Advanced training materials for autism; dyslexia; speech, language and communication; emotional, social and behavioural difficulties; moderate learning difficulties

Julie Dockrell – Professor of Psychology and Special Needs:

When we think of what we’re doing with identifying SEN, it’s underpinned by two issues. One is your model about what determines that a child has a Special Educational Need, and the other is where you contextualise that kind of identification.

So let me talk about contextualising first. So we know in the recent analysis of national data that Anna Vignoles has completed, that if you’re in a particular type of school setting, not just a local authority, you are more likely to be identified as having a speech, language and communication need than if you are in another one. So there are contextual issues about that which reflects the overall issue about the question of over-identification, and that feeds back to the notion of what kind of model we ought to have, and if we take a model that assumes, and this is an assumption that all children are exposed to quality first teaching in the areas that impact and that supports learning in the classroom, so that would be literacy and would be oral language, then what you find from that is that children who come up as having difficulty, having received that good teaching, are a smaller number.

You can then do specialist, evidenced informed interventions in perhaps groups where the children don’t have to have a special need at that point, but they’re having difficulties. And once that has been done, and providing there is evidence that underpins that type of intervention, and there are studies that are very clear evidence, then the child that is no longer ,or is not progressing in that context, then becomes an issue of concern, and that takes on some of the issues about variability across schools and local authorities, and it also means that you’re thinking about teaching and learning across the curriculum in different areas, you might have very good teaching and learning for reading but not very good for maths for example. So I think it’s the wrong question - are we identifying too many children across SEN?

John Brown – SENJIT Co-ordinator:

I think it’s an interesting question ‘are we identifying too many children with SEN?’ because we did some work with the European agency for Special Educational Needs three years ago I think, and across most European countries, one percentage keeps coming out, around three per cent of their school population have Special Educational Needs which is very close to the 2.8 per cent we designate statements of Special Educational Needs to. But then when you look at the much higher figures , it is quite hard I think to see how almost a quarter of a population can have something special about them and we also work in some school, these are mainstream schools where they will say to us at SENJIT - well eighty per cent of our children have Special Educational Needs, and to me the question there is: shouldn't the whole school's curriculum and its resources be geared to supporting those children and in a way they're not special within the context of that school are they? They are the school's intake.

Julie:

But that's the issue about quality first teaching and also the fact that actually schools have different intakes. And if you're in one of the nice shire counties, then the intake is very different from downtown, inner London where you have high proportions of children who have a range of difficulties, so the three per cent holds only because we’ve constructed that three per cent, and it relates to the testing that we do.

The other issue is a major issue about teaching and learning and, it's quite interesting also depends on country so if we take something around reading, there are very few children in Italy that are identified as having reading difficulties in the early stages of reading because of the way the orthography, the written Italian is, it's very transparent. Where problems start coming up are when they're starting to write, so they have problems in spelling, particularly, and so there's a contextual effect that we might have more children with reading difficulties but that's nothing to do with English as the language.

You get exactly the same thing, you know people look to medicine as very clear diagnostic categories but it's not clear. And whether you can identify particular types of problems may depend on the hospital you go to, the consultant you see, in a whole range of areas and that's one of the big debates at the moment, is around the revision of the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Diseases” and around health issues but also around mental health and to child development disorders, is tremendous amount of debate about what you're doing and how you should do this categorising.

Karl Wall – Lecturer in Psychology and Habilitation studies:

And enormous variation in the underlying evidence that feeds into it. There are studies that have been done in this country that suggests that of a class of thirty secondary school pupils perhaps a quarter have some need for visual correction: spectacles or contact lenses. Now if you go into a typical class, you may see one or two but you may see many that haven’t.

Julie:

The other very important thing for education is how that maps out for the child in their learning and socialisation at different points in development, and it’s likely to change. But let me give you an example where we have fairly good objective measures of assessing hearing loss. Right. You can test it, the audiologist can do it and it’ll fluctuate but roughly if you’ve got a sensory neural loss you can do that. We know that some children with a sensory neural loss, which would put them in the moderate range ,have quite marked problems in classrooms with learning and with reading and other children in exactly the same range with exactly the same kind of support don’t. And we don’t exactly know why that that is. So one is the nature of the problem, and the other is how it manifests in the classroom, and the sensitivity of the classroom to adapt, and the teacher to adapt appropriately.

Isma Sy-yed:

My name’s Isma Sy-yed and I’m the Inclusion Co-ordinator at Christopher Hatton Primary school.

Money or the budgets are always something that is at the back of a Headteacher’s mind, and the SEN budget is something that should be spent wisely in terms of interventions, effective deployment of staff, because at the end of the day, when we run interventions , annually you have to put this all on the costing map or the provision map, and the provision map is sort of like evidence that is public information that parents or members of the public can actually access in terms of well ‘how did the school spend the SEN budget in the academic year? Was it to fix a leaky roof? Or was it to buy in new programmes,’ so as the SENCo you would not be doing your job or you would be doing a disservice to the parents if say for example you weren’t bringing in a variety of resources or you weren’t bringing in effective interventions because Ofsted are really hot on judging the impact of interventions, and you can do an intervention to death and if it’s not benefitting the children then it’s almost like flogging a dead horse. So it’s really important to be on top of what’s working and what’s not. And that is through assessment, it’s through monitoring, it’s through even observations with your staff. Monitor your support staff, monitor the class teachers, it’s your job as a SENCo to make sure everything runs like clockwork and at the end of the day if you don’t do it, no-one else will.

