SCN0477

Written evidence from Dr Jill Harrington

 

Comments re ‘Assessment of and support for children and young people with SEND’.

  1. This is an individual submission. I am a parent (who has dyslexia) of a young person with dyslexia who is currently within the education system. I am a retired doctor who has worked in Child and Adolescent Mental Health and Learning Disability. I also have an MSc in Experimental Psychology. I was previously a committee member for a Parent Carer Forum involved in looking at the impact of SEND reforms. I am an advocate for dyslexia and other SEND.
  2. My comments relate to children and young people who have SEND but who do not have an EHCP and, particularly, to those with Specific Learning Difficulties (SpLDs). There are also many children and young people who do have SEND but who are not identified by the education system, and my comments also refer to them.

Introduction

  1. The DfE (2015) states that 13% of the 1.3 million children defined as having SEND have Specific Learning Difficulties (SpLDs). SpLDs are usually said to include dyslexia, dyspraxia/developmental co-ordination disorder (DCD), attention deficit disorder (ADD)/attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), dyscalculia and dysgraphia. However, the DfE does not report statistics for these individual conditions each of which requires different interventions. The impact of SEND reforms on individuals with these conditions cannot, therefore, be properly assessed. This is a fundamental failing on the part of the Government and DfE which urgently needs to be addressed.
  2. It is widely accepted that approximately 10% of children in the UK have dyslexia. Many of these are not included within the SEND system and there is no tracking of their performance. Pupils with SEND in mainstream settings have far worse outcomes according to various measures (e.g. achieving grades 4 or above in English and Maths-DfE Revised GCSE and equivalent results in England, 2016-2017) than any other pupil group including ‘disadvantaged’ pupils, and yet there is no political impetus to address this issue. The Government have failed to ensure that children and young people with dyslexia are achieving their full potential and the SEND reforms have done nothing to rectify this situation.

Comments

  1. The Foreword to the 2014 Special Educational Needs and Disability Code of Practice states that:
  2. ‘For children and young people this [the new code] means that their experiences will be of a system which is less confrontational and more efficient. Their special educational needs and disabilities will be picked up at the earliest point with support routinely put in place quickly, and their parents will know what services they can reasonably expect to be provided. Children and young people and their parents or carers will be fully involved in decisions about their support and what they want to achieve.’
  3. Despite these laudable aims the changes to the SEND system introduced by the Government in 2014 have utterly failed to improve provision for children and young people with SEND but without EHCPs; this group have been particularly disadvantaged and in many cases are worse off than in the previous system. Children and young people are not being identified early; not being assessed properly; nor being given adequate support. The system remains highly adversarial; parents and carers continue to have to fight for any provision and their views are still not given proper credence.
  4. The new Code of Practice did offer scope for improving provision in schools and colleges but many of the recommendations made in the Code are not being implemented and schools and colleges are not being held to account for their failure to act.
  5. SEND provision must be evidence based with detailed audit and outcome measures which analyse every individual type of SEND and every individual type of SpLD.
  6. SEND provision must be proactive, actively looking for SEND instead of ‘waiting to fail’.

The fundamental problems which the 2014 SEND reforms have failed to address are:

  1.         Lack of training and knowledge about SEND at all levels throughout the education system.
  2.         Lack of evidenced-based policy and practice.
  3.         Lack of accountability of educational institutions.
  4.         The assumption throughout the system that SEND means that children and young people must be functioning below average levels to qualify for help.
  5.         The SEND Code of Practice encourages schools and colleges to adopt a ‘wait to fail policy’.
  6.         The arbitrary definition of SEND which excludes many children and young people who do have additional needs.

 

  1.         Lack of training and knowledge about SEND at all levels throughout the education system.

17.1.                 There is a lack of training in, and understanding of SEND, at all levels within the education system, from Early Years, schools and colleges, through to Ofsted, Tribunal staff and the DfE. 

