We all know teachers should have high expectations of pupils.
Teachers who think their pupils can learn and do lots set more challenging work than those doubting their capacities and this leads to more progress.
Nobody – quite rightly – argues against high expectations.
Officially you can’t even be a teacher if you don’t have them – they’re in the Teacher Standards.
But high expectations aren’t the same thing to everyone. Given the huge variability in our education system how could they be?
Different teachers and schools demand different levels of effort and have differing standards on acceptable general behaviour.
But we don’t talk about it well because being accused of having low expectations isn’t just an observation – in teaching it’s a personal and professional insult.
Describing someone as having “low expectations” is damning, meaning at heart we think the person is not a good practitioner.
Thinking about whether we have high enough expectations makes us angry and defensive.
But it shouldn’t – ideally there would be no reason to take it so personally because our expectations are more products of our environments and experiences than deeply held and immutable core beliefs.
If we have always been managed by terrible bullying bosses, then we will expect future bosses to be terrible and bullying. If we have always hated exercise, then we will expect a new sort of exercise to be horrible.
Conversely if we have always enjoyed Indian food, we’ll be excited a newly opened Keralan restaurant and if we’ve always liked science fiction films and loved Dune 1 then we’re more likely to rush to see Dune 2.
The point is expectations are not ethereal or objective – they are set by what we have seen and experienced before.
This is true of standards in schools.
If a teacher has only ever worked in schools in which behaviour is poor, they are far more likely to think this normal than a teacher who has only worked in schools where behaviour is excellent. If a leader has never worked in a place in which the completion of lots of outside school study is normalised they are far less likely to believe children capable of it and more likely to be satisfied with less and lower quality work.
This makes it hard for people to change their expectations – telling someone their expectations are too low doesn’t usually work because this is rhetoric against experience, which is a battle that only ever has one winner.
Our experiences are very powerful.
If you’ve worked in or led a school in which students angrily swear at staff regularly or where violence is not uncommon it can be very hard to believe much better is possible. When there are a lot of dysregulated children behaving chaotically the idea it’s possible for a school to be truly calm and orderly can seem absurd.
To these people – those struggling to stay afloat in the most challenging of circumstances – the idea other places have succeeded where they have apparently failed is often laughable and it’s logical to explain examples of success away; perhaps their demographic is radically different or perhaps they are faster to exclude the children who are most challenging. Perhaps they have more resources. Perhaps they just have more staff.
This is complicated because such explanations might be true.
But sometimes they are not.
Even in the areas of highest challenge children can behave as well and work as hard, but knowing this often means experiencing it.
Some schools are genuinely turning the dial, but for lots of reasons it can be hard to accept this.
This problem isn’t unique to teaching.
Prior to the Joseph Lister’s pioneering work on antiseptics the death of very large numbers of patients after surgical procedures from infection was regarded by doctors as sad but inevitable. When Lister began achieving astonishing survival rates it was natural some of the first reactions were of disbelief; firstly, the improvement seemed too good to be true, and secondly the idea tiny invisible “microbes” could kill a powerful fully grown man was logically absurd.
These sceptical reactions were not a demonstration of low expectations – they were a sensible and entirely reasonable reaction to something they had no reason to believe and would have been fools to take on face value, especially when the new methods slowed surgeons down.
The initially sceptical are not the villains. The villains of the story are those who refused to look at the evidence or to change their practice even after it became clear a huge breakthrough had been made.
Why didn’t they change? It’s impossible to be certain. Perhaps they had wrapped up their personal egos in their professional status which meant they felt any admission of prior mistakes reflected on them as people. Perhaps they were overcompetitive and couldn’t deal with the idea a rival had found something they missed.
Lister’s attitude was not helpful. Arrogant, contemptuous and dismissive he called his peers “murderers”, which led to further defensiveness and entrenchment.
There’s lots to learn from this.
It’d probably be better if we viewed our expectations as expressions of our past experiences rather than expressions of our moral characters. Given all the rhetoric this isn’t easy. Quite recently a friend of mine questioned whether my expectations were as high as his, which for a second made me bristle until I thought about it and realised his perspective was different because he had spent much more time working in schools achieving excellent outcomes than I had.
It wasn’t personal.
Not taking things as personally would make it all much easier to talk about – easier to admire others and learn from them – easier to understand and appreciate nuance and context.
Those achieving brilliant things shouldn’t get carried away either – they should remember their results are better not because they are better people but because they have had the privilege of a different perspective.
It isn’t easy to get to this point – accountability metrics in England are inherently competitive and create winners and losers with all the associated hurt and hubris.
But education isn’t a game and when we play it like it is the losers are the children we all want the best for.
It is hard to talk about things when people don’t have a shared understanding of the words they use, and words usually don’t mean anything on their own – terminology is only given meaning through practical examples.
Two people – for example – both thinking they work at “warm-strict” schools can find differences in how they interpret the phrase mean their disciplinary systems have very little in common.
Discussion of “inclusion” is affected by this ambiguity, because the people using it often mean very different things.
What is an inclusive classroom?
To get to a point where this can be a meaningful question, definitions and examples are needed to avoid misunderstanding and misinterpretation.
On its own the word “inclusion” means nothing.
To be included or excluded there must be something to be included in or excluded from.
Alone, inclusion is only a word in an unfinished sentence.
Schools have multiple functions, and this makes assessing how inclusive they are tricky; a school can be more inclusive in some aspects of its practice than it is in others.
A friend of mine who works for Children’s Services helped me understand this a couple of years back, after I expressed frustration about internal truancy at the school I was working at and how being in the building was pointless if children in it weren’t learning.
He pointed out things weren’t as simple – that many of the vulnerable children he worked with were more of a danger to themselves and others if they weren’t under adult supervision at school. He recognised these children probably weren’t learning much in the schools he placed them in, but for them the protective function of a school was more important.
His definition of inclusion was different to mine and so were his success indicators. This is a tension I’m not comfortable with but get and respect.
Inclusion in classrooms is easier to understand because the primary purpose of classrooms is learning.
To be inclusive the children in them must learn.
Creating and sustaining an inclusive classroom is difficult at the best of times.
Children often lack an inherent drive to learn what is on a school curriculum, and many would often prefer to be elsewhere.
Children who would rather be doing other things are not unusual or deficient. Nothing has gone wrong if they don’t want to do algebra or osmosis. It is normal for children to want to do stuff they want to do more than stuff they don’t. This means teachers often have reluctant audiences and must be skilled at directing their attention and motivating them.
If a history teacher fails to spot a child is drawing anime characters in their jotter instead of answering a question on the feudal system, they are not included. If a child daydreams away the day and nobody intervenes, they’ve not been included even if they have been present in every lesson. If a child can’t read the text a teacher gives them and then copies out the questions instead of answering them, they have not been included.
Before getting anywhere near SEND designation and the specific difficulties some children face in learning it’s important to understand issues around inclusion in classrooms affect all children – not just a few, and that the degree of inclusion and exclusion to learning children experience day-to-day and lesson-by-lesson varies and fluctuates.
Inclusion is a continuum, affects all children and changes over time.
The continuum is affected by the teacher, the behaviour of children, the curriculum and lots of other things too.
It’s possible for a classroom to be more inclusive on Monday than it is on Wednesday and for it to be less inclusive in the first half of the lesson than it is in the second. If there is a topic on the curriculum that lots of children are naturally interested in, then it may be easier to make the room more inclusive than if it is a topic that’s less compelling, and this may vary from child to child.
The learning vulnerabilities of children change over time too – something as simple as the normal fluctuations in a child’s mood can make it easier or harder for a teacher to include them in the lesson – techniques that worked fine one week may not work as well or even at all the next week.
Neither inclusion nor exclusion are fixed states, and so trying to become inclusive as if this were a threshold to cross is to set an impossible aim, because the conditions affecting it change all the time and however inclusive a classroom is there is always more that could be done.
Instead of trying to become “inclusive”, teachers should aim to be more inclusive more of the time and work on strategies and practices that make this more likely.
Seeing things this way means better professional conversations and better decision making, because it removes the moral coding the term has assumed, which leads to defensiveness and theatrical performativity for other adults.
It also means people can talk more honestly about where they really are without fear of a potentially humiliating judgement, and might allow them to look at small, specific things they can do to move on the continuum without feeling the journey is too long and hard for it to be worthwhile even beginning.
