Introduction
The following is a summary of professional development material published by the DfES (© Crown copyright 2005 Leading on Inclusion DfES 1183-2005 G Primary National Strategy), which can be viewed and downloaded from the website:
They focus on inclusion in its broadest sense, as well as on SEN. They provide more detailed exploration of issues around self-evaluation and the use of data and include an additional focus on planning effective provision.
 Schools need to take a more strategic approach to managing inclusion issues, focusing on whole-school development rather than solely on meeting the needs of individual children.
The framework for development is the school improvement cycle, in which the school asks itself the following questions:
• How well are we doing?
• How do we compare with similar schools?
• How well should we be doing?
• What more can we aim to achieve?
• What must we do to make it happen?
Self-evaluation and understanding data relate to the first four of these questions. Planning effective provision relate to the last question.
An additional aim is to enhance the skills of inclusion coordinator,
EMA /EAL coordinator or SENCO as a middle manager.
Schools need to ask themselves these questions and respond to the issues they raise in order to improve.
Engaging in this process of school improvement has been shown to:
- be a motivating and inspiring process for those involved;
- provide opportunities to understand more fully what is happening in a school and classrooms;
- reduce variation and lead to greater consistency of practice across the school.
This school improvement process recognises that individual teachers are unlikely to promote lasting changes in school. To achieve lasting impact, whole-school processes need to change. This is particularly important when working in the inclusion arena, where there has been a tendency to locate the responsibility for children with special educational needs or the needs of EAL learners in one individual teacher.
Who is at Risk of Underachievement?
Consider the disparity between boys’ and girls’ achievement and the achievements of different ethnic groups but also consider issues of mobility and issues that pertain to the ‘different groups’ that have been identified by Ofsted and are listed below – appreciating that some children belong to two or more of these groups.
Ofsted identified ‘groups’ that might be at risk in Evaluating educational inclusion (HMI 235).
- Girls and boys
- Minority ethnic and faith groups
- Travellers, asylum seekers and refugees
- Pupils who need support to learn English as an additional language (EAL)
- Pupils with SEN
- Gifted and talented pupils
- Children looked after by the local authority
- Other children such as sick children; young carers, those children from families under
- stress; pregnant schoolgirls and teenage mothers, and any pupils who are at risk of
- disaffection and exclusion.
There are some urban myths that may need disproving, for example that children who have a statement of special educational need will not attain level 4 at the end of Key Stage 2 (in fact, in 2002, 12% attained level 4 in English and 15% in mathematics). Another such myth is that pupils of African-Caribbean heritage are low attaining throughout schooling (in fact the standards achieved by this group are often higher than other groups on entry to school and then gradually decline).
In addition to these national disparities, there is also considerable local variability between similar schools in the impact they have on children’s progress and attainment. This is why self-evaluation – asking the questions: ‘How well are we doing?’ ‘How well do we compare with similar schools?’, and ‘How well should we be doing?’ is so important.
The differences could perhaps be explained by how inclusive each school is.
We know that there are many interventions, that work for children at risk of underachieving and yet they are not being consistently used. By adopting certain interventions, children can make more progress.
Effective Self-Evaluation
- allows a school to focus on improvement where it is most needed;
- ensures that the school develops goals that are shared by all staff and tailored to the school’s unique character and needs;
- empowers the school to articulate what it does well and collect the evidence, guard against complacency and develop its own agenda for improvement;
- helps the school to plan for effective CPD that links teacher development with school improvement;
- ensures that the school is providing value for money and is using its resources in the best way to raise achievement.
When done well, self-evaluation will also enable the school to check compliance with legislation, for example, the Race Relations Amendment Act 2000, the accessibility requirements of the Special Educational Needs and Disability Act 2001, as well as checking against guidance such as the SEN Code of Practice, and the self-evaluation expectations of Ofsted.
Leading on Inclusion: understanding and using data
The central focus of this session is the effective use of data to analyse, improve and celebrate children’s progress and to enable schools to lead and manage developments strategically. These aims are best sustained by a collaborative approach ensuring the engagement of all staff. Isolated individuals providing complex data tables are unlikely to engage staff or significantly improve children’s progress.
Key considerations:
- the importance of the school improvement framework;
- the increasingly rich data available on children’s attainments and progress;
- the data variance at different levels (LEA, school, individuals and groups);
- the power of data to inform us about:
– improvements over time
– how we compare with others locally and nationally
– the progress of different groups of children;
- the developing use of Pupil Achievement Tracker (PAT); value-added line graphs; PANDA information; transition matrices and progress charts.
Leading on inclusion: planning effective provision
Planning effective provision involves, among other things, thinking about how to deploy additional staffing to meet the identified needs of children in the year ahead. This thinking is a key element of school’s actions at the ‘What we must do to make it happen?’ stage –though not the only element. Other elements might be planning professional development for staff or alignment of staff effort around a particular focus (such as to
increase children’s involvement in assessing their own learning).
