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

Lee Glynn – Deputy Headteacher

My name's Lee Glynn. I’m the Deputy Headteacher at Hawes Side Primary School in Blackpool.

Assessment is really the cornerstone of us as an establishment. It begins very, very early on from the moment they step foot into school we make use of data that comes up from any partner nursery schools and that helps inform the teachers in foundation so for the five year olds and the six year olds they know the children’s starting point. Around about October time the staff have got to know them and we’ve established a base line which is crucial for any school to know the starting point of the students that they’re dealing with. At that base line that’s kind of the first time where any sort of hints of Special Educational Need or disability may first be brought to the intention of our inclusion team.

This careful tracking I think is the key to any school and careful tracking of children’s abilities, and in the early years that is done by using the Early Year’s Foundation Stage Profile, and the teachers will very carefully track individuals against each of the thirteen strands bringing to any attention anything that seems out of the ordinary in any way, and covering the more able children and also those with potentially specific learning difficulties. We will set careful targets and the targets will be in place from Foundation and a similar process will continue into Year 1, Year 2, all the way up into Year 6. In terms of the Foundation Stage Profile we’ll have a base line assessment and we know that by mid-point in the year so many Scale points should have been achieved by those, and then we can very quickly identify children that are on target for progressing to where we would expect them to be at the end of the year, or any children that maybe aren’t on target. The ones that aren’t for whatever reason again are brought into discussions with our very strong inclusion team and then we can look at maybe involving some of the other processes that happen.

We also at Hawes Side take the whole child very seriously. We’ve recently set up an opticians in school, particularly when we’re looking to identify a specific learning difficulty such as dyslexia because we’re able to investigate whether there are colour issues and the optician will give us a great deal of information about that. That then enables us to make sure that we can provide the resources for such a child should that be identified.

Speech and Language Therapy is something else which we believe - communication difficulties are at the root of a great deal of reasons why children aren’t progressing at the rate that they could do. We’ve allocated funding directly to employ our own Speech and Language and already seeing the impacts of that, particularly further down in the early years. I think that’s what good SEN support is, it’s supporting a child in the right way and whether that’s a learning difficulty or indeed in some cases a physical need, i.e., sight, or hearing, or speech, that’s what’s making use of that service has allowed us to do.

In order to keep this very rigorous system in place we hold termly pupil progress meetings which involve class teachers, support, and also our inclusion team, who will come and we specifically look at the tracking information; look to see if there’s any deviation from expected progress and then crucially building interventions to try and meet those needs. The useful thing is, is the assessing pupil’s progress materials came down from a secondary model which has been in place for numerous years now and then the primary school started to take it on and we’ve found it a very consistent and useful tool to enable us to, across the year group, a way from having to use standardised tests but a way for us to use it primarily as a teaching and an intervention tool to make sure all pupils’ progress at the rate which we would like them to do so.

And this information is used by our secondary schools; we will send up any assessment information that we do have and they will make use of that when they are considering setting or when they’re considering where to place children within their own provision. Children with Specific Educational Needs or disabilities will also have a shared meeting between the inclusion departments to make sure that if there are specific needs that the secondary school where the child is attending is able to try and meet those. And again I think those close links around transition are very, very important if we’re to ensure the best possible educational journey, the best learning journey for the children we have in our education system at present.

Michael Shepherd

I’m Michael Shepherd, I’m Headteacher at Hawes Side Primary School.

Some of the benefits and some of the outcomes that we’re seeing from the approach we’re taking is that we’re able to track very short term, very small steps to improvement, so for certain children; they need to see that they’re making small steps to improvement because sometimes the levels that we’ve got from the national curriculum are too big a leap and if they can’t see that they’re making progress they can tend to get very disenchanted with that.

Sue Towers – Vice Principal

My name is Sue Towers, I’m the Vice Principal of West Oaks which is North East SILC which is a Specialist Inclusive Learning Centre. We’re a specialist provision that caters for pupils - 4 to 19 year olds.

