Headteacher Update Podcast: SEND staffing in primary schools

Hello and welcome to the Head Teacher Update Podcast designed to lead leaders and dedicated to spreading best practice across the primary phase. I'm your host, Hallefrostica Retired, Head Teacher and Annaly and a long-standing member of the Head Teacher Update Editorial Board. In today's episode we're discussing stuffing send solutions. We begin with nine quick ideas and then develop these further considering how the impact of send stuffing can be best maximized covering deployment and CPDF staff. In particular, we discuss the challenging role of the Senko and how they can be best supported. At the heart of our podcast is our pupils themselves and we discuss ideas to keep them central to provision mapping and an inclusive culture. This podcast was recorded on November the 11th. Now let's meet my esteemed panel of guests. My name's Dr Corvine App, well I'm Principal Learning Leader of the Thinking Schools Federation, which is a Federation of Two Schools in East London, one there Barking and one there Ilford, Highlands Primary and Art Pool Primary. Inclusion is a passion of mine and I started as an NQT working in a resourced provision school in Newham. I have an experience of working with children with profound and multiple needs and particularly working with children with social, emotional, behavioural needs. My master's had a specific focus on inclusion, I've been an inclusion leader and I've had the opportunity to present a conferences on my perspective on how we develop inclusive schools, structures and cultures and I was very pleased three weeks ago to present at the first world inclusion congress which took place in Kazakhstan. Three brief things that I think we could focus on in terms of how we really develop inclusive practice and we support our most valuable resource which is our staff, our team, to be able to meet the needs of not just our most complex children but every child. I think we're all somewhere on that spectrum of emotional behavioural needs and my doctoral thesis focused on the factors that impact upon teacher engagement in professional learning. So the first thing that I would say is how are we correct an environment which is really expansive in terms of professional learning for teachers and support staff so inclusion can't just be about our support staff or the designated adult, it has to be a team approach and I think it's the biggest untapped resource in our schools that that real deep professional learning, both formal and informal. The second thing that I think the challenge with a topic like this is there are really serious and significant challenges facing schools in terms of reduced funding and rising numbers of children with send and profound needs. So there is no magic bullet here to create these inclusive schools but one thing we could look at is additional resource provisions in mainstream schools because we've got children insufficient places in special schools and that is being supplemented by independent schools but I would like to create a culture in which children can go to their local school. And so how do we without providing additional challenges to schools, to support schools, to have additional provisions, not alternative, additional provisions which can provide interventions for children so that they are able to thrive in their mainstream classes. And the third thing I would say is to develop a whole school collaborative inclusive culture so how we can implement structures in schools which will influence a really strong culture for inclusion so you don't have people like Senko's feeling that they are working in isolation or they have to be experts that every member of the team sees themselves as responsible for every child. Fantastic. Thanks, Kovan. So you are talking very much there about the collaborative nature of working around the children that are especially in our schools and the inclusive school and you are probably were you pleased to see in the off-stand framework now a separate heading for inclusion? I wouldn't say I'm pleased to see anything in the inspection framework to be fair but I think the challenge there is that I do think there needs to be a focus on inclusion because we've created a culture of exclusion because there's such a focus on achievement within the inspection framework so can you be inclusive and get a strong judgment for quality of education and then that leads to practices such as off-rolling and higher numbers of suspensions and exclusions. In answer to your question I do think a stronger focus on inclusion is worthwhile how that plays out is going to be a different story. My aim is that every child should be able to go to their local school and thrive so ultimately there should be a culture of collaboration between schools and not competition which is what we have now. Gosh, that's through it a bit of a controversial question there. I don't know about that. I think it was because I was at a Governor's meeting last night we were going through the tweaks and changes and it just came to mind so let's move on. That's another podcast entirely. So welcome to the podcast, Beth. Hello, yes, so my name is Beth Tanton and I lead send across the Compass Partnership of Schools which is a trust based in Greenwich and Essex and it's a mix of primary mainstream schools and special schools serving children very similar to the profile that Colvon was just speaking about so children with PMLD, frowned on multiple learning needs to be a learning needs autism. And my role was created about three years ago and essentially it exists to do exactly what Colvon is just speaking about. It's supporting our school leaders and our staff to really be able to serve the four community, the whole community so that every child that comes through our gates is part of our community and there is definitely challenge in that and part of my role is finding those solutions. I am a teacher and a Senko and again similarly to Colvon. My master's focus very much on inclusion and send. And in terms of my three tips again, they're very similar but my first one was really around CPD but it's around kind of developing a very clear shared understanding in your school of adaptive teaching. I think it's a term that can be understood very many different ways. So I think a useful first step for any school leader for any head teacher is to really clarify what we mean by adaptive teaching. So is the planning anticipating barriers? Is the instruction responsive? Our teacher is checking for understanding and adapting effectively in the moment. And are they reflecting on that teaching sequence moving forward and adapting it? And I think the research kind of suggests that there's a huge amount of cognitive similarity in the way that we all learn. So there are powerful strategies that we can all be using that will benefit children with send but benefit all children. And I think my second point leads on from that which is to understand where adaptive teaching or scaffolding is not sufficient on its own because some children will need something that is highly personalised and different from their peers. And I think that when you think about children that need that that is going to affect your model of delivery, that will affect your staffing. So I think it's really important to kind of know who those children are and make sure that you're providing