Headteacher Update Podcast: What does an inclusive primary school look like?

Hello and welcome to the Head Teacher Object podcast designed to lead leaders and dedicated to spreading best practice across the primary phase. I'm your host Helen Frostit, a retired head teacher and annery and a long-standing member of the Head Teacher Object editorial board. In this episode, we are discussing inclusive primary schools, covering how to ensure that every learner thrives and how to create a culture of belonging for all. My two guests share ways to identify and support pupils who face barriers to learning, including how to best harness the expertise of external specialists and a fact-story action approach. The heart of the discussion is how to successfully address equity and equality and the importance of quality first teaching. All this and many further tips too. This podcast was recorded on December the 15th. Now, let me hand over to my guests. Hi, my name's Dr Corvon Atwell. I'm currently principal of two large primary schools in East London. They're barking for those of you who are familiar with East London. I have been an inclusion leader in a previous life and in my first school that I worked in, so where I did my own QT and all the assistant head eight and a half years was a resource provision school. So my particular expertise is working with children with social, emotional behavioural needs. And Corvon, I know you've been on the podcast before and I'm just interested in particular. Why this one on inclusion excites you today? Because I think it's such an important area of practice that I think matters so much to children, young people and their families. I also think that there are real challenges out there in the sector in attempting to be inclusive because with dwindling budgets, higher numbers of children we've send, you know, it's challenging and what we need to do is we need to accept those challenges but really look at developing a culture within our schools in which we are doing everything we can to ensure children are included rather than sometimes practices which will exclude children and particularly our most vulnerable children. So it's just a very, very important topic and I think I've got aspects of my own practice that I can share. Wonderful and thanks so much for giving it your time to be back again and welcome to the podcast for the first time, Alan. Yeah, thanks so much. I'm Alan Shields. My background is as a primary teacher and I've been head of a number of schools. I've worked in the independent and local authority sector in Scotland. The last four and a half years of spent working as an inclusion officer in North Lanarkshire Council and recently I've taken on a slightly different role within the education service here but I still work with the inclusion team. I oversee a cluster of schools, so it's a secondary school and associated primaries and I've got different responsibilities across the education service as well. For those of you that don't know North Lanarkshire, I wouldn't expect you to certainly do. We're the kind of fourth most populous council area in Scotland. Our biggest town is Motherwell. If you're a football fan, you might know a bit Motherwell in the Claret and Amber. It's a very post industrial area. It used to be a lot of heavy industry and recent years have been transitioning on to new things. Well, looking forward to hearing lots more from you, Alan, the podcast progress is in fact. I'm going to stay with you for this question. How do you ensure that every learner, regardless of their background or needs, is supported to thrive? Really interesting question. I suppose from me who's worked as an inclusion officer, I would absolutely want to see that a school has got all the right systems and processing processes and structures in place and those things are really, really important. However, I think if I put my head, teach your hat back on, I would say that more than anything, what's important is the school ethos and actually there's a desire to get things right. If people have a desire to get things right, then you're halfway there. I think part of that ethos has got to be centered around relationships and we might talk more about that later on, but I think those relationships are key. I think no matter how clever your systems and structures and processes are, if the relationships aren't right, it will never come off. It will never work as you would hope. And I think it's crucially important to try and understand children as individuals. I get a bit frustrated when they hear people saying, oh, nine-year-olds or girls at age, or they're just five-year-olds and putting children together in a group. Children are people and they're absolutely individual. And I think for class teachers and practitioners to really get to know their children as individuals, as key, you don't have a hope of meeting individual needs if you don't understand the individuals. Thank you so much. That's a very thorough answer and I like the way you brought it away from systems, processes, structures to the people themselves, the individuals and even the staff and imagine the leadership in particular who set and carry through the ethos in particular. Wonderful, thank you and Kulvan, same question. Yeah, I agree with Alan and I'll build on what he talked about because at the end of the day, there are those relationships between the adults and the children. So, yeah, you can have all the structures and policies in place, but if there isn't a mindset for inclusion and a determination to remove barriers and work collaboratively, and I know we're going to talk about that later. But for me, working in schools, I know that the single most important factor that impacts upon the quality of student outcomes and by outcomes, I'm meaning personal, social, emotional, self-regulation, plus academic, is the quality of teaching. So, the amount of time and energy and expertise I can spend working to create a culture in which we are professionally developing our teachers is the most powerful way that we can impact upon our students. And what I mean by that is unequivocally, a teacher coming into the profession, having maybe done a behead or a one-year PGCE, the biggest challenge they face is meeting the needs of all their children. So Alan's got its spot on there that we need to give time and space to our adults to really get to know and understand each of their children and their learning needs equally. So, if I can accept that people aren't equipped in the profession to be able to really understand what inclusive practice looks like, you then need to ensure that you create an environment