The differences between teaching in a mainstream setting and a specialist setting for me is that working with a whole child, the whole family, whole child, the holistic view, the multi-disciplinary meetings and assessments that you need to make, and bringing a lot of information together can be quite overwhelming to start with, that was a major difference.

In terms of teaching and learning, not that many differences. The generic elements are very strong, teaching is teaching, learning is learning, and how you apply that to the setting therein comes the creativity in designing the appropriate learning steps and devising the appropriate assessments that meet that range of needs; it’s often in reinventing a wheel at those lower ends of development, which can be the challenge in special schools, it’s not on a shelf to pick off, it’s not there produced nationally, so we often have to create our own. But again that’s about people’s professionality, creativity, and actually keeping their eye on the ball in terms of what they’re aiming for which is pupils’ learning outcomes.

Differentiation is a really key aspect of any good teaching, and it still focuses on all those levels that the children come into the classroom with, that you have to have prior knowledge of, building on those, being clear where your targets are set, where you want them to be by the end of a term, or end of a period of time, it might be even just that day in some children’s cases. So that creativity comes in, that breakdown of those steps, those targets, to be meaningful at the classroom level.

In the specialist setting with the mainstream colleagues we use, we still use all the national frameworks that are out there, again with due adaptation. We utilise the P-Scales, as again many mainstream schools do, and we try and use those as wisely as we can. We try not to be too slavish to those, they’re about, again, appropriate assessments in the appropriate places. And that’s my job as a senior leader to ensure those are in place, and to make sure those are carried out with good judgements, by proper moderation, by proper standardisation, but in the same vein, they’ve got to be meaningful, and they’ve got to be broader than just the core subjects. That again is particularly significant with pupils with Special Educational Needs, they may well be achieving in areas of curriculum, which are not the ones we spend our time monitoring.

So speaking and listening can be a really core strand to much of our work, and as a specialist school for communication interaction that of course is one of our focal points. But also personal and social development, really key one for pupils with Special Educational needs, and one where we can show huge gains in progress over time that may not be as visible in the data that you may have to collect in maths and science and literacy. So we try to go for a much wider profile, much broader based, and really show the things we value, and not just measure the things we’re asked to measure.

Trevor Bowen – Deputy Head

My name is Trevor Bowen, I’m Deputy Head of Almondbury High School and Language College in Huddersfield.

In terms of assessment for learning I think there are some important things that teachers must do. The most important thing a teacher must do is plan a lesson really, really, well. In planning a lesson you take in to account the nature of all the children that are in the room, but also you set out doing two or three key things. One is that you set up what the learning intention for that lesson is. So the children are sign-posted very, very, early on as to what you intend to do with that lesson.

Once you have sign-posted what you want to do, you then have to create a climate in the classroom. I have three rules in my classroom that are used by Professor Dylan Wiliam, and I can tell you I know for a fact make a great deal of difference. One is that no child is allowed to put their hand up unless they’re asking me a question. In other words I decide which child gets asked a question. And that’s a really effective way of differentiating the classroom because you ask different children different questions, but also every child thinks at any moment they’re going to be asked a question so it brings every child into the lesson and they’re engaged.

The second thing I have is that when they do answer a question they’re not allowed to say “I don’t know”, they must give an answer. By saying “I don’t know”, sometimes that means “I don’t care”. And by saying “I don’t know”, they are opting out of the lesson, they’re retreating from it, the pressure’s off them. So if you insist on getting an answer, and if you have to move to another child and come back to them, that way they know they’re engaged in it all the time.

The other thing that is more difficult to try and get in a classroom, but I have as well, is it’s ok to get things wrong. Children are very, very worried about making mistakes and that takes a lot, lot longer to create a climate where they can make mistakes, and you say to them, “it’s alright to make mistakes”, “learn from your mistakes”, because at this moment in time you’re not being finally assessed for it and actually when you get to the final assessment, and we do lots of staging along the way, if you make a mistake then, then that will count towards you final grade, but at this moment in time when you’re in a classroom and you’re exploring your ideas and your understandings and your misunderstandings, it’s perfectly ok to make mistakes. And by doing that I think you draw everybody in to the lesson.

