Something special

What does effective leadership of children with SEND (special educational needs and disabilities) look like? Angela Spencer finds out more.

At Crestwood College for Business and Enterprise in Hampshire, every teaching assistant (TA) is a subject specialist assigned to a specific department.

Rather than typically learning aside pupils in class, the TAs are more involved in supporting teachers in their planning and differentiation of learning, and building up a bank of resources that supports personalisation for young people with differing educational needs.

The initiative has helped provide consistency for pupils moving from having one teacher in primary school to around 13 in secondary school. The departmental TAs – together with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) TAs as part of dyslexia provision, pastoral support workers and ‘floating’ TAs who hone in on literacy and numeracy – offer an additional tier of care that enables children with SEND to prosper in an inclusive classroom environment.

In the same Eastleigh secondary school, a primary school teacher has been recruited to teach within the provision for dyslexia and lead learning intervention strategies. The thinking is that her experience of both settings can help pupils make the difficult transition across the phases, plus she has a strong grip on the mechanics of teaching children to read and write.

These two outside the box ideas – what headteacher Krista Carter refers to as the leadership knack of “putting round pegs into round holes” – are part of an entire restructuring of SEND provision that has helped Crestwood College boost pupil’s progress over the last two years. In November 2009, Ofsted inspectors found that “all groups, including higher attainers and those with special educational needs and/or disabilities, made progress at the same good rate.”

Krista said: “The provision was disparate. Now the whole ethos and character of the school has changed. The TAs have real ownership and they give of themselves above and beyond every day. When it comes to leadership of SEND, putting the right structure in place can make a huge difference.”

Effective leadership characteristics and strategies like those employed at Crestwood are a key element of the two-year Achievement for All project initiated by the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) and led by National Strategies.

The project is working with approximately 450 primary, secondary and special schools across 10 local authorities to improve achievement and progress of young people with SEND, improve engagement with their parents, and improve wider outcomes such as those linked to bullying and attendance. The National College involvement is in exploring and pulling together the key characteristics of effective leadership of inclusion and feeding the learning back into mainstream provision for leaders, including the National Professional Qualification for Headship (NPQH).

Paul Bennett, Operational Director of Strategic Initiatives, Primary at the National College, said Achievement for All provided a welcome opportunity to ‘concentrate minds’ and link learning on the leadership of SEND with other streams of work such as narrowing the gap and strengthening teaching and learning.

“I think there are things to be learnt from effective leaders in special schools – particularly around personalising learning, engaging parents and really focusing on where resources are going and what value they bring,” he said. “Equally, there are some key things we know about effective leadership in any context that we can look to apply better in ‘identifying and addressing’ SEND needs specifically.”

Dame Dela Smith, a former school head and now executive director of the Darlington Education Village – an inclusive federation of a primary, special and secondary school in the north east – has had more cross-phase experience than most.

She has helped develop a culture of support and challenge on a campus with a single register, a single budget and whole site collective responsibility for leadership of SEND.

Dame Dela said: “We have high expectations for every child and each has a different learning trajectory and targets set according to their prior achievement. Ours is a system of ‘whatever it takes’ intervention rather than feeding children through the education sausage machine. Leaders of SEND have to be resilient and not put off by performance tables – there are many other ways to measure progress.”

One of the biggest challenges however has been tackling fears that effective leadership of SEND comes at the expense of a school’s overall academic achievement: “We really need to blast the myth that special schools are so very different, because they are not. A personal low was the prejudice I faced as a special school head leading across the phases, so it was a real high point when our secondary school moved from 19 per cent 5 A* to C with English and Maths in 2008 to 42 per cent last year.”

Four years ago, exclusions on behaviour at Selby Community Primary School in North Yorkshire, where 36.7 per cent of pupils have SEND, added up to 50 days a term. That figure has gradually been reduced to an average of 15, although there were no exclusions at all in the last autumn term.

Headteacher Ian Clennan puts the improvement down to higher quality relationships between staff and pupils resulting from greater leadership focus and investment in provision for SEND.

“For me, it’s about knowing your children and finding out what works for every one of them,” he said. “We have put a lot of resources into having our own inclusion team, which isn’t unique in a primary school, but is rare. We also have a fulltime teacher who doesn’t have a class but does have an overview of all levels of need, including gifted and talented. Plus we have a local authority-funded home-school support worker based at school full time.”

Like Crestwood College and Darlington Education Village, the Selby school keenly focuses on measuring pupil progress, starting with a wellbeing ‘vulnerability audit’ and celebrating small steps of improvement along the way.

Staff CPD again features highly, as does an open door policy that encourages parents to come into school to see the inclusion team at any time. Ian said: “We work closely with social care, housing, credit unions and other organisations and agencies, but if we can help families ourselves, we will. It can take a lot of courage for people to come in and talk about their problems. If we send them on too quickly, they won’t bother to come again.”

Ian places staff trust high on the list of personal characteristics of leadership of SEND, together with a willingness to take risks and go back to the drawing board on interventions that don’t work.

He also thinks high visibility is vital: “I make time to talk to the children about their work. I don’t want going to the headteacher’s office to be a negative experience. I want them to know I care.

“It doesn’t get any easier of course. Each year we succeed in getting pupils off intervention programmes, but they are quickly replaced by new pupils coming into the school nursery.

“What is heartening is that visitors always comment on how friendly and welcoming the pupils are. We have tried to pinpoint that ethos and we think it’s something to do with the children recognising the improvement in their school and the improvement in themselves.”