Matthew Syed’s Black Box Thinking provides an interesting holiday read for leaders, educational or otherwise.1 Its argument, in summary, is that high performing organisations are culturally responsive, constantly review their existing practice, and actively seek positive change based on learning about themselves and from others.
It’s a message which resonates powerfully with the development of special educational needs and disability (SEND) provision at Park House school since 2013—a journey influenced by the school’s partnership with education improvement charity, Achievement for All, and leading to three inter-linking dimensions of change in relation to school culture, structure and practice.
Where did we begin?
In 2013, with the impending introduction of the new Code of Practice and major changes on the horizon, the school’s leadership identified the review and development of SEND provision as a key priority for whole school improvement. The central focus: every teacher is a teacher of SEND.
A critical analysis of the ‘musts’ and ‘shoulds’ of the new Code of Practice was completed in the early stages of this review, ensuring that child-centred approaches, the graduated approach (assess-plan-do-review cycle), and pupil-centred planning were at the heart of the development work undertaken by the school. A need to understand recent research into deploying support staff more effectively was also critical. Blunt and uncritical reliance on generically deployed assistants was, in some cases, preventing teachers from recognising their responsibility for students with SEND. As the Education Endowment Foundation have reported, ‘Students in a class with a teaching assistant present do not, on average, outperform those in one where only a teacher is present’.2
Dissonant research data of this sort, challenging accepted and entrenched practice, only served to emphasise that change was an imperative at all levels—within the senior leadership team, among teaching staff and with the support assistants.
The headteacher was inevitably at the heart of this process regarding the development of SEND provision, both in terms of the communication of a powerful and compelling vision for change and also more practically. The process would inevitably involve staffing and contractual issues, and decisions could not be made without understanding and approval at this strategic level.
The SEND review ran alongside a parallel process of equally critical reflection on the school’s approach to provision for pupil premium students. This proved to be a vital congruence, shaping the further direction of our approach to the former.
It was also in 2013 that the school began to work in partnership with Achievement for All to significantly improve provision for disadvantaged students and address what had developed into a widening progress and attainment gap. Implementing the charity’s successful and structured approach to this key issue, initial work alongside the consultant enabled staff to target change for certain students in year groups. This was through a process of structured conversations about progress at termly intervals, and involved parents, the child and a teacher.
Rapid gains with the pupil premium cohort redefined our thinking, and was the catalyst for the further changes to structure and practice in relation to SEND. The approach was adapted for all students identified with SEND at Park House and sat at the heart of the child-centred approach that the 2014 Code of Practice recommends.
Seeking expert help
The influence of Achievement for Allwas central to the cultural, structural and practical dimensions of change for which the school was searching in its approach to effectively redefined SEND provision. For example, the partner consultant worked alongside the special educational needs coordinator (SENCo) to break down work that needed to be done into termly areas of priority, so that strategic planning was possible beyond the operational level of the role. The newly-termed ‘Monitoring and Evaluation schedule’ provided a core structure and reference for the SENCo’s work at this crucial phase of the school’s planning for improved provision.
This heightened strategic focus for SEND and pupil premium meant that these students’ progress and attainment—and the practice that lay behind it—became a core part of the school’s review weeks, encompassing learning walks, monitoring of interventions and book observations. Findings were presented to all staff after each review to raise the importance of the issue.
As the identification of SEND was one key issue that the school needed to address, Local Authority guidelines were also helpful alongside this approach to distinguish between generic underachievement and SEND (see figure 1).
CATs data was additionally useful alongside reading and spelling ages for all newcomers to the school, and not just Year 7s joining at the start of the academic year. This meant that all students had a profile, and the data could be used to plan, review and adapt intervention as part of the graduated approach cycle.
The local offer, a ‘must’ in the Code of Practice, provided the final document used to re-structure practice. Once prepared, this could be shared at all levels (including governors) and gave a very clear framework for addressing provision across the school.