in which they are able to engage in deep professional dialogue. And I think I've mentioned it before, I've known that we invest in our teachers, who we call class leaders, by paying 60% towards each of them in doing the masters and we insist that one of the modules is on inclusion. So, they get opportunities to engage in action research. So, if Alan's talking about that there's structures and policies in place that really promote inclusion, then it's developing a culture that we are all equally responsible for all children. So, the child who may need adaptive teaching is everybody's responsibility. We all understand our children in such a way that we support and encourage our teachers to consider what they are doing to ensure that every child is in an environment in which they can thrive. So, I would say alongside the structures in the culture is a really strong focus on teacher professional learning to ensure that they are equipped at their classroom level, where they have that day-to-day contact. So, work with parents and children in such a way that every child is included. Absolutely, and I'm really glad you mentioned their parents too, as you came to the end of your answer, because you both are mentioning ethos culture. And I just want to stop off and think about what would your top tips be for creating a sense of belonging in your school to Alan? I think sometimes, you know, when we think about something like belonging, we sometimes kind of draw on our own experiences, and we think about times where we've really felt part of something, or we really felt that we belonged to that particular group or organisation. But invariably, we also think about times when we felt we didn't belong, and we didn't fit in, and we weren't really welcome. And I was thinking about why is that? Why do we feel different in different situations? I know I can go into some situations and feel very much part of in other situations, feel a bit awkward. And I think a lot of it comes down to those everyday interactions. Do we take time to literally look at each other in the eye, and to properly talk and listen to each other? Do we value everyone's contribution, even though we don't agree with it? And I think it's really important that we treat our children and our young people in that way, that we really take time to listen to them, we really take time to hear them. And I think from that, children and young people get the sense, actually, I'm important here and I'm part of something here. Now there's lots of things that we do in schools to make, you know, children feel part of the school or part of their house or part of their class, and we do lots of clever things, and they are important, but I think those everyday interactions are really important. And I was thinking as well, what does that mean, particularly as a head? Well, I think before you can ask your staff to behave in a certain way and say, you know, please, will you treat our students like this? Or please will you treat each other like this? I think you have to model it. And I think you have to live it out. You have to act it out because if you're asking people to behave in a certain way, and it's not the way you behave, you don't seem to value people in take time with them, then I think you're really going to struggle to get the rest of the team to behave in that way too. So for me, it's about everyday interactions and it's about as a head really taking the lead and modeling that. Fantastic, thank you. And Corvine, top tips for creating a sense of belonging. Yeah, I agree with Alan there that sometimes in organisations there's a difference between the espoused theories and theories in action. This is what we say we do, is that what our students feel. So no school is going to say they're not inclusive. But this is and I think we're and talking about modeling is the as a head teacher, you're the mood maker, you're the way in which you're talking to other adults is sending out the message that this is how we talk to each other. And it's also crucially modeling for our children, how we expect them to talk to each other and how we talk to our students. And the power of that is that there's a difference between knowing how to treat our children by reading a policy or knowing how to treat your children according to our values. So if you want to create a sense of belonging, then from a student's perspective is is there a sense of shared values amongst the adults in this in this school? Do they have a shared belief about what that looks like and what that means? And student voice has to be central to that, right? So you can't, I'll give you an example of the top tip is something we call a slice team. So we're a right-respecting school and we believe in adhering to the convention, United Nations Convention and the rights of the child. And I know lots of schools in Scotland, the higher proportion in Scotland, the right-respecting schools in England. And what that means is that we need to understand what our students' experiences are in terms of how they feel. We might think that they belong, but are we asking them and are we checking in on them? So an example we have a slice team where it could be different stakeholders within the school. So students, class teachers, we call our teaching assistants, learning coaches, leaders come together and talk about things like, is our behaviour policy working? Does it have the right values? And one little girl in year three, I remember, was in her little working group. And then when I came to get feedback, the adult said, "Oh, you know, I won't say her name, but she's got, she's got, she's noticed something." And I said, "Okay, do you want to share that?" And she said that sometimes the cover teachers, where we have cover teachers, they don't have the same shared values as our teachers. And what should we do about that? And she gave an example where she felt that her rights, her rights and education, wasn't respected in the same way. And she came up with the suggestion that before they come into the classroom, we should create a leaflet for them to have, which says, ask with the right respect in school. And this is what that means. And Alan's got it spot on, we all know what it feels like to belong. We all know sometimes we're in situations where we feel slightly uncomfortable, we might not even know why. But children's voice has to be central to creating a culture of inclusion. And other things that I thought about is, again, this sense of, it's not just saying we have an inclusion policy, it's our underlying values inclusive. Do we really believe that every student can achieve? Do we really value our children's