Provision for children with special needs and inclusive policies
There is growing evidence of more thoughtful provision for children with special needs and inclusive policies are broaching issues once considered too challenging for mainstream schools
One the most testing challenges to school leadership is contained in the deceptively simple term 'inclusion'. At its crudest it implies accommodating children with special needs within mainstream schools and classrooms. However, without prescient leadership and scrupulous attention to what 'needs' implies, it may harm both the children who are 'included' as well as their peers, their teachers and ultimately the school itself. There is growing evidence of more thoughtful provision in Scottish schools, at least those at the leading edge. There is much to be learned from their practice.
Resources InclusionResources Inclusion
Rosie Wilson
"The resource was set up to meet the needs of students with moderate learning difficulties. However the resource has far wider impact than this because it crosses over lots of boundaries. For example, if you have an Access 2 or 3 course running, there may be other students in the class, for whatever reasons (it may be social and emotional behaviour difficulties, it may be through absence, it may be because English is an additional language), they may take part in these courses so it's not exclusively for children with moderate learning difficulties..."Establishing the optimum relationship between special provision and support within the mainstream is a delicate balancing act.
Liz Taylor, Inverness Royal Academy
"Okay, the school has within it's environment a unit which we call the learning support unit which is for physically impaired, severely physically impaired pupils with communication difficulties. And these pupils have a fair amount of time in their base but they also spend a fair amount of time in subjects where it's possible. So they select fewer subjects and that's where the flexibility comes in if you like, for them. Select fewer subjects and they are supported throughout mainstream to achieve just like any other pupil will. This means that teachers and support teachers have to work closely to enable pupils to achieve the learning outcomes of any Higher Still courses that they are doing. It also allows them to achieve if you like, further up the scale..."In special schools provision and curriculum start from where the child 'is', what he or she is able to do, is alert to feeling and responsive to emerging needs. These are made possible by the ethos of special schools, the high teacher-pupil ratio and the professional expertise of teachers. As pupils move into mainstream schools they encounter a quite different ethos, one in which the individual is not at the centre of the school's priorities and in which individual care is more difficult to vouchsafe. Enabling children and young people to genuinely feel supported requires an ability to accommodate a special school ethos within the structures and day-to-day business (or busyness) of mainstream school life.
Rosie Wilson
"I think the students feel supported; that they have times within the day that they know that they're going to work in a small group and they're going to bring any difficulties they've had that day to that group. Perhaps we support their homework within that group, we look at different issues to do with transport that they may be having, and also socially within a small group they feel more able to talk and express their views rather than being in a larger classroom. The range of strategies is tailored to the individual needs of the child and where they feel they require additional support in particular areas then we would put additional support strategies in place."Schools striving to be inclusive in its most meaningful sense depend on the resource of time, materials, technology but above all on the expertise to deploy these intelligently and creatively. Clearly simplistic blanket policies do not work. Flexibility and a continuous process of readjustment are required to meet needs as they evolve and as understanding of diversity grows. The driver of flexibility is imagination and access to the state of the art thinking on individual and group needs.
Dominic Everett
"If you're talking purely about curricular matters, the children have full access to the curriculum, quite often depending on the needs of the child or the abilities of the child. In first year, for example, we have a blind boy, a totally blind boy, who I support within the art classroom. The syllabus is tailored to his needs; he follows the classroom syllabus; however we adapt it; for instance, the class are doing collages, which suits him down to the ground because obviously it's quite tactile, and I work collaboratively with the classroom teacher; she provides me with materials; we also have specialist materials which we provide from the Visual Impairment Resource Centre. He uses German film quite a lot, which is like a plastic sheet which we put on a rubber mat and he uses styluses; and that raises any diagrams or pictures that he's drawing so that he can feel then that again..."The example here of catering to the needs of blind and partially sighted children illustrates the extent to which schools need to find and develop expertise which lies beyond the repertoire of most teachers. As Dominic Everett points out, to simply 'include' children without that access to expertise is to reinforce failure.
Dominic Everett
"Braillists have to learn Braille codes for music which is quite difficult, and one of our colleagues in the Visual Impairment Resources Centre has taken it upon herself to learn the music codes. She is our resident expert on Braille for the musicians. So, yes, in terms of art, music, these things are easily accessible. Some subjects such as craft and design, there are health and safety implications, so we have to work very closely with the Technical Department within the school. Depending again on the visual ability of the child, the partially sighted kids can quite often access the craft and design classes or the technical classes, with visual impairment support in class with them. But some of the blind pupils we choose to withdraw them from craft and design or from tech because we feel that, rather than reinforce failure, we would rather bring them into the Visual Impairment Unit and for us to provide them with skills that will enable them to access the rest of the curriculum more successfully. So we withdraw the blind students from Technical and we provide them some backup with their Braille skills or we allow them that time to catch up on classroom work etc."Having themselves experienced the challenges of disability can give teachers a deeper insight and empathy. It is well illustrated by Dominic Everett's own struggles with visual impairment and how it not only benefited his own teaching but offers the school a valuable resource for understanding and dealing with special needs. The recruitment of staff with special needs is a challenge to inclusive leadership. Using that invaluable resource, exploiting available technology, communication and liaison with specialist expertise and specialist units assumes paramount importance as Helena Anderson illustrates.
