Inclusive and Supportive Education Congress
International
Special Education Conference
Inclusion: Celebrating Diversity?
1st - 4th August 2005. Glasgow, Scotland
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Inclusive and Supportive Education Congress 1st - 4th August 2005. Glasgow, Scotland |
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Claire Bibby
Tameside Metropolitan Borough Council, Ashton-Under Lyne, OL6 6DL
claire.bibby@tameside.gov.uk
At its most simplistic, the debate about inclusion has sometimes been reduced to a question of placement, and whether a child attends a ‘special’ school or a ‘mainstream’ school.
Tameside Council in Greater Manchester has been exploring innovative ways of promoting inclusion for learners with special educational needs for some time. Working in partnership with its designated special schools, Tameside LEA has adopted the strategy of working to ensure that all schools, regardless of their designation, have the skills and resources to be able to provide a good education for their pupils: in essence, making every school ‘special’.
One of Tameside’s maintained schools, Hawthorns, which is a primary school designated for pupils with moderate learning difficulties, has taken advantage of three factors to develop links with other schools in the Borough: a review of provision, a falling roll and Beacon status.
This paper takes the relationship between the LEA and Hawthorns as a case study to explore the following issues:
Introduction
The path towards the current debate about inclusion in the UK began with the familiar foundation of the Salamanca Statement and was developed in the various initiatives of the then new Labour Government in the late 1990s. The more we learned to move beyond the language of ‘integration’ and ‘mainstreaming’ and to shape our tongues around this new word – ‘inclusion’, the more those of us involved in education realised that this was a word which had many resonances and whose application could take us far beyond a preoccupation with ‘children with special educational needs (SEN)’.
In England and Wales, the inclusion agenda has been broadened by the implementation of the Disability Discrimination Act in 2002 and the implications this has for schools, now statutorily bound to make ‘reasonable adjustments’ for users of school buildings. This requirement applies not just to pupils, but to teachers, parents, ancillary staff and others who may use the building. It also applies not just to those who currently use the premises, but as an anticipatory duty for all those who may use them in the future: a wide-ranging duty indeed.
Further, the UK Government has pressed the notion of ‘social inclusion’, and the broader issues of belonging and contributing. This concern has at its heart the pragmatic twin imperatives of reducing crime and reducing poverty and unemployment, but also moves us to take a less negative stance in our view of the ways in which we might work with and engage young people. Thus the Children Act (2004) has, amongst the five aims for children, ‘Making a Positive Contribution’ and ‘Enjoying and Achieving’. This again lifts our vision to see how the inclusion agenda embraces all citizens, and puts ‘children with SEN’ as one group amongst many whose needs must be considered.
Having seen the horizon, we move back again to focus in on the area of life which is of immediate concern: the hotbed of activities which is often shorthanded as ‘school’, in one metropolitan authority in the north-west of England, Tameside.
Tameside was born in the 1974 local government reorganisation, the result of the marriage of 9 towns, each with their distinct identities but without the major centre of other Greater Manchester authorities such as Stockport or Bolton. The River Tame flows through the middle of this compact area, which is about six miles from north to south and eight from east to west, and home to just over 200,000 people.
The local education authority (LEA) has taken active steps to make a positive partnership with its 99 schools (76 mainstream primary, 18 mainstream secondary and 5 special) in promoting the inclusion agenda. Key partners in this have been the headteachers of Tameside’s five highly-regarded special schools, who were already working, long in advance of the report of a national working party on the future role of special schools (2002) to ask questions about what the future held for their own schools. This culture of questioning and the embracing of opportunities presented by the changes referred to above, set in a well-established context of self-review and reflection, enabled the LEA and the ‘special’ heads together to explore how both can contribute to the promotion of inclusion. The resultant policy document, ‘The Future Role of Special Schools in Tameside (2004)’ gave the impetus to much of the work which is discussed below.
Local Education Authorities in England and Wales have long since moved away from the controlling role they once undertook with the schools they maintain. These self-governing institutions have to follow the National Curriculum and abide by statute, but they have much more flexibility to create themselves as individual places of learning. They operate in an education market economy, where ‘successful’ institutions are more likely to attract pupils and thus resources, and in a time of falling pupil numbers are less likely to end up as the subject of speculation about closure or amalgamation.
