Senior leaders, teachers and support staff teaching assistants are at the forefront of supporting many of the most vulnerable pupils in schools.
However, unlike most of the professions concerned with the education and wider wellbeing of children and young people such as, social work, educational psychology, speech therapy and counselling, there is no formal tradition of professional supervision for educators in schools.
What is supervision?
Supervision is different from some of the more common professional development activities such as coaching and mentoring.
There is, for example, more of an emphasis on the ‘every day’ pressures of teaching as opposed to coaching for a specific skill or providing a mentor to support significant career transitions.
Supervision offers a structured process that supports the development of knowledge, competence and confidence of professionals.
Evidence from systematic reviews and more recent empirical studies of the benefits of supervision in other professions include greater job satisfaction, professional development and the ability to cope with job‐related stress.
Research studies on the process and benefits of supervision for educators are just beginning to emerge. Evidence from three small scale studies of supervision in schools for SENCOs and other professionals supporting vulnerable children reported very positive findings from participants and ‘tested’ different models/approaches to supervision.
Some of the benefits across the three studies included:
What’s needed
Currently, some educators such as Designated Safeguarding Leads and SENCOs, might receive supervision from the local Educational Psychology service.
But, if supervision is to become embedded and sustainable financially in education, we will need to train educators to become supervisors in their settings.
There may always be a need for some external supervision, for example, lead supervisors in schools to receive supervision from a Senior Educational Psychologist. However, the national shortage of Educational Psychologists and the cost of external supervision present major barriers to supervision becoming part of the ‘every day’ in school.
In other professionals working with children and young it is the norm for supervision to be provided by colleagues, who have received appropriate training, from their own profession.
In schools, we have very few educators receiving supervision, even less trained in providing supervision and little guidance as to how we fill these gaps.
How we get there
To address both these gaps, the Centre for Inclusive Education (CIE) at UCL Institute of Education, over 2018 and 2019, wrote and delivered a two-term Supervision Skills for SENCOs course.
The purpose of the course was for SENCOs to improve their understanding of the process of supervision and to develop their skills in delivering supervision in their settings to colleagues, through three training days and additional participation in their own group and individual supervision provided by the course leaders.
By training one colleague, senior leaders in the schools involved in the pilot are now able to provide ‘in-house’ supervision to more educators in their settings.
After review and learning from the pilot course, CIE has published guidance and resources for school leaders and training providers to establish effective and safe supervision practices in their settings.
It is the first guidance of its kind in England and therefore, the aim is to inform practice the practice of training educators in the knowledge and skills to offer supervision in schools.
By introducing supervision into the teaching profession on a more systemic and sustainable basis, it has the potential to contribute towards addressing two of the significant challenges facing the profession currently, namely, teacher wellbeing and retention.
Overall it is hoped that the guidance will contribute to nudging supervision forward and the authors look forward to engaging more widely with colleagues in schools to improve and expand supervision skills training, including supervision by and for senior leaders in schools.
Dr Catherine Carroll is an Associate Senior Researcher at UCL Centre for Inclusive Education. Catherine has worked as a secondary school teacher in mainstream and specialist settings.
Rosanne Esposito is a Lecturer in Special Educational Needs and Disability at UCL Centre for Inclusive Education and is the Programme Leader for the National Award in SEN Coordination. Rosanne has worked as a primary school class teacher, SENCo, Deputy Head and has managed the Specialist Teaching Services in an outer London Local Authority.