the right support. And the sort of mantra we use in our trust is for every child we should be able to answer the question in terms of their learning why this, why now and what's next. So it's really about empowering staff to understand those learner profiles at the earliest stages of learning. And my final point was really around looking to develop the universal and targeted provision for those high incidence send needs, the sort of needs that we are going to encounter in every school, so linking it to the four areas of needs and really thinking at a whole school level or at a more targeted level, what can we be doing to support these needs so that not all of your provision is reliant upon sort of one-to-one delivery. And hence coming back to the inclusive classrooms as well as the inclusive school. Thanks Beth and welcome back Sarah. And I, great to be back, great to be on this podcast. My name is Sarah Ulsten. I am now an independent consultant and trainer focusing on special needs and safeguarding, working under the inclusion, SEA, inclusion and safeguarding. My background is a teacher, I have 30, 80 years at the, what started as the chalk face, became the interactive whiteboard face. And in that time I have undertaken many roles in schools, those including DSL, Senko, class teacher, senior leadership of various brands and kinds. And my absolute passion in education is about inclusion. I'm co-author with Daniel Sebel of the book The Inclusive Classroom. You know, Beth was talking about inclusion and differentiation and adaptive teaching. It doesn't matter what we call it, it's how we do it. And it's the fact that we're doing it and we know that we can't go in with the one-size-fits-all. We need it to be fitted, touch them. I'm also, I think, coming to this particular podcast with a particular head and also author of the book, Working Effectively with Your Teaching Assistant. And my real stance within this is looking at how we make that effect of use of teaching assistants. I.e. the people working in classrooms to support learning. And I know different schools call them different Thittings, doesn't matter what the job title is. It's about their focus on supporting learning. My preferred title is Learning Support Assistant. And we know this is an increasingly rare resource and it is an immensely valuable resource. We need to say, how do we make the best use of these teaching assistants, learning support assistants to work with our children, to work with the teaching staff to provide the best support, differentiation, and learning environment for the children in our schools? My three sort of points would be the importance with all our children from our smallest, all the way up, through primary, through secondary, is about we need to be prompting our children for independence. We need to be developing their dependence, not making them prompt dependent and dependent on adults to support their learning. And when we're looking at staffing, I see it, I see it, being really imaginative about how we actually use our teaching assistants and not assume that working with our students or our special needs children, our pupil, pupil and pupil is the job of the teaching assistant. And so we may look at actually swapping roles. So the teaching assistant is up front during the triaging, sometimes even during the delivery, while the teacher is focusing on work with those most vulnerable children. So I think you're thinking about how can we use the skills and the relationships within the classroom to provide the best for our children. And I think the final point I'm going to make, I think it's one of those things which seems to me, we're blooming obvious, but we forget. We took start talking about interventions, and we get into a mindset that an intervention has to be outside of the classroom. And I think we really need to be looking at valuing, identifying, and being clear about the interventions we do within the classroom, and how not, you know, Coran has been talking about wanting every child to be in their local school. I want every child to be in their classroom, not out in an intervention, not out in a corridor, not out in a unit, but actually, how can we intervene in the classroom through really good practice, differentiation, adaptive teaching to make it work for the child. In the room, rather than ending up with children, what I would call "outventions" which happen outside the classroom. I like what you did there. Thanks so much, Sarah, so that takes us really nicely on to the next question about how can the impact of send stuffing be best maximized, given budget constraints amongst many constraints? It's a best, would you like to kick us off? Yes, definitely, so I thought about the CPD that we offer. But I particularly was thinking about how we use external specialists. And I think this is coming from a place of, you know, when I became a Senko, I didn't really understand how to use my external specialists very well. So you know, I had, these are fantastically experienced and knowledgeable educational psychologists and speech and language therapists largely, you know, assessing individual children and providing individual plans, and then those individual plans were delivered by individual teaching assistants often, you know, and I think over time I learned that we can use those specialists really effectively to impact the whole school. So one example recently in our trust is that we've had our EPs lead training on executive functioning difficulties with a particular lens on ADHD, and they followed that initial training within, you know, taking that group of staff through a lesson study approach. So, you know, teachers would plan together, you know, a lesson that would particularly, you know, be thinking about strategies for executive functioning, and then they would observe each other teaching, you know, and then they would reflect on that together. And then that can be, that cycle can be repeated. And you can just sort of see just by that process, firstly how much valuable CPD is being delivered and gained through that, but also the number of children that you're able to sort of support in a couple of hours of EP time is really increased, and another school that recently has worked quite creatively with their speech and language therapies. Again, they've sort of had, they really wanted to think about how they, in the reception year, years, they were really good at scaffolding talk, you know, and developing talk. And then they said they noticed that when the children went into key stage one, the teachers were a little bit less confident, you know, because it's a different kind of environment, and they weren't quite as confident in how they could extend children's speech and particularly support those children with difficulties with their speech. So training was delivered again by the speech and language therapist, and then they visited all of those year one classrooms to observe what they were doing, and then, you know, offer really personalized feedback and support to those teachers. So I think there are really creative ways to use our external specialists, and schools shouldn't feel that, you know, particularly Senko shouldn't feel that it all rests on their knowledge. I like the fact that the EPs in the speech and learning specialists are getting right down and working with the children, it seems really obvious, but I really like