Once the local offer had been compiled, external professionals were brought in at the beginning of the following school term. This enabled key principles of the new Code of Practice—and, in particular, the emphasis that every teacher is a teacher of SEND with the expertise to plan for and lead practice—to be made explicit and to revisit areas of need, structurally reviewing how these could be accommodated in classrooms.
Improving the impact of teaching assistants
With teacher expectation regarding SEND being challenged, this was also the time to fundamentally review the role and deployment of support staff. Several guides were useful in developing the vision for change—in particular, Maximising the Impact of Teaching Assistants3, and the Sutton Trust’s Making Best Use of Teaching Assistants4.
An audit was undertaken to enable effectiveness of the existing pattern of support staff to be objectively assessed by the leadership team. Evidence was generated through the performance management cycle, with teaching staff commenting on effectiveness by rating the support staff’s different areas of expertise. This audit also recorded levels of attendance. Sharples, Webster and Blatchford’s cycle regarding the deployment and development of teaching assistants (TAs) was critical in shaping the establishment of the new approach.5 This is summarised in figure 2 below.
A new, weekly team meeting, set up and led by the SENCo with support staff, to take place during a tutor period, was a key opportunity to communicate new thinking over an extended period of time. At the heart of these meetings was sharing information about the new Code—the changing role of the teaching assistant and the focus on quality intervention. This was also a forum for good practice to be shared by teaching assistants, discussing strategies to deal with different needs, sharing interventions that worked—and those that didn’t—and giving feedback on courses that had been attended. The empowerment of support staff to share their own views fed into other related changes. For example, the TAs began attending morning briefings for teaching staff. They were also each assigned a pigeon hole in the staffroom, which became their ‘base’. Previously, support staff had used their own break room, which acted as an unnecessary barrier to them building up relationships with teaching staff.
As the audit of expertise and training among support staff was completed, we realised that the aims of the new SEND Code of Practice would be difficult to achieve with our current deployment model. There was a strong need to move away from the traditional widespread deployment of the ‘generic’ TA, where impact of intervention could not be deployed and independence of SEND students decreased. It was now essential that the senior leadership team redefine the role of support staff and emphasise the expectation that ‘the needs of all pupils must be addressed, first and foremost, through excellent classroom teaching’.6
With this redefinition came the change in structure. While a small number of support staff had been departmentally based before the review, this pattern of deployment was extended right across the curriculum, with an associated emphasis on recording interventions and empowering more appropriately trained and departmentally-focused support staff to log the impact of the intervention on the student.
In essence, we were now further extending the acknowledgement by Sharples, Webster and Blatchford of good practice that: ‘In secondary schools, giving English and maths departments the responsibility for coordinating the day-to-day roles of TAs will help ensure teachers have full control of the variables they need to plan effective provision.’7
There was also a subtle, but highly significant, change in nomenclature. Teaching assistant became intervention assistant. These increasingly subject specialist colleagues now worked with—and were part of—departmental teams in English, maths, science, humanities, languages, and the creative and performing arts.
At the same time, and alongside the pattern of increased departmental deployment, a team of SEND core staff were appointed with responsibility for key areas of need defined by the code of practice and trained to deliver specific interventions. The autism spectrum disorder (ASD) intervention assistant, for instance, developed expertise with interventions such as social story interventions, social skills interventions, ALERT programmes and anger management. As intervention became specific to a role so too did it become more measurable.
Data matters
As roles became linked to specific interventions, it became much easier to develop a clear provision map for SEND. With support staff now working as intervention assistants, the idea that students were to be in all lessons and not removed, and that the teacher was the expert, could be fulfilled more effectively. If students were removed from class for a very specific intervention, this was planned and related to the work being missed to ensure smooth reintegration back into class.
As interventions were regulated, it also became possible to cost them far more effectively and audit the costings for individual students so that Education, Health and Care (EHC) assessment requests could be submitted to the Local Authority where necessary.
A new role was created to act as key liaison between support staff and the SENCo—the SEND secretary. The role has subsequently evolved into that of a data manager, who is now able to update a provision map, produce impactful performance data (see figure 3) for senior leaders, and link meetings with department heads, providing them with information on the performance of students—both SEND and non-SEND—in all curriculum areas and across years groups.