home language? Do we really want to listen to our children? Or are we just asking questions and going through a checklist? And one of the things that this is a final bit on this, one of the things is something I've read recently, which I think will be interesting to share. And something that's particular about right respecting schools, because what happens is you develop a shared language, shared language around inclusion, a shared language around behaviour. And if that is then modeled by the lead learner, who I said is the head teacher, so my title is principal learning leader, it becomes ingrained within the institution. And the other I read a book recently called The Culture Code. And it resonated with me because it's talking about the hidden curriculum. So again, that difference between what we say, we say we're really inclusive and we're every child's valued. But does that actually happen in practice? And they argued where you can create within an organisation a sense of community. So we deliberately use, at the two schools, we deliberately use the words the Highlands family and the Upall family. And that's when we're talking to our parents and we're talking to our staff and we're talking to our children. And one of the things we had a recent inspection at both schools, but at our pool, she couldn't believe how many people were wearing the Upall tracksuit top, which happened to be wearing when Helen and I last met. Apparently that creates a sense of community and it's not forcing it on anyone. But even someone having the badge of the school with their name underneath. So our first person that you meet in our school is Miss May and she's absolutely the most wonderful person. She's more important than me because she knows all the families and she looks after them and she sorts their problems. But she wears her up all jacket with Miss May and it means something. So that sense of belonging, a bit like I'd say, I mean I was at the football yesterday, I'm for to watch West families yesterday, is you feel a sense of something, don't you? You feel the sense of community and belonging and a school can provide that. And because remember those children, I always say I only have one year three and you're the year three teacher and this is their school. And final point last Friday about our winter wonderland extravaganza, which we go to town, we had like fairground rides, the whole playgrounds taken over. I don't even know if we're allowed to do this, but close to school early, so all the families and kids can come back inside. The amount of secondary school kids, former students that came to help or to just be part of it was because they feel a sense of community. But that's your family, I mean you know your family's for life isn't it? So I think that's a wonderful example of they still think of themselves as part of your family. That's life long. That's brilliant. I'm glad you mentioned the tracks too because if you hadn't I was going to introduce that and having names underneath because well you know uniform schools you have requests and things but you get the names printed on to you as well. Well it's only since I actually read a finished a book I'm already over the summer and I finished it in September and it's just a little touch that I think we're going to work our way through either initials because you'll see that the football managers in the tracks that they've got their initials, right? It just creates a sense of and part of something and I'm included and I'm valued. Yeah. Right okay so on to the next question I'm sticking with you for this one too, called on. So how do you identify and support pupils who face barriers to learning and/or their well-being? So particularly where you've got children with really identified needs whether they're on the safe example physical need. We've got a couple of children reception who can't walk, right? So in some ways it's easier to meet their needs because it's visible. You can make adjustments to the environment equally for children in your autistic spectrum and you get to know them and understand them and put a support plan. When you're looking at well-being the most challenging children I've ever worked with is where you cannot physically see the need. When children with really severe and emotional behavioural needs we may have suffered childhood trauma and sometimes as practitioners we take behaviour personally so we think if a child is calling out or they're not regulated that somehow it's against us but actually what we should do is look at the opposite way and think how can I get to understand this child's needs to ensure that what changes we make in our environment and how we work with this child to ensure that they are improving in their behaviour because that's the other thing. Any behaviour initiative that you introduce must lead to an improvement in behaviour and often when you look at children who are having punishments the same children again and again and again so we need to think about what we do differently. There has to be a whole school culture for development of mental health and well-being and I would always say that every adult has social emotional behavioural needs we're not perfect we get frustrated we get upset there wouldn't be any road rage if it helps or perfect so for first of all there has to be a whole school approach to supporting our children's mental health so we employ an emotional literacy support advisor and I mentioned this to you Helen that up for for example is in the most disadvantaged world in the local authority so lots of children growing up in poverty and it's a very big school and statistically 350 of those children access to bespoke mental health support last last academic year and what she does is she creates a space where children can have the opportunity to talk through how their feelings and specific strategies aimed at developing their mental health and well-being the other thing is we have we develop practitioners who are understand the appropriate conditions for learning so what we do is I do an activity with the adults where I ask them to describe an experience that they've had in their lives which a learning experience that was really positive then I ask them to describe to me a learning experience which was really negative and what were the social and emotional conditions in which those learning experiences took place and what it enables them to understand is they are the mood maker in the classroom they are creating the conditions that every classroom has a calming corner for example where if children need some space to regulate themselves or for those chemicals in their brain to