Every so often, in my what I like to call “more reflective moments”, I wonder if the SEND Code of Practice was written with primary schools specifically in mind.

When I think about primary schools, I can see that it is relatively straightforward to comply with the CoP. There is one class, and there is one teacher. For the majority of the time, that teacher has those children under their watchful eye.

Subject specialists are rare and, PPA aside, the one teacher teaches the lot.

SEND Code of Practice

Under these circumstances, it’s easy to see where any one child’s strengths and weaknesses are. If they bombed in the spelling test, you can big them up in PE, or music or D&T or maths. It’s the personal, immediate knowledge of a child that gives the primary teacher, when they are in this position, an advantage.

Secondary schools are a completely different ball game. In some ways, from the primary way of looking at things, they are unrecognisable as schools. Many of the difficulties present in secondary schools simply don’t exist at primary. 

Whereas primary schools are relatively simple, secondaries are unimaginably complex. It is inconceivable, for instance, in primary world, that a single teacher could teach more than 150 students in a week. OK, so maybe Mrs Green, the PPA cover teacher who does all the music and coordinates the school plays, might have a similar(ish) experience, but given the smaller nature of primaries, it seems unlikely.

Different approach

Organising a school trip, getting visitors in, meeting with parents; even the language - “literacy lead” (or coordinator) - is understood and organised (or not) in a different way.

It’s easy to say, and it’s easy to write; it’s easy, even, to believe it with your whole heart. Yes, every teacher is a teacher of special educational needs. But not every teacher works in the same kind of school. Not every teacher has the same kind of issues to address, and it’s hard sometimes to see how, in our fragmented and segregated education system, it might be achieved.

Tinkering around the edges seems to be our preferred policy position but, personally, I’m tempted to recommend going back to the drawing board - and this time, by not transplanting practice inappropriately from one sector to another (it’s not like we’ve never done that, after all), to ensure we get it right.

Nancy Gedge is Tes SEND columnist, coordinator of the Ormerod Resource Base at the Marlborough School, Woodstock, and author of Inclusion for Primary Teachers