It is regrettable that in England ‘success’ has largely been measured in terms of pupil attainment up to this present time. This has undoubtedly led to some schools seeking to attract pupils who they believe are more likely to attain higher grades at the end of keystage tests, and to focussing additional resource onto those who are expected to ‘just fail’, so that a maximum number can make the grade. There have been proven cases (though not in Tameside) of desperate teachers falsifying test papers in an attempt to assist their school attain the ‘success’ they believe it deserves. How can inclusion flourish in such an arid atmosphere?
To complicate the issue further, the players in the game are varied and have diverse interests. Teachers, for example, want to be successful in teaching. Where success is trumpeted publicly primarily as described above, they will of necessity want their students to attain the required grades, even though many teachers have personal views which extend far beyond the simplistic. Pupils who have additional needs of any kind are less likely to ‘perform’. The government has set a target of 80% of all pupils reaching the expected level. This in itself acknowledges that not every child will attain in this way, though the vernacular dubs everyone who does not as a ‘failure’, rather than promoting the idea of diversity and range. Children may, of course, be disapplied from end of keystage tests – as if it should not be expected that their attainment could be measured with that of other children. These mixed messages complicate and confuse.
Supporting school staff, are their professional organisations. In England at the turn of the 21 st century, the teacher unions have been effective in promoting better pay and conditions for their members. They have continuing and legitimate concerns about the stress which teaching undoubtedly places on the lives of their members if conditions are not suitable. Inclusion can be seen as one more stressor.
Most parents also want their children to be ‘successful’ and to ‘pass the tests’: they know that this is what is valued by schools and is more likely to lead to longterm financial security once their children have grown into adults (since society also, largely, values academic attainment over diversity). Parents certainly want their children to be happy, and many express the view that children with additional needs may threaten ‘success’ and happiness through diverting teacher time or by presenting behavioural challenges which may result in bullying. Since the rules have changed on the constitution of governing bodies, parents now form a significant proportion of the decision-making body.
At the heart of the issue, children and young people have expressed the view that they are interested in health, safety, contributing, financial security, enjoying life and achieving. They generally have positive views about their teachers, with 70% of pupils surveyed by Murray and Thompson in 1985 believing that their teachers helped them to learn, gave good advice and were ready to listen. Though these data are perhaps a little elderly, the results are echoed in other more recent surveys (for example Branwhite (1988) and Chui and Tulley (1997)). They also reflect views provided by Tameside pupils who have been receiving support for their behaviour difficulties, at least 70% of whom, in 2003, felt that they got help from their teachers when they needed it, worked well with other students, had enjoyed learning and had joined in.
There is an argument that schools should be allowed to develop inclusive practice at their own rate. If they feel that their staff are not ‘ready’ for this, or that their school is at a vulnerable stage of development, they should be allowed to be more selective about the children they accept onto roll, or should at the very least not be challenged to include students who may stretch their range. The argument says that if inclusive practice is as beneficial to whole-school development as its proponents suggest, it will eventually spread to all schools.
The principle virtue of this approach is that it comes from the grass-roots, and that it would mean that schools would move on when every member of the school community felt that the time was ready. The active agreement and engagement of everyone involved would ensure success. This is indeed a powerful argument since any initiative which is not embraced wholeheartedly, or where it is expected that failure will follow, is more likely to lead to a less favourable outcome.
Nevertheless, Tameside, in common with other LEAs, believes that this is not a sufficient argument when set alongside the disadvantages of letting inclusive practice grow in this organic way. For example, in its strategy for SEN, ‘Removing Barriers to Inclusion’, the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) highlighted the iniquity of the ‘postcode lottery’, which can operate between areas but also between schools within areas, if LEAs do not pick up their leadership role enthusiastically and ensure consistent high quality in pupils’ education experience. The opportunity presents for LEAs to provide clear direction and coherence as strong community leaders.
