implies that we should reset our expectations. We should emphasise secure early learning over superficial coverage, and develop positive relationships with every child. We should focus on the essentials with every child, every day - like language and communication, counting and operating confidently with numbers, and explicitly teaching children to regulate strong emotions.
This is an approach that won’t only benefit children with SEND but will help every child to get the most out of their time in education - and that is true in early years as much as in any other stage.
Julian Grenier is headteacher of Sheringham Nursery School and Children’s Centre. He co-leads the East London Research School