calm down to a point where they're able to engage in their learning is actually saying to children that how we are feeling will impact upon our engagement in our learning so you've got your structured in place but you've got the conditions for learning that take place in classrooms which enable children to develop their metacognitive skills because they're all coming into the into the classroom at different stages different points of their development and the simple fact of inclusion is how do I ensure from my teaching perspective that I'm challenging children in a way that is taking into account what they already know but also motivating and engaging them to move on to new learning and different children responding different ways so it's that it's that real whole school environment which is enabling children to flourish and the final point on that one is culture does take time to develop I always say you know if I'm going to go into a school which is struggling and if you're semi-successful you end up having to go into schools that that need you the most it's a three to five-year job it's not sticking past us it's giving people time and space to grow and develop and and I'm really aligning those values last year at up all with a high proportion of disadvantaged children 77% of our disadvantaged children achieved the expected standard in reading writing and maths at the end of year six in comparison to 47% of similar children nationally and 77% means our disadvantaged children outperformed advantage children by non-disadvantaged children across the country so this is about giving people time and space to grow and you did talk to me in our pre-meeting about resilience as well like you were just describing there how that it's not a static situation with pupils they can come in and out of times of need or challenge and I remember you talking to me a lot about how you promote resilience in your learners too yeah I think the the other thing we haven't mentioned is is a values led curriculum so although we are right in school we just follow seven values of kindness respect responsibility perseverance friendship empathy injustice and I'm a great believer that children don't learn kindness and respect from a poster or a sanction they learn kindness and respect by being shown kindness and respect and they learn the value of it and resilience comes from learning from mistakes because they learn to walk by falling over again and again and again because they they internalize that they would learn to walk because everybody around them has the expectation that they learn to walk but the first time they begin to doubt themselves is when they compare themselves to other children at school or receive negative feedback and this is really important because mistakes should be celebrated and discussed and the amount of time that we see praise which isn't a value it is which is actually saying to children and sharing with them wow look at what you've done because three weeks ago you were struggling with that you've pushed through and so you can't and you can't learn perseverance from listening to an assembly on perseverance you get to by explicitly articulate into children whether you have shown perseverance resilience which build great thank you thanks for the extras there as well and Alan this question identifying supporting people who are facing to barriers to learning or their well-being anything to add yeah yeah just a few thoughts thanks I mean I absolutely wouldn't disagree with anything co-varn said I think there's really good points and in fact some of the things I've written down I think co-varn and I are working off the same notes because we've got some very similar thoughts on that but I'll add a couple of things if that's okay in Scotland sometimes we we talk about this idea of fact story action so fact being you know what's the what's the statistics what's the data what's the information what's the observation of the child and then I think something that you know co-varn explained really really well there is that the story part of it so that's the fact but what's the story what's the story behind it what's what's this child's background what what of their experiences being what's what's happened up until now and then the third part of it fact story and then action what are we going to do what are the interventions what's our plan and it's an implicit in that action part would be some review some evaluation because sometimes you know we're very good at coming up with a plan and we might even implement the plan but actually did it work does it work because it's absolutely fine if something doesn't work that's that's okay that's part of leadership that sometimes we try things and they don't work that's okay but we need to evaluate it and we need to analyse it and we maybe need to come up with something a bit different and it's okay sometimes with bigger initiatives within the school as well to say do you know what we've been trying this for X amount of time and in co-varns absolutely things need the right amount of time but sometimes after that right amount of time we say this is not the right approach for our child and our young people we've analysed it we've reviewed it we're going to do something a bit different so that fact story action I think can be quite helpful way of thinking about things co-varn mentioned time and space a few times I think you said a few times and I'd written that down and I'd written it down especially thinking about time and space for discussion sometimes for some of the the children and young people that we work with who let's be honest we would find the most challenging we would find it really tricky to meet their needs we actually need time and space to have a proper discussion not necessarily a snatch few minutes in a corridor or you know bumping into each other in an office at the end of the day but really time to sit down to discuss to conference to review and really to reflect on things and sometimes I don't know that we always prioritise enough time for those really good quality discussions because you know often if you get the right people in the room who know the child to know the young person who have got the right experience then you can sometimes start to unlock different ideas and different approaches but you need to prioritise time and space for that and the final thing that I thought about was just the idea of what's typical for a particular child what's typical for a particular young person because as we talked about earlier it's really important to know the children individually because every child's got a different baseline and you know something