To be able to do this successfully, however, there are some essential precursors. Fundamentally, the LEA itself must have a clear vision of what it wants to achieve which is shared by its staff so that they are able to communicate this to others. The story of the floor-sweeper in the NASA building who, when asked what his job was replied, ‘Me, Sir? I send men to the moon,’ is pertinent here. By this, we do not mean that there must be an unexamined or uncritical acceptance of policy: those we seek to lead will rightly seek to determine whether we understand the balance of advantage and disadvantage, and to hear why a particular course has been chosen. Tameside’s Lifelong Learning Service sessions, which every member of staff is encouraged to attend twice-yearly, encourages active debate.
This leads us on to the most important underlying attitude which LEAs seeking to take up the leadership role must embrace: it must itself be inclusive. Large institutions, for practical reasons, operate in teams, and these can become self-contained and even competitive. Rather like a pack of huskies, the team cannot move strategically if it is pulling in different directions. Communication, co-operation and mutual respect cannot be promoted in schools if they do not exist within the LEA itself.
It is also vitally important that the personnel who are undertaking this role themselves have the necessary skills and qualities for the task in hand. In this, Councils are in the same situation as schools: success breeds success, and it is easier to recruit and retain high quality staff in a Council which has been dubbed ‘excellent’, as has Tameside in its last two Corporate Performance Assessments. Headteachers tell us that the most effective challenge to un-inclusive practice comes from School Improvement Partners who have a thorough knowledge all aspects of school improvement. Their challenging support is most effective where they themselves draw on the skills of colleagues in the LEA who have expertise in areas such as exclusions, SEN, or human resource management, for example, depending on the particular needs and circumstances of the school.
Once the three principles of vision, inclusivity and quality have been established, the LEA is in a position to be apply them to its work promoting inclusion in schools. The clear vision, which the LEA will have developed in partnerships with its schools and other partners can be shared and promoted. In Tameside’s case, inclusion lies at the heart of the whole education vision with its strap-line ‘Inclusion, Achievement and Progress for All’. This vision will be interrogated and examined critically until any weak spots are identified and the resultant product is robust and resilient. Effective LEAs must welcome this and be willing to change proposals which are shown to be aspirational but unworkable in practice, however commendable they may seem at the time of genesis. The prime commitment is to delivery in practice.
In order to exemplify the way this is working in Tameside, we will set our discussion in the context of the work undertaken between the LEA and Hawthorns Community School, a primary school whose 50 pupils are designated as having ‘moderate learning difficulties (MLD)’. In practice, of course, the profile of those students has become increasingly complex over the course of the past 10 years, as more pupils have pursued their education in their local mainstream school. Hawthorns School, in common with Tameside’s four other special schools, has been praised by OFSTED. It came to the end of a period where it was designated as a Beacon School in July 2004.
Beacon status has provided an opportunity for the school to celebrate its own strengths but has also challenged an already very good school to examine current practice and improve itself. Hawthorns took the statement “share and develop good practice” as their Beacon mission statement. Additional resources have enabled staff to widen their experience and to forge links with other schools to an extent which had not been possible previously. This has broadened the vision of the school, which sees the children on roll as their prime responsibility, while also sharing in a collective responsibility for all the children in the borough through professional development and the development of teaching strategies.
The same three principles as have been identified above – a shared vision, ‘inclusion is for everybody’, and high-quality personnel – apply equally within a school seeking to play an active part in promoting inclusion as to an LEA looking to be effective in leading the process of change.
In the case of Hawthorns School, the need for a shared vision underpins daily activity. The ‘vision’ documents, both LEA and school-based, are displayed prominently; the School Improvement Plan (SIP) has been summarised as a diagram which is easy to apprehend and visually pleasing; the school has ‘staff reflection’ days, where groups of staff work together to explore their own practice and learn from each other. The headteacher is explicit in referring back frequently to the SIP and to relating this to what happens in the school. So the Achievers Area, filled with a constantly changing celebration of individuals’ achievements, is an outworking of the vision which sets individual pupils at the heart of what happens.
