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The SEN paperchase
At its peak, the identification of SEN by mainstream primary school teachers ran at one in five (19.9 per cent) of all children. Mainstream secondary schools identified an even higher number (21.7 per cent). This meant a huge and unsustainable workload for Special Educational Needs Coordinators (SENCOs). A SENCO in one large city secondary school, for example, estimated that her department circulated over 6,000 Individual Education Plan (IEP) sheets every term â one in each subject for 400 pupils, 20 per cent of the schoolâs roll.
This is an extreme example, but it reflects a problem that every teacher who picks up this book will recognise. The problem is the oppressive weight of administration and paperwork generated by the well-intentioned aim that every child with special educational needs or a disability (SEN/D) will have an individual plan describing their needs, and how the needs will be met â each individual plan then generating its own cycle of review dates, discussions and meetings.
The government is now asking schools to make a fundamental shift in the way they manage SEN. It is the class or subject teacher or form tutor who should in future take the lead in assessing and planning for the pupils with SEN they teach, rather than the SENCO. âTeachersâ, the 2014 SEND Code of Practice says, âare responsible and accountable for the progress and development of the pupils in their class, including where pupils access support from teaching assistants or specialist staffâ (DfE and DH, 2014). In place of elaborate, paper-heavy and essentially separate procedures dominated by the use of IEPs, the intention is a system in which class and subject teachers assess and plan for children with SEN in the same way in which they plan for all pupils, but with added intensive involvement of parents and children or young people themselves.
Teachers are now also asked to identify fewer children with SEN and place less reliance on IEPs â but at the same time to ensure children get the help they need and that all make good progress. Schools are held to account for the progress made by the lowest-achieving 20 per cent and cannot achieve an outstanding Ofsted grade unless their SEN/D practice is good.
This means that they need to find new ways of helping all children to make progress â ways of doing a good job for a smaller number of children with âtrueâ SEN/D, and ways of maximising the progress of children who may just be lower-achieving or needing help with social or behavioural difficulties. This is the theme of this book.
It shows how schools can put responsibility for supporting children with most types of additional need firmly back where it belongs â with class and subject teachers. It describes how to use existing systems for class and subject teacher target-setting, recording and planning, rather than time-consuming, bureaucratic separate SEN/D systems, to ensure that all children who find learning difficult make good progress.
The difficulty for SENCOs
Most SENCOs have relatively little non-contact time (one to five hours a week for the majority, according to a 2004 NUT survey). This means that they are carrying a heavy workload and are often unable to maintain any sort of work/life balance. It also means that they have little if any time to do the job they would like to be doing â helping teachers plan their lessons with the needs of children with SEN in mind, supporting the work that teaching assistants (TAs) do with individuals and groups, evaluating practice so as to improve the provision that children receive, or teaching children directly.
A number of researchers have noted that SENCOs feel swamped by the bureaucracy of their task (Lingard, 2001; Wedell, 2002; Cole, 2005). Lingard, for example, surveyed secondary schools and describes responses such as: âIf I update IEPs three times a year, which my school expects, allowing 15 minutes per pupil, and hold one half hour review meeting a year for every pupil, it will involve me in 275 hoursâ work per annumâ. Wedell analysed messages on the SENCO-forum website and noted that:
SENCOs spend an inordinate proportion of their time keeping up with administration . . . parents should be regularly consulted about IEPs and there is no way this can be achieved with large numbers of pupils. . . . Subject teachers are faced with so many individual targets that it becomes impossible to keep track of them.
(Wedell, 2002, p. 204)
The problems of excessive bureaucracy are not confined to SENCOs. On average a teacher in Year 5 (the peak year for SEN numbers) might, in a class of 33, be operating IEPs for around eight children. In schools serving areas of high social deprivation, the numbers will be very much higher, sometimes as many as half the class. Each child will have around four targets on their IEP. That makes at least 32 different targets that the teacher is meant to remember. This is clearly an impossibility.
And if the teacher cannot remember what the targets are, how can they possibly use them in any meaningful way to guide their teaching or the childâs learning? This is the real emperorâs new clothes of the individual-plan system: the fact, rarely commented on, that teachers (like all human beings) have a useful working memory span of no more than seven to eight items, and that if this is exceeded by over-use of IEPs, those IEPs are likely to become static documents with little impact on progress.