might happen for a particular child and or they might do something and it wouldn't be a worry for us because we know it's typical we know it's something that you know sometimes they they present in a certain way but if another child were to do that it's a real red flag for us and that's about knowing children really really carefully and paying careful attention to how they behave what they say what they do and just knowing you know where those changes come and it's just something that we really need to step in with and that takes not only that kind of skill and experience but also takes that kind of achievement that we need with children and that ability to sounds a little hippy but to really be present with the children and really you know really there with them and just be able to notice how they're responding to a particular situation so yeah those are a few things for me that that fact story action is a way of can organise their thinking just prioritising that the time and space for discussion and really understanding what's typical for a particular child and that really takes you know knowing them properly. I do also add I think within this within this question I was thinking about assessment of tracking but from what you said for me as well it's the trailing of the pupils not just it trailing to me means like a following on so not just setting up the intervention setting up any system that's going to have an impact also about determining trailing of those people so they don't they don't come out of your view. Moving on to your core one please actually what are the factors involved in successfully addressing equity and equality of opportunity in schools? I think like many of the things that we've already said there has to be a culture of equity right so there has to be this feeling that everybody has a voice everybody's listened to so one of the things I believe strongly and it came to my doctoral research is every adult is a leader within school because you can't really have a hierarchical approach within a school because if I'm a teaching system I'm a learning coach and I'm working one to one with this child I'm making leadership decisions all day long so how do you encourage a culture to people and encourage to bring their brains to work and make choices and make decisions? If you give them a genuine voice and some research which came out of Europe led by Andrew Schleicher 2016 argued that teachers should be involved in decision making at whole school level every adult should be so that equity of voice comes from Bill our Alan was saying is who's around the table who's having these discussions is it equitable does everybody have a chance to share their perspective and opinion and I think if you've got that culture right with the adults it comes through with the students because either you are genuinely listening to your students or you're waiting for them to finish so you can get on with your lesson what I mean by that is we believe as a leadership team and that the most powerful personal development learning activity we engage in is coaching so we invest in enabling and developing every member of staff to be a coach and to be coached and that develops them as practitioners at listening to their children and listening to each other so the great of the opportunities for staff within a school to work in different groups which is why we do the slice teams or work collaboratively so they don't feel in isolation and the more you listen to students the the other thing in in a reading I did recently is the more distant you feel from someone the less likely you are to have empathy for them so if you don't know any asylum seekers you're less less likely to have empathy so we may not understand our children's learning experiences or what they're living with or where they're coming from but we just need to take time to listen to them so that they're sharing their experiences the other thing in equity of a quality of opportunity is does every child have a voice in the classroom because you will have students in your class who are always putting their hands up always wanted to share their opinion and others who would prefer to stay quiet so we use a dialogic teaching approach which ensures that there's a greater balance between pupil talk and teacher talk so the teacher is skilled at facilitating dialogue and talk so children are building on each other's ideas and they're sharing their ideas which which is which Robin Alexander calls into thinking and the other thing that that that we do is I was once told when I was before I started teaching I was told that get to know your local community so if it means don't just drive into the car park park up teacher class and then drive out if you can park a couple of roads away or get off one bus stop earlier or get off one tube stop stop early and walk get to know your local community and their experiences and understand what where they're coming from and what they need and finally it's a little thing like does everyone get a fair chance so if you want to be in the football team where you want to be in a club now we we we allow every child who's entitled to free school meals to come to every club for free because we want them to have those opportunities that no one otherwise be missing out on the final one is how inclusive is your school environment for parents so we have a parent forum which is just open once every half term where we might have a different topic or a different guest speaker that empowers parents to come into school who made themselves about negative experiences of education or authorities as young people themselves and um uh you know if you and celebrate diversity celebrate difference you know learn about the cultures or the backgrounds that your students are coming from learn about their local environment and experiences and encourage that real deep level of um people voice so that it that's related to belonging which we've already discussed yeah but it's still I'm thinking that this is your family approach as well isn't it and I was just thinking when you mentioned there about asylum see because there's one example I was thinking about those opportunities you are presenting the parents to get to know one another as well as school staff and because that will be a great source of support for them won't it in their everyday lives like helping with drop-off pickup and all those important things that go on behind the scenes as it were yeah really important and um returning to the aforementioned Miss May she's the first point of contact for every all of our parents who you know we we have to do our secondary admissions for some