Lesson structures are quite important, it’s very important that there’s not too much teacher talk, you’ve got about five minutes in my opinion to hook children into the learning that you’re doing that day. They’ve been on the playground, they’ve been playing, now it’s a lesson, you’ve got about five minutes to draw them in, with either a description of where this lesson sits in the scheme of things, or what the intentions of that lesson were.

Then if you’re going to give them anymore information, you probably don’t want to go beyond about ten minutes. Once you go beyond ten minutes children start to become a bit restless, they’re not listening as effectively.

And then you spend the vast majority of the time getting children to demonstrate back to you what they know and understand. Now this is the difficult bit with what assessment for learning is all about. It’s very draining for a teacher to do this but it’s absolutely the most important thing you do. You take feedback from the children almost constantly throughout the lesson and adjust your teaching accordingly. So you reshape the teaching dependant on what the children tell you they understand or they don’t understand. Simple techniques are things like, they all have a little mini white board, you ask them a question, that’s why questioning is so important you have to think about the sorts of questions you’re going to ask them before you start. But you ask them a question and the idea about asking that question is, “do you get this?” Or, “don’t you?” If you do get it and I get a series of answers, once they have been given the white board and I’ve asked the question I say write your answer down, it’s usually a one word or two word answer and hold it up for everybody to see. Then as a teacher you can scan the room very, very, quickly, and make a decision, they’ve either got this or they haven’t.

If they’ve got it, move on then, even if your lesson plan for that day had lots of other things to do to reinforce the learning, if they’ve got it, they’ve got it, move on. But if they haven’t got it, then you need to reshape that lesson to reinforce their learning.

All the techniques that he has, in my opinion, engage pupils in an interactive way, simple things like: think about what the whole lesson is about in one question and give it to them as they walk through the door. Now if they’ve got it, then that lesson is finished. You know they give you an answer on a piece of paper, you take them in, you read them very quickly, you choose a child to explain why they’ve written what they’ve written, and the lesson is over. However if they haven’t got it you can see all the misconceptions in what they’re saying.

Another way that’s probably more powerful is to give them that lesson as they leave, and then you collect in their answers, you look at what they understand or don’t understand, and then you use that to shape the lesson following.

I’ll give you a typical example. I am a science teacher, so I once had a girl who believed that we have day and night because the earth is part of a pivot. The sun is at one end of a seesaw, the moon is at the other, and during a day the sun rises on this seesaw and falls at night. It’s a model that’s not quite right but it meets her experience and then when you and when you say to her “have you ever seen the moon and sun in the sky at the same time?” That model would then collapse and she would then reshape that, no she hadn’t. So at that point you’re trying to get beneath the learning to where the misconceptions are, because it’s not just about being able to answer an exam question, it’s about dealing with children’s understanding of the nature of the subject, and that’s quite difficult.

Other things that are really, really, powerful are things like giving children other children’s work to mark, and asking them to mark each other’s work in a way where it is based around the exam board and the assessment criteria, so they learn two things. One is that this is what the examiner is looking for when they’re marking your work, but secondly, I want you to set this child some targets here next to you, that is based on what you think is good and the strengths of the work and the work that they need to improve. And we have a little golden rule, which is it’s two stars and wish. Two strengths, one weakness, simple little thing the children can learn, and then give it out to them. And they write on the bottom of the children’s work two strengths and something that they could do to improve it.

In terms of written feedback what I’ve found is this, if you give a child a grade, children are addicted to grades. If you give them a grade they don’t read anything beyond it. So when you are marking their work you’ve got two choices. If you want to grade their work I would hold back the grade, I would give out the comments and the comments should be informative about the strengths of the work and how they should improve it, and give them the grade later. In other words, make them read the comment you’ve made because that will make the biggest difference to their work. Or another good way of doing it is to get them into a group of children and hand out randomly if you like within the group your comments for their work and say “which comment matches your work then?” and again you get a discussion around the strengths and weaknesses of the work.

Written feedback has to be interactive if it’s just a teacher making comments on the work that the child never reads, then the child does not take that further in terms of assessment for learning.