2.The way children learn is more similar than different.
There are people who believe children learn in very different ways and this means inclusive classrooms require different children doing different things.
This belief was at its peak when VAK learning styles were in vogue, and while these have been for the most part driven out of education the underpinning beliefs remain with us.
This is probably because the existence of a diversity of learning styles is a view now held by much of society, and the claim humans learn in very different ways is often repeated as fact even though there isn’t strong evidence it is true.
Such beliefs make it logical to believe some children can’t learn much in school if teachers do not match instruction to the different ways in which individual children learn.
It has even led some to argue schools are not capable of being inclusive because they are incompatible with the pluralistic ways in which children learn.
This view was (in)famously explained by the Ken Robinson’s “Changing Education Paradigms” video, which went further and argued the uniformity of schools destroys the innate creativity of children.
Those that believe this think teaching classes of children the same thing in the same way is inherently exclusive because being inclusive means different children doing different things.
Some may be working on coloured paper.
Some may be wearing headphones or using computers or tablets.
Some may be using fiddle toys while others sit on beanbags on the floor.
In classrooms like this the teacher will not be instructing the whole class – instead they use different methods with different pupils. Occasionally overstimulated children who need a break leave the room quietly to stand outside while the re-regulate before rejoining the class.
The room has a cheerful productive hum about it.
This is what teacher training twenty or so years ago held up as the ideal, and while this vision isn’t as often explicitly articulated it still has influence, particularly when inclusion is discussed.
SEND support built around conceptions of “additional/different” can imply inclusion must mean different things for different children and don’t sufficiently emphasise even when individualised strategies have value, they can’t be effective in contexts of disorder and confusion.
Another cause of confusion is how the assessment of individual needs of children is often done through processes detached from their context as members of classes.
Teachers aren’t private tutors, and don’t typically teach children one-on-one, which makes teaching strategies designed to work in this context of limited use to a typical mainstream teacher – what might be a helpful suggestion for an adult working with just one child can be terrible advice for a teacher teaching a class of twenty-nine.
When they try the result can be chaos.
Often it means confusion, unreasonable workloads and an inability to establish and set up the predictable and consistent routines and systems that allow lots of different people to be in one room working together.
This is not unique to teaching – any context in which there are lots of humans in one place – from battlefield armies to building sites to football grounds have common expectations, rules and modes of behaviour allowing individuals to work together towards a common aim, and this usually means doing many things in the same way.
It would be odd if classrooms in schools were the only exception to this; to be included children need agreed expectations of how to rub along together.
A reasonable response might be it isn’t the pluralistic teaching style vision itself that’s wrong, but that those who attempt to enact it aren’t doing it right – that teachers need to be better trained and resourced and if they were then more children would be included and it would be possible to create places in which lots of difference and adaptation become part of the culture.
The argument deserves to be taken seriously because any good idea can be ruined by poor resourcing and implementation. We must not be afraid of idealism because with pragmatism and good logistics this is the only thing that changes the world for the better.
In this case, however, it doesn’t fly because there isn’t enough good evidence children do learn in very different ways, which means solutions designed from this point beg the question by proceeding from a flawed premise.
Even if it were true there would be significant questions around scalability because we don’t have good examples of where such approaches have been successful, which means there aren’t good examples from which the system can learn. Finally, it’s worth noting that calls for the entire restructuring of the entire system and hugely increased funding to pay for it all aren’t serious – this would be a huge risk and secondly because without the resourcing to pay for it there is no path to effective implantation.
We should always be open to new and compelling evidence but in the meantime good intentions can’t excuse poor outcomes – visions of an ideal world can’t be a reason to do things we know won’t work in the world the children in our classrooms are taught in.
What then works better?
To understand we could look at the needs of children identified as having SEND, found on documents like pupil passports and Education Health Care Plans.
Here it is striking how typical strategies that are features of strong teaching for all children are emphasised; behaviour management techniques such as “have consistent, predictable routines”, and “responds well to praise”, and teaching strategies such as “break tasks down into smaller steps”, and “regularly check for understanding.”
Such strategies aren’t suggesting some children need radically different teaching to other children, but the problem is by identifying these as individual strategies for individual children there’s an implication these are things a teacher must do just for them rather than aspects of teaching practice that should be in place for everyone.
It is possible I’m overreaching, and I’m open to the possibility there may be some circumstances and conditions in which to be inclusive teaching must be extensively adapted but it is implausible most of the approximately 40% of children identified as having a SEND need at some point while at school have been assigned this label because they all learn differently to others.
And even where children have been identified with explicit and specific learning difficulties there is still little evidence this requires wholesale changes to instruction.
Where adaptations are most obvious it is often not clear these are of benefit.
For example it is common for children experiencing difficulties in learning to be prescribed different coloured paper or lenses, despite there being no conclusive evidence such practice outperforms the placebo effect. Worryingly, this is true of many separate specific strategies and interventions claiming to help vulnerable children, and evidence they do help is often limited to anecdotes on company websites and promotional leaflets.
This isn’t me nitpicking over minutia – it is important teachers know this because if there is no evidence something does what it claims to, then they shouldn’t expect any learning benefit from applying it. Conversely if someone insists something does work then a teacher should expect to see benefits. Whether something is likely to work or not is important for teachers to know because it will affect their planning and instruction.
There are few magic bullets.
The basic tenants of good teaching remain the same for just about everyone.
Where teaching is good it usually shares common principles. Even where it may appear to be quite different – for example someone teaching a person with a profound learning disability how to use cutlery, differences are usually superficial with the deeper structures – breaking things down into small steps and modelling – the same.
All this often means teachers often don’t need to target supposedly personalised strategies at only children specifically identified as needing such strategies – it’s easier, more logical and more beneficial for more children for the teacher to make sure these things are features of their regular teaching not add-ons for a select, special few.
Teachers seeking to make classrooms more inclusive should first focus on things that need to be in place for all children before attempting to make extensive individual level adaptation and differentiation. Those that do may find they are meeting the needs of many more children as a result.
When this is done well, inclusive classrooms do not look very different to good classrooms in general.
They are calm, quiet, orderly and clear.
Teachers explain things clearly in small steps and then tell children explicitly what to do. They pause to check kids have understood. They respond and adapt if they don’t. They have high expectations and maintain high standards, being predictable and consistent with routines, rules, rewards and sanctions so that more children are included in the group.
They speak to children with respect and ensure children treat them and their classmates with respect too.
Inclusive classrooms are places in which the teacher knows children in the room as individuals and targets the right question to the right pupil.
Inclusive classrooms are first good classrooms.
While this may not be sufficient, it is necessary, and no amount of bespoke, additional pedagogy can compensate for poor teaching.
Teachers must be careful attempt to meet individual need through individual adaptation don’t compromise the necessary base conditions so that nobody succeeds – it’s much harder to break things down into logical clear steps for everyone if a teacher is trying to do this for lots of different children in different ways because they think this is what is required of them.
So why do teachers feel they must do this, even when it’s against their better judgement?
Perhaps sometimes it happens because teachers lack confidence in their ability to create and maintain a calm and disruption free environment, or when leaders insist on seeing different things for lots of different children because they think this is what inclusion means. An example of this happening might be a SENDCo visiting lessons, observing only children identified as having SEND and then asking for more individual differentiation as a solution to a disorderly environment in which few children are able to learn, when the correct solution is at class and not individual level.
This does not mean all children find things equally easy.
Those doing so are acting ethically and logically – as things stand there is no mechanism for parents to improve the overall quality of their child’s teaching, so if they are struggling seeking more bespoke support is their only option.
That said it seems unlikely we are seeing more struggling children because the nature of children in general has changed very quickly over the last few years.
More likely is in a context of rising poverty, increased time spent by children online, recruitment and retention issues, the collapse in children’s mental health services and declining real terms funding it is now harder for schools to create calm and positive classrooms for all, resulting in more kids struggling and being identified as having a SEND need.
This might mean better diagnosis or even overdiagnosis, but it is just as likely it means there are children with greater need who may have coped or even thrived before but are now not able to because we are experiencing the result of multi-system degradation.
These are difficult problems because many are not within the control of individual teachers.
While it is possible for teachers to be more inclusive when they focus on it, their efforts will be more impactful when school leadership supports them by creating conducive conditions to try – as hard as it is – to mitigate the effects of wider systemic failures.