At the same time, this sense of vision means that the school sees itself as sharing the leadership for inclusion role within the authority, a crucial aspect of which is ‘inclusion is for everybody’. Staff in the special sector can become isolated: they are rightly seen as specialists, but this in itself can lead to a narrowing of experience. They may be unwilling to relinquish their ‘special school allowance’ by moving between sectors, thus limiting career options. Breaking down these barriers is crucial where an LEA is seeking to increase inclusive practice and include all schools in this.
As a result of this, in Tameside we have embraced changes to the physical structure of our schools, of which more will be said below, but also to intangible aspects of school life. Thus it is significant that the school is called ‘Hawthorns Community School’: in eschewing the word ‘special’ and embracing community we are reminded that this is one school amongst the 99, though it has a particular role to play. The school staff participate in the LEA-wide SENCO network, as well as facilitating LEA-wide activities within the school as part of the Beacon work. Currently, the school is piloting a project to ensure that all special school inclusion teams have a common core of ICT skills and knowledge of ICT resources to facilitate access for pupils. And in a practical way, the Council facilitates movement, albeit temporary, between sectors by providing bursaries so that staff from one sector can spend time in another to learn new skills, broaden horizons and share expertise.
Living this message has also resulted in high-quality personnel in the school’s whole community: for example, the governing body has worked to develop every member’s skills and mobilise these in the service of the children in the school. Parent governors play an active and vital part in steering the governing body’s work, and last summer the chair stepped down, not because he was retiring or because he was weary of the role, but because he felt that someone else should have the opportunity to be in this position. In the same way the school has embraced the principle of ‘growing their own’ with respect to staff, and have reaped the benefits of this: so a student who had been permanently excluded from school was given a work placement in Hawthorns and has now been nominated for a nationwide community award; one of the teaching assistants is being supported through teacher training; and one of the cleaning team who is profoundly deaf became an important member of staff, communicating to pupils by signing.
During this time there had been a comprehensive review of Tameside’s provision for children with MLD and in December 2003 the Council had approved proposals which will see a fundamental change in the way in which provision is made, by rebuilding Hawthorns school and a local primary school together in one building nearby, developing resourced provision across the Borough so that nearly every child will be within two miles of specialist facilities and strengthening inclusive practice in all schools. It is this strategic approach which we believe will assist in the process of every Tameside school becoming special.
Two of Tameside’s special schools have already been co-located with mainstream schools. In those cases they were moved to the sites of existing schools, and while the result has been popular with pupils, parents and staff, it has been concluded that the optimal solution would be to build from scratch. We are currently in an exciting phase of discussions about how to build an entirely new type of school building: one which houses two schools, but where as many facilities as possible can be shared, where pupils can attend sessions flexibly in either school according to their needs, and which can be built in a way which allows for continued and incremental change in the relationship of the two schools to each other as the years will progress. This structural change evokes a variety of responses, sometimes all within one individual person at the same time! - excitement, fear, openness and defensiveness, a pride in what exists and a desire for continuity are all evident. It is clear, however, that such a shaking of the status quo presents an opportunity to identify what is really working effectively and what is merely familiar and comfortable. That this should happen at the same time as the remodelling agenda takes wings provides a further occasion for structural change within the staffing profile. Thus the school is keen that in the process of moving schools it will clarify the place of the Inclusion Team as opposed to the school having an inclusive outlook and undertaking inclusive activities. The headteacher is adamant that she will strike the right balance between people who are ‘experts’ in inclusion and those who work with the children on a daily basis and who can thus see the detail.
Like many authorities, Tameside has maintained resource bases within mainstream schools for a number of years. It can be tempting for these to revert to being ‘units’, where children who experience SEN can find a ‘refuge’ from the stresses of mainstream life. One cannot escape from the fact that the pupils who are placed in resource bases are probably not from within the school’s natural community, geographically. Children may travel across Tameside to attend a particular school if they are profoundly deaf, for example, as here they will find a deaf peer group, suitably adapted classrooms, and staff and peers who are used to signing.
