Academisation plans neglect special educational needs - Lord Addington
Aden Simpson
| PoliticsHome
There is a legal duty to teach every child, Lord Addington tells PoliticsHome, but the Government’s White Paper on Educational Excellence looks to fail those with special educational needs.
Support for special educational needs (SEN) is already ‘inadequate,’ says Lord Addington, president of the British Dyslexia Association: teachers are not trained to understand to them, and outside help is sparse.
Yet the Government’s White Paper - Educational Excellence Everywhere - setting out its plans for widespread academisation of English schools, is a ‘mess’ he argues, and likely to make a bad situation much worse.
“There is a legal duty for every school to get the best out of every child,” said Lord Addington. “Yet teachers are not trained sufficiently to teach all of them.”
Roughly 20% of pupils have SEN of some description: the average classroom has three dyslexics; one dyscalculic; one or two people with dyspraxia; and one in every three classes will have someone with autism.
“If you don’t know how to teach these people - if you don’t know the different learning curves or the one or two things they won’t be able to do very well - you are guaranteed at least under-achievement, and possibly failure.”
The Liberal Democrat Lord is leading a debate in the Upper Chamber today to make the case for improved capacity for SEN support. He will argue that in the current system, teachers are not trained to even understand the professional advice they are given on SEN, let alone teach to their various needs.
And as more schools sever their ties with their local authorities, upon whom they currently rely for SEN support, the various and very common needs of pupils will be left to the whimsy of headteachers and staff, who ‘may or may not be interested,’ and have no compulsory training.
“You’re changing a system that doesn’t work that well, to create one that is potentially worse, and one that has even less support,” he said.
“For an individual school, running itself, how do you guarantee that you’ll be doing it properly?”
The Local Educational Authority provides educational psychologists, but there is currently only one for every 25 schools. With an average of 500 pupils per school, that’s one psychologist for every 15,000 pupils.
“The current system works better in theory than it does in practice,” he added. “But again, if you change this, what do you do?
“We simply don’t know. Are you going to quadruple the number of educational psychologists, which takes six years of training? I doubt it.”
In a typical scenario, an educational psychologist will assess a child’s learning and give instructions to his teachers. But without even a basic awareness of the common conditions, these instructions will be difficult to follow.
“They might say: ‘He should be taught to do assisted phonics;’ or ‘he should be instructed to do voice operation into a computer for written work.’ If teachers don’t understand why this is necessary, the chances of them succeeding are next to zero.”
Resources may be allocated for teaching assistants, he added, but “they are often instructed to babysit people with SEN because no one knows how to teach them.”
Each school has SEN coordinators, but not SEN teachers, and who are often coordinating “little resource with little training.”
“A classic one for dyslexics is to give them extra spelling lessons,” he added. “If your brain has a problem with language-processing and short-term memory, giving them extra work tends to lead to bad situations in classrooms.
“Many dyslexics will hide in the middle of the class - disappear, do nothing and smile - or cause disruption from the back,” he said. “It might even be enough to make that person totally resistant to the educational system.”
The consequences of failure can be tragic. “If you want to find somewhere with the highest percentage of SEN go to a prison, especially young offenders centre,” he said. “There’s such a high correlation between educational failure and prison.”
After academisation, the danger is that provision for SEN support will be left to the discretion of a headteacher who may or may not be interested, or know anything about it.
Lord Addington will also be calling for Continuing Professional Development for headteachers, to make sure they understand SEN, how to coordinate support effectively, and bring in help from outside.
“If the headteacher doesn’t understand this, what chance does he have of getting it correct?”
“It’s a mess.” he said, “There is a legal duty to do this, they do not have enough resources to deal with the problem, and they are not smart enough or comprehensive enough to get assistance.”
“This debate is simply a way of pointing to the new system; how is it going to work? Because the old one wasn’t great.
“The subtext behind it, is that we should actually have teachers who are better trained. That’s the cause I’m fighting.”