of our parents because they they don't have a computer they can't do it and so this is about us adapting for the needs of our students and how they want to be included and that went to wonderland just a wonderful way as a school community to come together for an event because our kids aren't going to get taken to Hyde Park so we have to create our own one to give them those opportunities mind you with that probably they want them going to Hyde Park because it's a bit of a ripoff but yeah but you see how fake snow do you tell you do yeah we had fake snow and we had a snow globe so the child goes on the stage and it's like a snow globe and then the fake snow is sprayed at them and then they get to have a photograph taken that they can do you tell this is the festive podcast episode airing in January and this will be behind us wonder for thanks Coolvane and Alan saying question fear what are the factors involved in successfully addressing equity and equality of unity like I always smile at Coolvane's advice saying about you know trying to get to know the you know the local area I'm working with a group of schools are relatively new to me I don't know them especially well and I've just been working with them for a few months now and I was in one of the schools this morning but a few bits of business to do in the post office and I thought I don't go to my local post office I go to the post office in the town for the school and I was having a a bleeder as we would say in school and I was having a bleeder with the ladies in the post office and in chat and waiting them because it is really interesting to try and understand the context and it's amazing the things you just pick up from the you know the people that are standing in the Q and X team what they're talking about and what their issues are and really really interesting. Digress slightly but in another local authority that I used to work kind of worked in a very rural local authority I worked in our Gail and Butte which is a beautiful part of Scotland but sometimes they wouldn't see anyone from the council in their mind for quite a long time and they would maybe see me in the local shop buying you know a sandwich or something for lunch and they would start telling me about potholes and different things and different problems and about the grasping cut and the green and things and and at first I was just really sorry I work in education I can't help you with that I saw the disappointment in their face because they'd seen someone from the council and they thought he can fix this so I just just bring out a notebook, note it down and then when I went back to the office made a point of finding the person that dealt with potholes or grasping and trying to help them out with that. So in terms of you know successfully addressing the equity and equality I haven't spoken a lot about data because it's not my great love but I did think about data in relation to this in Scotland there's been a huge focus on we talk about closing the poverty related attainment gap you know in Kilvarn's you know illustrated very nicely the work his schools are doing towards that we know that typically children from from less advantage backgrounds do less well at school you know and there's lots of complicated ways of saying it but that's the long and short of it and we've had a lot of focus in that one of the things we've tried to look at in individual schools is where is your gap what are the things that create the challenges the the difficulties a lack of opportunity in your school you know so for some schools it's very much about those poverty related factors. Kilvarn you know mentioned English is in a additional language of last school I was head over the high percentage of children who had English is in a additional language we looked very carefully but that started to interrogate the data and say what's going on here because what we discovered there is if children could reach at a level of competence and fluency in English by a certain stage they actually went on to outperform the children who spoke English as a mother tongue so how do we help the very young children develop English and develop the English skills while still valuing and still respecting their their mother tongue so by digging in there and seeing you know where's the gap where's the particular challenge here what can we we do about it and then once you've identified those those gaps those challenges it's about really planning and delivering and as we've talked about already evaluating those interventions and as we've mentioned earlier when you go after some of these gaps and you go after some of these challenges it's like a game of battleships you'll have some misses you'll you'll try things that don't really come off but as long as you've got the right evaluation in place then that's okay you'll realise that and you can slightly you know adjust or refine your strategy so I think it is it's about you know identifying the particular challenges the particular issues for your community and then you know what's about saying what are we going to do about this and trying to work out at our interventions really working are they making the difference that we hope that we're going to so you've already mentioned having a well-being emotional literacy teacher support teacher I just wondered if there's any other way you're using additional expertise to enhance inclusion at your schools I think I think you have to use external additional expertise because if you're if you're focusing your environment on really creating those powerful learning conditions where you have children with specific needs you have to be determined to access the support specific support for those children so where I said that all of our adults are trained as coaches does not mean that they're counsellors so for example a coach is designed to develop people to improve their practice whereas a counsellor has specific skills to develop children and young people using examples from their past so where we work closely with the local authority is to access more bespoke mental health support for where children need it or supporting them in terms of occupational health and and really really specific could be play therapy really specific additional support medical support that they will need and I think where schools are really inclusive they are really both resilient and determined in doing everything they can to support those families and sometimes it's it's support for families it's not just support for students and one other example where where Alan said for someone you need a deep discussion what we do is we invest in an additional