The opportunity to open new resource bases within mainstream schools as part of the structural reorganisation has also given us the opportunity to ask what these are for, how they might operate so as to be as inclusive as possible, and what, in this context, their relationship to Hawthorns School will be. Already we have concluded that they must give children the opportunity to attend a school within two miles of their own home, so the school might be one which their parents would have chosen in the natural course of events. We are now exploring the most suitable physical structures. In one of the schools with whom the LEA is working, the headteacher is creatively exploring the use of all the spaces in his school in a radically different way, so that, in his words, there is no ‘room where the SEN children go’ but rather a set of flexible solutions to teaching groupings which will enable children placed at his school because of their learning difficulties to be a stretching of the teaching and learning range rather than a different group entirely. This is in accord with the idea of a continuum, rather than a staircase, of provision for which LEAs have striven.
Hawthorns School will of course be essential partners in the development of the MLD resourced schools. Although Hawthorns will not have line management responsibility for the specialist staff in the resourced schools, it is envisaged that this school will provide professional development opportunities, as well as being a resource for training, networking, the development of systems and strategies, and quality assurance. In this way, even though the resourced schools will by physically different one from another (there is to be no ‘master plan’), they will achieve common outcomes and maintain a consistent high standard of specialist provision.
The third focus of the review of provision for children with moderate learning difficulties was the promotion of inclusion in its widest sense in all schools. This strategy, which has seen, for example, the development of consultancy support for inclusion, the strengthening of the Parent Partnership Service, the staff bursary scheme referred to above, and the development of an Inclusion Framework within the Borough, is perhaps the most fundamental to the success of the MLD review. This is because children experiencing moderate learning difficulties attend every school in the borough. Their success depends on the ability of their local schools to meet their whole needs.
This focus on mainstream schools and how inclusive practice could be promoted across all the schools in the borough inevitably led to discussions about what it is about special schools which is ‘special’, and whether this could be spread to all schools, because a message frequently heard by the LEA is that some mainstream staff do not feel adequately skilled to teach some children, and that they need the expertise of special school staff.
There has been a continuing discussion about whether there is a ‘special’ pedagogy. The conclusion seems to be that there is not: that effective teachers of children with special educational needs are effective teachers whoever they are teaching (see for example the comments in the recent OFSTED report on Managing Challenging Behaviour, Knight B (1999), Corbett J (2001) and Allan J (2003) amongst many more). What is distinctive is that these teachers are responsive to the needs of their pupils, willing to explore the relationship between their own teaching style, the pupils’ learning styles and the learning environment. They use a range of data about progress and achievement in a critical fashion to identify their pupils’ strengths as well as their specific and general difficulties, and respond to their own findings. They are reflective and are not afraid of change and of learning new strategies and approaches.
There is a recognition within Hawthorns that one of their strengths lies in the experience of the staff in integrating areas of concern and developing coherent action plans which address these. Because of their daily encounter with children’s very complex needs, staff are skilled at identifying needs, and have useful benchmarks for learning and behaviour.
Tameside has also investigated whether the children in special schools are a distinct group, compared with those in mainstream schools. As part of the review of provision referred to above, the needs and attainment of pupils at Hawthorns were compared with those of pupils with statements in mainstream schools. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, it was found that the two populations overlap and no significant differences could be found between the two groups, except that the children in the special school in general attained lower, and that they were more likely to be identified as having a significant medical condition such as epilepsy. In fact it seemed to be this additionality of need which had led to them being placed in the special school.
It is also true that children in special schools are more likely to have experienced changes in their education placement as they may well have moved there following earlier experiences in a mainstream school. They may then be offered the opportunity of inclusive experiences in yet another school, all without having moved house. Children in special schools may find change less easy to cope with because of their learning difficulties. Staff at Hawthorns School have become very aware of the need to assist children to develop the skills they need to manage change. Following the Head’s attendance at a number of courses relating to developing children’s emotional skills and the school’s inclusion in the national SEBS pilot, a professional development course for all the staff was developed called ’10 steps for learning’. This is a basic pedagogy of ‘teaching’ skills for all staff so that consistency is established, revisited and evident throughout the school. This system for ensuring continuity is one which we hope that mainstream schools will find useful in helping them extend the range and diversity of pupils who are successfully included.
