Despite more teachers saying that schools are increasingly diverse and inclusive, the 2023 Pearson School Report reveals that 62 per cent of primary teachers and 49 per cent of secondary teachers think the national curriculum is “designed to support pupils defined as ‘normal’ and not those on the margins”.
As parent and professional forum Special Needs Jungle put it in a response to that report: “Inclusive curriculum? Only if you’re ‘normal’.”
In recent years, an increasing focus on adaptive teaching has promised to widen access to the curriculum. However, the path towards this is currently cluttered with obstacles. Despite the best intentions, too many schools’ efforts are not translating into improved practice.
Barriers to adaptive teaching
So what is going wrong?
The forces encouraging school leaders to focus on adaptive teaching are powerful. We all know of the rising numbers of children being identified with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), and the consequent acute funding and curriculum pressures on schools across the country. Senior leaders increasingly recognise that strong collaboration between Sendcos and teaching and learning leads will help to maximise access to lessons and what they describe as an adaptive curriculum.
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And many schools are already working on what they can change. For example, Amelie Thompson, assistant director for Greenshaw Learning Trust, talks about “stretching the ordinarily available”. This means widening access to everyday teaching so that fewer children need targeted support.
That stretch is sensible and strategic for a school to aim for, but plenty of barriers still remain. Here are three key stumbling blocks that schools and trusts encounter, and how to move past them.
1. Mindset, labels, language and low expectations
What we think and say impacts what we do. Research from Nataša Pantić and Lani Florian tells us that fixed-ability mindsets influence our planning and instruction.
Opinions, feelings and beliefs shape our actions. As Michael Fullan recently highlighted in US publication Education Week, “successful change requires changing…your internal habits and culture and your relationship to your environments”.
One school leader told me that working hard on stamping out judgemental patterns has made a difference at her school.
“We thought we were an inclusive school, but we started unpicking the language we used regularly and were shocked by what we found,” she says. “We were using ‘he’s autistic’ as a euphemism for ‘we can’t expect as much from him’.”
The school realised that using informal reinforcing terms such as “LATS” (low attainers) and “HATS” (high attainers) was simply a poor habit they were determined to overcome.
One middle leader at the school summed up this revelation: “Language is literally ambushing our good intentions.”
2. Distributed leadership and distributed knowledge
The SEND Code of Practice 2015 says that every teacher should be responsible for SEND.
For this to become a reality, sole responsibility for SEND learners can’t sit entirely with the Sendco.
Where the Sendco has deeper knowledge than the teacher about what works for any given learner, there won’t be the incentive for teachers to take responsibility for learning - instead, they will naturally pass it back to the SEND team.
To avoid this, the Sendco should work closely with the teaching and learning lead or with middle leaders, with the aim of distributing knowledge of how to support learners on the SEND register.
3. Pedagogy and professional development
With our schools’ population increasingly cognitively and socially complex, more teachers are now using adaptive strategies: manipulatives, timers, visual supports and so on.
But professional development needs to take practice further than this by helping staff to develop the procedural knowledge that can support teacher adaptivity.
For example, it’s just as important to systematically hone teachers’ skills of inquiry, problem solving, trialling and testing that will help them to build knowledge of their pupils, innovate and make decisions, as it is for teachers to gain the technical understanding that is currently prized.
The professional development opportunities needed to achieve this are not always built into existing school CPD programmes - but they should be.
Margaret Mulholland is the special educational needs and inclusion specialist at the Association of School and College Leaders
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