what we call structured conversations or children up to three or four children in every class who need more than the 10 minute parent conversation we have the normal parents evening so they will have an hour in which we release our teachers during the school day to do exactly what Alan described which is meet those parents to discuss to talk to us tell us what tell us what's happening at home and slightly not in terms of external support but we do lots of home visits so every child that comes into our nursery or reception gets a home visit so we're demonstrating that how we value the home and we're committed to every child that joins joins our school so output for example was really really high mobility so this week a child left on Friday from year five has gone to Newcastle another child has been rehoused in London and other children have joined that is every week and i think if you want to evaluate how inclusive a school is speak to the child that's just joined or speak to the supply teacher hasn't been to your school before because they will give you a really good indicator of what it feels like so there's definitely you need to access support and i know that those resources are limited and schools are struggling but you can't do it all by yourself so you know really been determined to look beyond your own school and your own staff team even if that means access to support from other schools or calling support yeah networking so my Alan same question could you recommend the best use of additional expertise yeah i think there's some things a bit of attention here because i know sometimes as a head teacher and sometimes you know as a class teacher if there was someone coming into the school of speech and language therapist or a physiotherapist or an education psychologist you were always desperate for that person to come and work with the child and to sit down and to work with them and you know sometimes that's absolutely the right thing to do and that's you know sometimes the most appropriate and the most powerful thing however the other side of the house is we tend to have a precious little amount of the use resources you know they're they're coming once a week or they're coming once a fortnight and you know it's not for as long as you would hope and you've got to think then how are we going to get the biggest benefit out of this you know yes they could be sitting working through an individual program with a child but it's about thinking what's going to be the most impactful here and sometimes the most impactful might be doing a piece of training for the staff and say listen if you can give us two hours this fortnight rather than you know working with those two pupils could you do a session for the staff on whatever topic maybe there can be a bit of you know developing a program so we're really struggling with developing you know kind of speech with our five-year-olds can you suggest activities that we can be building into the lessons you know could you could you summarize that could you spend the time that it's allocated to us to to help us develop that kind of program so that there's then an impact beyond you know just a couple of hours you know working with individuals now it's always got to be a balance because sometimes you need that absolute expertise to work with that particular child for a particular purpose but the one thing I would say is there let's be really clear about the purpose I was fortunate to work with a very eminent education psychologist just as he was coming to the end of his career and he joked with me Alan he said often Alan he says people ask me to do a full assessment of a child he said I still don't know what a full assessment is it was making the point that actually it works by sometimes when we're very clear about what we're hoping for in terms of you know these specialist interventions and assessments and what that particular psychologist was alluding to is is there a specific question we have you know almost that a research question if we like you know we know that the the tend to cope very well in lessons that are structured in such a way but we notice that they're really struggling with a regulation in these types of lessons can he suggest why that is and how we might adapt those particular lessons so see if we can focus in on the ask almost and that we will get a better chance of getting a good quality answer if you like I think that's why what you're talking about is value for money I mean if you're able to impact on a wider number of peoples from that one resource such as education psychologist and then why wouldn't you and I think it's brilliant idea thank you so coming towards the end now just thinking about an example of how you facilitated and promoted a culture of collaboration that is most effective in terms of people's outcomes so we've already sort of mentioned a little bit parents previously but Alan is there an example that you could give? Yeah and I suppose we thought of it some kind of specific examples about you know working collaboratively and how we bring people together I was thinking of taking a step almost further back from this and you know in Scotland there's been a big boost about recording properly child and young people who have a distance support needs and the recent statistics just published a week or so ago indicate that 43% of child and young people in our schools in Scotland now have either an identified through assessment or declared by the family some sort of a distance support needs a 43% so that's a completely different number than we probably had in our head even a few years ago and it made me think about how we approached that and I was thinking about a quote from Peter DeAmandis and he's talking about this kind of moonshot thinking you know when you're going for the really big challenges and I think we probably agree 43% of child and young people with some type of a distance support needs is a really big challenge and he says but if you sign up for moonshot thinking if you sign up to make things 10 times better there is no chance of doing that with existing assumptions so where I'm going there is in terms of collaborative working I think one of the best things we can do is give people permission to explore different solutions and say if you're coming together to work in this I'm not necessarily looking for just a little tweak here or a little tweak there you've got permission to look at you know very different solutions and a whole different way of viewing the situation and viewing some of the challenges and by definition you know thinking about the solutions but I think the danger is we get stuck when we