The final thing I think is ultimately this, in terms of a hierarchy if you can get children to self-assess, in other words they can tell you what they think they know and what they understand, self-assessment is really important at the start of the work, start of a module of work where you learn what you know already, build on that. But also at the end of the work where they can see the progress they’ve made, so that you say to them “this is what you understood at the start of all this”, “this is now what you understand at the end of all this”, “can’t you see the progress you’ve made?” and “by the way you say you understand all of this, but you don’t understand that”, well that then is the target for the work to improve even further. And I think that’s a really, really important part of what they say.

So questioning is crucial, that you ask good questions that actually probe for the depth of knowledge and understanding, and that you use your questioning to decide whether or not children understand something or not. And if they do you move on and if you don’t you reinforce.

With SEN pupils here’s the key thing, literacy opens the door to begin with for all children. Everywhere in my classroom there are key words displayed, we will have almost quite old fashioned if you like tests of what those key words mean, children are given those key words at the start of a unit, regularly tested throughout it all and special needs children particularly you need a match between what they know and understand, in terms of keywords and then trying to help them to expand their writing throughout the unit. But the keyword, if you don’t understand the meaning of the word “photosynthesis”, you can’t then answer a question on it. And there needs to be a lot of time spent by the teacher reinforcing it all the time.

One of the things I have, which is something I picked up from accelerated learning from Alastair Smith, it’s a brilliantly simple idea, what you do is you create what they call a learning matt. It has to be coloured because the right hand side of the brain works on colour, it has to include words, because the left hand side of the brain works on words. And what you do is you draw a diagram or you write down all of the information that you want the children to learn for that module, and you print it on a coloured mat, and you laminate it, and stick it on their desk, and every time they come into the lesson ,that mat is there. They then put their exercise book on top of it, and all the time that they are working they sort of, and you can imagine this, scan off the page sometimes or sometimes they may be a little distracted and they’re reading all of the information that you want them to learn over a ten week period and it reinforces that all of the time. And of course down each side of the mat is all of the words you want them to know right from the very beginning and you can use it in all sorts of different ways.

But the key thing for special needs for me is about literacy really in terms of my subject area, them knowing what the words mean, and helping them to answer exam questions fully, by knowing what the marks scheme is, and that’s where the assessment for learning works.

And you can be very skilful about how you pair children together, or group them. There are all sorts of ways of grouping them, of similar ability, of very different ability, and often it’s said that you wouldn’t necessarily put a more-able child with a less-able child, because the more-able child needs to be extended. But actually when you ask a more-able child to teach a less-able child, because they understand it and they don’t, teaching is one of the ways where you understand yourself whether or not you’ve got it, and that reinforces it for the more-able learner.

And the final thing we’ve done a lot of work here on, which works very, very, well for special needs children, but all children, is that we have a boy, girl, seating policy in the school. A boy must sit next to a girl in every lesson they’re in. And it’s very, very, simply this: boys and girls are equally descriptive, but girls are more reflective than boys. If you ask a boy how they feel, they shut up and won’t speak, whereas a girl is more likely to be open. And if you put a boy and a girl together, you end up with what I describe as a perfect learner, because then finally boy are very speculative, they like to take risks. Girls don’t take as many risks or don’t like to take risks. So you’ve got the two together, you’ve got a descriptive learner who’s learning from each other about reflection, and finally learning from each other about risk-taking, and you’ll get girls to take risks that they ordinarily wouldn’t take if they’re sat next to a boy, because what girls like to do is be quite comfortable, they like to get all their stuff together and understand what they have to do and then start, and boys don’t like to talk about feelings, and if you put those two things together, you bring all the children into the learning. That would be assessment for learning for me.

Will Hendy – Year 5/6 Teacher

My name is Will Hendy and I’m the Class 5-6 Teacher at Westwood Primary School in South Leeds.

In terms of SEN, the benefits of assessment for learning are the fact that they take control over their learning, and I think for that group, for a long time in the past has been that the learning is given to them and they’re expected to remember it, and there’s no consolidation, and they haven’t really participated as individuals, they haven’t worked individually, so assessment for learning, the benefits of it are to make them really part of the class and to expect them to reach the same conclusions that other children would meet.

