For a long time in education, there has been a widespread belief that teaching a child with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) is somehow different to teaching most pupils.

This has had consequences. Teachers worry that if they haven’t had specific training in how to support autistic pupils or children with dyspraxia, they can’t teach a child with these diagnoses. In effect, they are becoming deskilled. 

This must be addressed, and school leaders have a fundamental role to play here. 

The first step is for them to ask themselves one simple question: “Who leads SEND at our school?” If the answer is “ask the Sendco”, consider what message this gives out. It suggests that knowledge of children with special educational needs is the exclusive domain of a SEND expert.

This has a direct impact on the beliefs and behaviours of the rest of the school. It explicitly shifts responsibility from leadership and classroom teaching, and implicitly places accountability on the teaching assistants and Sendco.

Read more:

• Why we need to talk about structural exclusion

• What international evidence can teach us about inclusion

• Why teacher training needs to embrace the complexities of SEND

In 2021, Ofsted reported on mainstream schools and their support for children with SEND, and found, among many structural challenges, that teachers simply didn’t know their students with SEND well enough. The Sendco and teaching assistants had become an inadvertent barrier, keeping their experience separate.

Rather than relying on delegation, we need shared responsibility. In other words, teachers should know the child, understand how they learn, recognise their strengths and work collaboratively with the Sendco, TA or specialist teacher, who can share their expertise.

SEND support: taking a whole-school approach

Many schools argue they are already doing this. But when we look at the bigger picture, we begin to encounter what researcher Brahm Norwich has called the “dilemma of difference”: the need to ensure additional and tailored support can lead to rejection or denial of relevant opportunities.

So, how does a school adopt a process of change? 

It all comes back to leadership. Leaders must design school systems and processes that enable the effective teaching of children with SEND, and help teachers to see this capability as a bonus, not a burden. 

There are plenty of review tools that can help here, such as the Whole School Send Review guide. 

Leaders can also look to 2011 research from the University of Manchester to get an idea of where they are in their journey. In this study, researchers observed patterns of leadership that promoted a whole-school approach to the task of supporting SEND, rather than a few specialists targeting a small and discrete group of students as a bolt-on to the rest of the school’s work.

The framework describes leadership for SEND as having five dimensions: values, teaching and learning, resources, distributed specialist leadership and integrated services. It provides comparisons within each of these dimensions to show what the whole-school approach looks like compared with “bolted-on” practice.

This framework remains relevant today, and provides a list of strategies to help leaders move further towards the whole-school model.

Nobody is pretending that this work is easy. With ever-increasing pressures on school finances and the continuing rise in demand for education, health and care plans, schools will need good systems and processes to cope. 

But, within this challenging climate, it’s vital to enable SEND competence, confidence and capacity, now more than ever.

Margaret Mulholland is the special educational needs and inclusion specialist at the Association of School and College Leaders

She will be speaking about SEND leadership at the Tes SEND Show 2022, held on 7-8 October. You can find out more and register your interest here.