that, thanks Beth, and Sarah. I'm going to, before I get to my main point, I'm just going to say lesson study I've used it so effectively throughout my career with different groups, and I would actually really put a kite in people to do lesson study with teaching assistants and getting them to observe work with each other, particularly where you have staff working across the school or working with children's similar needs to get a chance to go in and learn from each other and talk and have professional dialogue about how they support those children. So that wasn't the point I was going to make, but I feel it's really important, so I'm going to say it anyway. What did I want to say about how we maximise SIN staffing provision? We need to move away from the language of one-to-ones. You almost never get an EHCP that says one-to-one provision. We're going again to this prompting for independence. If you have somebody there all the time, it's really difficult to develop independent, confident skills to be independent. I much, much prefer having a key person for children, so they know they've got that safe trusted adult who really knows them. It's great. There is so much good practice in early years that we don't carry further up to the school. I would take you with that language in the early years foundation stage, about the key person. Their role, the person holds child in mind, provides them with the professional love. I think it's so important that equally that key person needs to operate within a team around the child, because we cannot get into a position where we are dependent on one person to work with each single child. We can't afford it, but it's actually bad practice. It's not good for the child, it's not good for the member or staff. We need to build that team around the child, and I tend to look at year groups, or pairs of year groups, if you're single-form entry, and building the provision and the support across classes, so that you build that team, and you look at the children within that year group, within the two year groups for smaller schools, with those needs and how you support them, and how you build the staff experience and expertise, and share it in that team around the child. So that any body within that team can work with any individual child, and those children develop the confidence to engage with a team of adults, and the parents gain the confidence and understanding that support is not just from Mrs Brown, it is from the team. And also, as well as confidence, it's about building the children's social schools as well, isn't it? If you have a child who is working one-to-one with an adult, particularly if they are not a qualified teacher, which reality is, you know, very few children will be, you actually, that person can very easily become a barrier, both between the child and the teacher and the child and their peers. I remember doing an SCN review in a school, why, very quickly convinced the head that I was an absolute genius, because I could go into each room, and I could spot the SCN children immediately. There was no genius about it, it was merely they were sat to the back or to the side, occasionally to the front, but always with an adult between them and their peers, they were not able to develop those learning skills. And we need to have our children supported to engage you in learning, and learning is not just academic. Absolutely. Thank you, Sarah. Okay, thank you, Sarah, and I'm just going to mind you what the question was, how can the impact of SCN staff in the best maximise given budget constraints? Just to clarify those themes, the best talking about the value of professional learning, and she's mentioned lesson study. Just to agree with Sarah in terms of that overreliance on the, we call it one-to-one, right? What happens is children will internalise the values that the adults hold, and if the adult is telling the child that you're a lion on me, and you can't learn without me, then the child has not got the experience to draw upon to say no, I've got more resilience. So the concept of the children that are the most vulnerable and have the most needs spend the least time with the qualified teachers is sending out a really clear message. The other thing is about the classroom, so the links between the conditions for learning in the classroom, and the conditions for learning for adults within the school, which is my expertise, are intertwined, there has to be clear messages. So we have to see the learning of every child as everyone's responsibility. Sarah was talking about having teams working collaboratively, looking across the piece that every child, that is about that combined wisdom and working together to ensure that every child is learning and succeeds. The research will tell you that the single most important factor that impacts upon children's learning outcomes in schools, so if you take out the influence of the home or their starting points, and when we're talking about learning outcomes, we're not just talking about academic, we're talking about personal, social, emotional, the single most important factor in schools is the quality of teaching, and that includes, we call our teachers class leaders, because they're leading the learning of the children in their classroom, and they're leading the learning of the adults that are supporting in that classroom. And our teaching assistants are called learning coaches to give them that responsibility to show that they are nurturing and they're equally important in that classroom. So the more that leaders invest their time, in, for example, Beth was talking about lesson study, there's a chat to her in my first book, which is just about peer learning and lesson study, is there was a big piece of research coming out of Chicago in 2016, which argues that the average teacher stops improving in their third year, after really accelerating in the development in their first two. But in the best schools, there's a very, very expansive learning environment where everybody is questioning, everybody is trialing changes, everybody is thinking creatively and critically and developing their practice, and then you are far more likely to have that expansive learning environment that impacts upon every child, so that we're seeing every child drive and succeed. So that real deep investment in professional learning, and then how you are organising your staff team to meet the needs of all the children. And the final point there is a teaching qualification is insufficient to have a really deep understanding of inclusive practice, which is why teachers have to work in partnership and teams to really look at actually rather than erecting barriers, which is what an adult does. I helped them have to tell adults, can you just leave, can you let them get on with it? What's wrong with being stuck? Being stuck is actually good, right, how are you going to develop resilience? And I really agree with Sarah on that one, in that actually we make those children dependent and then the message is going home to appearances that my child can't learn without the adult and that isn't going to be in those children's best interests, so I'm really building on a combination of the two. So how do you deploy the different support staff roles and positions in order to spread the very stretch people resource we've already discussed? So Sarah, anything extra? How do we get our staff to work