All children benefit from consistency and predictability and if the learning and behavioural norms at a school aren’t clearly communicated and understood then associated confusion and disorder makes it hard for teachers to include children in their lessons.
Again, I think of my own daughter here.
When I think of her going to secondary school in a few years’ time I worry most about potential lack of clarity around things like how to behave at social times and on the corridor between lessons – if this is left to her to work out she’s more likely to make poorer choices and become dysregulated, which would make it harder for her to focus on her learning and harder for her teachers to include her.
This – again -is an example of how attending to getting the basics right for all children benefits those most likely to be marginalised most.
Answers will not be found in throwing more life belts to our drowning sailors – instead we need a better ship.
But there are dangers to what I’ve said so far -the most serious is a misinterpretation if the basics of schools are improved there would be nobody left requiring personalised support, and this isn’t true.
It is always possible to be more inclusive – the point of the continuum – and a calm, quiet, orderly, predictable, clear classroom can still be exclusive if a teacher allows children who find stuff harder than others to flounder.
3. Classrooms are compromises and more should be made in favour of those who would otherwise struggle most.
Designing any system that perfectly meet everyone’s needs is impossible because the interests and preferences of individuals are often opposed to each other. Trying to meet them all usually means nobody getting what they need.
The most able and knowledgeable children may prefer to learn independently but given how children are organised into classes allowing this for them means allowing it for all, and this has a negative effect on other children, and particularly those who find learning hardest who need the most direction and guidance.
A good example of this is the range of the primary curriculum and the size of the GCSE curriculum, which are too large.
A big curriculum is benefits those finding it easiest to learn because to cover all of it teachers must go too fast for those who struggle. At the end those finding learning easiest are those who gain top grades and access to more prestigious, high-status destinations. Those that find it hardest are least likely to see beauty or purpose in what they do and most likely to leave with qualifications of little practical use or value.
The purported purpose of SEND designation and – even more so EHCPs – is to balance this by requiring teachers and other education professionals pay more attention and afford more resource to these children than others. In many cases there needn’t be too much of a tension, and strong foundations make it easier for schools to identify and support the children who need help the most.
But while what works for all children usually benefits those with additional challenges most there will still always be children who require decisions to be made assertively in their favour even if this means others losing out.
Sometimes this is easy to see and straightforward to implement.
If a child with a hearing impairment needs to sit on the centre of the front row, then this need clearly outweighs the need of other children who might learn more if they sat there.
Similarly, if a visually impaired child requires a worksheet is blown up to A3 it would be unacceptable for the teacher to refuse to do it because it adds to their workload.
More difficult is – for example – what a teacher should do if almost all their class is ready to write an essay but some do not yet have sufficient mastery of the content to do it properly.
What should a teacher who wants to be more inclusive do in a situation like this?
Here teachers often – maybe usually – go with what they perceive the majority to be.
If most children are ready for the essay, then it’s time to write the essay and those that aren’t must muddle through as best they can.
Compromises like this may seem to be appropriately utilitarian in how they appear to be what’s best for the greater good, but they clearly favour the already advantaged most, which is uncomfortable because it is inherently inequitable.
This is a danger inherent in all societies and was written about well by John Stuart Mill – his arguments were latter summarised in the phrase “The Tyranny of the Majority”, which is what happens when what is best for most of a group is exclusively prioritised.
A more equitable compromise might be more pre work for those who aren’t ready even if this means some children must wait before beginning if the general conditions aren’t conducive to allowing some children to start while others receive more instruction.
Once children are working on their essays a more inclusive teacher would target individual support on the children experiencing most difficulty. This is equitable decision making because while the children finding the work easiest would also benefit from greater personal intervention, those struggling most lose out more if they don’t get help.
There’s nuance here too, and the concept of a continuum becomes important again.
Children aren’t either included or excluded in learning – they can be more or less included and including a child who grasps things easily more by, say, providing the class with more in-depth material or going at a pace that best suits them means those who struggle more are included less.
This might make them and their families happy, but it comes at a greater cost to those who struggle more, so it’s more equitable to make more decisions more in the interests of those who find learning harder especially when the system overall is slanted towards those who find it easiest.
This at scale would probably means trying to cover less.
This may seem radical but is not a fringe view – it’s one shared by Dylan Wiliam, emeritus professor at the UCL Institute of Education too.
None of this can be effective if strong general conditions aren’t embedded, and this is a mistake teachers can make through the best of intentions; if, for example, a class slides into talking and other off task behaviour when their teacher moves to individual support then this individual support won’t be effective and the result will probably be a-deterioration in general standards, which will affect those who struggle most making any individual support they receive ineffective.
Another helpful way of looking at this for classroom teachers is to first consider core principles of good instruction in general and then take steps to make sure every member of their class benefits from them, not just those who find learning comparatively easy.
Rosenshine’s Principles – adopted by many schools and teachers as a helpful heuristic for effective teaching – is a good place to begin.
Let’s explore just one – secure a high success rate.
This is easier to do for some children than others because of different starting points and differing learning abilities. Here a teacher who is being less inclusive might move on to new material after checking for understanding techniques show only some children have learned most of what they have just taught.
This is exclusive to children who have not achieved a high success rate because it means the teacher moving onto new material before they are ready. This means they can’t move onto the next stage – almost certainly in hierarchical subjects such as maths – and are excluded from the point at which they lost the thread. A teacher who is being more inclusive would spend more time responding and re-teaching so more children were able to secure a high success rate and be ready for the next stage.
And again, in this instance generally better teaching for all is likely to be inherently more inclusive because if – for example – explanations have been well sequenced and rehearsed to clarity then more children will achieve a high success rate meaning fewer requiring re-teaching and the teacher able to be more targeted and effective with those that do.
This is messy and complicated – and the only people able to decide what and how compromises should be made are classroom teachers as nobody else is close enough to the problem.
While it can be tempting for leaders and others to try and micromanage this, it doesn’t work.
4. Teachers should be in control of the decisions they make.
Children do not usually get a SEND identification in the same way unwell people receive a medical diagnosis.
They are assigned the label for many different reasons in many ways, and there are good reasons to be cautious about assuming there is shared meaning of the terms used.
There isn’t a standardised process or agreed criteria for adding a child to a school’s Special Educational Needs Register.
In many schools there is probably more process and procedure over buying a new laptop computer.
Indeed, the most significant predictor of whether a child is identified with SEND is the school they attend rather than anything about them.
We don’t know how much children identified as having SEND have in common with each other.
We don’t even really know who they are, and we don’t know whether they have enough in common to be grouped together at all.
Theoretically subdivisions such as “learning difficulty,” “cognition and learning”, and “social, emotional and mental health” should bring signal to the noise, but often they don’t because they too have no shared meaning; one setting might identify a child as having a cognition and learning difficulty, whereas another might not assess them has having a special educational need at all.
In practice a designation is made because a child isn’t attaining as highly as peers and nobody really knows why.
This makes it quite possible for a child to be identified as having special educational needs because they’re summer born, missed a lot of school or even because they’ve had limited access to good teaching.
Much of the information available isn’t secure enough for teachers to make decisions on without drawing on other evidence – most importantly what they notice about the learning of the child in their classroom. It means they can’t assume advice they are given on how to teach – say – children with cognition and learning difficulties is relevant to children in their classes because they can’t be certain the terms and criteria mean the same thing to everyone working with that child.
Similarly, while recommendations made by non-teaching professionals such as educational psychologists, counsellors and speech and language specialists can be useful, these recommendations are often not contextualised to the specific conditions in which a teacher encounters a child.
And this matters.
It’s striking how dissimilar the experiences of different teachers teaching the same child often are and the reasons for this can have little to do with how closely an individual plan is being followed.
This doesn’t mean teachers who want to be more inclusive should ignore information made available to them, but they should be allowed to be wise arbitrators of how best to use, interpret and apply advice, within legal frameworks meaning there are instances in which they must follow some directives for good reason.
The ability and capacity of teachers to do this varies, but nobody is capable of better decisions because nobody else is in the room with that child in that setting at that moment in time.
This is inevitable, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it even if they wanted to.
Ultimately, schools are set up for teachers to work with classes, and this means they must make minute-by minute decisions about how best to teach and include all pupils.