Helena Anderson
"Usually at the end of a term, in June, we have a meeting with the Visually Impaired Department and we go through all the course work for the following year. And if Joan and her team know that there's going to be a selection of children who are visually impaired, we look out all the necessary course work. That's sent down to the Visually Impaired Department and every single thing is either Brailled or enlarged so that all the resources are in place for that child starting school. So definitely communication and liaison with the Department is paramount in dealing with the visual impaired child. Also technology; I think it's important to use the technology that you can. Within the music department, we have quite a range of various software that we use. And, as a result, the VI Unit have bought that particular software and have become very able in using it themselves..."Many children have no obvious disability but may be disaffected and damaged in ways that are not known to, or accessible by, their teachers. They may be in care or in difficult domestic circumstances. In these cases effective liaison with carers, colleagues in social work, health services, or Children's Panels may assume critical significance for leadership. Appointing and deploying key people in key positions and monitoring their work is a function of leadership as distributive.
Rosemary Byrne
"Using the teacher for the looked after and accommodated children as a link is a great help. They also make sure that we know who the key worker is in the Children's Unit, and that we have a relationship by meeting beforehand. We do very ad hoc things like, sort of informally, if we're expecting a young person who is looked after and accommodated to arrive in school and, for instance, they're working with us in the Base and they don't arrive, we always 'phone. It's the same with attendance; we've got someone who deals with attendance monitoring. If they're not working in the Base, the young person, if they're in classes, the person who's doing the attendance monitoring will 'phone when the registration slips come through the computer, she will 'phone to check - nobody has called to say the young person's sick - so there's a way of knowing whether they're off school because they should be or not. Same thing happens with monitoring their behaviour or their learning..."Review is a common institutionalised procedure in Scottish schools for addressing special needs but these are of themselves often insufficient. As Glebe Primary illustrates a more flexible and ongoing approach to inter-agency relationships is critical.
Francine MacKenzie, Glebe Primary
"Well, there is a recognised system of review which ensures that all the child's needs are met by all the personnel who are involved with that child. In our school we ensure that a member of staff attends every meeting, every review meeting that is held, whether that is during the school day, during school holidays, after school in the evenings. A member of the management team would attend. Formal reviews are held regularly within the school, with all personnel involved with the child invited to attend. Anybody who isn't able to attend the review meeting, we ensure that minutes of the meeting are sent to them in order that they are kept appraised of the situation..."Competitive school policies which judge schools on crude aggregation of attainment scores threaten the development of inclusive policies. If there is to be equal status among the five national priorities then an enlightened approach to inclusion will contextualise and outweigh more simplistic measures of a school's effectiveness. For leadership it presupposes a reframing, or reinvention, of schools and how we measure their worth.
"The exploration of the notion of effectiveness in more inclusive settings will also require a more determined focus on the individual learner, and the priorities for learning that are specific to him or her, than has been usual up to now in mainstream schools. Leaders in these more inclusive contexts will need to learn how to be more creative in relation to the curriculum; more responsive to individual priorities; more willing to reconceptualise, restructure and reinvent schooling and the school itself in order to meet pupil needs and address pupil priorities and aspirations." (Byers, 2003)
The responsivness implied in Richard Byers statement implies a high level of professional development implicit in effective inter-agency work and implying a constant ability to learn as new kinds of needs emerge.
Andrea MacBeath
"Although I'm saying that we have a good relationship with all the other agencies involved in the child's education, that's something that we really have to work at, because we all come with our own assumptions and our own perspectives of a problem and unless we make the time to work with one another for the good of the child then that all falls apart, I think. The school is constantly changing because we're getting children in with a different set of conditions and therefore a different set of needs. To keep on top of that we really have to continue to invest in staff development and invest time in working with other professions so that we can really say we're doing the best for that child..."The skills and attitudes of inclusive leadership suggest a 'community' rather than a 'competitive' approach. As comments from these Scottish heads and teachers indicate leadership that is genuinely inclusive is distributed, devolved and emancipatory in character. This applies not only to the internal community of the school but to community networks beyond the school's physical perimeters. Power is shared, internally with teaching colleagues, members of learning support staff and externally with other professionals who can contribute to the transformational character of educational and social inclusion.
Leadership: From The Ground Up
