Support Services and Mainstream Schools

A Guide for Working Together

Mike Blamires, John Moore

• Publisher: David Fulton Publishers
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138161696
• eBook ISBN: 9781134012978
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

First Published in 2005. A new and diverse role s emerging for Support Services, yet many schools and Early Years settings are unaware of the wealth of specialist skills and expertise contained therein. The editors have drawn together contributions from experienced colleagues working in a variety of roles with Special education needs. They illustrate how support services and schools can work together to develop best inclusive practice and enable children to thrive both socially and academically.

	1

Support services: growth and development

Robin Attfield, Mike Blamires, Peter Gray and John Moore

Introduction

If schools and early years settings are to be successful in enabling the social participation and academic achievement of all children and young people within their communities, they will need to look beyond the boundaries of their own expertise and experience, and demonstrate a willingness to work with others who have the appropriate knowledge, skills and understanding. Traditional support services alone, however, whether statutory agency or volunteer-based, can no longer claim to have the monopoly of being a single point of reference and must now adapt to being part of a dynamic, flexible and evolving resource which may include the local community, special and other schools, regional organisations, national charities, local trusts and parents' groups. For this expertise to have impact, however, the school will have to ensure wide acceptance and ownership of in-school systems that are capable of assimilating or accommodating this expertise. This has not always been the case, and in order to consider where support services are going we must first consider where they have come from, and what, for them, constitutes development.

Remediation

Support services effectively began with the introduction of education psychology services in 1913 and the appointment of Cyril Burt by London Council as the first educational psychologist. The purpose was to allocate children to the limited number of special school places, this being 2 per cent of the school population, assuming a ‘bell curve’ distribution of intelligence. The work of Burt has continued to exert influence despite the considerable criticism that exists about the validity of his research and the deficit nature of educational need it supports. It is reflected, for example, in the DfES SEN Programme of Action (1998) that sets 2 per cent of the school population as the target for the provision of a Statement of Special Educational Needs. Whatever the criticism, however, Burt's work paved the way for clinic-based casework in most LEAs.

Later, the 1944 Education Act made clear the responsibility of LEAs for making provision for pupils for whom ‘special educational treatment’ was required (this excluded those then deemed ineducable, who came into the educational system following the 1970 Education Act). This led to additional training opportunities in a number of fields and the development of specialisation in teaching methods that were different from those applicable to most pupils. By the time of the Warnock Report (1978), the integration of some groups of pupils with additional educational needs was becoming established and specialist teachers were more involved in mainstream work, particularly in relation to sensory impairment and reading skills acquisition.

Much of the development from this point on, as noted by the Warnock Report, took the form of peripatetic teaching for children with a range of difficulties. This usually involved the withdrawal of pupils for individual or small-group lessons, with the aim of remediation in literacy skills. These lessons took place in local centres or, if in schools, outside the classroom. The HMI report of 1989 noted that the accommodation for these lessons was often of a poor quality, making use of corridors, school halls and medical rooms. The derogatory term for such accommodation soon became known as ‘the broom cupboard’. The growth of support services from this time has been well documented and readers are advised to turn to Gipps et al. (1987), Dessent (1987); and Moses et al. (1988) for further analysis.

Advice and differentiation

After Warnock, the intended role and language of the support services changed. The work was to be ‘advisory’ rather than ‘remedial’, with a focus on supporting class teachers responding to their pupils with special educational needs. This exhortation for change, however, did not always translate into practice. Duffield et al. (1995) investigated the beliefs and working practices among support teachers in Scotland using the key aspects of the support role as suggested by the Scottish Committee for staff development. The support teachers listed them in order of importance as follows:

Aspect of role	Rated as ‘of prime importance’
Co-operative teaching	44
Consultancy	23
Individual teaching	20
Staff development	<4

So while the rhetoric had been ‘out of the cupboard and into the class and across the school’, the support teachers themselves were reluctant to extend their impact much beyond the classroom. In the late 1980s the focus changed from ‘meeting special educational needs’ to ensuring access to common curriculum entitlement. In 1989 the National Curriculum Council published A Curriculum for All (NCC 1989) which,

By emphasising the role that ordinary teachers could play in identifying and meeting the special educational needs of pupils, the guidance effectively carried forward the view that good practice in teaching such pupils was no different from providing effective learning experiences for pupils generally. Much of the rhetoric prior to 1993 (The Education Act and subsequent Code of Practice) was concerned with mechanisms for sharing expertise, for demystifying special education practice and for enskilling ordinary class and subject teachers to ‘own’ the professional issues by enabling them to acquire enlarged repertoires of pedagogical strategies.

(Evans and Docking 1998: 50)

As a result it was thought that learners with special educational needs did not need to be taught different things from their peers or to be ‘remediated’; they needed to be taught the same things as their peers but in different ways. The task for support teams was therefore to support the development of ‘appropriate’ differentiation in teaching and learning. The focus moved from special provision to ‘appropriate’ teaching in the context of a common curriculum delivered in a variety of ways and in response to a diversity of learners. Such a change in emphasis, if adopted whole-heartedly by a support service, might have brought a further challenge to their credibility, as they had to be seen as ‘super differentiators’.