Micro-managing and imposing numerous and specific directions on them as to how to do this may be well-meaning but fails to account for the infinitive complexity within which teachers must work even if the way their pupils learn is mostly the same. It also invites in performativity; doing stuff not because it is really in the interests of children but to appease and satisfy other adults.
Where the evidence base is secure this might work but where it is not it doesn’t.
Better to empower and educate teachers to make better decisions than try and make decisions for them using incomplete and flawed information detached from the classrooms they work in.
5. Inclusion is the main business of classroom teachers.
Inclusion is primarily the business of classroom teachers.
Nobody can do it for them.
Attempts to try will fail.
“Inclusion” can’t be done by a SENDCO and Teaching Assistants alone – indeed this is a common concern and complaint of those who work with children identified with SEND who can often feel they are marginalised and siloed as if the education of a potentially hundreds of young people were only their responsibility.
There are just too many children who need great practice for a discrete specialised department or strategy to ever meet need.
Inclusion cannot be done by a strategy or policy document, or an IEP or a pupil passport or an EHCP.
Classrooms can only be made more inclusive by teachers, and they can only do this if they see the education of every child as their responsibility. They need practical support and help that makes it easier for them to fulfil this responsibility. This support must be clear and respectful of the contexts in which they work because when it isn’t it is too easy to think inclusion is too difficult and devolve responsibility for thinking about it to others. Support they get needs to start with the basics – leadership that makes schools calm, safe places in which there is room to think and decisions aren’t made in response to crisis.
Support should be dialogic and open to the possibility it might need to be changed and adapted when teachers find it isn’t helpful.
Inclusion – even when it is the first word of a completed sentence – is a verb not a noun, and teachers are the only people who can do it.
It must change as children and circumstances change. It must be worked on every minute. It is at the centre of good teaching, and teaching is not good if it is not inclusive.
It doesn’t need to feel mysterious or too hard to do, because most of it is about being a good teacher and seeing all pupils of equal value and having the same entitlement to learn. Seeing them as having more in common with each other than different.
I know to some this is a threat and must respect that, but to me it isn’t.
I don’t want either of my children to be thought of as special if this means being seen as fundamentally different to other children.
I want them to be seen as I and the people who know them best see them – perfectly normal, healthy human children requiring the things all children need to be happy and included in learning at school.
We are lucky, I know.
My children go to a school that understands this and sees inclusion in learning as a right both have – that respects the inherent humanity and value of all children.
This protects us from the SEND system which is failing everywhere.
It makes it matter less if documents are copy-paste terrible, the appointments cancelled, the advice inappropriate or even plain wrong – because the teachers are good teachers, and their values mean they include both my girls as much as it is reasonable to expect any child to be included in a system in which compromises must be made.
My final point is – I hope – the logical culmination and expression of the previous four.
Inclusion is primarily the business of classroom teachers and nobody can do it for them.
While the superstructure around inclusion can obscure this it does not make it any less true.
“Inclusion” can’t be done by a SENDCO and Teaching Assistants alone – indeed this is a common concern and complaint of those who work with children identified with SEND who can often feel they are marginalised and siloed as if the education of a potentially hundreds of young people were only their responsibility.
There are just too many children who need great practice for a discrete specialised department or strategy to ever meet need.
Inclusion cannot be done by a strategy or policy document, or an IEP or a pupil passport or an EHCP.
Classrooms can only be made more inclusive by teachers, and they can only do this if they see the education of every child as their responsibility. They need practical support and help that makes it easier for them to fulfil this responsibility. This support must be clear and respectful of the contexts in which they work because when it isn’t it is too easy to think inclusion is too difficult and devolve responsibility for thinking about it to others. Support they get needs to start with the basics – leadership that makes schools calm, safe places in which there is room to think and decisions aren’t made in response to crisis.
Support should be dialogic and open to the possibility it might need to be changed and adapted when teachers find it isn’t helpful.
Inclusion – even when it is the first word of a completed sentence – is a verb not a noun, and teachers are the only people who can do it.
It must change as children and circumstances change. It must be worked on every minute. It is at the centre of good teaching, and teaching is not good if it is not inclusive.
It doesn’t need to feel mysterious or too hard to do, because most of it is about being a good teacher and seeing all pupils of equal value and having the same entitlement to learn. Seeing them as having more in common with each other than different.
I know to some this is a threat and must respect that, but to me it isn’t.
I don’t want either of my children to be thought of as special if this means being seen as fundamentally different to other children.
I want them to be seen as I and the people who know them best see them – perfectly normal, healthy human children requiring the things all children need to be happy and included in learning at school.
We are lucky, I know.
My children go to a school that understands this and sees inclusion in learning as a right both have – that respects the inherent humanity and value of all children.
This protects us.
It makes it matter less if documents are copy-paste terrible, the appointments cancelled, the advice inappropriate or even plain wrong – because the teachers are good teachers, and their values mean they include both my girls as much as it is reasonable to expect any child to be included in a system in which compromises must be made.
This is Part 4 of a series on making classrooms more inclusive. Part 1 can be found here, Part 2 here, and Part 3 here.
Children do not have SEND in the same way unwell people receive a diagnosis.
They are assigned the label for many different reasons in many different ways, and there are good reasons to be cautious about assuming there is shared meaning of the terms used.
There isn’t a standardised process or agreed criteria for adding a child to a school’s Special Educational Needs Register.
In many schools there is probably more process and procedure over buying a new laptop computer.
Indeed, the most significant predictor of whether a child is identified with SEND is the school they attend rather than anything about them.
We don’t know how much children identified as having SEND have in common with each other.
We don’t even really know who they are, and we don’t know whether they have enough in common to be grouped together at all.
Theoretically subdivisions such as “learning difficulty,” “cognition and learning”, and “social, emotional and mental health” should bring signal to the noise, but often they don’t because they too have no shared meaning; one setting might identify a child as having a cognition and learning difficulty, whereas another might not assess them has having a special educational need at all.
In practice a designation is made because a child isn’t attaining as highly as peers and nobody really knows why.
This makes it quite possible for a child to be identified as having special educational needs because they’re summer born, missed a lot of school or even because they’ve had limited access to good teaching.
This is important because it means much of the information available isn’t secure enough for teachers to make decisions on without drawing on other evidence – most importantly what they notice about the learning of the child in their classroom. It means they can’t assume advice they are given on how to teach – say – children with cognition and learning difficulties is relevant to children in their classes because they can’t be certain the terms and criteria mean the same thing to everyone working with that child.
Similarly, while recommendations made by non-teaching professionals such as educational psychologists, counsellors and speech and language specialists can be useful, these recommendations are often not contextualised to the specific conditions in which a teacher encounters a child.
And this matters. It’s striking how dissimilar the experiences of different teachers teaching the same child often are and the reasons for this can have little to do with how closely an individual plan is being followed.
This doesn’t mean teachers who want to be more inclusive should ignore information made available to them, but they should be allowed to be wise arbitrators of how best to use, interpret and apply advice, within legal frameworks meaning there are instances in which they must follow some directives for good reason.
The ability and capacity of teachers to do this varies, but nobody is capable of better decisions because nobody else is in the room with that child in that setting at that moment in time.
This is inevitable, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it even if they wanted to.
Ultimately, schools are set up for teachers to work with classes, and this means they must make minute-by minute decisions about how best to teach and include all pupils.
Micro-managing and imposing numerous and specific directions on them as to how to do this may be well-meaning but fails to account for the infinitive complexity within which teachers must work even if the way their pupils learn is mostly the same. It also invites in performativity; doing stuff not because it is really in the interests of children but to appease and satisfy other adults.
Where the evidence base is secure this might work but where it is not it doesn’t.
Better to empower and educate teachers to make better decisions than try and make decisions for them using incomplete and flawed information detached from the classrooms they work in.
This is part 3 in a series of 5. Part 1 can be found here, and Part 2 here.
Designing any system perfectly meeting everyone’s needs is impossible because the interests and preferences of individuals are often opposed to each other. Trying to meet them all usually means nobody getting what they need.
The most able and knowledgeable children may prefer to learn independently, but given how children are organised into classes allowing this for them means allowing it for all, and this has a negative effect on other children, and particularly those who find learning hardest needing the most direction and guidance.
A good example of this is the range of the primary curriculum and the size of the GCSE curriculum, which are too large.