17.2.                 Despite some improvements in Initial Teacher Training there is a lack of specialist knowledge about different presentations of SEND and how to identify these conditions and intervene effectively. The Code of Practice talks about the importance of early intervention and there is plenty of research evidence to back this up; yet, many teachers simply do not have the expertise to identify SpLDs or other causes of SEND. LAs and Ofsted do not ask that schools and colleges show how effective they are being at identifying SpLDs or SEND in general. There are incidence and prevalence figures for most causes of SpLD and SEND, and yet schools and colleges are allowed to ignore them and not be held to account for exactly how many children and young people have been identified and whether this fits with expected levels.

17.3.                 There are plenty of examples of good practice in identifying and supporting children and young people with SEND (e.g. Dyslexia Friendly Schools Good Practice Guide, British Dyslexia Association 2012) which give specific details of screening checklists and screening procedures to ensure early identification but schools are not required to show that they are using them. Consequently many children and young people with dyslexia are unrecognised because of lack of specialist knowledge in schools.

17.4.                 Phonics testing in Years 1 and 2 do not alone identify dyslexia and do not help teachers without specialist knowledge of dyslexia to plan appropriate interventions and support. The premise of the phonics tests is that more phonics teaching will remediate literacy difficulties, yet where is the evidence that synthetic phonics helps pupils with dyslexia?

17.5.                 The Code of Practice refers to ‘High Quality Teaching’ as provision for pupils with SEND. This term is meaningless and cannot be defined or audited. Parents and carers do not want to be told their child is being given ‘High Quality Teaching’ but instead want to know that their child with dyslexia, DCD, ADD/ADHD, dyscalculia or dysgraphia is being assessed and supported by someone with specialist knowledge in that particular neurological condition.

17.6.                 9 out of 10 parents of children with dyslexia surveyed in 2012 said that teachers lack the proper training needed to support their child (Dyslexia still matters, Dyslexia Action, 2012). 9 out of 10 teachers surveyed had received less than half a day of training on dyslexia (The Fish in the Tree: why we are failing children with dyslexia, Driver Youth Trust, 2014). Is the situation any better now? Parents need to be surveyed again and schools and colleges must be required to report what specialist provision is available for each category of SEND and how many children are able to access it and when.

17.7.                 SenCo training has improved with the introduction of the National Award, but most SenCos are not specialists in individual categories of SEND and are not able to give specialist advice on identification or support.

17.8.                 LAs have a statutory duty to identify all pupils who have, or may have, SEND and yet they are not using appropriate data sets (as required by the Code of Practice) to determine incidence and prevalence of different categories of SEND, and to ascertain whether children and young people are being appropriately identified. They are failing in their duty to identify all those pupils who may have SEND because they, the LAs, are not adequately informed about SEND.

17.9.                 The Code of Practice refers (e.g. 5.48 and 6.58) to involving specialists ‘where a child continues to make less than expected progress, despite evidenced-based support and intervention’. It does, in Section 6.59, say that schools ‘may involve specialists at any point to advise on early identification of SEN’ but the emphasis is still on not using specialists until a child is failing to make progress. This is unacceptable; specialist advice on early identification and support must be available at very early stages, not when a child is falling further and further behind.

17.10.            The Rose Review (2012) recommended that every child with dyslexia should have access to a specialist in the field; this has not been realised and explains the failure to even identify many pupils who have this condition. The Driver Youth Trust operates ‘Drive for Literacy’ in which dyslexia specialists work with schools to promote identification of dyslexia and train staff in supporting pupils, but very few schools are able to benefit from this intervention.

17.11.            Ofsted staff do not have adequate training in SEND and not enough emphasis on SEND provision is made during school inspections. Ofsted should ensure that inspectors are properly trained in identifying good practice in specific categories of SEND. A specialist SEND inspector should be included in every inspection team. Ofsted must ask schools and colleges to report the numbers of pupils with specific categories of SEND and SpLD (to include specific figures for each type) to check that these are in line with expected prevalence figures; if a school has only a small proportion of the expected number they must be held to account. Ofsted must evaluate the progress of pupils with SEND across the academic/cognitive range: dyslexia occurs at every intellectual level and schools must be able to demonstrate that they are helping pupils to achieve at all, including the highest, levels.