Advice versus support

As services developed during this period, there were lively debates about the appropriate balance between ‘advice’ and ‘support’ and the legitimacy of those giving advice without an appropriate range of teaching experience. More fundamentally, there were those such as Dessent (1987) who contended that the continuing presence of extensive external support services potentially ‘deskilled’ mainstream schools and prevented them from developing their own more inclusive responses to pupils with special educational needs. Moore and Morrison (1988), however, suggested that support services had a key, if transitory, role to play in schools accepting responsibility for all pupils.

Statutory assessment

Interestingly while support services generally expanded throughout the 1980s, their work became increasingly linked to the statutory assessment process. This appeared to be for two main reasons: first, LEAs began to look to support services for advice about pupils' eligibility for additional resourcing (as demand for statutory assessments started to escalate). Secondly, services found themselves playing an increasing role in managing and overseeing the work of a range of additional teaching and non-teaching staff who were allocated to individual pupils with a Statement of SEN.

In this respect, while the philosophy of many services still espoused a significant role in mainstream school development, in practice, the focus of much of their work remained with individual pupils. There were, however, developments in the degree to which support services worked ‘in context’, with assessment and support happening more often in the classroom rather than on the more traditional withdrawal basis.

Delegation

At the same time, however, the growth of support services slowed and their range of activity across LEAs became more diverse due to the impact of delegated budgets to schools under the Local Management of Schools (LMS) initiative. The Education Reform Act (1998) brought in requirements for LMS under the assumption that local education authorities had been bureaucratic, wasteful and misdirected in their use of funds to support schools (Lee 1992, cited by Marsh in Clough 1998). The assumption of LMS was that schools, by themselves, knew ‘what was good for them’. Prior to this, schools were funded on the basis of:

(a) historic funding – where schools were given allocations because that was what they were allocated;

(b) officer allocation – an LEA officer decided upon allocation, possibly taking into account judgements of where needs were greatest; and

(c) bidding – where schools bid for extra funding for prescribed projects or needs.

(Knight 1993)

There was an expectation that schools should be funded directly to provide for most of their pupils' needs. In some LEAs, this meant some existing support service funds being immediately transferred to school budgets. In others, transfer of funds happened more progressively as they were increasingly delegated, particularly for some support service areas (Bangs 1993; Evans and Lunt 1992). The extent of delegation was increasingly affected by the need to match government-funded targets and, in some LEAs, to avoid mainstream school budget reductions.

Government guidance began to distinguish between elements of LEA service provision that were ‘mandatory’ and those that could be retained centrally as ‘discretionary exceptions’. This had a significant impact on the balance of different support service areas, with a tendency to retain services such as Educational Psychology, Sensory Impairment Teams and support for statemented pupils, and to delegate or reduce other areas of support that only had discretionary status.

Other limiting factors included the historic levels of provision for mainstream and special schools, the amount of funding required for centrally retained services such as educational psychology and educational social work, the availability and cost of service-level agreements as well as the influence of pressure groups. Furthermore, the introduction of Grant Maintained Status for some schools meant that such schools would be directly funded, thus further reducing the amount of money available to LEAs.

Thus the shift in balance of power between LEAs and schools led to a greater emphasis on the school as purchaser of LEA services, with a greater tendency for services to evaluate their contribution in the school's terms. This prompted a number of commentators (e.g. Bowers 1991) to speculate whether support services would ultimately work on a ‘freestanding’ basis, selling services more directly to schools and others.

School responsibility and market forces

The more explicit separation of school and LEA funding raised issues about the appropriate balance of responsibility for providing for pupils with special educational needs. LMS required the majority of funds to be distributed directly to schools. The 1981 Education Act, however, placed statutory duties on LEAs to ensure that appropriate provision was made for pupils with SEN, particularly those whose needs were ‘significantly greater or otherwise different from’ other pupils of a similar age. Continuing uncertainty about this area and growing pressure for statutory assessments in many LEAs led to various reviews (Audit Commission 1992a and b; House of Commons Education Committee 1993) and, ultimately, to the SEN Code of Practice in 1994. This was expected to provide a clear point of reference for both schools and LEAs about their respective responsibilities. In addition, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgement
• Preface
• Contributors
• 1. Support services: growth and development
• 2. Asking the right questions: a development model
• 3. Additional support: improving inclusive practice in mainstream schools
• 4. Social inclusion: supporting schools to help themselves
• 5. Interagency working: supporting school refusers
• 6. Interagency working: the education of young people in public care
• 7. Supporting transition: preschool setting into first placement
• 8. Supporting transition: from primary to secondary school
• 9. New technology: services for children out of school
• 10. Local learning groups and clusters: the potential of working in an integrated team with groups of schools
• 11. Becoming a business unit: a road to Nirvana or disaster?
• 12. The impact of funding
• 13. Best value: evaluating support service effectiveness
• 14. Issues for the future
• Bibliography
• Index