get people to work together collaboratively and just just tweaks here and there and a little bit more of this and a little bit less of that and a bit more emphasis on this not not quite so much emphasis on that but if we actually give permission you know of of looking at putting aside the existing assumptions then I think that's when that collaborative working becomes really powerful because you actually say the people do you know what within reason and maybe even not within reason nothing's off the table here yeah well Alan's talking about is divergent creative thinking so the more ideas that you can come up with the more likely you are able to come up with another idea so you have to encourage a culture of creativity and collaborative learning and I think that's a really important example that you shared in terms of a school level is well how the how collaborative is the learning environment in your school and what I mean by that is I did eight years of doctoral research on the factors that impact upon teacher engagement in professional learning and some of the some of the things some of the learning is just so simple so earlier I said the opportunity people have to work in different groups and how do you ensure that your professional learning is collaborative so if you my my theory would be if you put in formal structures that support collaboration bearing in mind we work within a sector that encourages competitions our schools are competing against each other particularly in England in terms of our inspection framework now you're going to have to try and get an exceptional grade by proving you're better than everybody else or you need to be above average well obviously that means half the schools aren't going to be above average and and then even teachers through performance related pay are encouraged to compete so quite simply we we release our teachers to have the PPA time we call LRC so they are together to the year group teams meet together and LRC stands for learning review conversations look at a dialogue about where you children are and what they've done what the impact is and what you might need to do differently the following week in terms of professional learning it's all collaborative to teachers there's no formal lesson observations teachers engage in peer learning and lesson study which is all collaborative and so that culture of that those structures of collaboration encourage a culture of collaboration where we understand each other and it's to believe that the combined wisdom of the team is so much more powerful than than than the individuals and that is simply creating structures that support a culture of of collaboration so anyone is listening have a look at your school and think about are you spending time with with those teachers or your friends or are you genuinely collaborating and the other thing is as Alan said is don't get people together to come up with ideas that are you going to reject or that aren't really much of a step up or a chain from what we've done before and what you do with that is we'll trial it trial it and see what it's like and how it's working and anyone anything that people have designed themselves they have an investment in they want to succeed and that's important for inclusion and it's simple as if I don't I don't set performance management objectives for my the team for the staff team they set them and they make them ambitious and they start with a research question what they want to learn about and what they want to find and their their performance management form is called a growth plan which they are part of designing that we work with them on through a coaching approach so this is really really important because then you have a genuine collaborative understanding of what do we need to do differently to support this year group to succeed and does that mean they don't wait for me to tell them to make a home visit they go and make that home visit and say we're going to reach out to this family we're going to find out what's going on we're going to do we're going to see how we can support them and so yeah it sounds simple but it has a great powerful group so cool one have you got any final takeaways nuggets or tips for the listeners on this very important topic of inclusive schools I think something that I shared with I had a meeting with a parents before school this morning regarding their child and one of the things about being inclusive is having a culture of positive regard and optimism and as challenging as you may be finding it right now working with a child or group of children always think about what what do you want in the long term and that might require really small steps really small actions but this belief that it will be okay and if I do the right things and as simple as if I'm a teacher just think about the starting point to do all 30 children right now and provide an environment of optimism to motivate children to want to engage and move forward from their starting point because it's those small steps that over time will make the transformative impact for all your kids. I really love that and that's getting right to the importance in thinking of the children fast and Aaron final words. Final words and I think over and hinted at this right at the very start if you can only focus on one thing and you don't think you can tackle everything as I had keep working on the overall quality of the learning and teaching because high quality learning and teaching and assessment is going to impact the highest number of children and if it's really high quality learning and teaching it will be inclusive and it will by its very nature meet needs so particularly you know if you're ahead and you're feeling a bit overwhelmed or you've maybe recently taken on a headship start focusing on the quality of that learning and teaching and we've talked about how to do that you know particularly through professing a learning but if you can improve that learning and teaching it will help everyone just by its very nature thank you for listening to the headship date podcast and many thanks to Corvian and Alan for sharing their expertise in December we discussed stuffing sense solutions which may be of interest as it covers best practice ideas related to this theme Pete Henshaw is hosting the next podcast on February the 4th focusing on improving teaching also Dr Corvian Atwell has published two books for thinking teacher and the thinking school the headship date 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 free weekly e-bulletin on the website at headteach-update.com or 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 bye for now