If we are to ensure vulnerable learners thrive in our classrooms, we need school-based CPD to change.
The new Early Career Framework (ECF) and National Professional Qualifications (NPQs) provide a great opportunity for a national infrastructure of teacher professional learning. Indeed, the ECF framework is “designed around how to support all pupils to succeed and seeks to widen access for all”.
In principle, then, these programmes should help those with special educational needs or disabilities and disadvantaged pupils indirectly, by ensuring that those marginalised learners receive the education they’re entitled to. In practice, though, we are seeing the emergence of a “one size fits all” methodology, which achieves the opposite.
Neither framework (except for the Early Years NPQ) fully addresses the fact that there are many contextual and intersectional realities affecting a child’s capacity to learn. We can’t achieve inclusion without understanding the complexity of identifying a child’s needs, or acknowledging the impact that shifts in home circumstances can have.
For inclusion to be fully realised, the lived experiences of those who struggle to learn should be at the centre of all teacher education programmes.
There is no such thing as an “average” child. Research shows us that, in fact, variability is the norm, not the exception, and we should build our teaching practice around this reality. This idea is crystallised in the 2021 Learning Policy Institute Report (Darling-Hammond et al).
The authors are clear that we need to change how we train and develop teachers to be more inclusive. This, they say, can be done by addressing the “what” and the “how” of teacher development. Like the ECF and NPQs, their approach supports the importance of knowledge acquisition, but then goes further, explicitly linking that knowledge to the professional dispositions and skills that support effective and inclusive teaching.
Greater focus is needed on those dispositions: professional habits such as empathy; a sense of efficacy; teacher agency; ambition for equitable; accessible learning in the classroom, and a belief that all children can succeed, alongside core skills that help to make sense of new knowledge about pupils. We need teachers who can recognise why and how to make reasonable adjustments, without lowering expectations of their students.
The current ECF also doesn’t provide sufficient opportunity for collaborative learning and inquiry. Effective teacher preparation and development programmes should use systematic observation and case studies of children, particularly children with SEND, to help shape a teachers’ learning.
These case studies must embrace the complexities of learning and allow teachers to collaborate on how to help all pupils move forwards. Any teacher may be met with a child who has sensory needs, poor working memory and high levels of anxiety: this is where training should be sharply focused. We need to build teacher competence and confidence to enable the progress of those who find learning tricky.
We have to recognise that improving inclusion is a long-term project. Throughout their career, teachers should be continuing to deliberately develop skills of observation, reflection, inquiry and, most importantly, adaptive expertise.
In all teacher development, much greater emphasis must be placed on practising the adaptive teaching skills of Teachers’ Standard 5 if we are to achieve the “high expectations” set out by Standard 1. We simply can’t have one without the other.
Margaret Mulholland is the special educational needs and inclusion specialist at the Association of School and College Leaders
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