It is true that special schools have smaller class groups than mainstream schools, and higher staffing ratios. Parents, in expressing a preference for their child to attend a special school, often cite the lack of teachers in mainstream to provide ‘one-to-one teaching’, overlooking the fact that children in special schools are also largely taught in groups. A key fact, however, is in the extent to which group sizes in special schools may allow for work to be more personalised, and for more detailed assessment, tracking and target-setting to be undertaken. This is certainly so in Hawthorns School.
Hawthorns School has developed some systematic approaches to personalised learning which the LEA has been able to promote with all schools to enable them to improve their own inclusive practice. The school has been working for a number of years now with PIVATS, a small-step tool developed by Lancashire LEA and which enables the measurement and demonstration of progress in children who are achieving lower than level 3 of the National Curriculum. Crucially, it allows progress to be identified in pupils who are below level 1.
Hawthorns School has worked with a consultant through its Beacon status to develop ways of collecting and collating this assessment information and of relating this to the national data which has been collected annually through CEM in Durham. Computer software has been developed which allows for the easy production of individual or group progress graphs in core subjects - graphs which have been used with children and parents to engage them in reviews and planning, to demonstrate ‘adequate progress’ in Code of Practice terms (see para 5:42), for staff to support performance management and threshold applications and for school improvement purposes. Now that the Beacon work has come to an end, the school is continuing to develop this work supported by the LEA, and to assist in spreading this practice around all schools.
The vision of setting the child at the centre of all activity has also led to the development of easy-to-use computer systems for tracking pupils’ behaviour, reward systems, and mainstream activities and opportunities.
Of course, many mainstream schools also have systems for tracking their pupils, but it is true that because the pressure is not so great on this special school for their pupils to achieve level 4 at Y6 and be shown in the national league tables, there is more freedom for the school to see the whole child and to recognise and celebrate achievement in a more rounded sense. The smaller group sizes may also contribute. If this is a prerequisite for success, it will challenge LEAs, for whom the economy of size is essential in making the budget stretch. Solutions might exist nevertheless, given that there has been a significant increase in the number of adults working in mainstream classrooms in recent years and in the light of the current remodelling agenda, which must provide more opportunities than previously for individuals to receive additional attention given good management of resources.
Staff at Hawthorns School have addressed this core question, and it may be useful for every school to reflect on what they believe is special both about their school and about special schools in their area. In the case of Hawthorns staff, they were challenged to choose a metaphor for the school and then to use it. They were also asked to identify an area of school that would exemplify to a visitor in 60 seconds what Hawthorns School is all about. The Achievers’ Area was chosen: this is an area where ‘Happiness and Success’ for the whole school community is celebrated every Monday and beautiful certificates and photographs highlight on a weekly basis the achievements of all.
The development of the school profile may present an opportunity in future for schools to celebrate their own achievements and those of their pupils. The draft versions of this national document provide, apart from the anticipated data relating to attainment, space for schools to put their own impress on the document and to demonstrate what makes their school ‘special’, regardless of its designation.
Finally, how will we know that what we are doing is better than what we were doing before? The SEN National Performance Framework (and thus the Audit Commission) measures successful inclusion by the proportion of children and young people who attend a special school. By this metric, the fewer the better.
Within Tameside, we have not embraced this mechanical definition of success. The shared vision of inclusion, progress and achievement for all children leads us to develop flexible solutions which will facilitate this for everyone. We have already experienced the exciting possibilities afforded by pupils who attend co-located schools, and intend to extend this opportunity to all pupils who are on the roll of a special school. In this way pupils can attend lessons in the context which is most suitable for their individual needs within one building. We know that this is a ‘good’ outcome for children through the experience of our schools for pupils with the most profound needs and their co-located partner schools. Parents and children alike are enthusiastic, and children make good progress.
The policy of developing resourced schools extends this principle of co-location: children who are placed at such schools because of their special educational needs are receiving ‘specialist’ education opportunities, but have easy access to mainstream peers and experiences where that is more appropriate. One measure of success will be the extent to which this flexible approach is adopted. It needs to be worked at, and in a context where there is no clear view that this is preferable, it would be easier for staff to retract and cease these sort of arrangements. The LEA can help schools share the vision.