The challenges for assessment for learning in terms of SEN, they’re quite big, in that for them to understand their learning I think is a challenge in itself, for them to understand how they’re doing in a lesson I think is a very complex thought process, so they may not be able to vocalise it, they may not be able to explain it very clearly. So when you’re asking them a question and they say, I’m stuck, for them to then be able to break it down to say what bit are they stuck on, I think is quite a complicated thing. But again having a really high expectation of that they will be able to explain it, and using certain questions to kind of not give them the answers but to kind of tease it out of them, and make them think that they can do it, and make them think carefully about what they’re doing, works very well.

Faiz Akhtar – Year 4 Leader

I’m Faiz Akhtar, Year 4 teacher and Year 4 Leader. I work at Bankside Primary School in Leeds.

There’s lots of strategies that I use for my assessment for learning, in particular for Maths. They do post-it notes at the end of the lesson to show me that they have understood that lesson or if they have got any worries or concerns about that lesson. So, for example, if they’re multiplying by 10, 100 and 1000, I want to know if they’ve been able to do that, if not, they can write a quick note for me saying, I’ve had some problems in multiplying with 10 - I need a little bit extra help. So I will read that note and then get back to them in the next lesson.

Kirsty Randles – Teacher

My name’s Kirsty Randles and I am a teacher at Hawes Side Primary School in Blackpool.

Once I’ve assessed writing skills, they always know of something that they need to do to improve their writing. So once I’ve assessed it, and I’ve seen that they’re able to do their target from before, they then have a new target and they’re actually involved within that target setting, they’re actually, they know their targets, they know what they need to do to improve their writing.

They’re also involved within some of the assessment because we have the pyramids, the punctuation pyramids that we use. We look at vocabulary, connectives, openers to sentences, and punctuation. And they’re all on different levels, so they’re split up between 4 levels, and the children look within their writing, and I will choose one or two of the actual pyramids for them to look at within their writing at that day.

So, for example, I’d look at openers and punctuation, and within that what they would do is they’d look at what kind of punctuation they’d put in it, and where they thought they would be, so for example, level one would just be using full stops, level two would be a question mark and a full stop, level three would be question marks, exclamation marks, full stops and comas. Level four would be ellipsis, question marks, exclamation marks and you’d have in there speech marks as well, and to be able to use speech marks correctly, so to put the punctuation in within the speech as well. And it’s very good, because the children can then relate back to where they were on that, from the last time, and they look at where they think they are. So they’re actually assessing their own writing, and they then know because they’ve assessed their own writing where they need to go from there, which then helps me to assess their writing as well, because it’s a joint, mutual thing that we sort of talk about it: “where do you need to go from here?”, “how is it going to help you?”, “what are we going to do?”, so they’re aware of those steps to get to that target as well.

Lyn Brimson:

I’m Lyn Brimson and I’m from Orchard Vale Community School in Barnstaple.

Peer support is really vital in the classroom because it lets children realise that they can learn from one another, and they can actually support and give each other next steps in order to improve whichever area of the curriculum they need to improve on really. In our class we use our white boards a lot, and they swap over their white boards, and they might mark each other’s learning on the white boards. We’ve also used somebody standing at the front of the class, and the whole class has assessed one child’s learning.

In their text books, in their work book sometimes in the classroom, the children will then swap over each other’s learning, and in a different coloured pencil they will circle all the things they may be noticed that need maybe an improvement point, and I’ll tick all the really good things that they’ve noticed which are related to the success criteria on the interactive white board at the front of the classroom, which means that all children then, because I think sometimes it’s really hard for a child to look at their own learning critically and evaluate it. Whereas if you’re looking at somebody else’s learning, I think they find it fun to look at somebody else’s learning and correct it, and tick it, and add on the next steps. And then they realise actually they’ve all got an important voice to be had in the class, and everybody, no matter what difficulties they have in terms of learning, they can all share their thoughts and ideas, and take part.