A big curriculum is benefits those finding it easiest to learn because to cover all of it teachers must go too fast for those who struggle. At the end those finding learning easiest are those who gain top grades and access to more prestigious, high-status destinations. Those that find it hardest are least likely to see beauty or purpose in what they do and most likely to leave with qualifications of little practical use or value.
The purported purpose of SEND designation and – even more so EHCPs – is to balance this by requiring teachers and other education practitioners pay more attention and afford more resource to these children than others. In many cases there needn’t be too much of a tension. Strong foundations make it easier for schools to identify and support the children who need help the most.
What works for all children benefits those with additional challenges most, but there will still always be children who require decisions to be made assertively in their favour even if this means others losing out.
Sometimes this is easy to see and straightforward to implement.
If a child with a hearing impairment needs to sit on the centre of the front row, then this need clearly outweighs the need of other children who might learn more if they sat there.
Similarly, if a visually impaired child requires a worksheet is blown up to A3 it would be unacceptable for the teacher to refuse to do it because it adds to their workload.
More difficult is – for example – what a teacher should do if almost all their class is ready to write an essay but some do not yet have sufficient mastery of the content to do it properly.
What should a teacher who wants to be more inclusive do in a situation like this?
Here teachers often – maybe usually – go with what they perceive the majority to be.
If most children are ready for the essay, then it’s time to write the essay and those that aren’t must muddle through as best they can.
Compromises like this may seem to be appropriately utilitarian in how they appear to be what’s best for the greater good, but they clearly favour the already advantaged most, which is uncomfortable because it is inherently inequitable.
This is a danger inherent in all societies and was written about well by John Stuart Mill – his arguments were latter summarised in the phrase “The Tyranny of the Majority”, which is what happens when what is best for most of a group is exclusively prioritised.
A more equitable compromise might be more pre work for those who aren’t ready even if this means some children must wait before beginning if the general conditions aren’t conducive to allowing some children to start while others receive more instruction.
Once children are working on their essays a more inclusive teacher would target individual support on the children experiencing most difficulty. This is equitable decision making because while the children finding the work easiest would also benefit from greater personal intervention, those struggling most lose out more if they don’t get help.
There’s nuance here too, and the concept of a continuum becomes important again.
Children aren’t either included or excluded in learning – they can be either be more or less included and including a child who grasps things easily more by, say, providing the class with more in-depth material or going at a pace that best suits them means those who struggle more are included less.
This might make them and their families happy but it comes at a great cost to those who struggle more – so it’s more equitable to make more decisions more in the interests of those who find learning harder especially when the system overall is slanted towards those who find it easiest.
This at scale would probably means trying to cover less.
This may seem radical but is not a fringe view – it’s one shared by Dylan Wiliam, emeritus professor at the UCL Institute of Education too.
None of this can be effective if strong general conditions aren’t embedded, and this is a mistake teachers can make through the best of intentions; if, for example, a class slides into talking and other off task behaviour when their teacher moves to individual support then this individual support won’t be effective and the result will probably be a-deterioration in general standards, which will affect those who struggle most making any individual support they receive ineffective.
Another helpful way of looking at this for classroom teachers is to first consider core principles of good instruction in general and then take steps to make sure every member of their class benefits from them, not just those who find learning comparatively easy.
Rosenshine’s Principles – adopted by many schools and teachers as a helpful heuristic for effective teaching – is a good place to begin.
Let’s explore just one – secure a high success rate.
This is easier to do for some children than others because of different starting points and differing learning abilities. Here a teacher who is being less inclusive might move on to new material after checking for understanding techniques show only some children have learned most of what they have just taught.
This is exclusive to children who have not achieved a high success rate because it means the teacher moving onto new material before they are ready. This means they can’t move onto the next stage – almost certainly in hierarchical subjects such as maths – and are excluded from the point at which they lost the thread. A teacher who is being more inclusive would spend more time responding and re-teaching so more children were able to secure a high success rate and be ready for the next stage.
And again, in this instance generally better teaching for all is likely to be inherently more inclusive because if – for example – explanations have been well sequenced and rehearsed to clarity then more children will achieve a high success rate meaning fewer requiring re-teaching and the teacher able to be more targeted and effective with those that do
This is all very messy and complicated – and the only people really able to decide what and how compromises should be made are classroom teachers as nobody else is close enough to the problem.
While it can be tempting for leaders and others to try and micromanage this, it doesn’t work.
This is the focus of the next post in this series – why teachers should be in control of the decisions they make in classrooms.
Part 1 – Inclusion is a contiuum – can be found here.
There are myths about how children learn which make inclusion appear hard for teachers to do.
Some believe because children learn in very different ways, inclusive mainstream classrooms must mean lots of different children doing different things.
This belief was at its peak when VAK learning styles were in vogue, and while these have been for the most part driven out of education the underpinning beliefs remain with us. This is probably because the existence of a diversity of learning styles is a view held by much of society, and the claim humans learn in very different ways is often repeated as fact even though there isn’t strong evidence it is true.
Such beliefs make it logical to believe some children don’t learn much in school because teachers do not match instruction to the different ways in which individual children learn.
It has even led some to argue schools are not capable of being inclusive because they are incompatible with the pluralistic ways in which children learn.
This view was famously explained by the late Ken Robinson’s “Changing Education Paradigms” video, which went further and argued the uniformity of schools destroys the innate creativity of children.
Those believing this think teaching classes of children the same thing in the same way is inherently exclusive.
To them being inclusive means different children doing different things.
Some may be working on coloured paper.
Some may be wearing headphones or using computers or tablets.
Some may be using fiddle toys while others sit on beanbags on the floor.
In classrooms like this the teacher will not be instructing the whole class – instead they use different methods with different pupils. Occasionally overstimulated children who need a break leave the room quietly to stand outside while the re-regulate before rejoining the class.
The room has a cheerful productive hum about it.
If you’ve been teaching for as long as I have this might all sound uncomfortably familiar.
It’s what teacher training twenty or so years ago held up as ideal, and while this vision isn’t as often explicitly articulated it still has influence, particularly when inclusion is discussed.
SEND support built around conceptions of “additional/different” can imply inclusion must mean different things for different children and don’t sufficiently emphasise, even when individualised strategies have value, they can’t be effective in contexts of disorder and confusion.
A further driver is how the assessment of individual needs of children is often done through processes detached from their context as members of classes. Teachers aren’t private tutors, and don’t typically teach children one-on-one, which makes teaching strategies designed to work in this context of limited use to a typical mainstream teacher.
What might be a very helpful suggestion for an adult working with just one child can be terrible advice for a teacher teaching a class of twenty-nine.
When they try the result can be chaos.
Often it means confusion, unreasonable workloads and an inability to establish and set up the predictable and consistent routines and systems that allow lots of different people to be in one room working together.
This is not unique to teaching – any context in which there are lots of humans in one place – from battlefield armies to building sites to football grounds have common expectations, rules and modes of behaviour allowing individuals to work together towards a common aim, and this usually means doing the same things in the same way.
It would be odd if classrooms in schools were the only exception to this, so to be included children need agreed expectations of how to rub along together.
A reasonable response might be it isn’t the vision itself that’s wrong, but that those who attempt to enact it aren’t doing it right – that teachers need to be better trained and resourced in facilitating different children doing different things, and if they were then more children would be included and it would be possible to create cultures in which lots of difference and adaptation become part of the culture.
I would love this to be true, and the argument deserves to be taken seriously because any good idea can be ruined by poor resourcing and implementation. We must not be afraid of idealism because with pragmatism and good logistics this is the only thing that changes the world for the better.
Would we, for example, have an NHS if there hadn’t been people with outrageous and audacious vision? People who dared to dream of better worlds?
In this case, however, it doesn’t fly.
There isn’t enough good evidence children do learn in very different ways – I’ll say more about this in a later post – and we don’t have good examples of where such approaches have been successful so there is nowhere to go to for the essential logistical stuff.
I am open to evidence that might change my mind, but in the meantime good intentions can’t excuse poor outcomes – visions of an ideal world can’t be a reason to do things we know won’t work in the world the children in our classrooms are taught in.
What then works better?
To understand we could look at the needs of children identified as having SEND, found on documents like pupil passports and Education Health Care Plans.
It’s striking how typical strategies that are features of strong teaching for all children are emphasised; behaviour management techniques such as “have consistent, predictable routines”, and “responds well to praise”, and teaching strategies such as “break tasks down into smaller steps”, and “regularly check for understanding.”
