Is good SEND provision just good teaching?

You sometimes hear that children with special educational needs don’t need different provision, they just need god teaching. I think there’s some truth to this.

Of course, what works best for children with special needs depends upon the precise nature of an individual’s particular needs. That said, we can draw some generalisable conclusions by thinking about some of the more common areas of need schools have to contend with.

For instance, a child with a working memory deficit is likely to benefit from having information carefully sequenced and instruction broken into manageable chunks. But all children have limited working memory capacity and so all children will benefit from having instruction chunked.

Dyslexic children have the best possible chance of learning to read fluently if they are taught using a systematic synthetic phonics programme. This is equally true of children who are not dyslexic.

Students with an attachment disorder are likely to benefit from a structured environment, consistent rules, professional distance and focusing feedback on behaviour not the child. A child with an autistic spectrum disorder is likely to benefit from orderly routines and a calm environment. And a child who has ADHD is likely to benefit from clear boundaries and consistent, proportional consequences, but so is every other child.

If an explanation is too complicated for a child with limited working memory, simplifying and sequencing it is unlikely to make it worse for anyone else. If routines are too ambiguous for an autistic child, making them more predictable won’t disadvantage anyone. If a child with ADHD struggles because expectations are inconsistent, greater consistency will improve the classroom for everyone. What some children require in order to succeed, others will find helpful.

Of course, some children do need genuinely different or additional provision. It would, for instance, be absurd not to give a child with a visual impairment a text they’re unable to see. It’s essential to distinguish between accommodation, which changes how a child accesses learning, and intervention, which addresses an underlying difficulty through additional teaching. In both cases, SEND provision should, as far as possible, act as an on-ramp to the same ambitious curriculum rather than a detour into a quiet cul-de-sac.

While not all children are equally able, all children are more likely to achieve well if their teachers have high expectation of what they are capable. Those with educational disadvantages need explicit instruction, clear modelling, well-designed scaffolding which is removed as rapidly as is possible and lots of guided practice. But this is what’s most likely to benefit all children.

The late, great New Zealand professor of education, In his wonderful book, The Hidden Lives of Learners, Graham Nuthall said, “Ability appears to be the consequence, not the cause of differences in what students learn from their classroom experiences.” (p. 123) You may need to reread that sentence for its implications to sink in. We tend to believe that differences in children’s ability cause some to learn more and others to learn less but what Nuthall suggests is that children’s academic ability is — to some extent — a product of what happens in the classroom.

So what is it that occurs in classrooms that result in children becoming more able? Siegfried Engelmann, the creator of Direct Instruction wrote that, “The curriculum will largely determine the extent to which children are smart.”1 If some children are given a less challenging curriculum than others we ensure they will become less capable. Our determination of their ability to access the curriculum becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The single most important difference between children is the quality and quantity of what they know. This is not to discount the profound differences between children’s socio-economic backgrounds, or their relative fortune in the genetic lottery. Instead it is to observe that most of the differences between children are not amenable to the actions of teachers: we cannot solve social disadvantage and have no ability to meaningfully address children’s physical or mental endowments. However, we have enormous potential to determine what children encounter in our classrooms. The quality and quantity of what children know is the area on which we can have the most impact and so is, in my view, the most important for us to influence.

So, if knowledge is the aspect of difference over which schools have greatest control, then the question becomes how best to ensure that all children, not matter the labels they’ve been assigned, acquire as much of it as possible. The complexity of some children’s needs complicates the process, sometimes profoundly, but it rdoesn’t change the basic conditions under which learning is most likely to occur. If anything, it makes the need for effective teaching more acute.

While there will always be exceptions, by and large, the types of pastoral support and instructional practice that work best with children with SEND will be likely to get the best results with all children. If you want to know what good practice looks like then a good first step is to speak the SEND Co-ordinator at your school; very likely they will have some wise and useful insights that will help teachers in teaching all students.

Identifying a child as having a need can — often does — lower expectations. When we rationalise why children find it difficult to engage with an academic curriculum, it’s a small step to finding reasons for them not to have to struggle at all. Scaffolds become permanent, ambitious texts are replaced with more ‘accessible’ ones and support intended to provide access slides into approaches which inadvertently create dependence. Rather than find ways to protect children from the curriculum, good SEND provision provides them access to the same ambitious curriculum that all children are entitled to.

The children who are most disadvantaged, most at risk of failing, will be those that most need their teachers to be aware of effective practice. Advantaged children are more likely to thrive regardless of what their teachers do but they too will still benefit from the kinds of practice children with SEND need. The quality of teaching in a school should be judged by how well it works for those least able to compensate for its weaknesses.