One way of planning how to deploy additional staffing to meet the identified needs of children is to construct a provision map each year – a management tool that details the range of provision the school makes for children with additional needs and provides an ’at a glance’ picture of what is planned or in place
- Developing a provision map will involve all staff and makes transparent the criteria for deploying additional adult support. The map makes explicit the additional provision on which class teachers can expect to draw.
- Developing the map will involve inclusion coordinators, EMA coordinators and SENCOs in roles that are strategic rather than merely procedural (keeper of IEPs, records of children with SEN and so on).
- Provision maps enable a school to manage different funding streams (SEN, EMAG, funding for catch-up and booster provision and so on) coherently to target particular patterns of need in different year groups. For example, the audit of need might show a group of children in Year 1 with significant literacy difficulties, a problem with behaviour across Year 3, a group of children who with a little catch-up help could get back on track to reach nationally expected levels in mathematics in Year 4, significant underachievement by advanced bilingual learners in Year 5. This analysis would allow the school to combine funding from various sources and plan Wave 3 literacy intervention in Year 1, lunchtime clubs and social skills groups in Year 3, a Wave 2 mathematics programme like Springboard in Year 4 and additional guided language group work in Year 5.
- Starting by auditing the needs of children allows schools to identify where there will be a need to develop staff skills – if, for example, the audit shows a large group of children needing additional help to develop speaking and listening skills, it may be necessary to plan CPD for staff in this area.
- Often schools plan provision on the basis of history or particular staff skills – ‘we do Additional Literacy Support (ALS) in Year 3 because we’ve always done it and Mrs. B knows how to do it’. This approach may, or may not, match the actual needs of children from year to year.
Further points:
- Provision maps can reduce bureaucracy and paperwork if the school records the steps it has taken to meet a child’s needs by highlighting the relevant provisions on a provision map, rather than writing individual education plans.
- All schools have to undertake self-evaluation, and a provision map enables the inclusion co-ordinator to track and evaluate the impact of specific provisions on children’s progress.
- Schools are accountable for the provision they make in a number of ways. In SEN, they must have a policy that sets out how resources are allocated ’to and amongst pupils with special educational needs’ (Annex 1 to the SEN Code of Practice): a provision map, attached to the policy, could fulfil this requirement.
- Governing bodies are accountable through annual reports to parents on how resources are allocated and the effectiveness of their provision for SEN: a provision map provides the framework for this report.
- LAs are required to monitor schools’ use of resources to ensure that they raise the achievement of pupils with SEN: many schools are finding their provision map, combined with data on pupil outcomes, allows them to provide the LA with the necessary information quickly and effectively. Similarly, there may be a need to demonstrate the effective use of other funding sources, such as the Ethnic Minority Achievement Grant or Behaviour Improvement Programme funding, which a provision map will fulfil.
- Provision maps help schools to avoid situations where in one class there might be a teacher and three teaching assistants, each attached to support individual children, while next door in a parallel class the teacher is struggling alone with no additional support.
- Some schools choose to use their provision maps to help them cost the provision they make through additional staffing, so as to manage the overall inclusion budget effectively and work out which types of provision represent ‘best value for money’.
- Provision maps help schools to make sure that the provision children receive is coherent over time. They quickly show up contexts where the provision that children receive is the same year-after-year-after-year.
- Copies of highlighted maps showing the provision the child has received each year can be kept in a child’s file to provide a useful record of interventions over time. This can be matched to evidence about the child’s learning.
- It can be really helpful to use a provision map as a tool for communicating with parents and carers. A provision map can form the basis for discussions about the forms of support available in school and for involving parents and carers in decisions about which provision will be most appropriate. A provision map, highlighted to show the particular provision a child receives, can also demonstrate to a concerned parent or carer exactly what is being provided for their child. Such a map will often reveal that the child with SEN, for example, is accessing a greater range of group and individual provisions than other forms of recording, such as IEPs with individual ‘hours’ of TA support on them, may show.
Waves of Provision
 The better the inclusive provision at Wave 1, the fewer children there will be who end up needing additional provision through a provision map.
Quality first wave inclusive teaching (aligned to the principles of the National Curriculum statutory Inclusion statement), is:
- teaching which ‘tracks back’ or forwards through relevant frameworks of learning objectives to identify those that are relevant to the child and linked to the work of the whole class;
- teaching which draws on a variety of teaching styles (open and closed tasks, tasks of varying lengths, visual, auditory or kinaesthetic learning, modelling of language for EAL learners) matched to the needs of individuals;
- teaching which builds in access strategies (such as alternatives to written recording, provision of culturally appropriate resources) to overcome real or perceived barriers to learning.
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