effectively with our children? And this move from the language, the focus on one to one. And I talk about a move from Velcro, the person stuck with the child, to what I call a helicopter approach. And so that we're saying, when a child starts at that value of a prompted start, making sure they know the equipment, they know what they've got to do and they can begin to task. And then the teaching assistant or the teachers working with them, lifts off like the helicopter, they may circle. At that point they can go and work with other children, we can spread our resources, we can engage with more children, and then they may come and touch down, we check, we focus, praise is there, the child or group of children they're working with, then lift off and work with others and come back here. And I think that approach of how do we deploy staff, giving staff the permission to work with other children, their focus child, we demonstrate to the children the belief they can be independent, even if it is only for 30 seconds. We also need to allow children to get things wrong, to get stuck, to find it difficult because so often with children's special needs, with the pace of the curriculum, we need to keep them going, we need, so we can't have, don't have time for them to be stuck. We are afraid that if they find something difficult, they're going to kick off, we're afraid of them being disrupted, they're coming disregulated, but actually we need to remember that failing to do something is key to learning to do it. And we don't actually learn effectively, and we don't know how to learn if we find everything easy. I love that and I can just see the spotlight coming down on the children from up high, from the helicopter, so yeah, that's so important, great, I love that idea, and Kulvar. Yeah, I know we've talked about this, but I'm a great believer in investment in early years, so having really strong early years practitioners, and I'm very fortunate that both schools have got learning coaches who want to spend the rest of their careers in early years, and that's great, because the development of those early childhood learning behaviours and that sort of confidence and resilience and understanding that feeling of safety and security and the ability to take risks and that we learn through making mistakes. The other thing that from a leadership perspective is, for practitioners, there needs to be really clear synergy between the expectations of what we expect to see, so you can't have children learning in an environment where they are confident about working independently or thinking critically or taking risks unless every member of staff understands the conditions for learning that enable that to happen, so I operate from a very simple approach to say, what do we want our class to feel like, to sound like for our children, what do we want the conditions for learning to be, and then a really strong pedagogical approach, so we use a dialogic teaching approach, and our children are aware of what that looks like, but every member of staff is fully trained in understanding, and what you do is you then create a far more equitable learning environment in which everyone has a voice, everyone is able to challenge each other, and we, we're the lead school for the Mayor of London's Talk Matters program, we're also a lead UNICEF right-respecting school, and it's interesting going back to Sarah's brilliance at spotting who was a children with send, we had a recent visit at our school where we had about 18 practitioners from a local, a neighbouring local authority, and the first thing, there were three people from the same school, the first thing they said to me afterwards, where were all your send children, and then I said, they were in there, they were in there, but we went to about 20 classes, and then the next question was even more powerful one, they said, they were, where were all your ADHD children, and I said, I said, they were there, and you met a couple on the stairs on the way up, but it's this feeling of actually rather than constraining these children, and like Sarah said, oh, fear of kicking off, actually create an environment in which people feel that they can be themselves, and that it's okay to be dysregulated, because we say that for adults all the time, isn't that be the same for for children, but it's about this whole school approach so that children don't feel this inconsistency. I'm a governor of a secondary school, and what students in secondary school do, they adapt their behaviour according to the classroom that they're going to, because they understand those expectations and structures and routines are different. So that consistency of approach, so that every adult is encouraging those children with additional needs to take risks, to be independent, to be challenged, whether that's in their PE lesson or their music lesson, you know, when you have additional classes and whether they have their PPA so that when a teacher's covering them, it isn't a different experience, that has a really powerful impact on how children internalise what that learning looks like, which means that when a child says I don't get it, so that's a really powerful thing to say, because a child can actually challenge an adult and say, yeah, I've heard what you're trying to say, but I still don't get it, and that we can say, yeah, you just don't get it, yeah, that's very powerful, enabling those children to see themselves as learners. It's also just so powerful if they have the feel they have the autonomy to say it, and they understand enough about their own learning to be able to say. Yeah, so the ultimate is to get to enable our teachers to be experts in developing children's metacognitive skills, because what we do is we are, we, children are internalising where we use language of my highest, my lowers, of what am I going to do, and actually we should be looking at each individual starting point, and no one's brilliant and everything, and no one's terrible at everything. So this is about a culture within the school of, this is our shared approach to inclusion, and it's not about isolating a Senko or considering the Senko to be the expert, that actually we are all adapting and being creative in our planning and our practice and its collaborative to actually say, well that didn't work as well as we thought it would do less to do something different, and that's okay. So this is, this is again that that synergy of expectation, how our children are greeted and treated by every adult, to enable them to feel that they can be themselves, and they are going to learn, and this focus on effort leads to success, rather than ability or your current starting point. I can also see from your approach that transitions wouldn't be too much of an issue, you know, move children the challenge of moving up to the next key stage or into the next door classroom, I can just see it being very seamless, which is really exciting, thank you, and best. So I answer this question by thinking about the creation of specialist TA roles, which is something that I have seen work well in our schools. So we know that, you know, when TA's are leading high quality interventions with high quality resources and CPD and support, that that can be really impactful, and I completely agree with Sarah's points about, you know, that's definitely not all we want TA's to be doing, but when they are doing