There is much discussion at present about the need for a more inclusive education system and embedding inclusion into teacher training.
If you believe, as I do, that inclusion is a process rather than an event, then we need to look very closely at the changes in the new Initial Teacher Training and Early Career Framework
(ITTECF).
From September 2024, a new section entitled “Supporting pupils with special educational needs and disabilities” (SEND) positions a teacher’s capacity to identify and support individuals with additional needs as central to teacher development.
And there are new additions within the framework, too, intended to give SEND greater priority, following on from the commitment made by the Department for Education in the 2023 SEND and AP improvement plan.
SEND: more than adaptive teaching
There isn’t room here to detail all the changes (suffice to say they are subtle) but if used well, this framework could herald significant change to teaching for all.
In Standard 1, for example, the need to “challenge and stretch pupils from their starting points” is referenced. And those four magic words “from their starting points” are key. This is a fundamental adjustment, requiring equitable attention for each individual learner rather than expecting a one-size-fits-all methodology to be effective.
I’ve long been a critic of how we (providers and practitioners) tend to focus our observations about teaching learners with additional needs purely against Standard 5, which focuses on adaptive teaching.
This has perpetuated the fallacy that children with identified SEND require a different adaptive offer as a discrete group and may not be considered relevant to assessment against the other standards.
Rarely is the question asked about what high expectations look like for a learner who is navigating sensory needs or who has a medical condition that affects attendance. What would effective teaching for these children look like in relation to Standard 4: Planning or Standard 6: Assessment?
It beggars belief that we haven’t had a framework of standards for teacher development that is clear in its expectation to develop in each of these areas. I welcome the shift in the revised framework that explicitly links recognising the barriers and not lowering expectations.
This shift is also exemplified in the revised Standard 2, which states: “Pupils have different working memory capacities; some pupils with SEND may have more limited working memory capacity than their peers without SEND”.
As a parent of a young person with a working memory in the first percentile, I see every day the cruelty of hidden disability: not being able to hold on to the information you have been given repeatedly, being too embarrassed and stressed to ask again for someone’s name or for a crucial instruction to be repeated.
Small adjustments to teaching - repetition, chunking, word banks, using recall cards or mnemonics - can make a huge difference to the progress, self-worth and life chances of these children, and all children.
For too long we have looked at these teaching practices through an equality lens rather than equity. Chunking information to accommodate ”children with SEND” as a homogenous group fails to recognise the reality that the breakdown of information needs to go further for some of the children in the room.
The revised framework helps to put a foot in the door for inclusive teaching. Our job as leaders is to now prise it open.
Margaret Mulholland is the special educational needs and inclusion specialist at the Association of School and College Leaders
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