Some schools, however, have found a way out of this maze of paperwork. They have found different, less bureaucratic ways of meeting pupilsâ SEN/D â for example by provision mapping, and helping class and subject teachers to record what they will do to support pupils with SEN/D via their normal curriculum planning.
This book is about sharing the practice of these schools. It represents an attempt to liberate SENCOs and INCOs (inclusion coordinators) from an excessive workload, whilst at the same time protecting the rights of children, and their parents and carers, to the best possible inclusive teaching and learning.
Why all this paperwork?
The rewards for schools for producing a high volume of paperwork around SEN/D have until fairly recently been many, enough to outweigh the negative impact on work/life balance and quality of provision. The more children the school logged as having SEN, the more favourably its position in league tables was judged if it appeared to be underachieving in its end of key stage SAT or GCSE outcomes.
The IEP, a visible indicator of what teachers do to meet SEN, easy to get hold of (in both literal and metaphorical senses) by Ofsted inspectors whose expertise in SEN might be limited, also received heavy emphasis in inspections:
Some schools had found that inspectors were more interested in the listing, production and number of IEPs than how they related to pupilsâ achievements and progress . . . some schools were mechanically producing IEPs for the purposes of inspection, with no planned reviews and no mechanism for their subsequent maintenance.
(Ofsted, 1999)
Until recently, too, funding mechanisms encouraged schools to focus on paperwork. The more and smarter the IEPs compiled by a school, the more additional local authority (LA) funding attracted through audits or Statements. And, once attracted, the only way to keep funding allocated to individuals was to prove, through voluminous records, that the child was still struggling despite being well supported.
The rewards for plentiful, elegantly executed IEPs were thus once great; the SENCOâs credibility, and often his or her âearning powerâ for the school, could stand or fall on IEP performance.
But things have changed. Now, funding formulae delegate funding for all but the less common or complex (low-incidence, âhigh needsâ) types of SEN/D to schools on the basis of prior attainment. The Pupil Premium provides earmarked money direct to schools to meet the needs of disadvantaged pupils. This means that schools no longer have to submit detailed plans and records for individual children with the more common types of SEN/D in order to secure or retain funding.
Ofsted, moreover, is more likely these days to be interested in schoolsâ data on the progress of children with SEN or disabilities, and schoolsâ self-evaluation of the impact of their provision on vulnerable groups, than they are in individualsâ paper plans. What they will look for are the systems in place to quickly identify underachieving pupils, whether the poor behaviour of some pupils may link to unidentified SEN, what actions are taken for pupils who need help, and how the impact of interventions is tracked and evaluated.
Another significant and relevant development in recent years has been the trend towards âpersonalisationâ â assessing and planning for the unique needs of every child, not just those identified with SEN or a disability. These developments are described in a report on effective leadership that promotes the achievements of students with SEN/D (Chapman et al., 2011):
We take the view that responding to children with special educational needs should be seen as part of a wider set of issues relating to the education of all children who experience difficulties in school . . . in taking this position we believe that the distinction between âSEN/Dâ and ânon-SEN/Dâ children is now rapidly becoming outmoded, in that it overlooks the considerable developments that have occurred in the ability of the education system to respond to a wide range of difficulties.
Together with Assessment for Learning, personalisation has meant that class and subject teachers are increasingly setting personal targets for groups of children, and sometimes for individuals, and involving children in reviewing how far they have achieved them. This increasingly makes redundant the setting and reviewing of individual targets for some children via IEPs.
Technology, via the opportunities to store and share information about pupils presented by management information systems, has also fundamentally changed the way teachers can build knowledge about individual pupilsâ needs into their planning. And finally, we have seen the growth of provision mapping. First developed by my colleague Ann Berger in Bristol schools, and later incorporated into materials I wrote for the National Strategies, it provides a simple way of recording the extra interventions that the school provides in each year group. A teacher or SENCO/INCO can highlight on the provision map the interventions that a particular child receives, and use this, together with personal targets set by the class or subject teacher, as an alternative to writing separate individual plans.
What is stopping schools from reducing bureaucracy?
Despite the system changes that ought to be helping schools to reduce bureaucracy, there is as yet little evidence of the widespread changes that might be expected.
Many years ago I wrote an article, âPaper Promisesâ (Gross, 2000), that described the overwhelming burden of paperwork that schools were experiencing and suggested ways of achieving the ends of the SEN Code of Practice by different means.