interventions, we want to be reassured that those are really effective and impactful. So in our trust, we've developed in some schools, sort of specialist TA roles, which I'm sure many other schools will have, such as Elsa, so emotional literacy support assistance, you've had speech and language, lead TA's, literacy support, lead TA's, and usually they are then sort of linked up directly with an external professional, whether it's the EP or the speech and language therapist, who will train them directly, but will also then have that overview of the children they're supporting, you know, so they will come and look at their interventions and offer guidance and say, you know, this child's ready to move on to this or try this with this group. And I think there's a few benefits to that, the first is you obviously develop these experts in your school. It means one member of staff receiving that training, rather than maybe you need to sort of train six people to go and deliver that training across the school, you can bring the children together in groups, where it makes sense to, and then you know, you then have these key staff members that have that overview of the needs across the school and can support other teacher assistants or teachers, and it's another kind of way of working quite efficiently with your specialists. So yeah, that's what I wanted to add, they're a little bit different from the other speakers who are absolutely fantastic, and I've made lots of notes, they thank you. So really you talk about cascading, the training down as well, which is another cost saving exercise, and we're all thinking about that too as a constraints, so thank you. I think across the three of you, you're coming up with some similarities, but some great differences in how you contribute into the podcast, which is excellent. So, thinking now about our teaching staff, who are at the front line of teaching STEM pupils and responsible for the learning in their classrooms, and many of our teachers don't have the specialism, what CPD can be effective for them, and also what CPD can be impactful for support staff too, it's a co-varm. So obviously, this is my area of expertise in terms of my doctorate, but any collaborative learning, so it doesn't matter if you're the teacher or you're the learning coach, that any professional learning that is collaborative is more powerful because of the exchange of ideas, the critical thinking. We talked about peer learning and lesson study, these are really deep models that build trust and engagement, and really focus. The reason our support staff or teaching assistants are called learning coaches is we empower every member of our staff team. I haven't quite got to the mid days, they're harder to reach, they all get coaching professional learning, and so every member of staff gets the opportunity to coach and be coached, and what that does is that develops that personal capacity to be really solution focused, and to be creative in thinking what can we do together to meet the needs of our children. We pay 60% towards every teacher to do a master's and a learning coach, if they so choose, and we insist on one module being inclusive practice, because if you're engaging in a ten session module, developing your knowledge and understanding of inclusive practice and engaging in a piece of action research within your classroom, that impacts upon everybody across your team, because it then moves into that collaborative professional learning. The reason we argue for that is that what I've said earlier is you're not equipped at the start of your career. In my first term, I was working with some children with severe emotional behaviour difficulties. I started a master's because I needed to develop my expertise, I needed to engage in research, and I needed to develop my understanding and practice. By empowering teachers to do this, if we agree that the most important factor that impacts upon student outcomes is the quality of teaching, what engaging in action research does is develop teacher confidence in terms of what works. What we're aiming to do is to create a really powerful dynamic learning community, which I talk about in my book, which impacts upon the expansiveness of the informal learning environment in schools. At the end of a lesson or in play time or during your PPA, which we do together, we call learning review conversations, you're spending time really thinking about what I need to do with this, and I know Sarah said it could be proprenium, it could be disadvantage, it could be new joiners. What are we going to do differently? How are we going to adapt to meet the needs of these children? The result is that if you've got a team of really empowered, independent, masters-level critical thinkers in your school, you're going to have a far more powerful collective impact upon inclusive practice and the outcomes for all children. Sarah was talking about children, you need to encourage that autonomy and agency to self-evaluate, to critically evaluate, to use those metacognitive skills that are particular to individuals. What supported me last time when I found something tricky? What can I draw upon? You have to give that same agency and autonomy to your teachers. You can't encourage that autonomy whilst having a culture of power compliance, monitoring, control. You have to give genuine agency to the teaching team to make those decisions at the front line that impact upon those students. If they're able to do that whilst engaging in action research, masters, peer learning, lesson study, coaching, collaborative planning, collaborative professional learning, you create what I would describe in my conceptual framework as this really dynamic learning community. So with less people, it's about the impact that they can have collectively. That just sounded extremely dynamic. I'm just thinking of the new wave of teachers coming in who I remember when I was interviewing teachers, they wanted to know what, not what was in it for them, but they do genuinely want to develop and learn, don't they? And it sounds like the value you're placing on your staff team is there in evidence you pay for parts of their master's degrees for goodness sake. That's brilliant practice. Thank you, Kulvan. And Beth, I also think that's absolutely fantastic, Kulvan, that you offer to your staff. That's just amazing. I think I would suggest really thinking about how send friendly your pedagogy is in a school is a helpful way to approach things. I think people teachers can find this a bit of a overwhelming area and they can sometimes assume they need to know in great detail about all the many different diagnoses that exist, which can feel very daunting. And I think when you sort of frame it around, let's look at what pedagogy is supportive to children with lots of different types of send and all children, then that becomes a little bit easier. So you're looking at things like direct instruction and scaffolding and metacognitive strategies and oracy and you're looking at how you're grouping the children. And I think it's just about letting teachers know that they are the experts on pedagogy. They are the experts in teaching. So there may be lots of other specialists working with a child at any time, but they are also experts and they should feel confident in what they are doing. So I think a helpful lens can be for a teacher just to sort of think about their lesson