For example when I’ve met other SENCo’s on the training days, the first thing all the SENCo’s do is just sort of have a moan about all the frustrations and all the barriers that you’ve hit because as a SENCo, you’re quite isolated because your sort of working on your own but yet you’re involved with so many different professionals, the different teams of outreach that come in, and you’re co-ordinating everything, making sure meetings run like clockwork, parents attend, you’re liaising with numerous amounts of people, and it’s just pretty much yourself. But it is so rewarding when you see the children move on and make progress, it is just the best thing in the world it really is, and it just makes you think ‘yes’.

John Brown – SENJIT Co-ordinator:

I’d like to draw us into the area now of pupils voice.

I think one of the interesting things is when you start focussing on what pupils, children, young people, think themselves, the perception that you get is often very different. In some work we did in the Midlands we asked for teacher’s perceptions, this was in relation to visual impairment, teaching assistants perceptions, parents perceptions, and the children/young people’s perceptions, and what was striking about the children/young people’s perceptions was that: A - they were generally different to everyone else, that what they thought was difficult wasn’t actually what the others thought was difficult, and certainly wasn’t difficult in the social sense, it was the social sense that was very significant for them.

So although they were working with the practicalities of their visual need, it was the social element of it that was of concern, and they, just contrary to what we’re saying earlier about progression, they were very conscious of how this might play out in the future. We were working with 12 and 13 years olds’, and they were thinking well: ‘what that does this mean when I’m studying in the senior part of the secondary school?’, ‘what does this mean about going to college?’, ‘will there be support?’, ‘will people notice?’, so their emphasis was quite different.

I think the mosaic approach that was developed here at the Institute in part, where you look at a different experience from many different perspectives and use very different modalities; pictures, videos, reporting conversation, is a way of capturing that, particularly with younger children because there is an issue if one’s going to say pupil voice is important, then how is that pupil voice accessed? And a formal interview or discussion like this may not be the most appropriate context in which to.

Julie Dockrell – Professor of Psychology and Special Needs

It’s not just access it’s actually, listen to and acted upon, I mean for a long time in the annual reviews, children with statements of Special Educational Needs, have an opportunity to voice their views and their concerns and what they’d like changed, and I’ve sat in many of these and I think rarely are what the child, the young person has said, actually taken on board and worked with, because the adults in the group know better, or that’s the you know the underlying assumption.

Karl:

It certainly has to be facilitated, and that’s part of the preparation for that particular sort of activity and if it isn’t, that’s the likelihood of children’s voices coming out.

Julie:

No but even if it’s facilitated, even if they say and they’re very clear and articulate about what they want the adults will sit and say yes okay, and but nothing changes.

John:

It’s not up to them.

Karl:

They’ve got to be taken seriously.

John:

Or the systems can’t be flexible enough to support them. So for example I did some work up at one FE college, and one of the things that the young people in that college want was independent travel, but for various reasons some of them are still being bussed to college but the reasons were nothing to do with them and it was absolutely bizarre to see some people being bussed into college and when you ask them what they’re doing at college, they’re doing an independence course!

But the systems really need to be flexible and I suppose we’re trying to address that through things like personal budgets and so on, but I think it’s particularly hard for young people when they’re being given help to turn around, I remember one girl in a school saying to me ‘well actually I don’t want all this help’ and ‘I don’t want a teaching assistant with me the whole time’ but at her review, the teaching assistant was there, her parents were there, the school was there, they felt they were doing the best for her, it’s incredibly difficult as one young person to say I don’t want this help.

Julie:

I think so but it’s also worth looking at data on samples that have shown that young people when they look back on their school days have said actually the most important thing to me was the learning support assisting to help me get through that, and there are studies that have actually 16, 17 year olds look back. So in a sense it’s like most of special needs it’s not ‘one size fits all’ isn’t it? And it’s how you do that.

John:

Absolutely.

Karl:

But the issue of participation as part of the process to getting something done, is probably the very most difficult part of all of this, because with the best will and for the best motives one can create the situation where a voice can be heard, but very often when I've been in the past responsible for statement reviews where children, young people, being active in those reviews ,you come to a point where either explicitly or implicitly, the question is asked well ‘what will this do in the future?’, ‘how will this change what is going on?’ And often partly because of the systems, partly because of the capacities of the various services, the likelihood of that being changed is very, very, limited indeed because there is no explicit practical outcome that can follow on from it, that that group of people have control over or can influence, so there’s also an issue about the recognising the limits to what is possible, and where those limits come from and how they can be accessed.

Jane Hurry – Reader in the Psychology of Education:

Now I think that’s absolutely true, you have to take into account the realities within which you are operating, but I think certainly in my work with older learners, that’s kids in secondary school and going up the grades in secondary school – young people that are a bit turned off school, possibly will have Special Educational Needs in terms of their behaviour in school, if you don’t listen to what they’re interested in, if you don’t enable there to be an interchange at these angle reviews or whatever meetings they have with their teachers or tutors which allows them to see why they might want to do it, in other words if you don’t negotiate them to be part of the process, it’s not going to happen. And I can see the trouble is that teachers are put in the situation where there is a lot of tension between trying to get the kids through a qualification for example, or stick to a curriculum path, but on the other hand you have to take account of where it’s going to get to the point where it’s counterproductive and the child is actually going to stop attending school or something like that.