Such strategies aren’t suggesting some children need radically different teaching to other children, but the problem is by identifying these as individual strategies for individual children there’s an implication these are things a teacher must do just for them rather than aspects of teaching practice that should be in place for everyone.
This is a lesson I have learned through my own daughter who has Williams Syndrome and an associated learning disability. Some of her differences are genetically driven and there’s fascinating research around it all.
To begin with this led me to believe she might need radically different pedagogies to other children.
I went to the best research I could get hold of and found while she was likely to be more distractable, have and experience more difficulty with visual-spatial task than most children without Williams Syndrome the way she learned was largely the same.
What worked for other children would usually work for her.
And so it has proved to be.
She is successfully learning to read through a synthetic phonics programme and numeracy through counting, spotting patterns and using manipulatives.
She goes a bit slower than some others and needs more expert, careful instruction in more frequent, shorter bursts, but there are no radical differences in method because there aren’t radical differences to how she learns.
She doesn’t need teaching to be different – she needs what works to be done expertly.
It is possible I’m overreaching, and I’m open to the possibility there may be some circumstances and conditions in which to be inclusive teaching must be extensively adapted but it is implausible most of the approximately 40% of children identified as having a SEND need at some point while at school have been assigned this label because they learn differently to others.
Even where children have been identified with explicit and specific learning difficulties there is still little evidence this requires wholesale changes to instruction.
Where adaptations are most obvious it is often not clear these are of benefit.
For example it is common for children experiencing difficulties in learning to be prescribed different coloured paper or lenses, despite there being no conclusive evidence such practice outperforms the placebo effect. Worryingly, this is true of many separate specific strategies and interventions claiming to help vulnerable children, and evidence they do help is often limited to anecdotes on company websites and promotional leaflets.
This isn’t me nitpicking over minutia – it is important information for teachers because if there is no evidence something does what it claims to, then it means they shouldn’t expect any learning benefit from applying it, which has important implications for their planning. Conversely if someone insists something does work then a teacher should expect to see benefits, which again means they need to adjust take full advantage of them.
As much as we may wish otherwise there are few magic bullets. The basic tenants of good teaching remain the same for just about everyone.
Where teaching is good it usually shares common principles. Even where it may appear to be quite different – for example someone teaching a person with a profound learning disability how to use cutlery, differences are usually superficial with the deeper structures – breaking things down into small steps and modelling – the same.
All this often means teachers often don’t need to target supposedly personalised strategies at only children specifically identified as needing such strategies – it’s easier, more logical and more beneficial for more children for the teacher to make sure these things are features of their regular teaching not add-ons for a select, special few.
Teachers seeking to make classrooms more inclusive should first focus on things that need to be in place for all children before attempting to make extensive individual level adaptation and differentiation. Those that do may find they are meeting the needs of many more children as a result.
When this is done well, I don’t think inclusive classrooms look very different to good classrooms in general.
They are calm, quiet, orderly and clear.
Teachers explain things clearly in small steps and then tell children explicitly what to do. They pause to check kids have understood. They respond and adapt if they don’t. They have high expectations and maintain high standards, being predictable and consistent with routines, rules, rewards and sanctions so that more children are included in the group.
They speak to children with respect and ensure children treat them and their classmates with respect too.
Inclusive classrooms are places in which the teacher knows children in the room as individuals and targets the right question to the right pupil.
An inclusive classroom is first a good classroom.
While this may not be sufficient, it is necessary.
No amount of bespoke, additional pedagogy can compensate for poor teaching and teachers must be careful attempt to meet individual need through individual adaptation don’t compromise the necessary base conditions so that nobody succeeds – it’s much harder to break things down into logical clear steps for everyone if a teacher is trying to do this for lots of different children in different ways because they think this is what is required of them.
So why do teachers feel they must do this, even when it’s against their better judgement?
Perhaps sometimes it happens because teachers lack confidence in their ability to create and maintain a calm and disruption free environment, or when leaders insist on seeing different things for lots of different children because they think this is what inclusion means. An example of this happening might be a SENDCo visiting lessons, observing only children identified as having SEND and then asking for more individual differentiation as a solution to a disorderly environment in which few children are able to learn, when the correct solution is at class and not individual level.
Stopping here would be misleading. Perhaps even disingenuous and dangerous.
Those doing so are acting ethically and logically – as things stand there is no mechanism for parents to improve the overall quality of their child’s teaching, so if they are struggling seeking more bespoke support is their only option.
That said it seems unlikely we are seeing more struggling children because the nature of children in general has changed very quickly over the last few years.
More likely is in a context of rising poverty, increased time spent by children online, recruitment and retention issues, the collapse in children’s mental health services and declining real terms funding it is now harder for schools to create calm and positive classrooms for all, resulting in more kids struggling and being identified as having a SEND need.
This might mean better diagnosis or even overdiagnosis, but it is just as likely it means there are children with greater need who may have coped or even thrived before but are now not able to because we are experiencing the result of multi-system degradation.
These are difficult problems because many are not within the control of individual teachers.
While it is possible for teachers to be more inclusive when they focus on it, their efforts will be more impactful when school leadership supports them by creating conducive conditions to try – as hard as it is – to mitigate the effects of wider systemic failures.
All children benefit from consistency and predictability and if the learning and behavioural norms at a school aren’t clearly communicated and understood then associated confusion and disorder makes it hard for teachers to include children in their lessons.
Again, I think of my own daughter here.
When I think of her going to secondary school in a few years’ time I worry most about potential lack of clarity around things like how to behave at social times and on the corridor between lessons – if this is left to her to work out she’s likely to make poorer choices and become dysregulated, which would make it very hard for her to focus on her learning and so harder for her teachers to include her.
This – again -is an example of how attending to getting the basics right for all children benefits those most likely to be marginalised most.
Answers will not be found in throwing more life belts to our drowning sailors – instead we need to fix the ship.
All this said it would be wrong to say if we make schools better in general there will be nobody left requiring personalised support, and there’s always a danger the sorts of thing I’ve said so far might be deliberately misunderstood by those who think we spend too much money to say we can spend less.
Categorically this is not what I think.
It is always possible to be more inclusive – the point of the continuum I talked about earlier – and a calm, quiet, orderly, predictable, clear classroom can still be exclusive if a teacher allows children who find stuff harder than others to flounder.
This is rarer and more disturbing– rooms in which children sit doing nothing because they don’t understand while others around them work productively is disturbing to think about.
My next post is about how teachers might best support those who find learning harder.
Things are hard to talk about when people don’t have a shared understanding of the meaning of words they use.
Even the difference between formative and summative assessment can lead to chaotic discussion if there isn’t an agreed definition of the two terms.
The problem is further complicated by how a term can’t mean anything on its own – abstract positions are given meaning by practical examples. Two people – for example – both thinking they work at “warm-strict” schools can find differences in how they interpret the phrase mean their disciplinary systems have very little in common.
Discussion of “inclusion” is affected by this ambiguity. The word is used all the time but the people using it often mean very different things, and it can’t mean anything in the abstract.
What then is an inclusive classroom?
To get to a point where this can be a meaningful question, I must define and exemplify what I mean if I am to avoid misunderstandings and misinterpretations.
The first thing to get straight is the word “inclusion” means nothing.
To be included or excluded there must be something to be included in or excluded from.
For inclusion to have meaning there must first be something to be part of.
On its own inclusion is just the first word of an unfinished sentence.
Schools – whether we want this to be true or not – have multiple functions and this makes assessing how inclusive they are tricky. A school can be more inclusive in some aspects of its practice than it is in others.
A friend of mine who works for Children’s Services in Leeds helped me understand this a couple of years back.
I expressed frustration to him about internal truancy at the school I was working at and how being in the building was pointless if children in it weren’t learning.
He pointed out things weren’t as simple – that many of the vulnerable children he worked with were a danger to themselves and others if they weren’t under adult supervision at school. He recognised that these children probably weren’t learning much in the schools he placed them in, but that for them the protective function of a school was more important. His definition of inclusion was different to mine and so were his success indicators. This is a tension I’m not comfortable with but get and respect.
I don’t need to get into all that because in this series I’m only focused on inclusive classrooms.
While it may be no easier to achieve, I think it’s easier to understand.