This data also informs the SENCo’s discussions with department and learning heads regarding interventions and reviews of the identification of students with SEND. It has also became an evidence-based opportunity to revisit work around specific students causing concern.
The establishment and subsequent evolution of the SEND data manager role has significantly reduced the administrative burden on the SENCo, enabling a more strategic focus on student interventions and their impact. It has also meant that information on pupils is now easily accessible on SIMS for all teaching staff.
Keeping the child at the centre
The importance of the child’s voice was always a key priority in the process of cultural, structural and practical change in SEND provision at Park House. The aforementioned Achievement for All approach to improvement in provision and outcomes for our pupil premium cohort had documented a termly meeting between parent, child and school as a key driver of the process. Once again taking this approach as a template for wider improvement, we invested time at Key Stage 3 to develop a similar framework for SEND, dividing the structured meetings for high needs SEND students between SENCo and head of year, and lower needs SEND students among tutors. It was felt that, for those students where there was multi-agency working, meetings needed to be conducted by the SENCo to ensure quality outcomes, should the Local Authority need to be involved. Involvement of tutors in the process once more helped to instil the idea that every teacher is a teacher of SEND.
The Local Authority’s documentation for recording these meetings was re-drafted so that outcomes from the meetings were on the same document as academic development, key strengths, difficulties and support strategies for the student concerned. The plan produced was termed a Support and Achievement Plan, or SAP. This consolidation has led to quality, robust documents being created that took on board parents and students’ views, and were all part of the graduated approach (assess-plan-do-review).
Training was given to enable the conduct of the meetings to be effective and to ensure staff understood the idea of robust outcomes working back from the long term aspirations of the young person.
Ensuring increasingly effective transition arrangements was the final element in the improvement process at Park House. Extra visits for SEND students were encouraged with structured sessions in advance of the official taster days. Three visits were normally planned, but flexibility was the key with extra visits being arranged where necessary on an individual student basis. Obtaining information from primary schools was critical. Good working relationships with primary SENCos helped to gain parents’ trust on first meetings, as the needs of the child were already known. After a large investment of time in a child, primary SENCos also felt reassured that the child’s education was in safe hands.
A continuing journey
There are many complex processes that underpin SEND and school improvement, all contributing to cultural, structural and, ultimately, practical change in provision. And, in the spirit and organisational culture of continuous improvement alluded to in Black Box Thinking, it is to the continuation of these cycles that Park House now turns.
We are now beginning to further refine the processes that have developed over the last three years; they are certainly still not perfect, but have moved our provision on to a much better place. As a result of a critical, institutional growth mindset, and a willingness to engage with and learn from partners such as Achievement for All, Park House can now begin to look at new government challenges, such as the increased demands of the curriculum and its assessment, knowing that its staff are clear that SEND achievement is a matter for all.
Derek Peaple has been headteacher at Park House School in Newbury since 2003, during which time he has played a leading role in regional, national and international sports education initiatives, including the values-themed London 2012 Get Set Education programme. In 2016, he was shortlisted for the TES Headteacher of the Year Award.
Steve Oxley is SENCo and modern foreign languages teacher at Park House School, Newbury.
References
1. Syed, M. (2016) Black Box Thinking: Marginal gains and the secrets of high performance. London: John Murray.
2. Education Endowment Foundation (2016) Teaching assistants - printable summary. Teaching and Learning Toolkit. [pdf] Available at: educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/resources/teaching-learning-toolkit/teaching-assistants [Accessed 7 October 2016].
3. Russell, A. (2012) Maximising the Impact of Teaching Assistants. London: Routledge.
4. Sharples, J., Webster, R. and Blatchford, P. (2015) Making Best Use of Teaching Assistants. [pdf] Available at: educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/public/files/Publications/Campaigns/TA_Guidance_Report_MakingBestUseOfTeachingAssisstants-Printable.pdf [Accessed 7 October 2016].
5. ibid.
6. ibid. p10.
7. ibid. p15.