When school leaders ask themselves if their school is an inclusive school, how can they tell?
It’s not an easy thing to measure, but one option is to assess the reality of inclusion through a review process, as outlined by the Department for Education’s special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) review framework.
Ten years of experience have taught me that this is one of the best ways for a school to improve its SEND provision.
What does a SEND review involve?
A review helps to shine a light on the inclusive practice of the school with the help of a powerful quality assurance tool.
It covers eight areas: outcomes for pupils with SEND; leadership of SEND; quality of teaching and learning; working with pupils and parents/carers of pupils with SEND; assessment and identification; monitoring, tracking and evaluation; efficient use of resources; overall quality of SEND provision.
How helpful the review will be comes down to the way schools use expertise from within and beyond their school. Leaders should own the quality assurance process but rely on multiple stakeholders to inform and challenge.
The process is also contingent on good evidence collection. The wider the evidence, the more effective the analysis. Schools should look at parent voice, pupil voice, lesson observations and current systems and processes, trying to be as forensic as possible in their capture of information.
I’ve seen excellent collaborations between Sendcos and leadership teams to widen the lens of review, for example by visiting other schools or inviting peer review from another school.
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Calling in a consultant is another option. A quick review done by an external expert can feel agile and efficient, and relieves the burden of self-evaluation from busy staff. Seeing your school’s progress through an external lens is beneficial for everyone.
However, allowing someone else to “hold the pen” means the process can sometimes feel like it’s being “done to” the school rather than being driven by it, with everyone expected to play their part.
Even with good collaboration, where school leadership works closely with the expert, if the team defers to the expert’s knowledge and simply waits for a set of “even better if” recommendations, then the review process will be less effective.
By handing over responsibility to the expert, the resulting report risks being seen as an easy “fix”, rather than a catalyst for real improvement.
For there to be genuine progress towards making a school more inclusive, the process of review must be valued as part of school improvement - feeding into an ongoing cycle of development that continually informs school improvement planning.
Leading on SEND
When leaders make the call on what changes are needed, it’s far more motivating for them as it positions them as the driver for what can happen next.
Being central to a review creates buy-in among those involved; it helps leaders to see themselves as the changemakers, rather than as dependent on an external process.
That’s not to say external expertise isn’t valuable. No school should mark its own homework.
Instead, schools should deploy experts to help scaffold the process, challenge leadership, add a wider national perspective or recommend training to build capacity.
External experts can help school and trust leadership teams recognise the value of regular, iterative review cycles that they themselves drive and use to inform action planning. Regular reviews should be built into school-wide systems and processes.
When asking how effective we are, the question we really need to ask is: how effective can we become? That’s because inclusion isn’t a one-time fix - it’s a process of continuous improvement.
Margaret Mulholland is the special educational needs and inclusion specialist at the Association of School and College Leaders