The primary purpose of classrooms is learning.
To be inclusive the children in them must learn what teachers wants them to learn.
Like schools they do have other functions too – for example learning how to behave in a group – but being good at these other functions can’t compensate for children in them not learning anything.
This does not mean all children in one year group should be all learning the same thing. By trying to do so schools usually end up being less inclusive – for example insisting children who do not know how to read well attend all timetabled lessons regardless of whether they understand a word or not.
Being more inclusive does mean adapting curriculum so it’s appropriate for children and in practice at school level this does sometimes mean children learning different things – for example a child with learning disability in mainstream because there are no special school places available would be badly served if they had to follow an identical curriculum to their non-learning-disabled friends.
But even when this is done well it is still hard.
Many children lack the inherent drive to learn what is on a school curriculum.
Many would prefer to be elsewhere, and this doesn’t mean anything has gone wrong.
Children who would rather be doing other things are not unusual or deficient. They are normal children. If all children wanted to be in school learning, then we would not need to compel attendance.
The often-reluctant nature of their audiences means teachers must be skilled in directing attention and motivating them. If a history teacher fails to spot a child is drawing anime characters in their jotter instead of answering a question on the feudal system, they are not included. If a child daydreams away the day and nobody intervenes, they’ve not been included even if they have been present and happy enough all day. If a child can’t read the text a teacher gives them and then copies out the questions instead of answering them, they have not been included.
Before getting anywhere near SEND designation and the specific difficulties some children face in learning it’s important to understand issues around inclusion in classrooms affect all children – not just a few, and that the degree of inclusion and exclusion to learning children experience day-to-day and lesson-by-lesson varies and fluctuates.
This takes me to my first principle; inclusion is a continuum, affects all children and changes over time.
The continuum is affected by the teacher, the behaviour of children, the curriculum and lots of other things too.
It’s possible for a classroom to be more inclusive on Monday than it is on Wednesday, for it to be less inclusive in the first half of the lesson than it is in the second. If there is a topic on the curriculum that lots of children are naturally interested in, then it may be easier to make the room more inclusive than if it is a topic that’s less compelling, and this may vary from child to child.
The learning vulnerabilities of children change over time too – something as simple as the normal fluctuations in a child’s mood can make it easier or harder for a teacher to include them in the lesson – techniques that worked fine one week may not work as well or even at all the next week.
Neither inclusion nor exclusion are fixed states, and trying to become inclusive is quixotic because the conditions affecting it change all the time and however inclusive we are there is always more that could be done.
Instead of trying to become “inclusive”, teachers should aim to be more inclusive more of the time and work on strategies and practices that make this more likely.
Seeing things this way means better professional conversations, because it removes the moral coding the term has assumed which leads to understandable defensiveness and performativity for other adults. It also means people can talk more honestly about where they really are without fear of a potentially humiliating judgement, and might allow them to look at small, specific things they can do to move on the contiuum without feeling the journey is too long for it to be worthwhile even beginning.
His most recent blog post unpicks the issues caused by unwise group level announcements and I found it challenging.
A lot of what he identified as problems is present in my teaching, and it made me see there are issues I didn’t know I had.
That’s annoying because it requires a response.
Here’s a few things I say to classes in lessons and the reasons that aren’t necessary.
(As a class enters the room) “No talking once you’re in the room, please.” (They know this)
(As the class sits down) “Answer the Do Now questions.” (They know this)
(As a class works on a piece of writing. “Remember to include evidence to support your argument.” (Non- specific so doesn’t add anything)
(As they near the end of a task) “Just a minute left now!” (There’s a timer at the front of the room)
Even before I read Adam’s post, I knew saying stuff like this was silly and sometimes wondered why I was doing it. Who were the comments for? What was I trying to achieve?
I had no good answer and yet carried on with my occasional interjections – the sort of annoying director’s commentary that was faddish as special features on DVDs a few years back.
(“In just a minute I’ll ask them some questions”)
Why do I do it?
I can think of a couple of reasons.
It might be I developed the habit early in my career when I was less effective at getting classes to do what I wanted them to. In these years – and sadly it was years – I probably felt I had to repeat instructions and reminders again and again because I wasn’t used to children doing what I asked them to first time, and, even if they did, I assumed they’d forget what I wanted by the next lesson.
The second is even more annoying.
I think I picked up habits like this because I’d been conditioned to think if I wasn’t seen to be always doing something, I’d be penalised by performance management systems that incentivised high-energy dynamic teaching styles and punished perceived passivity.
This is probably also the reason I have an internal voice that still sometimes goes external to narrate the purpose of a task even though it’s irrelevant to the children doing it. Stuff like “this sort of question carries 8 marks so we need to get really good at them.”
When I think about it, I cringe but is it really that serious a thing to worry about?
Until I read Adam’s post, I didn’t think so.
There’s a lot of things that I can get better at, and this wasn’t on my radar.
But now I see it’s more of a problem than I thought it was and can think of other reasons in addition to those Adam identifies.
First there’s the issue over how repetition can make an instruction seem more negotiable.
When anyone asks someone to do something again and again it implies they aren’t sure they will the first time, which makes it seem more acceptable not to do it. At its worst this creates a vicious cycle, with students coming to think that if they aren’t asked to do something explicitly, they don’t need to do it even if this is normal, expectation, and then presenting as if they need the constant reminders.
As well meaning as it might be, it may subtlety lower expectations.
Secondly filling the air with words is like inflation – the more there are the less valuable they seem.
This is not the same thing as saying teachers should talk less, which is a historical nonsense those of us trained twenty years or so ago remember. Instead, it means that when we do talk – for however long- it should be valuable and useful, so students can better see the connection between listening and knowing and being able to do more.
If pupils can sometimes tune out a teacher without penalty, then we are asking them to know the difference between “not important to listen” and “important to listen” and switch between them, which is a very hard thing to do for lots of young people and can lead to frustration for everyone.
This has implications for planning general explanations too.
Sometimes, when I’m not clear what it is I want to explain or the best way to explain it, I find myself sort of flailing around the point with lots of scene setting and rhetoric, which is really a scaffold for me to work my way to the important bit.
The problem is while I may understand what the important bit is when I get to it, my pupils probably don’t, and for them it’s confusing.
For these reasons and – those Adam went through in his post – I am going to work on this. I’m going to try and stop banging on as much.
I think there are probably higher impact things, but also that this is one I can crack quite quickly – the equivalent of an emails that only takes a minute to reply to.
I hope I’m right but might not be – we’ll soon see.
Finally – it’s not really true I’m cross with Adam Boxer.
I like this stuff. The craft – a thing we can keep getting better at bit by bit.
On Christmas Eve in the village of Willerby, the children sing carols door-to-door.
The adults and older children lead the littler ones down the only street, past the old pub, past the barrows, past the hardly ever open post office and the church.
Then, pools of light falling from open doors, they sing.
At the end of the evening the singers gather at the green and then on to a kindly house for mince pies, hot cocoa and mulled ribena in front of an open fire.
There is always a girl who both belongs and does not belong, who is there and also not there.
She wears the same clothes and is always the same age.
She smiles as she sings, correct on every word.
She never speaks. When the last song is sung, before the pies and cocoa, she goes back down the lane where – it is presumed – she returns to her forgotten grave lost somewhere in the undergrowth of the ancient churchyard.
Nobody is alarmed by her. She does no harm.
There is no question of interfering priests or exorcism. She is welcome.
She just likes singing with other children.
For many living in in Willerby she’s a comfort – a sign when we are gone there may be something else after.
She was a particular comfort to Jane and Dan Johnson who brought up four children – three long departed and living miles away – and one buried one in Willerby; Andrew – hit by a car on a nondescript Tuesday in February the week before he his eleventh birthday – the worst day of their lives.
The worst day in Willerby in living memory.
A thud everyone heard.
Jane screaming and Dan shouting for someone to call 999 while the driver staggered around shouting he was sorry again and again.
This never stopped bothering Jane.
“As if anyone cared he was sorry,” she said to Dan many times, a splinter she couldn’t pull, “as if that mattered at all, as if it were relevant, as if anyone even gave a fucking shit.”
Then after the shouting and screaming the sirens and after that – worst of all – the awful deadly silence that fell over the houses and the villages and never really went away.
“If she’s here,” Jane said to Dan, “then that means a part of us goes on.”