ahead and think, who will find this lesson challenging and what can I do to make it more accessible. And that's a kind of a good starting point, but I'd also sort of steer people towards there is some really good and often free CPD out there for staff that do want to, you know, to improve their knowledge and the universal send services is a good starting point. So I said that's completely free, yeah, it's DFE funded and it's, I think it's a series of about 20 webinars. Wonderful. Yes, thanks very much. And Sarah, last word on this slide. I think absolutely what Beth is saying about making our teachers feel confident and making them feel that our special special needs is part of their teaching or teachers are teachers special special needs is not done by an expert or all teachers are special needs. And we need to impart teachers to feel that their SEM teaching is part of their good practice not a bolt on or an or worse still an additional thing they have to do. They get it right for their SEM children, they get it right for all their children. And that's where the high quality differentiation adapted teaching, whatever we're going to call it is key. And also one of the big bits of my work is a moving from looking at the label you've attached to a child to diagnosis and what is that child's needs and what helps them. And if you look at the focus of the child's needs, stuff is much more confident to identify the needs than if they feel they have to have an expertise in autism or ADHD or something else. So I think the more we look at the needs of the children, they used to look at the needs of the children and then that allows them to say these children may not have the same diagnosis but they have the same needs, how do I support them within the room. And I think it's also the small tweaks and adaptions. We need to remember the value of the very small things we do in our class, which may be the way we give instructions. It may be who we get to hand out the books so they get a bit of heavy load work. Those small adaptions, thinking actually for that child it makes a difference if they come into the room first and sit down before the other students, they've got that moment of quiet. The small tweaks and adaptions are within all our teachers' capabilities and it's recognising and giving them, empowering them to feel that they can make those decisions about how they run their classroom and they don't think of the adaptions, the interventions to be big actions. They can be those small tweaks. I'm going to stay with you, Sarah, because I really enjoyed reading your article in her teacher update magazine looking after your Senko, so I'm going to focus on that in particular now. So, how would you optimise the role of the Senko and how can leaders best support them to fulfill their very demanding role, Sarah, your specialist subject? I mean, this is an article I wrote, I think about a year ago, which came from my, you know, really sort of a bit of a cry from the heart of my experience as a Senko, and you know, what do we need as schools to do to support us? We need a clear role, we need that Senko to be recognised as a senior leader to part of the senior leadership team and in value, because we're all teachers of Senko, your Senko is part of the discussions you are having across the board about all your children. It means that it is embedded across the approach and the values of the whole school, so we need to really value and support the Senko. We need to give the Senko time, and the time may vary during the year, because I work for many years in a school attached to a miniature camp, we have very, very high from mobility. And so the numbers of children I had on my register might actually vary over the year. So I actually, when I had, as my number of AHCPs grew, or on the year when all my children with AHCPs were all moved by the army to somewhere else in the country, the amount of time I needed as Senko varied, so you actually think about the time, think about the other roles you're asking as Senko to do, because one of the things as Senko's because SCN is so much embedded within so much of what we do, you often end up with mission creep, that the Senko gets more and more bits added to their role, and nobody, and they say, "Oh, can somebody just look at English children with English traditional language?" Somebody just look at Gypsy Roman travelers, can somebody just look at, and it all gets added to the Senko role, and suddenly you realise that Senko's got this enormous role, which is developed without anybody watching. The other thing, similarly, is helping Senko's protect their time. One of the things to eat to your time as a Senko is, "Can I just ask you a quick question?" Those quick questions might be the 32nd, and they're very rarely 32nds, and it's supporting the Senko to be balanced there, availability, but also allowing them to protect their time so they can actually do the job, making sure the job does not just become a glorified administrator because you've got a really valuable talented member staff, it's a real pity for all they get to do is fill in paper, never see the children, which means you need to put it, make sure you support your Senko with logistics, access to a phone, access to an office, access to workplace to work, a decent computer that actually works, with the right software, a second screen, because so much of the staff, the broader comparing document, really boring thing for that, and I would say also, making sure that Senko's get their training, because the training and the networking may be different to what other staff need because they don't fit in the normal pattern, and the final thing I would say is don't let you Senko become the full guy. Interesting bit of research just came out from the National Gatherers Association. The vast majority complaints into school are about SEM, and we're getting more and more of these complaints, more and more than are written with AI, and some of them are truly vicious. And when you have a Senko, he's absolutely doing their absolute best for child, and they feel they're under a personal attack, we need to make sure the whole school is working together and all is on the same sheet, same page about what SEM is and how the school support them, and that goes from your TA's up to your head, and the executive head, if you're in that, everybody's on the same, and people without qualifications do not diagnose children. So the TA should not ever be saying, but I think they've got whatever. That is a fine rallying cry, thank you Sarah. So that's a bit of a relief, and that's, I'm sure this resonates with you, because this is your role, so how would you like your role to be optimised and how do you want leaders to best support you in fulfilling your demanding role? Well, I think we all need a Sarah for a starters, amazing advocate for Senko's. I would really just add to what's been shared, particularly that point about, you know, how the Senko works with the head teacher. There was a conference held, I think it was last year, a room full of Senko's, and they were asked, you know, what is the one thing that would keep you in your role, saying five years' time? And everyone kind of anticipated it would be things around workload, but what they actually said was a head teacher that leads inclusion, a head teacher that really, really gets this, you know, so that we're a team. I