Progress is, of course, a key factor in measuring success. The LEA has collected attainment data for pupils with SEN for the past three years. This has embraced pupils in all types of school, and of all ages. The data have been analysed by age group and by principle learning difficulty, and graphs made available to schools electronically to enable them to make comparisons with appropriate peer groups in other schools. This year, we have ‘matched’ pupils from the first round of data collection, so that it has been possible to produce early comparisons showing progress from 2002-2004 for pupils with MLD who, for example, were at P6 in 2002. This data set will be vital in enabling the LEA and its schools to see the effect of the ‘every school special’ strategy.
As has been mentioned above, feedback from parents and pupils will be a crucial measure of success. Hawthorns School has systematic ways of eliciting the views of their pupils and parents, through comments at reviews, for example, and through the comments pupils make on their ‘Inclusion Passports’ about their own education. Of course, there are some pupils who find it hard to express their views because of the level of their communication or the degree of their learning heeds. Again, the staff at Hawthorns have developed innovative ways of seeking pupils’ views: for example, the staff wanted to consult the pupils about the proposed new school, and worked hard with a variety of media to help the children enter into a ‘what if?’ exercise which was not easy for children who learn best through concrete experience.
Finally, school staff are a useful barometer of whether the LEA is getting it right. A survey about learning support was conducted amongst all staff in Tameside schools in 2004. This asked questions about the extent to which staff felt confident at matching the curriculum to children’s needs and differentiating work, and explored the barriers which staff experience to meeting children’s learning needs adequately. This survey showed that 88% of staff felt confident or very confident at differentiating work, while 80% felt that they could meet the needs of the children in their classes. The barriers were perceived to be lack of time and resources, both human and curriculum. Nevertheless, this gives us an encouraging basis on which to work. It seems to say that in Tameside we are perhaps moving in the right direction and can stride out with confidence into the future.
Allan J (2003) Productive pedagogies and the challenge of inclusion British Journal of Special Education 30, 175-179
Children Act (2004) http://www.hmso.gov.uk/acts/acts2004/20040031.htm
Chui LH and Tulley M (1997) Student preferences of teacher discipline styles Journal of Instructional psychology 24(3).
Corbett J (2001) Teaching approaches which support inclusive education: a connective pedagogy British Journal of Special Education 28, 55-59
Department for Education and Skills (2002) Accessible Schools: planning to increase access to schools for disabled pupils. London: DfES
Department for Education and Skills (2004) Removing barriers to achievement London, DfES, and at http://www.teachernet.gov.uk/wholeschool/sen/senstrategy
Department for Education and Skills (2003) Report of the Special Schools Working Group at http://www.teachernet.gov.uk/_doc/4620/wORKING%20gROUP.pdf
Disability Rights Commission (2002a) Code of Practice for Schools – Disability Discrimination Act 1995: Part 4. London: Disability Rights Commission.
HM Treasury (2003) Every Child Matters London: The Stationery Office
Knight B (1999) Towards inclusion of students with special needs in the regular classroom Support for Learning 14,3-7
Lancashire County Council (2002) Performance Indicators for Value Added Target Setting (PIVATS) at http://www.lancashire.gov.uk/education/pivats/index.asp
OFSTED (2005) Managing Challenging Behaviour is at http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/publications/index.cfm?fuseaction=pubs.displayfile&id=3846&type=pdf
SEN National Performance Framework at http://194.223.26.51/sen/index.cfm
Tameside MBC (2004) Future Role of Special Schools in Tameside at http://www.tameside.gov.uk/schools_grid/sen/specialrole.htm
Tameside MBC (2003) Review of Provision for Children with Moderate Learning Difficulties: Final Report (December) at http://www.tameside.gov.uk/schools_grid/files/sen/mldreport04.doc
Tameside MBC (2002) A vision for Education at http://www.tameside.gov.uk/tmbc8/vision.htm
UNESCO (1994) The UNESCO Salamanca Statement and Framework for Action on Special Needs Education. Paris: UNESCO
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