The dog jumped and the small girl in the wheelchair seemed to be responsible. The teachers kept watching. The dog jumped again and this time, the teachers were sure: Annabelle had meant to do it. She had pressed the small button clasped in her hand, and she had looked up to see if the toy dog backflipped. She had understood cause and effect.

For the staff at the special school, it was cause for celebration. Their provision is for pupils with extremely severe learning difficulties and disabilities; children who have had little expected of them. But the teachers there have high expectations for every child, and the lives of pupils like Annabelle are transformed as a result.

Annabelle’s story may seem like a solid case study to support the high-expectations narrative. This states that we cannot let our perceptions of a child limit their opportunity to achieve, so expecting the utmost of everyone ensures that we do not unwittingly put a ceiling on attainment.

But Annabelle benefited from a highly contextual and individualised approach - something that’s so often out of reach for mainstream teachers, who are forced into a more general aim of the highest point of academic achievement for every pupil.

This brings challenges. Cognitive psychology researchers talk about our need to struggle so as to get the most learning gains. However, as pioneers Elizabeth and Robert Bjork have stated, difficulties need to be desirable. What makes a difficulty undesirable? “If the learner does not have the background knowledge or skills to respond to [the difficulties] successfully, they become undesirable,” the academics state in a 2009 book chapter.

Teachers need training and time

In theory, this is where the scaffold that is central to the high-expectations movement comes in - those skills are “added” into the task according to the need of each child. Thus, the unattainable becomes attainable; the difficulty becomes desirable.

But how successfully are teachers able to do that scaffolding currently? Is there the time and the training - or the right discussion happening - to get it right? Is it coming at a cost of teacher burnout?

At Annabelle’s school they were able - owing to a low student-to-teacher ratio and detailed medical and social assessments - to know every child well enough that high expectations were incredibly fine-tuned to each pupil. Stretch was highly calculated to fall just into the desirable zone; celebrations of progress were pitched at the right levels at the right moments.

My worry is that such precision is impossible in the high-pressure, high-accountability, time-poor conditions of mainstream education. And a failure to acknowledge this could result in damaging unintended consequences.

One possibility is a misdiagnosis of SEND (special education needs and disability): a recent Ofsted report found that children struggling to access the curriculum were being labelled as SEND when the problem was actually that they needed a different approach to teaching. But more generally, self- esteem and engagement could be negatively affected and to support those pupils, we would need to fully understand where those damaging feelings were coming from.

There is no criticism of teachers here: the logic of high expectations is sound. But it’s clear that at a policy level we need to take a moment to appreciate that humans are complex and that teachers need training and time to achieve a functional high-expectations model. We need to properly set out what scaffolding should be for a given individual. And we need to recognise that unfortunately, unlike the toy dog, we can’t push a button and guarantee a backflip.

@jon_severs

This article originally appeared in the 25 June 2021 issue under the headline “Great expectations must be bolstered by even greater support”