think the most difficult thing for Senko is when they feel that they're working in isolation or they may be thought that they're slightly working across purposes sometimes with their head teacher or leadership team, it's that sense of we're a team and we're doing it together. And exactly as Sarah has just mentioned, you know, resources are becoming fewer and fewer, and it's, it can be really challenging for the Senko, so making those decisions about resourcing as a team and then backing each other, you know, is really important, but I would also just add, again, sort of linking into what Sarah was saying about making time, try to build a team around your Senko, particularly if you're a slightly bigger school, so look at those sort of TAs, look at the roles that you can give them that will support that role for the Senko, either around Admin, taking Admin away from them, or, you know, and I spoke before about those TAs that can lead certain aspects of the Senko role. So when I was, I'm no longer an acting Senko, but when I was a Senko, I had, you know, a TA who was an incredible specialist in speech and language needs and, you know, the teacher came and said, oh, I think this child might need something, I could literally deploy that member of staff and go, just go and do an observation for me, you know, they had all the assessments or just a few assessments, come back, give me your opinion, you know, and then I could just go and quickly have a look, I wouldn't have to do all of that work. That person could then go and, you know, fill out most of the referral form for me and I would just need to look over it, make a few tweaks. So there were like really practical things you can do to free up your Senko time, that being just one example. And the final thing I would say is it's so important for Senko to have a supportive network of other Senko's as well. So we come together at my trust as a group of Senko's and we will work through challenges together, we will find solutions. And yeah, and we will just share in, you know, what is a really challenging, but also a really, you know, wonderful job and celebrate the successes together as well. Thank you so much, Beth and Kovar. Well, I don't think there's too much for me to add, because there's some very sensible and thoughtful suggestions, particularly for people who have experienced the role. I'm happy that Beth said, I see my role as in, despite the fact that I've got two schools is the leader for inclusion and the leader for teaching and learning at both schools. And I still teach and the reason I do that is because then I can engage in collaborative professional dialogue with practitioners because if there's a new pedagogy, a new focus that we're looking at, and I will teach the lowest attaining children, because that is my background and my expertise. Just what I would add is that the reiterate the support for Senko's to have further professional learning opportunities, either with other Senko's or relevant courses, to support them to continue to engage, I don't want them, we don't need them to be the expert in every possible condition. Because I really agree with what Sarah was saying about such a focus on labels, but what difference does it make? I already know what that child needs are, and now you're telling me that they're autistic, and there's no two children on the autism spectrum, not the same anyway. So this is about empowering teachers to really understand their kids and where they're coming from, and their starting point, and to ensure that we're challenging them sufficiently in their learning. And we don't want this cultural environment of where teachers are going to the Senko to solve the situation with these children. The other thing that I will reiterate, and I'm sure lots of listeners will, and Sarah's point about complaints, it's emotionally draining when you're working that hard to be receiving these AI-written complaints of, you know, sometimes disability discrimination. My child's needs aren't being met, and so that's important. And then the opportunity, all those practical stuff that Sarah needs, Sarah was saying that the Senko need, that was nodding and thinking, "God, we should be saying that you need a space, a room, a meeting room for parents, computers, and relevant and protected time." But I think it's important because we can take it for granted, but opportunities to focus on strategic, so actually having time to go to the year group planning sessions where teachers are actually reviewing, we call them learning review conversations. And the Senko's having those conversations at the planning level, rather than only having to deal with the admin or the meetings. And so I think it's this approach to say that actually we are all leading inclusion, and this is the Senko's role specifically in relation to this. You can't ever Senko focus in on the achievement of Roma Traveller Children, which Sarah said. You can't have them, then also teaching three days a week. You've got to be able to give them the tools and the resources to give their best in what is a very challenging role. And I think we're leaders are very inclusive, then the focus is on actually, we've got 900 kids in our school. If 899 children are thriving, it's exceeding and one isn't, we need to do something differently. And the Senko is part of a team, and you never want the Senko to feel isolated. Well, this takes me on ICT. How do you use provision maps to ensure best practice? And the same with you, Corvine, have you got any tips regarding provision mapping? I think a provision map is really considering the overview of the children with the most significant needs and what you are planning for them. But what you don't want that to include is interventions, which don't have any impact on children's engagement in their classrooms. So you do not want children spending, you do not want children spending too much time outside of their classrooms, because often the activities they are doing outside, it's like doing a reading intervention, doing your English lesson, well hold on a minute, how is that going to be impacting? So where you've got children with really profound and multiple needs, with physical needs, who need additional gross motor development, we invest in an additional PE programme that supports some of our children, had these additional gross motor skills needs met. But beyond that, I would want a provision map to focus actually on where our children are in their learning, and then give that responsibility to year group teams. If your teams are big enough, like we have four from five from entry, these are big teams. I would rather they were driving the expectations for learning within their team, and within the children in their team, rather than someone doing it too distant, and saying that this is what these children need. So I have gone into schools in which the focus has been more on the provision map than actually the quality of the provision and the experiences in classroom. So I would much rather look at the provision map in terms of identifying the needs, and then having that agency with the year groups teams to design how you're going to meet those needs, the need those children on. Yeah, starting in the right place there, and Sarah, what's about you with this question? Right, I think again, if we spend longer writing down what we're going to do than we are doing it, we're on the