17.12.            Tribunal staff need to be properly trained in SEND and be able to show what training members have undertaken; it is not good enough just to include members who have teaching experience or even general SEND experience. Each Tribunal panel should include someone who has specialist knowledge of the particular condition in question. Tribunals must ensure that they are not disadvantaging children and young people by decreeing that conditions recognised in the Equality Act, which mean that employers must make reasonable adjustments for adults, are judged not to fall under the remit of the act because a pupil is deemed not to be sufficiently disabled.

17.13.            The Government and DfE choose to base SEND policy on political ideology rather than understanding and knowledge of SEND or evidence. Policy is set for political expediency rather than the benefit of the children and young people who have SEND. The SEND reforms introduced in 2014 took a political decision, not based on any evidence, to reduce the numbers registered as having SEND. From 2014 to 2015 191,505 children were arbitrarily removed from the SEND register and the proportion of pupils with SEND went from 17.9% to 15.4% of the total pupil population. What has happened to these ‘disappeared’ children and young people? Did their dyslexia, their ADHD, their DCD suddenly cease to exist or were they left failing to reach their full potential?

17.14.            The Government introduces policies such as the multiplication tables check where ‘every pupil will be expected to know their times tables up to 12 times 12 by the time they reach the end of primary school’ as ‘part of the Government’s commitment to giving every child an excellent education’ (DfE and Nicky Morgan Press release, 3 January 2016). This policy shows a complete lack of understanding of how children with SEND learn and an arbitrary dismissal of expert advice. Many children with SEND, including dyslexia, have poor working memory, slow processing speed and other deficits that mean that they will not be able to learn times tables, and yet the Government thinks this is an appropriate way in which to give children with SEND ‘an excellent education’. If the Government, DfE and educational institutions were properly to attend to the notion of helping pupils with SEND achieve their full potential, as is claimed by the SEND reforms, they would not subject children to entirely inappropriate simplistic ‘educational’ strategies. It is well recognised by Professor Steve Chinn and others, that failure rarely motivates, and forcing a child to attempt a task that it cannot do is not conducive to learning.

17.15.            The Government has received expert submissions from a variety of sources that the new GCSE examinations are likely to disadvantage pupils with dyslexia, and other SEND, and yet it has chosen to go ahead without considering the consequences. As the Government does not collect data for how many pupils have dyslexia it is not in a position to evaluate the effect of the new examinations on this group. This is not compatible with the supposed aims of supporting individuals with SEND.

  1.         Evidenced-based policy and practice

18.1.                 The SEND reforms have not improved the assessment of and support for children and young people with SEND because they have failed to use adequate evidence to inform policy and practice or to audit levels of need, service provision or outcomes.

18.2.                 Data collection

18.3.                 The SEND Code of Practice, 3.27 and 3.28, says:

18.4.                 ‘To inform commissioning decisions, partners should draw on the wide range of local data’. 3.28 ‘Data-sets include but are not restricted to: • population and demographic data • prevalence data for different kinds of SEN and disability among children and young people at national level’ but this is not happening at school, college, LA or government level.

18.5.                 The DfE only collects numbers of pupils with SpLD. It does not give individual figures for dyslexia, DCD, ADD/ADHD, dyscalculia or dysgraphia. These conditions present differently, need different identification and support strategies and must be counted separately to ensure appropriate identification and support is occurring.

18.6.                 Interventions must be evidence-based. The DfE do not collect data on dyslexia and are therefore unable to analyse the effect of different interventions on dyslexic pupils. This, of course, applies equally to other specific forms of SpLD.

18.7.                 Outcomes must be recorded for individual types of SEND. The DfE, LAs and most schools and colleges (unless they are specialist providers) do not know how many pupils have dyslexia and cannot therefore track their performance against the general pupil population.