But 14 years later, I still see many SENCOs/INCOs and teachers struggling to manage large numbers of IEPs, meetings and reviews, despite the fact that government after government has clarified that such systems are not and have never been a statutory requirement.
In 2011, the DfE made explicit their view that IEPs had had their day:
Extract
From Support and aspiration: a new approach to special educational needs and disability (DfE, 2011)
We know that parents value the use of non-statutory Individual Education Plans (IEPs), which are recommended by the Code of Practice. In the period since 2001, when the Code was last revised and published, we know that many schools have developed new approaches to planning, reviewing and tracking the progress of all pupils that have enabled them to achieve what IEPs aimed to do without many of the associated bureaucratic burdens. These approaches have included new ways of tracking pupil progress, involving pupils in setting their own targets, engaging regularly and effectively with parents, and using individual profiles and provision mapping.
In order to reduce bureaucratic burdens on schools, in reviewing and updating the Code of Practice, we will remove advice on using IEPs and encourage schools to explore the ways in which these and other new approaches can be used to enable pupils with SEN to develop, progress and fulfil their potential.
The 2014 SEND Code of Practice fulfilled this promise. It makes no mention of IEPs, leaving it up to schools to decide what paperwork to use, and referring only to meetings with parents and pupils where âA record of the outcomes, action and support agreed through the discussion should be kept and shared with all the appropriate school staff. This record should be given to the pupilâs parentsâ.
And yet I fear that despite these new freedoms many schools will stick to the safety of the known, and not change their IEP systems. There seem to be a number of factors behind this:
- ⢠pressure from class teachers, who believe that maintaining an IEP for a child will mean that the child gets support, usually in the form of a teaching assistant;
- ⢠concerns about parentsâ reactions if the IEP process or the linked push for Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) are not used;
- ⢠a historical belief that the quality and quantity of paperwork is the key to attracting and retaining funding;
- ⢠bureaucratic procedures in some local authorities, such as encouraging schools to provide provision maps as well as, rather than instead of, IEPs. Whether or not schools persist with IEPs has been found to be highly dependent on local authority advice, which varies greatly across the country (Ellis et al., 2012);
- ⢠a belief that IEPs make a difference to pupil outcomes.
Do IEPs make a difference?
All the paperwork involved in SEN/D would be well worth doing if we knew that it was actually making a real difference to children. But is there any evidence of this?
Schools tend to think there is, because they see children achieving the small-steps targets set for them on IEPs. There is a circularity, however, in school self-evaluation systems claiming proudly that children are achieving the targets set on their IEPs, when the targets are required to be set from the start as specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-constrained. Achievable targets may not be sufficiently stretching; in their 2010 review, Ofsted noted that: âthe challenge represented by the targets in individual education plans was highly variable . . . using these targets to judge whether children or young people were making good progress was extremely subjectiveâ.
There is an issue too in whether the achievement of a series of these achievable targets actually aggregates, over time, into improved attainment or personal and social skills. National data, as we will see later, suggest that the procedures of the SEN Code have not so far led to these improved outcomes.
Schools have historically embarked on the paperwork involved in SEN for one main reason â the quest for additional resources. And yet those resources, once painfully achieved, may in fact make little difference to the childâs progress. Pinney (2004) analysed a wide range of national statistics and found no link between the numbers of Statements maintained by local authorities and the results achieved by their pupils with SEN. A series of key national reports (Ofsted 2004, 2006, 2010) have all made clear that the provision of additional resources to pupils with low or high incidence SEN/D â such as teaching assistant support â does not ensure good quality intervention or adequate pupil progress. Substantial research from the Institute of Education (Blatchford et al., 2012) even concludes that the more teaching assistant (TA) support pupils receive, the less progress they make â a finding that holds even after controlling for SEN status, prior attainment and other factors that might explain the relationship.
The lack of any link between established SEN/D systems and improved attainment is most evident for pupils with literacy and numeracy difficulties â the most common type of SEN. Since 1998 the percentage of children with very low attainment at the end of primary school (below Level 3) has hovered around the 6â7 per cent mark in English, and 5â6 per cent in maths, despite ever-increasing numbers identified as having SEN and placed on the SEN Code procedures, and despite any number of IEPs that continue predominantly to focus on literacy and numeracy as their prime source of targets. All those targets, written by thousands of schools on millions of IEPs â âWill learn to read first 50 high-frequency wordsâ, âWill be able to read cvc wordsâ, âWill know number b...