wrong thing. I think your provision mapping needs a lot, you need an overview, but you need to focus on what the individuals need, and remembering if you're putting, you know, they need it, so we know what the need is, how do we respond to it, how do we know it's going to work. And that small tweaks and adaptions within the classroom, actually writing down, you know, I go back again and again as an example to a little boy I had had extreme difficulties accessing writing, and it was about emotional regulation and about the stress of actually starting writing and the possibility of getting wrong. We discovered that one of the things made a huge difference to him was if we physically took a pencil and we put it in his hand, we didn't ask him to find a pencil or get a pencil. Tiny intervention, huge impact, write it down so that everybody who works with that child knows that if you want them to do some writing, so I think making sure those support plans reflect the, don't aren't just listing provisions, and intervention, they're about the practical strategies. As shared with all the people in the classroom, you're asking a teaching assistant to implement things on a plan that you haven't bothered to share them with them, they're not going to be able to do it. They need to be able to see the plan and they need to be able to give them time to read and to be able to ask questions. I would also say the whole thing about children needing to be in the classroom, the interventions not the outventions, where we have got things and I absolutely agree the best, there are points where we need children to go out of the classroom for additional support. With that having a clear target, why have we got this child attending this intervention now? I could best have three things, it was who what now, I think, something like that, and I thought it was great, what's our target, what do we want them to do, get better at spelling isn't going to help us, because how do you measure it, how do we know they've got better at spelling? We need a clear target, we need an entry baseline assessment, we need to set the target and we need to at the end check if they're meted. If that intervention isn't allowing them to meet the target, it's not the right of intervention to be doing. I also think we need to be being clear that we're not just doing interventions to the sake of interventions, we need them to meet the children's need, and one of the things I do is I get when I go in and do SN reviews, I see schools where they're doing these interventions, and we're always done whatever it's called, so we do it, Mrs Jones likes running it, that's nothing to do with the children, it needs to be about the children, it needs to be their needs, and we need to know what, what, where, and if we are running interventions out of the classroom, please can we make sure we have somewhere decent around them, you know, I've been in the position of teaching, the most vulnerable, the most distractable children in a corridor, oddly, it's not impactful. Thanks so much Sarah, and finally to you, Beth, how do you use provision maps to ensure best practice? So we have actually moved to using a provision mapping software, I definitely won't name it, it's been incredibly helpful. So it links to our MIS, so immediately you can gather, you know, lots of other information about child and build up a bit of a contextual picture of what's happening for that child, but the thing it has really helped us to do, just as Sarah was really mentioning there, we are being very, very precise, you know, about the targets that we are setting, and also R&A was just kind of to come back to Colvarn's point about wanting his, you know, his middle leaders to be involved in that process. Everybody has access to this software, so some of those provisions and interventions will be added on and led by the Senko and their team, but very much some of them will be added on and led and monitored by other leaders in the school as well. And it also enables us to really review the impact, and to, you know, look at reports over time of the impact that our interventions have had so that we are really secure that they are perhaps full. Right to the end of the podcast and starting with you, Colvarn, any final tip, nugget or takeaway. The way in which we create a really strong, inclusive culture that actually is a mindset to say a principle, to say we will do whatever we can to ensure every child achieves, and they'll have bumps along the way, and that is okay. And the second one is, I'll go back to Sarah again, why are we doing this? You know, it's because Mr Jones has always run this, actually be really dynamic and considering what can we do differently to support our children, to enable our children. And the most powerful way that we can support our staff team is with their professional learning. So if we encourage our staff to have a culture of trial and changes taking risks, adapting their practice, then they're more likely to be able to do that for their students too. Thank you, and Beth, the final tip. So I think listening to Colvarn and Sarah today, it's just really struck me, you know, when we have greater complexity coming into our school and into our send system or school system, that really is an invitation for us to become more expert. And just to become more excellent. So I think it's helpful to understand it that way and frame it in that way. Yeah, and learning opportunity. And Sarah, I'm going to go for really, only practical, making sure that we share our planning with all the people in the classroom and give some time to read it. Don't just share it to them, here it is, but actually allow that, so that anybody, everybody in the classroom knows what it is we're teaching and why we're teaching it. And I actually take it down to three questions, what is the learning objective? What are we teaching? Why are we teaching it? What is the key vocabulary the child is going to need to access the learning? And what is the outcome you want for that child? And it may be that may not be the same as for some of the other children, but actually sharing that key information so everybody goes in to the lesson understanding the learning that should be taking place. Thank you for listening to the head teacher at Dave podcast and thanks again to my three guests for their insightful contributions. In our next podcast on January 7th, we'll be discussing inclusive primary schools. For Sarah's articles, visit headteacher-update.com/authors/sera-alston. Headteacher-update magazine produced two podcasts earlier this year, both focused on SCN. In February, we looked at managing SCN across the primary school and in April, we looked at speech and language needs across the primary school. Find these via headteacher-update.com/podcasts Sarah's books are the inclusive classroom and working with your teaching assistant. Cool Vans books are the thinking teacher and the thinking school. The headteacher-update podcast is free to download from your streaming services. You can find all of our podcasts, best practice articles, webinars and regular conferences along with details of our three-weekly eBullettern on the website at headteach-update.com or find us on social media, blue sky, LinkedIn and X. Visit the website for all of the links. Thank you so much for listening and until next time, goodbye and have a happy Christmas when it comes along.