  1.         Lack of accountability of educational institutions.

19.1.                 The Code of Practice 6.2, says ‘Every school is required to identify and address the SEN of the pupils that they support.’ Many schools and colleges are not fulfilling the requirements set out in the Code of Practice to show how they identify and support pupils with SEND. Ofsted are not ensuring that all the requirements of the Code relating to identification and support are being fulfilled. Pupils continue to have their special needs unrecognised.

19.2.                 Schools are required to produce a SEND Information Report but not all are doing so, or are not making them readily available, and, of those that do, the reports are often so vague as to be meaningless. Schools must be required to report how many pupils they have with SEND, with numbers for the specific subtypes, including each variety of SpLD. Schools must show, with reference to good practice for each condition, what specific measures they take to identify and intervene, what reasonable adjustments they make in class, and what the outcomes are for each group as compared to those without SEND.

19.3.                 Schools are required by the Code to say what they contribute to the Local Offer. Many of these school Local Offers are pro formas which talk vaguely about ‘Quality First Teaching’ and identifying pupils by failure to make progress. Few seem to take a proactive approach to identification and support. Schools must be required by Ofsted to show how they use appropriate screening checklists and screening tools, specific to individual types of SpLD, and what specific aspects of recognised good practice they offer.

  1.         The assumption throughout the system that SEND means that children and young people must be functioning below average levels to qualify for help.

20.1.                 The Code 6.1 says ‘All children and young people are entitled to an appropriate education, one that is appropriate to their needs, promotes high standards and the fulfilment of potential’ but the emphasis within the Code and widely adopted by educational establishments is that pupils only have additional needs if they are making ‘less than expected progress’:

20.2.                 ‘6.17 Class and subject teachers, supported by the senior leadership team, should make regular assessments of progress for all pupils. These should seek to identify pupils making less than expected progress given their age and individual circumstances. This can be characterised by progress which: • is significantly slower than that of their peers starting from the same baseline • fails to match or better the child’s previous rate of progress • fails to close the attainment gap between the child and their peers • widens the attainment gap.’

20.3.                 The majority of pupils with SEND are in mainstream schools. Many forms of SEND including dyslexia, DCD, ADHD, autism, SLCN, occur across the cognitive range and, with the correct identification and support, individuals with these conditions should be expected to achieve at all levels, including the highest, of attainment. However, pupils and their carers are frequently told that they are not entitled to have any support because they are not achieving at sufficiently low levels. Paragraph 6.23 does say that ‘it should not be assumed that attainment in line with chronological age means that there is no learning difficulty or disability’ but this is widely ignored and pupils who may be significantly affected by e.g. dyslexia are denied the opportunity to achieve their potential.

  1.         The SEND Code of Practice encourages schools and colleges to adopt a ‘wait to fail policy’.

21.1.                 The Code emphasise the importance of early identification of SEND and notes the improved outcomes associated with it. There is also evidence that early intervention is more cost effective. However, as already noted, schools and colleges tend to make assessments only in terms of failure to make progress instead of using proactive strategies to identify SEND before a pupil starts to fail. Being left to fail before receiving any help is hugely detrimental to outcomes and, in many cases, pupils’ mental health. This ‘wait to fail’ policy which the Code has encouraged must be addressed as a matter of urgency.

  1.         The arbitrary definition of SEND which excludes many children and young people who do have additional needs.

22.1.                 The Government and DfE have made an arbitrary definition of SEND and reduced the numbers on the SEND register, after the introduction of the SEND reforms in 2015, by 2.5%. The DfE did not make these reductions after auditing the number of pupils who might have SEND by using demographic data and referring to known prevalence of conditions, but by deciding that numbers must be reduced. 10% of children have dyslexia, sometimes estimated to be around 1.2 million children, and yet the vast majority of these are either not recognised or are excluded from provision. Assessment of and support for SEND must be according to actual need not political expediency.

22.2.                 The Code refers to provision that is over and above usual school practice. If every nursery, school, academy and college were following good practice evidenced-based guidelines for e.g. dyslexia then it is possible that provision for pupils with dyslexia might be included within usual practice. In reality, that is very far from the case. 

 

June 2018