Then one year there were no children in Willerby because all the old ones were grown and there were no young families.
That year for the first time no singing was arranged, and nobody thought about the girl from the graveyard.
Until – looking out of the bedroom window together – Jane and Dan saw she had come anyway.
She was under the lamp that lit the lane that went to the graveyard, her features shadow-edge distinct in the island of electric light. She looked left and right, down the street, took a step forward – uncertain and uneasy – and then stepped back.
“Dan,” Jane said. “We can’t leave her there. Not on her own. Not tonight. Not at Christmas.”
Dan shifted uneasily – but while the girl was eerie and he was afraid he knew his wife was right.
“I’ll get our coats,” he said.
They were in the hall by the door when they heard her singing.
Joy to the World – a child’s voice, clear and high and unaffected and almost unbearably lonely.
They opened the door and went to go to her, but before they took a step, they saw they were not alone.
In the front gardens of all the houses in the village stood small groups of children.
They were singing too and walking out onto the street as more children appeared behind them.
It went on and on until there were hundreds of them. Maybe thousands.
Ghosts?
Perhaps but if they were, some at least were ghosts of children who did not die because Jane and Dan knew the living adults they had become.
Familiar faces with the years peeled away from them – old neighbours and friends – children who had moved away and they’d never seen again.
Children who’d been funny, cheeky and kind, and sad, disappointed and discouraged, who’d laughed and cried, loved and been loved.
Children who’d grown to travel the world and children who’d never moved far from where they were born, some who’d grown to have children of their own and a few who did not get time to do much at all.
Children who’d become adults, their memories bleeding into an abstract wash, fuzzed with nostalgia and half-remembered secrets, exiled from a kingdom they could now hardly see.
And their own children.
“Jane,” Dan said. “Look it’s Sally”. And although Sally was now forty-five and living in Australia there she was, seven again and stepping along the street hand in hand with an older boy she’d adored so many years ago and Dan had forgotten all about.
And then next to Sally they saw her older brother Max, and her younger sister Sarah -all grown now but children again on that night – singing and smiling in the dark.
Jane could not settle to the miracle.
She moved into the small front yard to see the whole street. She scanned the road, head turning left and right, looking through and past the singing crowd.
Then with a gasp that was also a sob she reached back and pulled her husband to her. “Dan,” she said. “Look! Look by the churchyard gate! He’s come! He’s here!”
There – where the girl had been before -stood Andrew wearing a coat his grandmother had given him many years before.
“Andrew!” Jane shouted, waving, “Oh my boy, Andrew! Is it really you?”
Dan was shouting too. “Andrew! Andrew! We love you! We never stopped loving you! We’ll always love you! We think about you every second. Oh, our boy, our beautiful boy, we never forget you! We never did, we never will!”
And Andrew did see them because he was waving back and grinning, mouthing that he loved them too, before he ran to his two sisters and his older brother, who swept him up onto his shoulders to carry him to the green where all the children were now gathering.
They sang Silent Night, close together and swaying slowly until – although not a drop had been forecast it began to snow so heavily they were hidden, their voices muffling then dropping away to nothing.
It snowed the whole night, and Christmas day too, covering the street and the cars, folding the hedges into the fields, painting the world as blank and timeless as eternity.
On Boxing Day – when it finally stopped – there was no sign of them.
“It’s funny really, thinking only the dead can be ghosts,” Jane said to Dan long after it was all over and they’d both cried the healing tears they’d waited so long for, “because we die every minute don’t we? We’re only ourselves for a moment. We’re not the same a day to the next. Perhaps we all leave ghosts everywhere.”
These days it is hard to tell, because so often it feels as if we are thinking with other people’s thoughts – even my questions rhyme with a meme I’ve seen somewhere online.
The twenty-four hours news cycle is now an every second news cycle.
Social media means we experience the thoughts and feelings of others more than we have ever done before.
It can be hard to know whether what we think and how we feel is how we think and feel, or whether our emotions are those of others reflected and amplified by us.
Undoubtedly it is not an easy time – in schools and beyond.
Behaviour seems worse.
There’s been in change in the way communities view education.
Recruitment and retention are in crisis. More and more children are struggling and there’s no clear answer on how to help them.
The dreadful death of Ruth Perry has the us all reeling and brought to the fore old and current hurt that feels existential.
When we turn from education the news elsewhere is even bleaker.
A declining economy, awful wars with no clear end, unseasonal warm weather reminding us we may be on the brink of further catastrophe.
Hope and happiness feel almost inappropriate – as if taking time to appreciate anything good is naïve – even irresponsible – a failure to come to terms with the gravity of everything.
But this is wrong – we need hope more than ever. We need happiness and Christmas is the time for it.
While – perhaps – the scale of our challenges might be unprecedented, Christmas is timed deliberately to fall close to the winter solstice when the nights are darkest and the light furthest away.
Since very ancient times humans have been vulnerable to despair at this time of year.
We are not the first.
As a history teacher I imagine a father living in an Anglo-Saxon village in brutal December worrying whether his children would survive the winter. I think of Great War soldiers huddled in their trenches with death all around them and why each year so many hoped for and end to the fighting before Christmas.
More than anything – whether you believe in the Christian message or not – I think Christmas is about hope against all odds.
This is why we need Christmas – at this time of year it is not wrong to turn into the light because without hope and a deliberate focus on things that are good, we won’t have the strength to do anything about the dark.
It is what Christmas is for.
And there is light – and this year I’ve been making a conscious effort to see and recognise it.
At the school I teach at there was a wonderful Christmas lunch.
Turkey with all the works, crackers, party hats and a pupil band playing songs they’d practised for months.
Children and teachers sat together talking and singing along. I wandered around the groups grinning, wishing there was a way I could explain to everyone how much this meant to me without freaking them out, wishing that they could know just how happy seeing safe, joyful children makes me.
The week before that a pupil in one of my classes really revised for a test for the first time and when they got their paper back did a tiny fist-pump and hissed “yes!”. And then later they asked if they could take the paper home to show their mum.
Just a day or so ago I made a minor change to a seating plan by telling two wonderful and sometimes chatty best friends that an Iron Curtain had descended between them, and we all laughed.
Just a minute ago I went through the canteen on the way to SLT briefing and saw an ECT miss a shot playing table tennis with one of her form, and they both burst out laughing while the children around them broke into ironic applause.
This year I’ve reminded myself to notice moments like this – to use them to remember that despite everything that’s hard I still love being where I am doing what I do. That as hard as things might be there are still wonderful things happening every day. That I’ve never been more in love with teaching and schools, and that what I do still feels as important and valuable as it ever has. That I wouldn’t go back and change my choices even if I could.
Feeling like this is OK – hope isn’t just allowed but essential. To have the strength to pick up our burdens we must feel we can, and it is part of our responsibility to help children feel they can too.
And now it is the end of term and in the face of the state of the world there are things outside work to be happy about.
My daughters are happy and healthy and so excited.
My brother and sister-in-law arrive from Norway tomorrow. We’ll be together as a family with my mum and dad and I can’t wait.
I’m thankful I took my wife’s advice this year and put stuff in the calendar because I have pub dates with old teacher friends. We’ll probably drink more than we should, tell each other stories that we’ve told each other many times before and just enjoy existing together.
I hope we’ll look forward too.
I think we will.
We’ve all had bad times – at work and elsewhere – and because we are good friends, we know all about these and helped each other in them. We came through and the strength we needed when stuff was really tough depended on us believing it was possible for things to get better and us reminding each other of this when it was hard to see.
Perhaps things will improve.
But even if they do not there is nothing wrong with choosing to feel hope and happiness, particularly when times are hard.
This is something Emily Dickinson understood well. In her poem “Hope” is the thing with feathersshe writes about hope singing the tune without the words, and I think what she is getting at is the outrageous audacity of it – that even when we aren’t quite sure what we are hoping for, hope is still powerful.
And sometimes in the face of all the odds – when we are at our lowest ebb – the most astonishing things do happen.
I didn’t use to believe in miracles but now – for very personal reasons – I do.
Not every day, not common but common enough for it to be sensible to hope for them.
Merry Christmas everyone – see you in the new year.
“And so tell everyone that there’s hope in your heart And tell everyone or it will tear you apart At the end of Christmas day When there is nothing left to say The years go by so fast Let’s hope the next beats the last.”
Ben Newmark 